Dear Israel:

You don't really want peace ever, do you?

In talks I've had with Zionist types, I've heard Israel described in a lot of the same ways colonists to the Americas described things here. They describe it as an open, empty land without any actual inhabitants or with inhabitants who were to primitive and stupid to know how to cultivate a desert climate. (Rightttttttt, no one lived in Israel before WWII, just like no one lived in the Western hemisphere before Columbus). And we know how well that turned out for us native folks, what with the death and reservations and everything. Do you really want to be the harbingers of death to the local population?

I am starting to side with some of my friends who think this lynchpin of religious real estate needs to be nuked till it's molten glass. No more religious shrines of any flavor. Nothing left to fight over but an unlivable patch of rock and sand.(And I say this as a giant fan of archeology who was heartbroken over the Iraq museum lootings). Or perhaps we just need an army of secular humanists to come in smack some sense into you all. You have more money and certainly more (US supplied) weapons than the Palestinians. You control access to vital resources like food and water. Perhaps it's time you stopped corralling people of a different faith than you into urban refugee camps and bulldozing homes? Perhaps it's time for you to act magnanimous.

You are becoming the thing you fear the most. You are becoming genocidal maniacs intent on wiping out an entire people through actual death or creating conditions so miserable that they will be forced, again and again, to give up their homes and property rather than risk another bombing.

Jews deserve to be safe from mass exterminations. But so does everyone else. You are becoming the thing you hate, aggressive, hate mongering bigots who would rather kill innocents than find a real solution. Is it any wonder then that the Palestinians turn to Hammas? You are the ones with the power and the weapons. You are the ones that came into a land that was already occupied by Arabs and Sephardic Jews and Coptic Christians and pretended that your home had been invaded by these people while you were on a 2000 year vacation. You must be the ones to make the real sacrifices toward peace first.

But I don't think you really want peace. I think that after the horrors of Hitler you have burned into your national psyche this capacity for violence, not unlike the abused child who becomes a bully. Is that what you want to be known for?