Weights & Measures

This piece has nothing to do with graduated sizes of lead cylinders and extensive instruments used in determining finite measurements.  No, this is all about the heavy weights placed upon people who take on positions of leadership and the manner in which they are measured by their handling of these matters.  There exists no metrology for this arcane business.

Personally, I hated the speech given by President Obama at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee gathering in March.  Oh yes, the president was able, because of his intelligence and the capability of his writers, to give another sound and fairly convincing speech that was likely appreciated by the supporters of Israel's sovereignty and will surely be an over-all plus in his run for re-election.  What I hated was the fact that he had to deliver it at all. 

The words this president and all presidents in the last six decades have been obliged to say about the virtual island called Israel are to me a mystery and the premise itself is indefensible.  Our leaders in this country are always required to say words of strong protectionism toward Israel.  Israel!  A tiny nation carved out of the sands and rocks of the Middle East, surrounded by Syrian, Arabian and Jordanian (and doubtless a few others too obscure to gain notice) peoples and cultures.  And much like the briefcase of nuclear power and other responsibilities which is handed off to each new president, in fact part & parcel of that bag of responsibilities, is the protection of Israel.  The weight of that powder keg was handed off from Truman to Eisenhower in 1953 and has continued to be handed on down to each new Commander-in-Chief to this day.  And each has been measured by his caution and wisdom in handling that explosive.

WHY?  Indeed!

Allow me to draw a totally far-fetched analogy here.  Let's imagine a playground at a school.  That's right - a playground.  Silly, I know, but playgrounds have been exigent and weighty in the affairs of men!

The In Crowd - let's use this as the title for the acknowledged strongest group of kids on the playground, encompassing most of the larger and physically more imposing boys who are always prominent in this milieu.  The In Crowd has been around and respected, often feared, for quite some time, growing stronger with each challenge to its supremacy.  The individual members of this crowd continually change, but the crowd never lessens in its strength or influence over the whole playground.  Those smaller cliques that dare to rise up against it are always quelled in such a decisive fashion that they fall away and often dissolve and disappear as a cohesive group that could ever again threaten the In Crowd. 

One day an intelligent and persuasive fellow, one of the older and more serious students who is respected and has a devoted but cerebral and harmless following of his own, approaches the leaders of the In Crowd with a request.  Could this big, strong group perhaps support the much smaller group who have a big mission and difficult plan to execute?  The leaders of the In Crowd listen to a captivating story, well told by this serious older student, about the fact that long ago, before this school existed, even before this whole area was developed and heavily populated, a venerable old man lived in a sad little hut on a small plot of ground.  This little old man, let's call him Old Jude Adams, lost track of all his children who had not stayed near him to work his little plot of land.  Over many years, they had re-settled elsewhere, with no close ties to the old man or his property.  Now, due to much seeking and interesting coincidental events, it had been discovered that a substantial number of the descendants of Mr. Adams wanted to touch base with their ancient forefather's land.  This serious student, call him David, acting on behalf of all those distant cousins, had found that old Mr. Adams had left a monument to his legacy.  This monument, a strong piece of concrete engraved with the Adams name and inlaid with a small but imposing stone, had been left unnoticed over the centuries by developers, and low and behold, was actually the cornerstone of the current playground activity center.  From ancient notes left by Old Jude Adams, the lines of his small plot were easily measured from this monument, and the original property, that should rightfully have been passed on down to all these descendants, now contained the Jungle Jim and other playground equipment area - not any large basketball courts or baseball fields, but that little center of activity that the kids all took for granted, using whenever they pleased.

So here was the request:  We, the descendants of Jude Adams, would like to claim this one small area as the place where only we who are all the cousins can play.  It should have been ours all along, so we hope that you, the strongest of all the groups of all the kids who frequent this area, will support our decision to make this little plot of our great ancestor, our own private playground.  That you will help us put our markings around it and claim it and all rights to its use, for our family only.  And further, that you will protect us and our own descendants, allowing us to always play here and keep others out, for all time.  

For some strange reason, the leaders of the In Crowd decided they could make that commitment. 

Back to today's real world of actual events; after more than six decades, it is not unreasonable to question the whole business of the 1948 world playground and a strange deal that was struck.

Sadly, some of the most devoted present day bright advocates for peaceful solutions to Israel's problems are fine young folks born too recently to question some elements of the way things are.  Israel itself was born only three years after I came along, so most of today's American fighters for Israeli concerns have been aware, for all of their lives, only of this great conflict in the Middle East.  It's hard for them to grasp the reasons for so much conflict and the hatreds surrounding Israel.  Hearing the passionate pleas of intelligent young activists on behalf of Israel and our (American) initiative to stand firm for Israeli sovereignty and safety, makes me a little crazy.  People who visit websites like J Street can offer support and join the conversation.  Great discussions on television and in meeting halls everywhere can be continued (have been and will be continued) to keep the fight alive and protect Israel at all cost.

Here's my own solution.  And since I have no weight in world affairs, my comments will not be measured, (therefore I can toss out any cockamamie idea I please), but here is what should have been done when the United States so desired to assist (a fundamentally good desire) the Jewish People back in 1948 to obtain a homeland.  We could have selected one and deeded it to them!  Why didn't we give these people we felt obligated to protect, a piece of ground we actually controlled - somewhere more desirable (and safer)  than that harsh landscape east of the Mediterranean Sea.

How about Camp Pendleton?  Our government had already commandeered that large chunk of California ocean-side property in the war years to use as a training facility for our fighting soldiers and Marines.  By the late forties, the war was over and that land could readily have been returned to good use in the art of living rather than preparing for more future killing.  Yes, the area is only a fraction of the total size of the current territory called Israel, but it's probably close to the amount of desirable and arable real estate contained in that whole Middle East region.  And to me, it has always seemed a crime that any part of the beauty of the coastline of California is devoted to the ugliness and cruelty of war.

So, you say a little more land would have been required for a truly thoughtful gift to our friends?  We could have thrown in Santa Catalina Island!  Just a breeze of a boat ride, maybe forty miles from the Pendleton coastline, or a very brief commuter plane trip away.  You say, but it wouldn't have been like returning to Jerusalem!  True.  But really, anybody can admit, no matter what mythology is involved, that a city itself cannot be holy.  At least, none built by humans.  You may believe deeply in a New Jerusalem to come, but that one supposedly will be built by a supreme being and made of pure gold!  Putting that aside, think of what a fabulous and distinctive dedicated city could have been built there in the natural beauty of Catalina without even disturbing the small group of existing local citizens at that time.  By spreading out over the whole beautiful island, folks could live far better than they do while shoe-horned into the tiny center of Jewish life in the original Jerusalem.

This could all be done still today and we could call a halt to the madness of our obligation to protect eight million people struggling (and terrified) to live in the middle of the Middle Eastern Muslim world.  Giving up that part of the commitment to our military preparedness would surely offset the need to keep open this one training facility of Pendleton (one of several in California alone) and the whole arrangement would beautify and honor this part of our planet.  Imagine what those creative and hard-working people could do here!

As for the Catalina Island part of the deal, the four thousand citizens of Avalon would very likely vote to approve the take-over by Israelis who could make more of the area than has been accomplished there in the past.  After all, the island is accustomed to historic changes and extremely few of these current inhabitants were there in 1948 when the island was most ripe for the change.  Tom Robbins who was deeded the island in the early 1800s did little with it and the Banning family went broke trying to make a go of it a century later.  Bill Wrigley did okay with his (majority) ownership of the place and for a few decades the Chicago Cubs trained there.  But basically, the island sits quietly, invitingly, off the coast near the heavily populated cities of Los Angeles and Orange County communities, and those of us fortunate enough to get away now and then (I finally did so in 2010) can hop a boat to Avalon.

Of course, if the current residents were not on the whole in favor of the deal, they could easily be convinced of its workability.    Current residents could be left to live exactly as they do now but could attend to their tourism business with the cooperation of strong business-minded Jewish leaders while watching as the new immigrant population develops the entire Island into the flourishing paradise it could be.

Naturally, anyone reading this will want to pass it off as strictly satire, but please don't.  I'm as serious as a six-day war!  The whole foolish concept of the playground story above is completely appropriate.  The wildly implausible story of a people having some kind of "forever rights" to a homeland because of a fantasy plan of some kind involving promised land being handed down from a phantom being to a long-ago ancestor, was patently ridiculous as a cause for action on the part of a powerful western government in 1948.  How did Zionism even gain any credence here in the U.S. back in the World War II era?  Two simple facts existed:  Everyone with any humanity at that time, decently and rightfully felt compassion for a race of people almost destroyed by a despot; millions of western Christians added to their human compassion a guilt factor.  They shared the mythological connection to that original phantom in the heavens and felt that the race that begat their hero, Jesus, should not be erased from the Earth.  They were also (as are fanatical believers still today) under the weight of biblical verses (variously interpreted) that prophesy some concept of Jews being IN JERUSALEM at the (longed-for) time of Christ's return.  So they launched into an attempt to manipulate synchronicity!

The entire frustrating malaise of the Middle Eastern dilemma was set up and established as an in-perpetuity obligation incumbent upon all U.S. citizens and their political leaders to follow after 1948.  So today, our president has to speak to the problem with solidarity, with full bluster and show of strength to the world on behalf of that small stolen piece of almost empty land in an unfriendly and dangerous part of the planet.  He has to do so as Ike was obligated to do immediately after the theft was perpetrated and the borders were drawn; JFK was required to do the same, and so has every president since.  And now, the most recent three presidents have grown up thinking Israel is real!  It was imagined by a non-practicing Jewish writer named Herzl and promoted for half a century until being forced into being in 1948.  The project on the whole may be seen a century from now, in the long view of history, as a failure.  That nation may even be crushed and forgotten by then!  No matter how ignorant and ill-advised I believe it all has been, I nonetheless hold great respect for the amazing leadership of Ben-Gurion and other Israelis over the decades who have managed to establish and develop some kind of government and some kind of life in a totally uninviting land where they are uninvited intruders.

Think of how much better it would all have gone in California!