A New Year Letter for my friend Merav Ben Nun in Jerusalem

Dear Merav:
I wish a Happy New Western Year for you and your family in Jerusalem. I understand a little your drama in Israel and theirs in Palestine particularly onto the weakness of the Palestinian National Authority and of the Lebanon state. Using this lack of response capacities by the constitutional forces in both cases, militias like Hamas and Hezbolla can use without control these Palestinian areas as bases, and even the whole Lebanon territory for the rockets attack. And as Israel has a powerful army, there are state ‘reasons’ to react, after advertising them ‘Please stop launching missiles against us’ with not answer, or with the answer of more missiles or suicide attacks. In the other hand Palestine it’s a failed state, thanks to the Britons, and they know nobody in the world will help them to be successful (I think except themselves), or to defeat Israel, supposing erasing Israel from the map is going to improve their lives in the earth, although they believe it happens in heaven when they blast a bomb in a market in Tel Aviv killing dozens of innocents civilians (I know a little the story of Hassam Ibn Saba, The Old Man from the Eagle Nest Mountain and his group of the haxxaxin, the origin of this modality of terrorism and source of the Spanish word ‘asesino’ it is, killer).
It’s a circular and irrational argument for both parts, because both parts have enough reasons to stop but don’t do it. So reasons in strict sense have no much to do in this issue. Of course is true after every road map Hezbolla and Hamas start a new jihad, but is also true that in the moment when all the world felt for a little while the hope of the peace (Camp David Agreement with Clinton as mediator), somebody shot Rabin, or Netanyahu pith in a mosque to provoke a new attack and become Prime Minister.
Well, sometimes I agree with Arendt when she says the Palestinians and radical Jewish don’t know the category of forgiving. They do like Old Athens; after a war, they devastated their enemies, house after house, as you can see in the tragedy ‘The Troy Women’. Romans introduced the ius gens, in order to deal with the foreign territories, as you very well knew during the Christ life in Palestine. It means you don’t destroy your enemies, you win, you reduce the peril and even you can convert their reconstruction in a business for the economy and the democracy, as Americans did in Japan and Germany. Well, this is one of the best heritages this Jewish named Jesus gave us in the Jewish-Christian Western Civilization.
Is there any hope? I think so. The most powerful country in the world now is ruled not by a jerk like Bush but for a man who knows how to negotiate and who knows in his genes the beliefs of the enemies, being a full American Christian and follower of the American creed. I think it can help, because people like Netanyahu would hardly trick with his cynicism to Obama, and at the same time he said Bin Laden should be killed, and at the same time he could get into a mosque with property.
We need now a good prime minister in Israel, at the same level like Obama. It is not so probably in Palestine, Syria or Iran, although believing so could be a kind of superiority complex ‘We can produce state men with this level but they don’t’. I think they can, and I remember people like Edward Said, sharing dreams with Daniel Baremboin. We should add to Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can’ an appendix ‘And if we can, so can you, and they can too’. To put the felling of moral duty between ‘me’ and ‘us’ at a human rights level with ‘they’ is not an easy task but it’s possible. Sometimes the good guys win, and it happens not only in the movies. OK, Albert Gore lost the Presidency against this you know what named George Walker Bush: but Obama won, in hardest conditions. Even here in Venezuela we –I supposed candidly we are the good guys- had lost 9 strike elections against Chavez, but suddenly the students came out, and we stopped the bad guys in their attempt to join a kind of evil club with Castro, Saddam and Amedinajed. Yes, I know what happens because we are involved too: we –or him the Venezuelan President- are dealing with Iran, the country whose President is trying to produce nuclear devices to finish Hitler’s job against you. It’s disgusting to see all those Iranians in the Caracas hotels in a kind of conspiracy against freedom and peace. We are in focus because we have petroleum, water, and all the resources of the future, so anything that occurs in India or Jerusalem affects us and vice versa. The world now it’s so small…
This year many of the good guys and gals triumphed against the bad ones in the case of Obama versus McCain in US, also here in Venezuela, and we think we are going to win again next year. The same thing can be happening in Syria or Iran with no media coverage. I think so because despair opens minds, and when you don’t see solutions you say ‘don’t shoot, stop!’ You can say it doesn’t happen with suicide fundamentalist martyrs, but not everybody want to be a martyr, many people just want peace and good life. And when this kind of people become majority, nothing can stop them like in the former USSR, no matter the tanks and the nuclear weapons.
Is it happening in the Middle East? I don’t know, but part of our job is to find out that. After so many deceptions in Venezuela I can see clearly this new majority growing up in silence. Media doesn’t help very much in this case because good guys and new majorities are not good for the business: murders, suicide attacks and military offensives give more share and rating in the polls. But as we see the world through of their cameras and they don’t care about the good guys, we should open ours to capture this world there outside.
Is it a dream? Not really: if we Venezuelans are doing it, why not you Jewish and the Palestinians? Democracy and freedom have growth in splendid ways the last century, no matter the prophets of the III World War. Namely a large number of countries define themselves as democracies. It didn’t happen in the Century XIX. Is the moment to achieve a global democracy and a global peace with social justice and ecological concern? It will not happen by itself, it will be possible only if we join the task and work hard day and night educating to foster these new majorities.
I pray for the peace in your city Jerusalem, in your country, in mine, in the world.
Oscar