Common Interests

There is no question that Israel was justified in responding to the rocket attacks from Gaza with retaliation to destroy the Hamas rocket launchers.  Hamas fired first and Israel responded. Targeting the terrorist leaders has been effective and ultimately saves other lives on both sides. Israel left Gaza unilaterally and therefore obviously does not want to own or rule the place. Hamas has publicly declared it wants to destroy Israel and backed up that claim with numerous rocket attacks on Israel over years, making life for Israelis living within range of the Hamas rockets difficult and dangerous.
Having said that, no matter how intransigent and difficult your enemy is, to demonize him and say peace is hopeless because he will never change creates a self fulfilling prophesy and is therefore counterproductive. Actually both sides have common interests. Both sides need peace and prosperity. The mullah theocracy in Iran threatens both sides. Centuries of European anti-semitism made a Jewish State a necessity, and the surrounding Arab dictatorships made Israel the scapegoat for their own failings. Israel is here to stay and will not be undone, but the Arabs are also present and won't go away. Hopefully, some day the people on both sides will come to grips with reality, and the Zionist dream of an Israel at peace with its surroundings will become complete.

Obamacare

I am a 74 year old physician. I worked 15 years in solo fee for service practice and then the past 28 years in an HMO. "Obamacare" (Affordable Health Care) is simply filling in the gaps which now exist in the delivery of health care, i.e. making it possible for people with pre-existing conditions to get health insurance and making health insurance affordable for all Americans. It works through private insurance companies in most cases. It will bring down health care costs in the USA.
Romney says he wants to stop Obamacare, but now before the election he all of a sudden denies opposing filling in the gaps like the pre-exisitng condition question. But that is Obamacare! So, Mr. Romney what side are you on?
Obamacare will eventually happen because it is an inevitable step in the progression of health care in America going back long before President Obama or Governor Romney were born. At its best we have the best health care in the world. The problem is that the best is not yet available to everyone in the USA. Obamacare will fix that.

Turn Around in Ben Ghazi

I was happy to read this morning that many people in Ben Ghazi demonstrated against the terrorist militias and apprently drove some of them out of town. They realized that the terrorists were using them and have been trying to replace the dictatorship against which they fought with another one at least as bad as the original. This is a ray of hope for the Middle East. Maybe it is a pollyanna idea, but eventually (maybe after generations) history will be with reason and not with the zealots. Maybe even the rational people in Iran will throw out the mullahs one day.
To Israel, I say reason. democracy, openess, and pluralism are your strengths. Narrowness, exclusion, and fundamentalism are your weaknesses. Your mistrust of your neighbors is understandable. Military superiority for now is absolutely necessary. The Middle East is a scary and unpredictable place, but it is the place where you live. History has brought you there, and there is nowhere else to go. Turning yourself into another inward fundamentalist theocracy (even a Jewish one) will not serve you well.
To the Arabs, I say look upon Israel as an opportunity, not an anomaly. History has put Jews and Arabs on two different roads, but racially (if that makes any difference), by language, and by origin, we are as close as any people can be. Israel has the technical know how to bring your culture forward and to make the Middle East again become an economic and cultural center in the world.
Both sides need to promote their common interests, put aside minor religious details, and lighten up.

People Who Use Religion For Their Selfish Agendas

Belief in God is to believe that life has a purpose and existence is not just senseless chaotic crap. That is why so many diverse separated people have believed in some sort of deity since prehistoric times. The problem is with people who think that their particular way of approaching God is the only true way and especially with people who use religion as a means of promoting their selfish agendas. Those people include the creep and his backers who recently made an anti Moslem movie with the express purpose of stirring up a reaction among Moslems (like pouring gasoline on a fire), the idiots in the Moslem world who reacted like his puppets with violent demonstrations, and the terrorists who used the cover of those demonstrations to kill innocent people in the American Consulate in Ben Ghazi. Those people do not represent God, no matter what they scream.

Riots in the Moslem World

The riots in the Moslem world illustrate why Israelis are skeptical about trusting the neighboring countries. A small amateur movie which most Americans (myself included) have never seen, made by an obscure small time crook (who has spent time in an American jail), financially backed by a small lunatic fringe group has stirred up a reaction by equally lunatic groups in the Middle East. The difference is that while the American lunatics are a small fringe group here, the lunatics over there seem to be larger in proportion to the general population, and powerful enough to intimidate their governments. Mr. Bacile (or whatever he chooses to call himself today) and his cronies (Thank God they are not Jewish) have succeeded in putting American soldiers and American interests at risk. They have also put the innocent Coptic Christians of Egypt at risk. Meanwhile the rioters in Moslem countries have performed like puppets exactly what Bacile and his friends wanted them to do and exposed themselves to the world as unreliable idiots.

Asian Science Camp

Congratulations to the Asian Science Camp for choosing Israel as the site for the 2012 camp. This is a step for reason, for science, for progress, and for peace.

Medicare

Today, I want to discuss an issue facing our country, America. Romney's new vice presidential candidate Ryan is an uncompromising Right Wing ideologue. He has trumped up a voucher plan to replace Medicare to start in about 10 years if he gets his way. He has grandfathered in the present generation over 55 years of age because he knows it would be political suicide to screw the present generation of elderly. He is betting that he can pull the wool over the eyes of the people in the 30s and 40s. He figures that they are more concerned with immediate needs, namely dealing with the present economic slow down (which was started by the policies of the previous Republican administration). That generation would be double screwed. They would have paid for the Medicare of the present grandfathered elderly, but will not enjoy the same benefit when  they reach that age.
The way medical insurance works (like any insurance), everyone pays in whether sick or well (or without knowing who will become sick later). Private insurance companies try to accumulate as many healthy members as possible and as few sick people as possible (if unregulated). Private insurance companies will deny coverage to sick people or charge them higher fees. So people who arrive at old age healthy (and wealthy) will more likely opt for the voucher system. People who arrive sick without the money to sufficiently supplement the voucher will have to go with traditional Medicare.
So, in the Ryan system, the private insurance companies will get the well members who will cost them less and sick people who can afford to pay more money. Traditional Medicare will get the the people who are the most sick and unable to afford the supplement required by private insurance. This will penalize traditional Medicare and articially set it up for failure.

Presbyterian Church and Israel

Hooray for J Street! By standing up to the Presbyterian Church's plan to divest from certain companies that do business in Israel including the West Bank settlements, you have put yourself in your proper position as a voice of reason. I too am not a fan of the settlement movement because it is not in the interests of Israel and Zionism. But the Presbyterian divestment plan smells of anti-semitism. Actually it has done the Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar comapnies a favor. It has placed them on my list of investment possibilities and the lists of others as well.

Who is a Refugee?

There is a question of whether all the descendants of Arabs who left the land of Israel/Palestine in 1948 can still be considered refugees. The number of Arabs who left in 1948 were a few hundred thousands, but their descendants number in the millions. If they are all refugees, then logically my grandchildren, my children, and I must be refugees because my parents and grandparents were refugees who came to America to escape persecution in the Russian Empire. But actually my grandchildren, my children, and I are not refugees. We certainly don't perceive ourselves to be refugees. The descendants of Jewish refugees from Arab countries (most of whom live in Israel) do not consider themselves to be refugees and do not receive any help from the U.N. The problem is that the Arab nations surrounding Israel use the Palestinian refugees as pawns in opposing Israel, and even the Palestinian leaders do the same.

Israel Needs More Israelis, Whoever They Are

Immigrants are a source of strength and progress for a country. The United States was built into the strong and innovative nation that it is by immigrants. Families who have lived in a country for generations often find life too easy and lose their drive for success. Immigrants tend to be hungry and hard working. The recent anti-immigration attitude by exremists in the USA has had a negative effect on our American economy. The State of Israel did a miraculous ingathering and assimilation of Jews from all over the world who spoke various languages and came from various cultures during its early years. Since then most of the rest of us have been comfortable staying where we are. Although some purists might want the rest of us to come over, it won't happen. Now, Israel needs immigrants from wherever, Jewish or not. The foreign workers who speak Hebrew and their assimilated children who grew up in Israel but don't happen to be Jewish should stay in Israel if they want to. This should be done for the sake of Israel to keep Israel strong. Everything possible should be done to assimilate Moslem and Christian Israeli Arabs and to encourage Israeli Jews to accept them as equals. Every effort should be made to assimilate African refugees and put them to work. Israel is predominantly Jewish, and will more likely stay that way if you don't worry so much about it. Just look at us? We Jews/Hebrews are a racially and culturally diverse group of people who are not all necessarily religious Jews but share a common history. If other people come to share that history by assimilating into the Israeli culture and language, then are they so different than our Hebrew, Polish, Spanish, Roman, and myriad other ancestors who also joined us (in the olden days through the Jewish religion)? Of course Israel is a small country and has to set limits on immigration, but the Negev is still big and needs to be developed. Narrow minded people like Eli Yishai, Israel's interior minister, who seems to think that any non-Jewish immigrant threatens Israel's integrity, do not do Israel a service. In fact they themselves are Israel's greatest threat. Israel needs a miraculous immigration and assimilation policy like the one it did in the early years of the ingathering, but now for anyone who can offer a service to Israel.

Israel's Defense

Israel is a small country surrounded by Arab and Moslem countries with an overwhelmingly larger population, many of whom have been taught for the generations to hate Jews and Israel. These surrounding lands have been generally ruled by dictators and monarchs who have used Israel as a scapegoat for their own shortcomings. The "democratic" governments that have recently replaced those autocracies in the "Arab Spring" have not shown themselves to be any friendlier to Israel than their predecessors. In fact, freedom of speech has often revealed more hatred than before. Israel over the years has come to an understanding with many of those Arab countries, but the instability of those governments has led to the question of how much can Israel trust those countries with the present shifting of power there. The armistice lines of 1948 have given Israel a long and tortuous border with all of Israel situated close to the border, particularly the areas of greatest population density. Attempts by earlier liberal governments to create 2 separate states, Israel and Palestine, failed miserably. The rapproachment between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs in the 1990s led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority but collapsed when Yasser Arafat rejected the Clinton/Barak plan for a Palestinian state and instead started the Second Intifada with suicide bombers. A first stage attempt to unilaterally force the creation of a Palestinian state by withdrawing from Gaza resulted in a Hamas government sworn to the destruction of Israel which caused or allowed rockets to be fired into Israel.
Israel's defense against a surrounding larger population in which most people detest israel and would be happy to see it disappear, is its greater technological advancement and military power.
In the Israeli population, the zealots and settlement people are a minority and the majority are mainly relatively secular Mediterranean people (probably most similar to the people of the European Mediterranean coast) who don't like the settlements, desperately wish for peace and normal life, and don't want to control the Palestinian territories. But the normal majority in Israel has been disillusioned by their experience with their neighbors over the years. Add to that a Jewish history of persecution for two thousand years culminating in the holocaust which killed 1/3 of all the Jews in the world. No wonder Israelis have elected a xenophobic government. But xenophobia is contrary to the Zionist ideal. Zionism is supposed to take Jews out of the ghetto, not turn Israel into a new kind of ghetto.
Israel's technical and military superiority is mainly because of the ingenuity, bravery, and hard work of the people of Israel, but it is also partly because of the help it gets from Jews and non-Jews in other parts of the world. Some of that help is given unconditionally, but some is given with the understanding that Israel has a purpose. In our tradition, we Jews are supposed to be a good example for eveyone else. The purpose of Israel should not be to repopulate the ancient Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel), putting real estate ahead of peace and fairness. Israel should be a beacon of modernity and democracy in a part of the world that desperately needs that. I don't believe in the concept of Jewish "birth right". Israel exists because it exists, however it came about. If the armistice lines happened to exclude part of Eretz Yisrael so be it. Smooth out the lines for a defensible position and move on. If everything else can be resolved, I'm sure some equitable solution can be ultimately found for Jerusalem. As intransigent as the Arabs might be, you have to keep trying to make peace. What else can you do? Israel is there and the Arabs live around it. That won't change.
Actually, there have been glimmers of hope. The SESAME project is one. It is a physics project located in Jordan which includes Israel, a number of Arab countries, Iran, Turkey, and Cyprus. Another glimmer is trade between Israel and its neighbors. It is conducted below the radar, but it exists. Another glimmer is in the reception by ordinary Iranians of the music of Persian Jewish Israeli singer Rita Jahanforooz. Her music is popular in Israel and has recently become popular among young Iranians in spite of the government.
So let us hope that the time will  come soon when Herzl's dream will fully come to pass, an Israel based on Jewish (Hebrew) values, democratic for all its inhabitants, a haven for oppressed Jews (and some non-Jews integrated into the Hebrew Israeli culture), which does not have to worry about its Jewishness, which can be an example of modernity to its region of the world.

Egyptian Democracy?

Recently, people in Egypt have been rioting because the former leader of their country, Hosni Mubarak, was given a life sentence instead of execution. In a democracy, when a leader leaves office, no matter how bad a job he has done, he goes back to a normal private life. Is the blood thirsty mob an improvement over Mubarak? No wonder the people of Israel are skeptical of any arrangement they make with their Arab neighbors. Practicality means that Israel has to make compromises for a chance of peace, but it has to be pursued cautiously and with keeping a balance of power weighted in Israel's favor.

Shimon Peres on the View

I was impressed with Barbara Walter's interview of Shimon Peres on the View last week. Mr. Peres (the President of Israel) made it clear that coordination between Israel and the USA are better today under President Obama than under any previous American president. Actions speak louder than words.