By Octavius Bin Sheik
Special to PalestineChronicle.com
To put an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, all that must be done is for the name to be changed, to something like the Angolan-Mauritius conflict, for example. Problem solved.
For one, you are by no means inspiring a new conflict, Angola and the Island of Mauritius are a long distance apart; the former attracts Cuban doctors and the latter cheap French tourists who still think that France is God’s gift to humanity.
But most importantly, the main reasons that continue to fuel the conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli Jews will cease to exist. Palestinians will no longer have the ‘Arab’ affiliation with the conflict – since it will be dropped – and the Jews in Israel can no longer identify with the conflict as theirs. Israelis would no longer subjugate the Arabs of the West Bank – and other Arabs who dare sympathize with them – and the latter will be denied the opportunity to blow themselves up or fire their homemade rockets in desperation.
By changing the name, the Israeli Lobby in Washington DC will have no reason to lobby on behalf of a party in a conflict that no longer exist; indeed, there is little chance that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will change its name to the American Mauritius Public Affairs Committee (AMPAC); true, the name is still catchy like hell, but what is a catchy name without money; the tens of millions of dollars that AIPAC spends buying and selling Congressmen and Israeli policies on Capital Hill will run dry so will their influence over the White House.
The US media would find itself in a tough spot. On one hand, they would fear that by not siding with Israel regardless of how the latter behaves might prove costly in the name calling department, on the other hand, they will soon realize that Americans don’t give a hoot about neither Mauritius nor Angola (only stuck-up French tourists and Cuban doctors) and they will become a lot more objective: for example, the media will begin reporting on the death of Mauritius children and Angolan children as if there lives equally mattered without fearing being called anti-Semitic. ‘Anti-Mauritius’ doesn’t sell well among Americans, who hate France and Cuba anyway, and prefer Hawaii over Mauritius any day.
The Arabs will use the opportunity to wash their hands of Palestine, but at a cost. While the change of name might free them from any link toward that whole messy conflict – side notes: Arabs tourists are not fond of Mauritius and can only be found in Edgware Road, London or looking for pleasure elsewhere, and Arab doctors can barely handle their own countries to help Angolans; Gulf countries’ Arabs don’t have their own doctors, they import them from India, therefore they should be excused – it will deny Arab dictators the opportunity to humiliate their own peoples by imprisoning and torturing those who demand reforms. For such demands are now understood as a foreign-funded calls that would threaten the blessed ruler’s chances from meeting his responsibility to liberate Palestine and must be crushed by any mean necessary. Playing the ‘free Angola’ card wouldn’t sell too well among Arab masses either, so the rulers would either have to concoct another conflict, allow it to perpetuate endlessly and write mesmerizing speeches about how they intend to resolve it, or perhaps, they will get overthrown by their peoples before they get around to do it.
Internationally, the conflict, once renamed, will start losing its appeal. The Bush administration would have to pull out of Iraq; why stay in Iraq when you can leave the country and negotiate better oil contracts from home, and when Israel needs no proxy or protection for the conflict is no longer ‘Israeli’? True, the US was heavily involved in past conflicts in Angola but that was because the bloody Soviets tried to make communists out of poor Angolans, and then the damn Cubans sent their doctors and got the Americans worried that a Soviet-Cuban conspiracy to take over the world was about to originate from Angola. (Note: don’t blame the French for that one, but its okay to blame French mercenaries for trying to take over coup-coup islands 21 times. These guys crack me up.)
Here you have it, folks. It’s all about language, for indeed, language is culture and it shapes both perception and reality. If you compare the reality of the situation in Palestine and the public perception of it based on how the New York Times portrays it, you will most likely agree.
Side note: there is no guarantee that the Israelis will not try to take over Angola either directly or by proxy, using the US military. In that case, Cuban doctors would have to leave to Palestine where they are urgently needed, for Gaza’s hospitals are running dry. Meanwhile, French tourists would have to relocate and find some other islanders to bother, which really doesn’t matter as long as they stay away from Hawaii, where the larger, anti-French American tourists liked the island so much, they turned it into state. With the whole obesity problem on the rise over there, hungry Americans can easily develop taste for chatty French women who think they are too hot because Moroccans think so, which leads me to my final point: what the hell is wrong with Moroccans?
-Octavius is a world traveller; he has seen it all and returned with life’s greatest lesson: (which he has long forgotten.) He cannot be contacted for the simple reason he strongly believes that no feedback is of any worth to him. He is an avid reader of boating magazines, although he is scared of water. His bio regularly changes because he likes to assume alternative personalities to evade capture. He thinks that the Left has lost its moral campus, yet still identify with the Left for he too can talk endlessly and achieve nothing.
