And now let's cross to the West Bank. First of all, Benjamin Netanyahu said he couldn't talk to Palestinian "President" Mahmoud Abbas because he didn't also represent Hamas. Then when Abbas formed a unity government, Netanyahu said he couldn't talk to Abbas because he had unified himself with the "terrorist" Hamas. Now he says he can only talk to him if he breaks with Hamas - even though he won't then represent Hamas.Netanyahu's bizarre logic is easily explained if we accept that Israel does not want peace, and therefore does not want to talk, because peace will not give Israel more land.
"And Netanyahu said," according to Avnery, "if they are not stopped by the permanent Israeli garrison there (on the Jordan river), they will appear at the gates of Tel Aviv." The truth, of course, is that the Israeli air force would have crushed Isis the moment it dared to cross the Jordanian border from Iraq or Syria.Surrounded, as in a military siege. Isn't that the whole point?
The importance of this, however, is that if Israel keeps its army on the Jordan (to protect Israel from Isis), a future "Palestine" state will have no borders and will be an enclave within Israel, surrounded on all sides by Israeli-held territory.
The first thing that occurred to me as I read some of these items was that the reason people wish to emigrate is because of some situation in their homeland that makes living either uncomfortable or impossible. Let's face it, nobody picks up and emigrates just for fun. And if someone emigrates to "make more money," it's usually because they cannot make enough where they live to survive. Of course, there are those that want to do more than just make enough money to send home so that the family can have a roof over their head and food on the table, but we will get to that.See also:
So, considering that emigration is a symptom of a country's failure in some sense, it's decline in equitable distribution of wealth, what can be at the root of such a problem? Why are so many countries full of people who want to go somewhere else?
Exploitation. The global economy has, by and large, been rigged to benefit a small ruling elite and to begger everyone else.
The fact is, poverty in most of the world is directly caused by large landholdings - the big estates of the ruling elite, and the war mongering of same in their efforts to acquire more land, more resources, more wealth. That is why Mexico has a flood of dispossessed seeking escape to the US; that is why Iran has so many Afghan refugees; that is why there are so many Muslims in France; that is why urban areas are so poor and overcrowded and crime ridden and wages are so low for everyone. And in most cases, it is due to the covert or not-so-covert U.S. involvement in the finances and internal policies of those countries.
In the present day, society is not much different from the time of Dickens when there were huge estates of England and starving, dying masses of people in East End London. Just look at South America and the stupendous land holdings of the Rockefellers and other international bankers.
So, what is at the root of the exploitation problem?
Psychopathy: those who seek to feather their own nest to an obscene degree at the expense of others.
It is psychopaths who have arrogated the world's wealth to themselves. Psychopaths are always and ever monopolists of the world's wealth, and they justify their having the wealth by their various pathological economic theories. It is psychopaths that say that "common" people "breed like rabbits and that if the masses had money and land and leisure they would just increase the population until their new land was just as teaming with poverty and stench as before". What is hidden behind this paramoralistic ideology is the truth that psychopaths fear the population of normal humans with conscience and a feeling of connection to other human beings.
Immigration: Ignota nulla curatio morbi!
Comment: So the EPA goes after the "little guy" while large, polluting corporations get off with little more than a slap on the wrist.