The Most Disturbing Thing I've Heard...

well... since the news yesterday, in fact. It just gets worse and worse.

David M. Friedman, U.S. Ambassador to Israel, was interviewed on NPR this morning about the embassy move to Jerusalem. The interviewer raised a question about the original U.N. intentions in 1947 to have Jerusalem as an international (in other words, a neutral) city.

Friedman's answer (which I recall with almost bone-chilling clarity) was, "Let's go back beyond 1947. Let's go back 3500 years to the Bible, when God gave Jerusalem to the Jewish people as a title grant to the land of Israel. When God created the world and gave this land to the Jewish people."

So we are now once again in an era of faith-based diplomacy. Anyone who thinks this is going to help the peace process, or raise our standing with various Middle East nations, is a self-deluding fool (which, I guess, sums up our current dweller in the White House).

I can't take credit for this solution to the Middle East problem, since I read it in Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great", and he related it as a speech by someone else... but the solution would be to have two states. And the only way that the two peoples will accept that, is to give up the idea that a "God" gave them title to that land. There's nothing special about Jerusalem or Israel or Palestine, except if you happen to enjoy living there. There IS NO god to "give" anything to anybody. 3500 years ago it was a land of squabbling tribes. Nothing has changed, except that now the tribes have much better weapons, and their squabbles threaten us all with nuclear war.