Peace Now can suck my sweaty nutsack.

Israel’s second war in Lebanon seems to have wound down upon agreeing to the great white hope that is a UN brokered cease-fire. What can be said about recent events that have not already been uttered or put to print?

During the first Lebanon war Peace Now was founded by the Jewish-Israeli Zionist-Left movement - mainly comprised of combat soldiers who split their time fighting on the frontlines and organizing popular resistance on the homestead to the very war that they were concurrently fighting. As part of its activities, the group successfully organized the largest anti-war protest in Israeli history. Following the end of wartime combat, Israel maintained the wonderfully failed experiment of the Southern Lebanon security zone, most likely because the children of the combatants of ’82 also wanted a chance to see action in the North. To be men, just as their daddies had been forced to become. Upon pulling out - under the auspices of Ehud Barak, the Labor’s tit-for-tat answer to the Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu – Israel proved, once and for all, that the real answer should never have been the withdrawal method but just old-fashioned abstinence. Just ask any middle-America, low-income high school drop-out and he she’ll tell you, “If you’re gonna fuck, either wrap it up or you get yourself a job, get married and then have the kid.”

Israel just does not want to listen. After its attempt to abort the Southern Lebanese Army (SLA) - our unwanted, illegitimate child - well into the 38th trimester, it should have been perfectly clear, if Israel wants to fuck shit up and have a good time, we had better do so with a willing partner. Showing up to the family dinner that is the international community is never easy when you have the shame of being a baby killer inscribed across your forehead, and that’s after they already hate you for being a dirty, Christ killing, Palestinian raping Kike.

So we know who our enemies are - just about everybody (save the die-hard Christian Evangelicals – for now). Yet, every fucking year and without fail, we show up to Christmas dinner both expecting our equally ostracized Muslim neighbors to accept us and our Crusader descendent Christians to remember to greet us with Happy Holidays rather than a Merry Christmas. But, without fail, when neither group properly acknowledges us, we go running to our little Middle Eastern room and put our fists through the walls (and sometimes build them where they should not be). Our only outlet for the burning rage we feel for being the constant whipping child of just about everyone out there, sans the Micronesians.

But, just like the fat chick with acne and braces who you took to your prom just so that you can say that you went and have the picture to prove it - despite keeping the photo tucked away in your sock and underwear drawer, never to see the light of day due to the horribly embarrassing nature of it all - a puny Micronesian embassy in Jerusalem just doesn’t seem to be worth anything when the captain of the football team keeps his embassy in the heart of Tel Aviv, occupying choice, beachfront property.

Yet we continue on. Always at the ready to demonstrate our eagerness to wage peace, while simultaneously eager to flex our American funded, M-16 shooting, soccer playing muscles against our own perpetual whipping children.

Now that there is a more worthy opponent we are more than happy to accommodate with a full scale battle in a futile attempt at clawing our way up one more notch on that Middle Eastern bedpost that is sustained conflict, where no one regional player ever succeeds in recognizing that it isn’t even a Middle Eastern country that occupies the top spot.

For more than two decades Israel’s Left has declared that it wants peace and that it wants it now - without ever providing an answer or solution. Though, to be fair, we did have a good run with Oslo. Though with neither side willing to take responsibility for its failure, it remains difficult to absolve the Israeli Left for this setback on its path, while offering it kudos for a job well done. So, to be certain, this leaves nothing more than happy thoughts, warm wishes, hoping against hope and some really fucking interesting academic debate on the topics of politics and philosophy; all of which are for little more than the trappings of a Hallmark store on a university campus.

In the end, the Israeli Left does little more that fight the battles of the Right, literally and figuratively. While screaming at the top of our lungs that we’re for real - having shed our own blood and tears and not under our own terms - we demand respect and to be taken seriously. But you can only play and fight by someone else’s rules for so long before you’re exposed for being a fraud. Thus, after many years of bringing salad to the Israeli political discourse that is little more than a BBQ meat-fest, the Israeli Left has finally learned that age old lesson, one does not make friends with salad. (Joe Leiberman, you stinking kike, take note and feel free to be in touch. I will not judge you.)

So, what’s left? Besides being a poignant question following the end of the Cold War, the answer is very little. The Right has triumphed and the time has come to abandon the rules, paradigm and dogma of its rhetoric and actions. We must take back the Zionism that the Right has raped and plundered to further its own cause of occupation and corporate capitalism. There is no reason to be ideologically committed in engaging the Right with a willingness to lay down the lives of our own and of our enemies in furthering a perverted ideology. Zionism needs to be reclaimed from those on the Left who have waved its flag as little more than a shield in an attempt to protect itself while it impotently rubber stamps the policies and battles of the Right.

No more should we cry Peace Now in between our stints at the front hoping to cleanse ourselves of the war crimes that we perpetrate with the aid of the US taxpayer. Rather, let’s unite with that classic American underdog, John Q. Public and shout together that we have had enough. No longer do we need to slave away, while remaining blind and ignorant to our world because there isn’t enough money for education. No longer will we Israelis take your hard-earned tax dollars to finance our weapons of mass and minute destruction. We are not interested in cheapening our own lives to dance that entertaining dance so loved by CNN, Fox News and all of their Israeli copycat constructions.

Fuck it all. It’s time to go bowling.

Meshuggenah Mile

In July of 2005 the national Jewish student magazine, New Voices, published the following article that I wrote while serving as their Israel correspondent. In it I interviewed the American King David and Mike Levin.

David died in Shin Bet custody this past week. I was first informed by an acquaintance of his who emailed me after conducting on online search for her friend's name. You can read a brief report on his death here. In the email that I received I was told that this was not a hunger strike but his refusal to eat anything other than organic foods, which were not provided to him.

Levin was killed in battle in Southern Lebanon recently. Besides the vast local and international coverage of the American who died in the IDF you can read a little bit about him here.