Across Palestine were celebrations of the Nakba.

{Which The Times covered better, but then made impossible to find on their website.}

The reason for this were well outlined here.

To summarise:

• Over 500 villages, charred and in ruins, scattered throughout what is now known as Israel.
• 56% of Palestine occupied prior to 1967.
• 78% afterwards.
• 312 dead Palestinians this year, 197 of them innocents.
• 5 dead IDF soldiers, 5 dead Israeli innocents.

Certainly sounds like a catastrophe to me. The Palestinians woe is ongoing, though, as these statistics show that they not only had no force willing to defend them when it matters but suffer from much the same at present, with even the most active group, Hamas, capable only of launching ineffective asymmetric offensives, which elicit the indiscriminate killings of the ethics devoid IDF.

As far as I am concerned a two state solution is beyond the realms of possibility by this point. To gauge some sense of precisely how far off of the agenda this is imagine a vile fantasy world where the person most likely to become president of the United States after the esteemed George Bush was Mr. Christopher Hitchens.

Now imagine that you are writing an article advocating withdrawal from Iraq, total and immediate, and you will gain a rough grasp of the sense behind suggesting two states as a solution.

Only deranged die-hard Zionists settled in Gaza because the area was deprived and inhospitable while the far more delightful confines of the West Bank ensured that both far more settlers took root and also those with much better connections. This ensures, as this article demonstrates to any who harboured any doubts, that the Olmert lacks the strength required to purge the West Bank of illegal settlements. Meanwhile the Israeli right have no inclination whatsoever to pursue such a policy, in fact it is an anathema to them.

Indeed, Likud’s current leader is “Bibi” Netanyahu, a man who came to power thanks to a coalition of those who felt more secure with his laissez faire attitude towards zionist land-thieves.

This considered there seems no chance of a viable two state solution for the foreseeable future. It seems unlikely that the perhaps miraculous volte face of Sharon from Greater Israel coveting expansionist to centrist scourge of the extremist Zionists and turn-coat extraordinaire shall be repeated in our lifetime.

In fact, even if it was that would almost certainly be too late since it seems we’ve got a few years to pull off the two-state sol, with even that assuming it is not too late already.

This considered what is to be done? Such was the challenge Ali set to me and to be honest I’d rather deal with a less complex issue such as abortion that people make less of a fuss about. If pressed, though, I’d most likely offer the same argument I offer in response to many problems: get people to spend a lot of time around each other so that eventually they start fucking and then inter-breeding so thoroughly that we can’t tell the difference and the horrible past starts to matter a lot less.

Will it work here? It’s a long shot. Firstly faith schools would have to be abolished entirely and I imagine that it simply wouldn’t work at all in settlements and the surrounding areas. Then there’s all the theological whining caused and the honour killings that would ensue and the fact that we’d probably have to work out whether Christian-Muslim inter-breeding within the Palestinian population had even happened before trying to get a three way going and the issue of exactly how you short-term work out people both having a state that exists for them and stand a half chance of being denied property and the issue of whether that family that’s creepily stayed the same for thousands of years guarding Christ’s keys in Jerusalem will get in on the cross-blending action and a plethora of other, less important, stuff. Furthermore you’d have to put an end to all of the checks and restraints and perhaps even establish a {limited} right to return and by the time the entire thing had become plausible you’d have probably done a lot to solve what was causing the issues anyway.

Fine. The whole place is irredeemably fucked and nothing I say or suggest can change that. It’s apartheid or Arab majority, either ending Israel as we know it. My inter-racial mergefest continues to be the optimum solution that I’ve encountered, as far as I’m concerned. The fact that reality gets in its way doesn’t stop me being a damn fine progressive.

McCain-Obama or Obama-McCain?

After the insanity this year has provided so far it would not surprise me as much as if you told me that on New Year’s Eve. Certainly more appealing than Obama-Clinton, at any rate. Not to mention far superior to Clinton-Obama, which seemed unlikely on the 31st only because Hillary looked set to dominate.

Also, in the same link, scroll down for a rebuff to Ben’s suggestion that “Hamas <3 Obama” = Obama > McCain. Apparently “Hamas <3 Obama” could well mean Hamas <3 McCain. I might well buy that, just so long as I can understand them as an organism operating on a rational basis. Which, given their seeming total rejection of any claim to empiricism may be, itself, irrational. There’s a strong part of me that suspects they are simply bored of getting nowhere penned in with innocents dying all around them while firing rockets that barely hit anyone.

Not bored enough to stop firing rockets, though. Maybe it’s just for form by this stage. They definitely haven’t run an efficiency check. Would McCain give them an excuse to? Unlikely.

Not a lot has been heard from John McCain lately. It’s not that he hasn’t been saying much, simply that his words have been drowned out by the continuing {and seemingly endlessly on-going} drama about the Democratic nominee.

Recently though he gained some attention over the adverts he ran on global warming and his {longstanding} commitment to ending it, which resulted in some spectacularly rantish responses from the absurd right. Now Andrew Sullivan picks up on something bound to leave Michelle Malkin frothing at the mouth:

If I am elected President, I will work with anyone who sincerely wants to get this country moving again. I will listen to any idea that is offered in good faith and intended to help solve our problems, not make them worse. I will seek the counsel of members of Congress from both parties in forming government policy before I ask them to support it. I will ask Democrats to serve in my administration.