mushinnoshin

I know I give Ron Paul a lot of shit over his backwards approach to social issues — his homophobia, his desire to have the government enforce a Christian interpretation of personhood, and his willingness to coddle and associate with outright racists, whether he be a racist himself or not — but make no mistake, it is to some extent at least because I’m hardest on the ones I love.

Because while he’s no Ghandi, sometimes he’s the closest we’ve got:

As an opponent of all violence, I am appalled by the practice of lobbing homemade rockets into Israel from Gaza. I am only grateful that, because of the primitive nature of these weapons, there have been so few casualties among innocent Israelis. But I am also appalled by the long-standing Israeli blockade of Gaza – a cruel act of war – and the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the latest Israeli attack that started last month.

There are now an estimated 700 dead Palestinians, most of whom are civilians. Many innocent children are among the dead. While the shooting of rockets into Israel is inexcusable, the violent actions of some people in Gaza does not justify killing Palestinians on this scale. Such collective punishment is immoral. At the very least, the U.S. Congress should not be loudly proclaiming its support for the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza.

Unfortunately, there are no cheap and easy answers to this conflict. There *is* an answer, but it’s a difficult one which will require a revolutionary upheaval in the way that both the left and the right approach our definition of property and our relationships between the individual, the society, and the earth.

It’s tempting to blame religion for this ancient conflict, but that’s giving religion too much credit. Religion is the glue that binds the opposing factions to be sure, and it is the tool their leaders use to motivate action against the enemy — but it is not the why of the fight. As suggested by Malthus, this, like all war, and indeed all politics, is at its core a struggle for control of our natural resources.

In many ways, the struggle between Israel and Palestine could be seen as emblematic of the root bug in our whole damn system. Solve this one — by recognizing that all of the earth belongs to all of the people, that true property can only extend from what one does, not where one stands, and by reorganizing all of our human institutions around these principles — and we solve not just this conflict, but the vast majority of what plagues us the world over.