During the past week, the Palestine-Israel argument, an argument that has been argued for more than half a century, has done the inevitable – it has gotten longer. Yet, to this day no more substance is in it than when our grandparents argued this malarkey.
In essence, we continue to do what we did as children: point fingers. We argue back and forth about who started it. It is useless. Our parents taught us to accept when we do something wrong. Funny thing is, all I see happening as we get older is that we find more ways to circumvent the rules we will someday teach our children. Whatever happened to "Two wrongs don’t make a right?"
This is the first time in history we have this level of contact the world over. Our parents only heard about Israel in church. Odds are they never knew a Palestinian. Today we do, especially here on this campus. We see both sides in living color. And what are we going to do with our newfound treasure trove of experience? Walk in with preconceived notions and point them out in front of everyone.
We argue it in class while we look at our professor, not our opponent, but outside of class we all get along fine. Why are we continuing our parents’ argument? They are both enemies. They are in a war, or at least a continuation of hostilities with intermittent periods of relative calm. In war, the worst in people comes out. They both do evil things. When a kid in Tel Aviv dies from some whack job who thinks Allah sanctions suicide, a kid in Tel Aviv dies. When Israeli Defense Force tanks destroy a building and a kid in Gaza dies, a kid in Gaza dies. There is no right in that, and I don’t care who started it. The question remains, who is going to stop it?
This generation has a chance to do things no generation has before. Forget right or wrong, had we put as much money into research and development for cancer and AIDS with the minds and availability of information we have today as we have put into the war, we would likely have cured both of them.
If you take the scientific advances our grandparents saw in their lifetime, and squashed it into 10 years, I doubt it would hold a candle to the last 10 years we saw. Rather than continue the fights of our elders, we should take advantage of this chance for real world change.
