Place: Middle East
I just read a particularly silly piece by Shlomo Avineri, the Israeli political theorist who has written some interesting things on Marxism.
IN HIS BRILLIANT SATIRE of the plight of the Palestinians as a captured nation, Emile Habiby introduced Saeed, the ill fated pessoptimist. His beleaguered hero explained his inability to differentiate between optimism and pessimism in this way: "When I awake each morning I thank the Lord he did not take my soul at night. If harm befalls me during the day, I thank Him that it was no worse. So which am I, a pessimist or an optimist?" In an analogous way, the Democratic Party, choking in the grip of power politics, has in short order revealed itself the ill fated pranti-war party.
Our political organization is thoroughly rotten, almost non-existent. It is Carthagian… Never was there such an absurd waste of power, such ridiculous inconsequence of policy—not for want of men but for want of any effective central authority or dominant idea to make them work together.
André Siegfried, England's Crisis, 1931
New Politics: 2008 is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel and of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. What do you see as the Israeli goal and has it changed over the years?
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