Try­ing not to dwell on the state of the world is well nigh impos­si­ble, but lim­it­ing con­tem­pla­tion seems to me to be essen­tial for san­i­ty, not least because the grow­ing list of conun­drums cov­ers the gamut from naïve, through shame­ful to ridiculous.

The prize for the first lev­el must go to the head of Vietnam’s Depart­ment of Cin­e­ma, who announced that screen­ings of the new movie “Bar­bie” were being can­celled because the film fea­tures a map that appears to high­light “China’s dis­put­ed claims over a large swath of the South Sea.”
Sorry to down­play Viet­namese con­cerns, but as seri­ous as the issue in ques­tion is, the like­li­hood of any adults who actu­al­ly want to see a movie based on a best-sell­ing doll hav­ing a clue about the issue, its geo­graph­ic loca­tion or sig­nif­i­cance, is as remote as the chances of Mid­dle East peace.
Which brings us to the “shame­ful” cat­e­go­ry of which the past week has had an abun­dance. The  head­line “Israel Launch­es Biggest Air Attack on West Bank in Near­ly Two Decades”, kicked off sev­er­al days of reports of death and destruc­tion in Jenin, an over-crowd­ed con­crete and cin­der-block refugee camp, pop­u­lat­ed by some 14,000 descen­dants of Pales­tini­ans dis­pos­sessed when Israel was cre­at­ed in 1948. Its pri­ma­ry indus­tries are implaca­ble hos­til­i­ty towards Israel and grow­ing Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tant groups.
The growth poten­tial, how­ev­er, is expo­nen­tial, cour­tesy of the appar­ent inabil­i­ty of Israelis to grasp that the will of the Jew­ish peo­ple to fight for as long as it took to get and then defend a nation of their own in the land of their ances­tors, is matched by that of Pales­tini­ans to do the same for themselves.
The only dif­fer­ence is the Palestinian’s inabil­i­ty to fig­ure out how to do so effec­tive­ly. Jenin res­i­dents blamed the joke that pass­es for their polit­i­cal lead­er­ship for not fight­ing back against the Israeli oper­a­tion. By way of an alter­na­tive, masked gun­men escort­ing the bod­ies of the dead for bur­ial fired bursts of gun­fire into the air. The con­cept of both grav­i­ty and wast­ing mon­ey by shoot­ing at clouds seems not to have sunk in.
That the ham­ster wheel of vio­lence is still spin­ning, three decades after the Oslo Peace Accords were sup­posed to have marked the begin­ning of the end of hos­til­i­ties, speaks vol­umes about both sides.
Nei­ther side will ever be in a posi­tion to claim an out­right mil­i­tary vic­to­ry, but the Israelis are star­ing into the abyss of a moral defeat. As an arti­cle in For­eign Pol­i­cy put it, Israel has “…locked in a sys­tem of Jew­ish suprema­cy, where­in non-Jews are struc­tural­ly dis­crim­i­nat­ed against or exclud­ed in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe seg­re­ga­tion, sep­a­ra­tion, and domination.”
The obvi­ous echo in that is apartheid, but it should also send a fris­son of the spec­tre of an even more insid­i­ous blight in his­to­ry, rat­tling up the spines of the most hard­line pro­po­nents of claim­ing every square inch of “The Promised Land”.

                        MEANWHILE…

Leav­ing aside the pros, cons and con­sti­tu­tion­al bless­ing or oth­er­wise of gun rights, con­sid­er that a spate of shoot­ings in the U.S., which left 15 peo­ple dead (includ­ing a sev­en year-old boy hit dur­ing a dis­pute over reck­less dri­ving of a jet ski) and more than 50 peo­ple wound­ed, can be blithe­ly summed up in the New York Times as: “None of this was par­tic­u­lar­ly unusu­al for the hol­i­day that marks the birth and inde­pen­dence of the Unit­ed States, at least in recent years.”
The may­hem sparked the pre­dictable “thoughts and prayers” and cris de couer that “some­thing must be done”, which have about as much effect as the obvi­ous accel­er­at­ing of cli­mate change when it comes to pro­vok­ing an out­break of com­mon sense.
The ridicu­lous lev­el was high­light­ed by a sto­ry about real estate prices soar­ing on an island with  chances of sur­vival sci­en­tists describe as “doubt­ful” and where “the only ratio­nal path is retreat”. In the face of the sci­ence, how­ev­er, “stud­ies show more Amer­i­cans are mov­ing into cli­mate dan­ger zones.”
All of that goes some way to vin­di­cat­ing Irish play­wright George Bernard Shaw’s obser­va­tion: “The longer I live, the more con­vinced am I that this plan­et is used by oth­er plan­ets as a lunatic asylum.”

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