Imagine arriving from Mars or some faraway place totally unlike earth and hovering over the Middle East. The combatants would not look all that distinguishable. True, some may wear what resemble, to your eyes, beanies, others with what look like dish towels. Others pray to a wall and someone they call Yahweh, others bow and invoke Allah, who appears to require Blessings Upon Him.
What will be distinguishable, however, is the blood red soaked terrain your Martian eyes can see stretching over the whole area. Blood pouring from open wounds for generations. As you can foretell the future, there is no end in sight.
Having learned current argot as you are tuned to social media blasting out from this strange place, you would be excused for thinking “wtf is going on?!” Well, here is a new book that helps to answer just that quandary.
Unlike many books about this region, it provides historical highlights of the conflict rather than mind numbing and overwhelming detail. Also unlike others, the book presents both sides. But most importantly, Mr. Journo takes a position and explains his reasoning on how to think about right and wrong. In an era where even the Supreme Court can’t take a firm position on something so prosaic as a cake, Mr. Journo is to be congratulated in tackling this most controversial of geo-political conflicts!
Readers should be aware that this book does not subscribe to the modern notion of the PC culture: “who can judge different societies”. “Who’s to say”, many tell us, “what is right or wrong”. Mr. Journo answers by asserting what should be obvious to all: “the moral framework I apply... is not religious, but secular it’s concerned not with collectives, but with the lives of individual, irreplaceable human beings.”
He comes out firmly on the side of Israel’s right to exist and the superiority of the country with respect to the life its individual citizens live. But that is not mere boosterism, as some may charge. It is a sincere invitation for all thinking people involved in the confrontation to examine their premises and follow a uniquely articulated roadmap out of the quagmire.
Even if from Mars or Venus, honest individuals will find the book a valuable journey of discovery and re-assessment!
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