Isreali Prime Minister Ehud Barak is trailing badly in the polls behind hawkish candidate Ariel Sharon. With the election scheduled for February, 2001, it seems likely that if the current trends hold the nation of Israel is set to take a dramatic swing to the right, probably prompted by growing frustration with the continued violence in the country during the latest round of the intifada. Perhaps in response to the swing, Ehud Barak recently stated that he would never allow Palestinians who were displaced during the establishment of the state of Israel the right to return to territory currently occupied by the Jewish State. The right to return remains one of the fundamental demands of the Palestinians, and organizations such as Human Rights Watch suggest that their demands are in accord with the principles of International Law. Unemployment continues to climb in the Palestinian territories, as recent moves by the Israeli government to seal borders have left many Palestinians who are dependant on income from jobs in Israel without recourse. The normally busy tourist season in such perrenially Christmas attactions as Bethlehem came to absolutely nothing in the winter of 2000, and the growing economic hardship is the sort of thing that can only fuel greater frustration and further violence in the territories, and certainly is not going to be conducive to achieving any sort of peaceful resolution to the current round of the conflict. Meanwhile Human Rights Watch has condemned the Israeli military for using excessive and indiscriminate force in the territories, and has also critisized Palestinian police forces for not taking measures to control armed bands who are often firing on Israeli soldiers in areas where civilians are present. The organization states that the Israeli response is usually indiscriminate and ham handed, resulting in the loss of civilian life. It is a myth that the current conflict between the Arabs and the Jewish people in Israel is something that has been going on for thousands of years. During the times of the persecution of the Jewish by Christians, it was customary for Jews to seek refuge with Muslims. Jewish people have lived in greater peace with Muslims throughout the centuries past than they ever did with the church, which, really, was the main persecutor of the Jewish people in the past, and not the Muslims. The conflict which has occured in our times is one last relic of the end of the colonial period, and was sparked both by Arab resentments over the domination of Arab lands and the arbitrary carving up of Arab territories practiced earlier in this century by colonial powers (it was a customary practice to deliberately create artificial Arab states, dividing traditional ethnic areas piecemeal and distributing them among the newly created Arab states to avoid any possibility of Arab unity and nationalism developing in the void left by the departing colonial powers). This simmering resentment was ignited by the arbitrary creation of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the displacement of close to a million Arabs who had traditionally occupied the land in the resulting wars and conflicts. Several hundred thousand more Arabs were displaced from their homes during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, some of them for the second time in their lives, having fled to West Bank in 1948, and then forced to flee again to Jordan in 1967. Shortly after the war, in 1948 the United Nations passed a resolution, never observed, that insisted that the Arabs who had lost their homes should have the opportunity to return at the earliest possible opportunity, but Israel remains adamant to this very day that the Palestinians will not be returning to territory now part of the state of Israel. Israeli politicians and many citizens fear the results of establishing a multi-cultural democracy in Israel, resulting in the dilution of Jewish votes and Jewish influence in the country. Israel would cease to be a Jewish State and instead become a kind of melting pot nation. Even more problematic is that Jews and Arabs, after decades of hostility and resentment, would be faced with the difficult problem of living together, and Israelis might feel threatened as one small island surrounded by an Arab sea. Unfortunately, the centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence among the Jewish people and the Arab Muslims has, as a result, become a thing of the past in our century. The conflict is fueled by religious elements, particularly those on the far right, who employ fundamentalist interpretations of passages describing the return from exile in Babylon, and a literal interpretation of the Torah, including certain politically inspired, racist ideology espoused by the ancient book, as an excuse to ignore almost two thousand years of Arab presence in Palestine. The reality of the existence of the State of Israel, and the presence of millions of Jewish people on the land, the potential power of a large Arab voting block in the land, and the growing and increasingly entrenched recent history of hostility and suspicion make it seem unlikely that the right to return of Palestinians, or a modern mulitcultural truly democratic state of the kind envisioned by Human Rights Organizations in compliance with the principles of International Law is likely to become a reality in the Middle East any time soon. Rather it seems more likely to be the case that the State of Israel is about to take another severe swing to the right, meaning more settlements in the occupied territories by the religious right in the country, more clashes Palestinians, and further bloodshed and anger, the sort of things that it seems will permanently destroy the peace these people enjoyed for millenia.
A Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory
is also available as a zip file -> unified.zip
Introduction :The Pioneer Effect and the New Physics. A brief description of the new physics required to explain the 'Pioneer Effect', which is the constant deceleration of space craft as they fly through space.