Recently I stumbled across Orson Scott Card’s blog, and have enjoyed reading what he has to say. He’s the author of Ender’s Game, most famously, but for the purposes of his “WorldWatch” blog he’s simply an accessible thinker and writer. This post on the history and meaning of the Gaza pullout is worth reading, especially by anyone who feels like the Mideast an opaque and unfixable mess.

Truth is, it might still be unfixable, but this makes it a little less opaque. Newsweek had a good article on the pullout too; Card’s post covers the same material but more concisely. The bottom line is that the Palestinians are being used by the rest of the Arab world. It reminds me of how African warlords use starvation of their own people to manipulate the sentiment and goodwill of the developed world. The pullout is a way for Israel to show that they are willing to make a tangible and costly sacrifice for peace. What will happen next? I know I’m going to be paying close attention.

Over the last fifty or sixty years, the Arab world has been racking up an awful lot of human misery on their account. Combine the basic tawdry mismanagement of their own resources, dishonesty about Palestine, and the grotesque actions of the Janjaweed gangs in Darfur, not even to mention Saudia Arabia, the mullahs, and Al-Qaeda, and it’s hard to avoid the feeling that everywhere you turn you see Arabs trying to erase, by genocide, anyone who…isn’t Arab.

I suppose that the world has to deal, periodically, with someone’s world-conquering ambitions. Sixty years ago it was Germany and the Third Reich. Now it’s the Arabs, using different techniques, but the same basic urge. Not all Arabs are terrorists, and not all Germans were SS troops. But in neither case have these extreme elements required a numerical majority in order to set the political agenda of their respective nations.