This    month of May marks the 73 rd  anniversary of the state of Israel.   And to quote the ETHAN EDWARDS character in THE SEARCHERS:  “ Just as  sure  as the turnin' of the  earth”,  Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other. As sure as the cicadas come back, Israel bombs Gaza ( see picture below) as the mad terrorists who run Gaza, HAMAS, send a murder of rockets into Israel.  B ut this time, there is a new and explosive element, Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs are lynching each other.   This Blogger happened to be in Cairo during the first Gulf War; he was sitting in the Sheraton watching the television with a bunch of Kuwaiti exiles when some Palestinians asked to join the group. As a courtesy to this Blogger, the entire future conversation was in English; which this Blogger thought was very thoughtful.   The common dream of the Palestinians was the establishment of a secular state on the land of Israel, in which Jew, Christian, Druze and Muslim could live as brothers.

Abba Eban,  the brilliant Israeli diplomat, once offered up this devastating insight into   the Arab mind set: “ The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Except perhaps now-“…… Palestinians in east Jerusalem are applying for Israeli citizenship in hopes of swapping their vulnerable status as mere city residents for the rights and ease of travel that come with an Israeli passport. The citizenship debate reflects the unsettled status of Jerusalem’s 330,000 Palestinians who make up 37% of the city’s population 50 years after Israel captured and annexed the eastern sector……asking for an Israeli passport still carries the stigma of implied acceptance of Israeli control, and only about 15,000 Palestinians have requested one since 2003; of those, fewer than 6,000 were reportedly approved……Israel’s 1967 annexation of east Jerusalem opposed by most of the world did not come with an offer of automatic citizenship for the tens of thousands of Palestinians living

This Blogger just finished listening to Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech about the imbroglio in the Middle East, specifically between Israel and Palestine.  The speech started off as the best, most passionate speech John Kerry has ever given, and,then in typical Kerry fashion, deteriorated into mediocre tedium. As the speech never ended, this Blogger thought about the last Israeli lion, Shimon Peres, who died in this year 2016, at the age of 93. It is one of the great sins of 20 th Century History that an Israeli/Palestinian accord could not be forged when other great Israeli lions were alive: Moshe Dayan, David  Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin, and Abba Eban. Alas, the great Arab lion of that age was Gamal Abdel Nasser; who was delusional. He threatened Israel with annihilation; then,rather than plan for an armed Israeli reaction to his threats, a preemptive strike, he spent hours discussing the future of Jews in a post Israeli, Palestinian state. With lions like Dayan, one