It’s highly typical of well known voices from Hollywood like former Star Trek icon, Leonard Nimoy, to talk of Israel and the Arabs known as the ‘Palestinians’, in simplistic, utterly moralistic, black and white terms. According to Nimoy, the Arabs’ conflict against Israel can be likened to an episode from Star Trek, “Let that be your last battlefield”.
Israel and the Arabs are supposedly locked in an eternal struggle just for the sake of defending the memory of the those killed in the struggle. The scenario carved out by Nimoy/Spock however, doesn’t actually relate to the reality of the conflict, for one side, Israel, has done all it could possibly do in order to end the other side’s aggression against it.
No matter how well meaning, Leonard Nimoy is only helping to further muddy the waters of the Muslim Arab’s conflict with the Jews, for the state of Israel desperately wants peace with the Arabs, but the Arabs are not willing to end the conflict with a Jewish state left standing. You can’t negotiate with intransigence predicated on the destruction of your own people. Leonard Nimoy’s “logic” therefor isn’t logical at all, it’s not even close. Spock would agree. KGS
H/T MY RIGHT WORD
Dear Friend,
When I was a teenager, I told my dad I wanted to be an actor. In response, he gave me the only piece of advice he ever offered me–“Learn to play the accordion.” And he was serious. He said, “You can always make a living with an accordion.”
Because I ignored his advice, I never found out if he was right. Instead, I’ve lived 80 creative years pursuing acting and photography, and working as a director and poet.
If I had listened to my father, and hadn’t done any of those things, chances are you wouldn’t have recognized my name and you wouldn’t be reading this. Now that you are, I’d like to ask you to consider what I have to say. I reach out to you as someone who is troubled to see the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continue apparently without an end in sight.
In fact, there is an end in sight. It’s known as the two-state solution–a secure, democratic Israel as the Jewish State alongside an independent Palestinian state. Even Israel’s nationalist Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has come to see this as the shape of the future. The problem is how to reach that end point. It’s something we should be concerned about–not only as world citizens, but as Americans.
You might recall the episode in the original Star Trek series called, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.” Two men, half black, half white, are the last survivors of their peoples who have been at war with each other for thousands of years, yet the Enterprise crew could find no differences separating these two raging men.
But the antagonists were keenly aware of their differences–one man was white on the right side, the other was black on the right side. And they were prepared to battle to the death to defend the memory of their people who died from the atrocities committed by the other.
