Tag Archives: Hamas

A Two-State Solution Without Statesmen

December 4, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Palestine and Israel

FORMER US PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter, in a New York Times editorial “Two-State Solution on the Line,” invokes his view a month previous at the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem and reflects that

The rate of settlement growth in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is staggering. There are now more than 500,000 Israeli settlers living beyond the Green Line, in violation of international law. Their numbers have doubled since the Oslo peace accords of 1993. Thousands more settlement homes are planned or under construction.

World

The “Gaza Wars”

November 19, 2012 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

Gaza War

IN THIS LATEST of the Gaza Wars, a little noted symmetry offers insight into developments which doubtless portend the years ahead. The symmetry to which I refer concerns the names attached to the battles of 2008-09 and 2012.

World

Living in the Age of The Endless War

November 12, 2011 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

ON A WALL at the National Capital’s War Monument are inscribed these words, past which I walk each day and derived from the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid: “nulla dies umquam memori vos eximet aevo.” Here I shall provide some context, deferring to Robert Fitzgerald’s 1983 translation for Random House:

Fortunate, both! If in the least my songs
Avail, no future day will ever take you
Out of the record of remembering Time,
While children of Aeneas make their home
Around the Capitol’s unshaken rock,
And still the Roman Father governs all.

World

Palestinian Statehood: a plague on your houses

September 23, 2011 Wayne K. Spear Leave a comment

AT SOME point, without the help either of the nudge or the wink, I’ll wager you have grasped through one commonplace observation the cynical and fraudulent character of the more crude manifestations of American nationalism. Well, are you in? Good. The observation to which I refer is the Chinese manufacture of so many American flags.