King Salomon, the baby and Israel vs. Lebanon...

Wednesday night, my friend was giving me a hard time on my comments about Alan Dershowitzs' piece on 'blame the terrorists not Israel.' I subsequently wrote this on what Dershowitz had to say. He asked me how I could take a liberal Jewish opinion seriously about Israel or this conflict. I said to him, that one has to take their opinions seriously when they make sense.

But I thought more-and-more about this concept. By not taking into account Jewish, Israeli or Zionist opinions on something that is in their backyard or impacts them sometimes directly, is like not taking into account American opinions on our foray into Iraq or on immigration issues. Only Europeans or Africans or Asians can have an opinion on something in the US or in the Middle-east that doesn't really involve them? Is it disinterested parties that have a greater understanding of situations than do the people that are involved on the spot? I do not think that they are worthy arbitrators of these kinds of conflicts. They do not have enough at stake to and not willing to fight for what is right but only accept what may be expedient.

I remember in Sunday School as a kid hearing about the story of King Salomon. In the story there are two new mothers, one of which who had smothered her baby during sleep and claimed the other woman's baby as her own. The problem is presented to King Solomon, who proposes the baby be split in half, each woman receiving one half of the child. The woman who was lying agrees to the "compromise," while the real mother immediately feels sympathy for her offspring. Rather than see her child killed, she says the baby belongs to the other woman. Solomon instantly gives the baby to the real mother, realizing that a true mother would compromise to see her offspring survive.

As the Salomon biblical story relates, only those that are closely connected to the situation are actually in a position to care enough about solving the problem and making it better. The mother didn't want to see her child split in half and preferred giving it up to allowing it to die. Salomon realized this and knew who the true caring mother was. Hezbollah, Syria and Iran don't care if the baby dies. They have their own narrow objectives in mind. The people to listen to here are not the outsiders but the people that actually have a stake in the outcome of these conflicts.