Make Mistakes - Grow Wiser

Al Franken:

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

Niels Bohr:

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

Ehud Barak apparently reached conclusion that he is not yet an expert and he needs another opportunity to make some mistakes to invigorate his learning process. Otherwise it's impossible to explain how after such a disastrous premiership he is now asking Israelis to give him another chance.

During his meeting with elderly members of Kibbutz Afikim in the Jordan Valley Barak had to face some tough questions:

"That's nice that you say you want to work as part of a team now, but you forgot to work together with people last time and you left us a party in shambles," Oded Gafni told him.

. . .

"You are the father of the policy of unilateral disengagement, which you started in Lebanon and, in my opinion, has been proven mistaken," said a woman named Smadar.

Barak responded to Gafni that he "did not say that he had changed, just that he had learned lessons."

It appears that having secured that he properly learned the lessons of his old mistakes Barak is now after new lessons.

To Smadar, he (Barak) made a point of not ruling out future unilateral steps.

"I would want to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, but you can't force an agreement on the other side and it takes two to tango," Barak said. "If there is no partner, Israel might have to ask the international community to help the Palestinians prepare themselves for a diplomatic solution in which there will be two states for two peoples. (!!! NB)"

This means what? That the international community will send an occupation force to Gaza to crash Hamas and setup a Christian Democrats party for the Palestinians? How exactly the international community will help the Palestinians to prepare themselves for a diplomatic solution if they don't want to be a partner?

You can understand what you want from this and probably Barak himself has a very vague idea of what he is talking about but practically it will look like this: After having failed to stop Kassams attacks from Gaza, Israel will try to unilaterally pull out of parts of the West Bank counting on some kind of a UN force to do the IDF's job. Of course the force will probably fail to stop weapons smuggling or rocket attacks but it will keep filing complaints about the IDF overflying the West Bank airspace and other shit.

Yitzhak Rabin and I got elected because we were perceived as coming from the Center," Barak told the crowd. "Some of the candidates are considered radical leftists. You cannot win an election in the State of Israel with leftist policies."

Though Barak is right that these days it may be hard to win elections with leftist policies, it is probably even harder to achieve with Barak himself.

Regarding Iran, he (Barak) said an Arab leader had told him that Israel remained the strongest weight against Iran in the region.

Source

An Arab leader? Should we understand from this that Barak was not sitting idly all those years but he was busy making friends with Arab leaders? And so he is not coming back empty-handed but with some kind of an Israeli Arab anti Persian alliance?

Actually I really want to know if Olmert and Barak are seriously planning to take part in a big anti Iranian coalition together with Sunni Arab states. Because until now I was sure that our integration into the region was dependent on how diligently we'll be learning Arabic (see previous post).

Basically what comes out is that it's not enough that we are supplying weapons to Abu Mazen against Hamas. We are now invited to take part in the great Sunni Shia civil war as well?

And in exchange for this dubious honor we will be allowed to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and to evacuate the Golan heights? Did I get it right?

Actually I am one of the few Israelis who will be excited to take on Iran together with Sunnis. I just don't know what to do with these two thousand kilometers that separate the two countries. Had Barak and Olmert ever checked the map? Olmert is reported to have been genuinely surprised to hear during the last war that Haifa was attacked by a Hezbollah rocket unit stationed near Tyre. I have no idea what it means that he was surprised. It's as sure that Tyre is in Lebanon as that neither him nor Barak are good at calculating distances.

Actually we do have some Iranian friends right here. We can help Sunnis enormously in this respect. But the thing is that these friends are Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Jihad in Gaza and maybe I missed something but I never noticed Sunnis showing any enthusiasm whenever we tried to stop these monkeys from shooting their rockets.

Or maybe the things are changing and we are going to receive an official invitation from the Saudis to take on Hamas and Hezbollah next summer (most Israelis hate to have wars in winter . . . too cold)?

Who knows. The world has grown so complicated and I sure did not commit enough mistakes for getting wise enough to be able to figure it all out.

PS

I was thinking recently that maybe there is nothing we can do about our politicians and we should just sit and wait until the current generation of our leaders dies out.