Tag: Middle East

See You in 3000 Years

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Fire licking at the edges of my retinas, I pound out this screed on a typewriter fueled by equal parts mescaline and Middle Eastern mayhem. The news, a brackish tide of reports, washes over me – the Third Temple, that shimmering mirage in the desert, remains but a pipe dream. Israel, that ambitious experiment in a homeland, seems to be dissolving like Alka-Seltzer in a glass of holy water.

Flickered neon signs casting an apocalyptic glow on Jerusalem’s dusty streets. The air crackled with a tension thicker than the sheesha smoke curling from every hookah bar. This wasn’t the Zion the founding fathers dreamt of, folks. This was a fever dream fueled by religious fervor and geopolitical chess games.

The Third Temple? More like a pipe dream gathering dust in some rabbi’s basement. The dream of a purified Israel, an ethnostate carved from the bleeding heart of the Middle East, had bled out itself. The Great Reset, they called it. Palestine, the ever-present ghost at the feast, finally rose from the ashes, a phoenix with a keffiyeh wrapped around its singed wings.

But hold on, pilgrim! Don’t confuse the dream with the dreamer. The grand ideal of a singular, unified people, that might be gasping its last breaths, but the people themselves – they’re a different story. For centuries, they’ve been tossed and turned across this weary world, these folks who’ve carried a heavy burden for generations. And they ain’t going anywhere. They’ll endure. They’ve faced worse, a whole lot worse. They’ll find their way, they always do. But hold on there, pilgrim! Don’t mistake the nightmare for the dreamer. The sins of the fathers, the blood on European hands from the Spanish Expulsion to the horrors of the 20th century, that stain won’t cannot be washed away on the backs of Palestinians.

The Jews, though, they’ve carried the weight of history on their backs for millennia. They’ve been cast out, persecuted, yet they endure. They’ve seen empires rise and fall, witnessed humanity at its worst, yet they find a way to keep going. This dream of a singular homeland, that might be flickering out, but the Jewish spirit? That’s a fire that won’t be extinguished. They’ll adapt, they’ll persevere, just like they always have.But this grand experiment in building a nation solely on shared ethnicity? That bonfire finally sputtered out of fuel.

This ain’t some hate manifesto, far from it. This is a howl at the absurdity of it all. Here we are, teetering on the precipice of the 21st century, and the same old land squabbles are still playing out like a scratched record.

History, that bastard, has a wicked sense of humor. Remember all that “land flowing with milk and honey” talk? Now the only thing flowing freely was sewage in the neglected infrastructure. Gone were the promises of a tech haven, replaced by a black market bazaar hawking knock-off Iron Dome missiles and bootleg falafel. But here’s the thing, and listen up, you paranoid patriots back home: this ain’t about some blood purity contest. This ain’t about hating Jews. This is about the folly of clinging to ideologies that have curdled past their expiration date.

Maybe, just maybe, 3000 years from now, when the cockroaches are the only ones left reading the graffiti on the crumbling walls of Jerusalem, this whole mess will be a punchline in some cosmic joke. But for now, the stakes are high, the tempers are hotter than a phoenix convention, and the future of that little sliver of land hangs in the balance.

So, as the sands of time shift, and Palestine rises from the ashes of Israel as a Jewish Arab state let this be a message in a bottle. We, the bleary-eyed inhabitants of this lunatic asylum called Earth, better figure this mess out before the whole joint explodes. Because one thing’s for damn sure, folks – this ain’t the last act of this particular drama.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a rendezvous with a bottle of rotgut tequila and a sunrise that looks like it’s been dipped in blood. So, as I sign off, headed for parts unknown with a heart full of disillusionment, remember this: the only Promised Land worth searching for is the one built on mutual respect and shared humanity. See you all in 3000 years, when hopefully, we’ll have learned a thing or two from the ashes of this one. This story’s a long way from over, and who knows what madness the next 3000 years will hold. But hey, that’s the Middle East, baby. A land where prophecies curdle faster than camel milk in the desert sun.

Westworld

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Scratching at the surface, man, you see Israel as the iron fist, the puppeteer yanking the US strings. But the Control Panel running Deeper, a roach motel of power where shadows writhe. Israel, is just a fleshy extension, a tentacle of the American Dream dipped in radioactive isotopes – Manifest Destiny dripping with Islamophobia and the sweet, fleshy tang of conquest.

Israel, a flickering neon oasis in the American desert, pulsates with a strange energy. These Brooklyn cowboys, these West Bank settlers, they’re just roaches scuttling across the circuitry, brainwashed by flickering propaganda. Can’t speak the language, passports forged in the fires of delusion. Israel, for them, a Westworld fantasy – “Yeehaw!”, they scream, six-shooters spitting chrome nightmares, “This here’s just like the good ol’ days, wrestlin’ the land from the savages!”

Cut the cord, man, sever the connection, and watch the Israeli psyche unravel like a cheap tapeworm. The delusions of grandeur, the paranoia, it might all start to untangle, a chance, a glimmering possibility for peace in that sun-baked hellhole. But the machine churns on, Westworld forever, a self-perpetuating loop of violence and control. The strings stretch taut, the US at one end, Israel at the other, and the American puppeteer, fat and grinning, his pockets lined with blood money.

These greasy-haired cowboys with delusions of Leviticus, swagger through dusty towns, six-shooters holstered low. They speak a broken Hebrew laced with Brooklyn slang, pronouncements of “Eretz Israel” echoing off tumbleweeds. These are the psychological flotsam, the psychic sewage dredged up by the American Dream and deposited on a desert frontier.

Israel feeds off the dark id of the US. An unacknowledged shadow, a place to indulge in the primal urges of power, land grabs, and good ol’ fashioned “othering.” Cut the wires, sever the connection, and perhaps, just perhaps, the Israeli psyche might start to resemble something approaching sanity. The desert winds could finally carry away the whispers of “chosen people” and the ghosts of ancient battles.

But the control panel hums on. Westworld, a name carved into the sandl, a chrome-plated monument to the conquistador spirit. The prognosis? Grim. Westworld will remain Westworld, a funhouse mirror reflecting the ugliest aspects of American power, played out on a dusty stage far, far away.

Israel, a psychic pressure valve for the American id. Islamophobia, a hissing steam, the need for unfettered power a throbbing erection disguised as democracy. Let the Israelis fend for themselves, cut the umbilical cord of fighter jets and lobbyists. The delusion of grandeur, that shiny chrome exoskeleton, might start to rust, revealing a human vulnerability beneath. Maybe then, peace could rise from the ashes of manifest destiny and settler arrogance.

But the needle gets stuck, the mariachi screams in a feedback loop. Westworld will remain Westworld, a grotesque sideshow under a plastic sky. Israel, a mirage reflecting the distorted desires of a nation in freefall. The colons writhe, a reminder that the past is a disease, ever-present, throbbing just beneath the surface of the American Dream.

Europe, the id in a rumpled trench coat, shoving its primal urges onto the global stage through American muscle and Middle Eastern conflict. Here in Westworld, everyone’s got a role to play, a twisted script directed by the ghosts of empires past.

Europe, they built the sets, erected the barbed wire fences, wrote the racist manifestos that became the theme park brochures. Now, they wash their hands, point at the cowboys and the fanatics, all the while whispering, “Look at the barbarity! How uncivilized!” while clutching their bloody pearls.

But the shadows stretch long, man. The stench of hypocrisy hangs heavy. Antisemitism, that ancient European viper,slithers back across the continent, shedding its skin of “criticism of Israel” and revealing its venomous core. They outsource the hate, then clutch their fainting couches when it spills back across the borders.

This whole damn theme park is built on rotten foundations. Until Europe confronts its own darkness, until they stop projecting their id like a flickering B-movie, there can be no peace. The cycle will continue, a grotesque carousel of violence, spinning ever faster.

Maybe Israel’s a pressure valve for Europe too, a way to vent some of that toxic gas built up over centuries. But it’s a faulty valve, spewing out violence and instability across the whole damn playground. And where’s the superego, the voice of reason in all this? Lost in the funhouse mirrors, no doubt, drowned out by the screams and the gunfire.