I have been known to mention two experiences in my life that have made me realize there are two kinds of people.  One experience was real, the other imagined.

The real experience came from my years as a software engineer supporting and developing code for the circuit simulation program called SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis).

Computer programs are broken down into subroutines.  Each subroutine has parameters which are its inputs and outputs.  In Spice, there was seldom an explanation of what a subroutine was trying to accomplish and seldom an explanation of the meaning of its inputs and outputs.  If you knew either what the routine was trying to do or if you knew the meaning of its inputs and outputs, you would have a much easier time figuring out the missing piece of information.  In the case of SPICE, you would start by making some assumptions about the two missing pieces of information, and then go round and round in circles trying to reconcile the two things.  If you succeeded in finding out what was going on, you frequently realized that your initial assumptions on both what the routine was trying to do and the meaning of its inputs and outputs were quite different from what was actually correct.  Of course the effect was multiplied because to figure out what a subroutine did, you had to figure out what the subroutines inside it did.  You were continually going up and down the hierarchy of subroutines trying to make sense of it all.  In bugs I found and fixed in SPICE, I could frequently detect that the person who wrote the bug didn’t fully realize what the routine was trying to do or what the inputs and outputs were supposed to represent.

What I learned from this experience was that I would never write computer programs in this way and inflict this amount of pain on whomever might have to work with the code I had written. As I saw other people work in this domain, it seemed to me these others took a different lesson.  The lesson they seemed to learn was that the code in SPICE was an example of how a PhD student ought to write code and lesser people should aspire to that same style.

The imagined experience was thinking about the hazing rituals in fraternities.  There too, I expect there were two lessons you could take away from that experience.  The one I took away from imagining it is that I would not like to go through that experience, and I would never want to inflict that kind of punishment on anybody else.  The other lesson I suppose you could learn is that if the people who did it to you could get away with it, you were certainly going to take your turn inflicting this on the next set of initiates.

I suspect that you can see these life lessons and my reactions to them reflected in many of the things I post on this blog.

The Real News Network has the interview Deputy Speaker of Israeli Knesset Calls for Expulsion and Jewish Reoccupation of Gaza.

Here is an excerpt of the more palatable part of the interview.  I leave it to your imagination as to whether or not you want to see and hear the rest.

But beyond that is there’s the genocidal aspect of Feiglin’s remarks. And genocide, incitement to genocide, is incredibly common right now in Israeli political discourse. It’s not just Feiglin. There’s Giora Eiland, who was one of the heads of the Institute for National Security Studies, which consults for the Israeli military. He’s a former national security adviser, someone who’s deeply embedded in the military intelligence apparatus. And today he published a piece in Yedioth Ahronoth, which is the main newspaper in Israel, pretty much calling for genocide in the Gaza Strip, or at least justifying it. He’s basically making the case that there are no civilians in the Gaza Strip because they elected Hamas as Germans elected Hitler. This is the same rationale that Osama bin Laden used to justify the 9/11 attacks and the indiscriminate slaughter of Americans, because they had elected governments which had attacked the Middle East, which had attacked Muslim nations. So you’re hearing this from mainstream figures, not just from crazy old Feiglin, who’s willing winning lots of fans and followers with this kind of rhetoric, who’s really keeping up a public profile

This video is what I was aware of, but did not even want to see when I responded to my cousin Rachel’s Facebook post.

My response to the article she posted was the following:

Rachel,

I could give you a list of Israeli behavior similar to the Gazans, and we could discuss whether or not there was any moral equivalence. However, the answers wouldn’t matter because we would be asking the wrong question.

I am not looking for ways to stoke or justify the hate between the two sides.

I am trying to find ways to bring a just peace.

As sure as it seems that neither side can trust the other to be peaceful, I think about South Africa. I am sure the Afrikaners felt the same way about the black Africans that they suppressed as the Israelis feel against the Palestinians and the retribution that would result if the other side ever got power. The world was amazed when this expected outcome did not happen in South Africa. Perhaps the same good result could be brought about in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. We should be looking for ways to make this happen instead of wallowing in our mutual hate.

I often think of your Grandfather (and my uncle) Sam. If he could survive and rise above what he suffered in WW II, then the least we can do in honor of his memory is to try to be as good as he was in how he handled his feelings and showed in his behavior.

I guess my only justification for this post is to urge all sides to stop and think before you go any further down this road.

If Israel succeeds in the goals discussed in this video, it will be impossible for me to be “proud” of that accomplishment, to put it mildly.

Sharon reminded me that one of her brothers essentially committed suicide over what he saw and did in Viet Nam, the details of which we can’t even imagine. It is crazy to even contemplate the effect on our own soldiers of what they were asked to do ahead of contemplating the effect on the people they did it to. However, if that’s what it takes to make the public wake up, then maybe that is what has to be said.