Dear Robert,

I think you're whistling in the wind if you call people you disagree with 'buffoons' and think they cannot get majorities as if your position is automatically clearly the majority one. It makes me uneasy to read your breezy optimism, given past history... even though I think your identification of Netanyahu and Buchanan meretricious and your continual association of nationalists with fascists equally so. And that's even when I do agree with some of what you say, which is as often as not. There's a simplistic approach to the messages that is not optimistic at bottom, because it seems they dodge the fine points.... as if you're writing politics rather than discussion, making credos rather than arguments. Which given the current Israeli level of presentation, I guess is par for the courses... but even as politics you could do better, it seems to me.

Richard Sherwin                      "even when rooted in Gd
Department of English             a flower withers when cut"
Bar Ilan University
52900 Ramat Gan, Israel
sherwr@ashur.cc.biu.ac.il

Dear Richard,

Thanks for your note. This response is being written under the influence of the Jerusalem bombing this morning. But yes, you are right, perhaps I have been going on a bit much about the buffoonery of Bibi -- and American politicians in general.

I also admit that I believe Shimon Peres is far closer to the ideal of Zionism than the settlement movement, which I have long regarded as the most serious anti-Zionist threat to the State of Israel, because they drained resources both political and spiritual from the Modernist Post-Industrial State that Herzl so eloquently described in his vision.

And yes, in our argument with the Palestinians we have a problem -- too many of them are convinced that the Herzl's profile on the wall of the Knesset is really a secret Jewish map of a planned conquest all the way to the now polluted junction of the Tigris and Euphrates waters. They think our common grandfather tried to sacrifice Ishmael, while we think it was Isaac.

Perhaps you and I differ in that I believe the Jewish mission of spreading Torah from Zion should mean to help spread democracy through this part of the world, something the entire planet needs to happen to survive what mankind did to it in the last 150 years. Cyberspace, as a place in space, is also part of that mission. Israeli companies are pioneers in almost every technology that makes this place right now between us, common, shared, real.

It is not merely the instantaneous communication that is critical to this first perpetual motion machine in history; the elimination of geography as a constraint is liberating for the human spirit -- we who live at the intersection of the three continents that describe the way so much of the human race split at birth, do have a responsibility for helping to heal that rift. And we are doing so, because in the marketplace of global communications, our strength enables us to impose our rules for many of the changes we need to take place; that the Arabs accept democracy, that the Africans unite enough to allow highways from South Africa to Europe, that the Russians eventually make it into Europe.

These are very long term historical projections, but they are beginning to become possible if for no other reason than they are being discussed, in a forum accessible to anyone interested in any word in at least the title, if not the body of the message.

The bombing should temper my optimism. But being a contrary person, I'd like to suggest that such bombings, no matter how tragic for the people whose lives are ruined by it, prove that the inexorable process for finding a compromise in this difficult land is still under way, if it can create such horribly fanatic opponents.

My optimisim regarding the peace process -- and cyberspace -- is risky, of course, leaving me open to attacks whenever such bombings take place. But it is not an optimisim born of naivete. Instead, I believe it is a hard-headed appreciation of the forces at play now in the world.

Those forces are lining up -- who will take part in the next century's global economy and who will not. The only way it will work is if it's as global as possible, so yes, fascism, nationalism, isolationism, all the f-ing isms seem silly most of the time because they are so self-aggrandizing when in fact, in the ocean of cyberspace, they are at best currents, if not merely little eddies in far-off lagoons more curious for their shells than their waters.