Rainy Day in Haifa

It's raining here. I don't have a lot of work to do. I said I did in the last post, but the work is part of a project on ETA for Terrorism and Responses, and our meeting has been pushed off until Tuesday night. I've been sitting here in my room, exploring some untouched music on my computer and reading The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. It's a great book. It's about Twain's trip to Europe and the Holy Land towards the end of the 19th century. The image it casts of the Middle East is a lot different from the Middle East of today.

Not having a TV set is great. It gives me more time to read. I've compiled a list of books that I plan to read while I'm here. They're not literature, they're all related to the place I'm in now. The books are:

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (I read the original paper in the London Review of Books)
From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas Friedman
Palestine: Peace not Apartheid by Pres. Jimmy Carter (I skimmed this over the summer, I recommend people read it and take it with a grain (or sack) of salt)
The Deadliest Lies by Abe Foxman (I'm curious what his rebuttal is to Walt and Mearsheimer)
Anything by Tom Segev
Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East since 1776 by Michael Oren
The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann by Chaim Weizmann
Anything by David Ben Gurion

There's a lot more I just can't think of them right now. I've left off Chomsky, Dershowitz, and Finkelstein. They're all childish pundits and are all equally full of crap. Foxman is too. I'm just curious about what he's written.

Interest in Middle Eastern politics is a disgusting vice and is a lot more addictive than tobacco.
Discussing the politics here reminds me of the scene in All Quiet on the Western Front where two old German guys are sitting with a solider, discussing the tactics of the war and how it will be over before Christmas. To demonstrate the tactics, they move beer glasses and nuts around on the table. Everyone is guilty of this somehow. Reducing the lives of soldiers and civilians to beer and nuts. It's disgusting and mind boggling how people can toss around other people's lives and think that they're more expendable than others. Or that they're worth more than others.

That's exactly why I'm going back to Pitt. I am on Middle East overload. All the talk about war, peace, nuclear weapons, terrorism, Iran and such is making me sick. I need to get back and work on something else. But I'm still going to read those books. I'd rather be informed than ignorant.