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Debugging the “Peace Program”
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Have you ever banged your head against a wall?
Does it accomplish anything, other than give you a
headache and possibly damage the wall? If someone
told you that banging your head against a wall would
make you lose weight, or get rich, and you tried it
and didn’t lose weight or get rich, would you keep
on doing it anyway? Why would anyone want to bang
their head against a wall anyway?
Sometimes even the most well-intentioned projects
don’t perform in reality the way that they were
expected to perform in theory. When that happens,
it’s wise to look for errors in the original script
before running the program again. Sometimes all that
is wrong is a misplaced comma or semicolon, and
you’re up and running. Other programs are so full of
bugs and errors and endless loops that they never
execute successfully.
There is nothing more frustrating than trying to
migrate a legacy application, which never really
worked to begin with, into a new environment with
which it is completely incompatible. It wasn’t
working well before; it is completely broken now,
and no amount of patching and tweaking can fix it,
but produces even more errors. Just scrap it and
start over with a blank screen.
Let’s just say that not even Microsoft would have
released the “Peace Program” even as a beta, and if
the “Peace Program” was a computer application, it
would fail to even compile, let alone execute. No
corporation would support such a thoroughly useless
project, or continue to employ incompetent
developers who failed to produce a working
application after thirteen years of tweaking and
debugging.
The people who designed the “Peace Program” were not
professional engineers or scientists who are trained
to produce results based on proven methods, but
career politicians determined to create a “legacy”
for themselves without a thought to the consequences
of failure. This determination to obtain a “legacy”
unattached to any measurable accomplishments, was
further impeded by the tragic murder of the chief
developer, Yitzhak Rabin, which caused all his
original errors and false expectations to become
enshrined as critical core components never to be
touched or tampered with. Even worse, the extreme
act of a deranged lone individual has been used to
scapegoat and demonize the entire population of
religious Zionists, particularly the “settlers” but
also those living within the 1949 ceasefire lines,
designated as “sacrifices for Peace,” who are
collectively and exclusively blamed for the failure
of the program. At the same time, the unstable
element of “The Palestinians” is always designated
as “peaceful,” “moderate,” and “innocent,” no matter
how many acts of murder, kidnapping and terror they
commit or how many unapologetic genocidal gangsters
they elect to their government.
Even demonstrably provable mathematical facts are
brushed aside in order for the “program” to proceed.
The variable of “Palestinian demographic growth” is
assigned an arbitrary number far in advance of its
actual known value, as an excuse for further
withdrawals and retreats, while the variable of
“Jewish population” is assumed to be flexible and
subject to removal at any time, for any reason. Even
more flawed is the assumption, based on no evidence,
that the amount of land that can be exchanged for a
true and lasting peace agreement is < the total land
area of the entire State of Israel.
When programmers screw up this badly, they get
fired. When projects drag on with no evidence of
progress or probability of success, they are
scrapped. When the same actions applied over and
over again consistently result in the same failure,
it is time to stop repeating these fatal mistakes
and try something else, something that hasn’t
already been done and known to fail.
Getting back to the original question: why would
anyone want to repeatedly band their head against a
wall?
Because it feels so good when you finally stop.
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