Debugging The Peace Program

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 integrate 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.

Bug in design

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.

Matter of numbers

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.

Gamla
10.18.2006