I went to a talk with a Palestinian playwright/professor and a Cornell theater professor. I was the only one there so I got to ask quite a few questions. I don’t know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so it was nice to hear the Palestinian side. It was pretty depressing though. The playwright was pretty certain there would be a war in the near future over the conflict. I asked if anything could be done to stop it and he didn’t think it could be stopped. I’m curious what the Israeli side is now. The Palestinians seem perfectly justified in not wanting to be oppressed by the Israelis, but Jewish people generally seem pretty supportive of Israel.

The play he wrote is about an Israeli doctor who suffers from some kind of trauma that affects how he deals with his patients in a psychiatric hospital. I don’t think I understood exactly what the message of the play was. I know it deals with insanity and how people arguing about the conflict were crazy in the backdrop of a big massacre of Palestinians. I asked him what he would like to see as a solution to the conflict, and both professors wanted a United States of Israel-Palestine kind of arrangement, but socialist. I’m not entirely sure why it would need to be socialist to solve the conflict. That seems like it’s sticking an extra political message into an agenda that doesn’t need it, but they said inequality was the justification. Palestinians are poor and Israelis are rich. That seems much more in line with government favoring Israelis to me than capitalists exploiting people, but I’ll never understand socialists. Wealth redistribution doesn’t even have anything to do with socialism. Public ownership of the means of production does not require redistribution, and private ownership does not prohibit redistribution. Anyway, they’d probably get more people to agree with them if they didn’t try to bundle socialism in with social justice.