Netanyahu's Red Line offers a real opportunity for drawing down nuclear proliferation: A line has two sides, so does a quid pro quo. Instead of threatening Iran, why not offer to give up or decrease Israels' nuclear stock pile...or at least, offer guarantees that Iran will not be in Israels' cross-hairs regardless of provocative actions in the Middle East.
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Good point, Thom. While I agree with you 100% on the issue, I'm poignantly aware that as humans, when we are fearful, we tend to become more defensive--sometimes aggressively so--rather than surrendering.
I haven't corroborated it, but I was recently in Dubai where I was told by a local that if you have even visited Israel in the past 6 months, you won't be allowed into the UAE (United Arab Emirates).
Given the history of persecution of Israelis and evidently feeling surrounded on all sides by large groups of people who really seem to have animosity for them, as a nation, they clearly feel cornered and targeted. I'm sure you're more than familiar with what Jung had to say about situations such as this:
“Indeed, it is becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earthquakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’s greatest danger to man, for the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics, which are infinitely more devastating than the worst of natural catastrophes.
The supreme danger which threatens individuals as well as whole nations is a psychic danger. Reason has proved itself completely powerless, precisely because its arguments have an effect only on the conscious mind and not on the unconscious. The greatest danger of all comes from the masses, in whom the effects of the unconscious pile up cumulatively and the reasonableness of the conscious mind is stifled.
Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is. It lets loose effects which no man wants and no man can stop. It is therefore in the highest degree desirable that a knowledge of psychology should spread so that men can understand the source of the supreme dangers that threaten them.
Not by arming to the teeth, each for itself, can the nations defend themselves in the long run from the frightful catastrophes of modern war. The heaping up of arms is itself a call to war. Rather must they recognize those psychic conditions under which the unconscious bursts the dykes of consciousness and overwhelms it.” --(in The Undiscovered Self)
I don't suppose Netanyahu will make the offer you suggest anytime soon--and I wonder if it would, indeed, make a difference to Iran or others. But I'm pulling for a world in which they could feel safe enough to try...
Who said anything about "surrendering?" The strength of the Feminine involves tactical restraint ala The Art of War. Of course Israel is extremely vulnerable, but a victim can just as easily kill as anyone else. Jung is right, but a vague phrase like "knowledge of psychology should spread" will hardly quell the passions that burn in the Middle East. We must get out of this victim - victimizer paradigm. Jung: "One-sidedness, though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.”