Nathan’s Musings

Yesterday I heard an interview on the BBC with Samir el-Youssef, a Palestinian writer living in London. The topic was the eternal one: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, the discussion was about the Palestinians’ “right of return” to the territories within Israel proper, from which they fled in 1948, a demand which no Israeli government can ever meet since it would effectively mean the end of the State of Israel. I am now listening to the podcast of the interview, and am quoting loosely:

Question: How do you give hope to the thousands of Palestinians still stuck in the refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon–the second, third generation?

Answer: That’s why we have to widen the perspective on the refugee problem. We Palestinians must acknowledge that it is not solely the responsibility of the Israelis. Of course, the establishment of the State of Israel is what created this problem, but it is not just the Israelis who perpetuated the problem. There are thousands of Palestinians who live in this country (meaning the UK), and yet there are no Palestinian refugee camps in London or in England. Why? Because we have a state here which does allow people to have a chance to integrate. If this had been happening in the Arab world–in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan and Egypt and the other Arab countries–the refugee problem would have been solved long ago. We are talking about 21 Arab countries!

El-Youssef went on to talk about how Palestinians living in the Arab world have had no opportunity to integrate into the local societies despite the fact that there is plenty of space, there is no language issue, the cultural differences are minor etc. I am sure many Arabs will consider him to be politically incorrect at best and a traitor at worst. But if people like him were in positions of power in the Arab world, the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been solved long ago. Unfortunately, the only place where an Arab can express such opinions in public is outside the Arab world, in our decadent West…

In yesterday news, within 15 minutes of each other, I listened to two stories on the radio, showing the highs and lows of the human condition in more than one way. First, there was Poland’s Irena Sendlerowa, a 97-year old lady living in a nursing home in Warsaw, being honoured by the Polish parliament and president for having saved 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto during the war. A truly remarkable feat, for as Poland’s chief rabbi pointed out in an interview with BBC, each time she saved a child (by smuggling it out of the ghetto), she risked her life–and she did it not once or twice, but 2500 times! Mindboggling.

And then to the idiocy: a Russian billionaire is supposedly going to spend a few millions getting married to some blonde chick only to divorce her 5 days later. The sole purpose of this is to win a childhood bet with some friends according to which he was going to be married by age 42, an age he will reach on May 3rd. It is unclear whether the story is true or not, but it could well be true. Why not? Russian billionaires have been spending their money in all kinds of stupid ways, so why not this? The man in question is Mikhail Prokorov, owner of Norilsk Nickel–like most other Russian billionaires, this guy is involved in the commodities industry; and like most if not all of them, he came to his riches not through hard work or entrepreneurship but by being in a position to buy state-owned assets for virtually nothing in the chaotic early 1990s. Rich people are not particularly popular anywhere; but especially in Russia, where most people are poor by Western standards, and where the rich are (accurately) perceived as having gotten rich basically by stealing from the state. You can say what you want about Bill Gates, or Sergey Brin, or Richard Branson etc. But one thing they all have in common is that they got rich by starting companies that created new products, or new ways of doing things from which we all benefit today (whatever one thinks of Microsoft, they have made computers useful to hundreds of millions of people; Google has made the internet much more valuable; and Virgin and other low-cost airline pioneers have made flying accessible to people who in earlier times would never have dreamed of taking a foreign holiday). In contrast, the Russian rich have not contributed anything to society: no inventions, no new products, no entrepreneurship–they have simply stolen Russia’s minerals, oil and gas. It is for that reason that most Russians heartily applauded Putin’s dismemberment of the oil company Yukos and the arrest of its founder, Michail Chodorkovsky. That is also why many rich Russians, even those who are “friends” of the Putin regime’s, find London a safer and more hospitable place than Moscow.

Blanket statements are always dangerous, but I think this one is pretty accurate: there is not a single Russian on the Forbes top 1000 list who has come to his riches in a way that the average person would consider honest. If I were Mr. Prokorov, I would be a bit more careful about ostentatious displays of wealth. In today’s Russia, it may not be good for your health.

The past week our children had their winter break. My 17-year old son went to Val d’Isere with a bunch of friends, while my wife, our 12-year old daughter and I drove to Switzerland to spend a couple of days in Flumserberg, our usual skiing spot when we lived there and the destination of our annual winter trek since we left Switzerland in 2003. If you visit their web site, note the news item entitled “Finally-snow flurry!” To see a ski resort at 2200 m celebrating the fact that they had a day of snow in early March really tells you something about what kind of winter they have been having. When we arrived on March 1st, it was mostly foggy, with some rain in the town (located at 1500 m) and not much of anything on the slopes. The snow was there, but it was wet and heavy. Then some decent snow on the morning of March 2nd, followed by a reasonably sunny afternoon; and then back to rain on March 3rd, so my wife and my daughter gave up on skiing around lunchtime. This is a place where we used to go even in April! If this year’s winter is a taste of things to come, then Flumserberg and other ski resorts at similar altitude will be out of business in 10 years–sure, you can make snow, but to run a profitable ski resort you need reliable, natural snow end enough cold and sunny days to make the place attractive.

The trip to Switzerland was not all doom and gloom, though. We visited some friends, I spent a pleasant day walking around Zurich (I don’t ski), and I had time to work on my pictures and post them to the web while still there. Take a look at my images from the trip here.