Why do people do it? Why do they persist? Surely they know that they are destroying the ability of the soil to hold together when the rains come? The few remaining trees, so valuable at this time for fuel, are also destroyed. Future generations are being compromised for the sake of a few mice. And the interview? Every question is dismissed and every attempt to understand bogs down in flat rejections. The viewer learns absolutely nothing about the reasons why we are where we are. There is no analysis, no explanation and certainly no apology. And what will future generations think when this interview is replayed? Their country, their future was flitted away for no reason, it seems, other than that those who are in power wish to remain in power.
All the indictments Jesus pronounces in the gospels against the leaders can be summed up in one phrase: hardness of heart. When ever he tried to make progress, to open peoples minds to new possibilities he met this attitude; grieved to find them so obstinate, he looked angrily round at them (Mark 3:5). Paul met the same attitude; they have shut their hearts … their sense of right and wrong [is] dulled (Ephesians 4:18). Once people are like that there can be no progress. You have met a brick wall.
I heard a Palestinian saying recently that a way forward for peace in the Middle East would be for each side to imagine what life is like on either side of the divide there and what life could be like. We are all human and we all want a better life. We share one hope. What blocks people from imagining what life could be like for all of us is that we confuse compromise with identity. If I try to see life as the other person lives it, and if I think of compromising so that they other person has a better life, I might lose what I have and that would be the first step to ceasing to be who I am. So I retreat into Zionism or Zanuism as a safe fortress and try to put the others out of my mind. So we are stuck. We are condemned to a wasteful and unnecessary war of attrition between those who have most to gain from change and those who have most to lose. Meanwhile the country burns as the arsonists cannot imagine anything else to do.