WarSclerotic

Sweden and John Kerry would make wonderful partners to get lost in the same maze.

By: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu

Published: October 31st, 2014

via The Jewish Press » » Can IKEA Put Together a Middle East Peace Package?.

Sweden’s foreign minister has told her Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman’s that she would be happy to send him some IKEA furniture as a model for understanding how to make peace with the Palestinian Authority.

Lieberman, responding to Sweden’s decision to recognize the Palestinian Authority as a country, said that the peace process is “more complicated than self-assembly furniture at IKEA.”

Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom shot back, “I will be happy to send him a flat pack of IKEA furniture and he will also see that what you need to put it together is, first of all, a partner. And you also need to cooperate and you need a good manual and I think we have most of those elements,” she said in an interview with CNN.

“If we want to use them also for the conflict in the Middle East and for peace, you need the partners to actually sit down at the same table.”

It really is a simple as putting a round peg in a square hole. If they don’t fit, you simply make the hole square or the peg round, depending on which one is Arab and which one is Jewish.

Israel has been making peace, or trying to make peace, with enemies for 3,500 years, but IKEA was not around, and now Wallstrom has come up with the solution that has been lacking for so many centuries. It’s kind of weird she did not suggest her magic potion for the Ukraine and Russia, Iran and the rest of the world, Obama and Netanyahu and Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber’s, of whom perhaps you, like me, know nothing about without a Google search on “Hollywood fight.”

But, really, let’s give Wallstrom a chance to build peace following the IKEA approach. Maybe she has something going that all of the king’s men and all of the king’s horses never came up with.

Forget Rabbi Kook, whose writings include the phrase that the Land of Israel is not a piece of property.

Forget religion, which always messes up logic.

Forget culture, which ruins conformity.

Forget a future. Just put the pieces together. The worse that can happen is that you throw it out after five years and by another peace package.

But is IKEA so simple, as Wallstrom indicates?

The Digital Trends website has written, “IKEA is a place of heaven for a lot of homeowners, renters and young professionals on a budget. Its furniture pieces are modestly priced and have a minimalist design that suits every kind of lifestyle.

“The problem with IKEA never was its pricing structure or array of furniture lineup, it’s what happens when you bring the box home and realize you have to put these funky-named pieces together yourself.

“Do you fancy a game of real life Tetris?”

The report continues that IKEA is aware that maybe its instructions are not so great, so it now has YouTube tutorials

Digital Trends is not so impressed.

“The MALM bed frame instruction video has been live for about three weeks, and the public’s verdict?

“I watched this and still didn’t understand,” one commenter said.

“IKEA’s YouTube representative responded to the poor commenter… But it’s not exactly the videos that users are truly having a problem with, it’s the basic idea that these instructions are not at all intuitive…. How is someone supposed to figure out how to create a computer desk out of piles of wood with just random figures and barely any words?”

Swedish-American blogger Ken Arneson’s blog offers some helpful insights on why Rabbi Kook was so right and why the simplistic view of the West repeats the idiotic mistake of imposing one’s culture on another.

In a 2012 blog, Arneson wrote:

“Do you remember the first time you stepped into an IKEA store? How utterly confusing it was? How you were led into the display section of the store, and the store seemed to just go on and on and on forever?” In an observation that is a fantastic fit for the U.S. State Dept. and the European Union foreign policy division, Arneson noted:“[IKEA] is designed for the efficiency of the organization, not for the benefit of the customers. And IKEA isn’t alone. When I visited Sweden this summer, I found that the whole country seems to operate on this mentality. It’s a country of the bureaucracy, by the bureaucracy and for the bureaucracy…

“I went into a Burger King at one point to get some fast food… They didn’t have a menu, just some gigantic photographs of about five different value meals to choose from. What if I don’t want a value meal, just some hamburgers? What did that cost? I couldn’t find the information. So I said, forget it, I’ll just go next door to McDonalds.

“When I went to McDonalds, same thing. No list of what they sell, just five gigantic pictures of their extra value meals….

“A restaurant without a menu! The concept had never occurred to me. I guess they just assume that their customers have been there before, and already know exactly what they want, and don’t care how much any of it costs.

“Everywhere I went in Sweden, I started noticing the same thing. Buses, subways, airports, grocery stores, convenience stores…a sort of implicit assumption that everybody already knows how their crazy system works.”

Wallstrom, like Kerry, Catherine Ashton, and almost every other European know-it-all, understands how her system works for her country.

The United States was founded by colonists sent from Britain to develop big business. The culture of “Let’s Make a Deal” is ingrained in the country. If it works there it must work elsewhere, right? Don’t let history and the future get in the way of the present.

So give Sweden a chance. Let it use the IKEA approach to make peace for Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Give it a couple of days, or maybe a couple of weeks, sit back and watch the entertainment while she is so confused she doesn’t know which way to turn, and then offer her a ride to the airport.

Give her something to read on the plane back to Stockholm, perhaps a copy of Rabbi Kook’s teachings.

Israel is not just a piece of property.

It is not a piece of furniture, either.