Today, I surrender.

One of the more annoying things about traveling abroad is foreigners, upon learning that you’re American, assume you are fit to bear responsibility for national policy and action across the globe. These ridiculous people conclude in the world’s richest, oldest and best-informed democracy, the average citizen is knowledgeable and participatory.

We, of course, know much better. The degree to which our democracy is participatory is laughable and deserves no further discussion. Beyond that, I, and most likely all of you, are totally in the dark about events across the world. It’s not that we don’t watch the news, but we are unable to place a day’s news into context as part of a narrative. We didn’t see the World Trade Center bombing as the culmination of 20 years’ antagonism between the Middle East and the West. We saw it as a single act of brutality.

There is no continuity to the American view of the world, which isn’t surprising given our government’s total inability to look further in the future than the next election.

I made an effort to be different. Several times in the past few years, I have tried to learn the history behind the situation in Palestine and Israel and write about it, so a few of us could begin to understand a little of the slow violence on the other side of the ocean. I weathered a good number of angry, sputtering, incoherent e-mails from both Arabs and Jews every time, but I thought it was worth it.

Today, I give up. Today, I admit any attempt to place the conflict in the Middle East in any recognizable order is irrelevant. Perhaps, some time in the past, it would have been useful to learn the directions of the movements in the area, but today I realize there is no direction.

The area, the war and the conflict are now in a state totally free of explanation, of logic, or argument or of justification. In six days, six suicide bombings have been carried out by Palestinian terrorists, killing people as they celebrated Pesach with their families, as they ate in a street cafe. Wednesday, an Israeli sniper killed a 56-year-old woman returning from a West Bank hospital where her broken leg had been set and cast.

Yasser Arafat has been trapped in his house in Ramallah, which is now ringed with barbed wire. Ariel Sharon, moved by personal animosity as much as anything else, has brought his country into a war against extremists. His actions are supported by Israel’s own extremist settlers, who bulldoze civilians’ houses to make room for their trailers.

I give up. I no longer care who is in the right, who is in the wrong or even who is being killed. I realize there are innocents dying, but I also realize those innocents are matched in numbers by and represented by people who have so little regard for the simple value of human life that they no longer want the war to be over. The story of the Middle East is no longer important, and the rights and politics of the people involved are subjects I don’t care about.

The situation in Israel and Palestine as it stands can now only be seen as chaos, with no acceptable governing body on either side of the war. While Sharon and Arafat may have achieved their positions through legal means, their indifference to human life invalidates those positions. As such, the rest of the world owes it to our common humanity to protect the lives of the people in the area, regardless of the sovereignty of the states involved. As I see it, the United States has several options in leading this effort:

• Pack up their marbles and take them home: The United States has approved $5.2 billion in aid to Israel for this fiscal year, 80 percent of which goes for military purchases. We have also approved a $400 million aid package to the Palestinian National Authority. We can no longer fuel the fire of the region. That money - almost $6 billion - can be used to transport and resettle whomever wishes to leave the area. If someone wants to live, we will move and settle them somewhere else - Jordan, Australia, Oklahoma, I don’t care. If they insist on staying, killing and dying for the Holy Land, let them.

• Build the empire of the United States: When there are two parties, each claiming right of governance, the surest way to settle matters is to unite them under a third ruling nation. The full weight of the United States military could be brought to bear in the region, maintaining a single nation or two with strictly maintained borders. When the Soviets left Yugoslavia, it fell apart. The reverse could be true for the Middle East.

• Get off our butts and use our considerable economic and military influence to force Israel and Palestine to the bargaining table: Nah, this will never happen.

• Continue to plug our ears and sing, “LA LA LA LA LA LA”: This involves the maintained presence of our president in Crawford, Texas, while Sharon and Arafat become progressively more insane. The Middle East coalition we worked so hard to build and will prove invaluable in our coming invasion if Iraq falls apart, and the rest of the world wonders why we can’t connect our Palestinian policies and our war against terrorism.

Two of these options are ridiculous. One will work. The last is our most likely course of action. I would be outraged, but, if you remember, I surrendered.

Rishi Kundi is a third-year medical student. Reach him at kundiris@msu.edu.