I was talking with John Papworth about Israel over breakfast this morning. Fourth World Review ran an article by Kirkpatrick Sale a couple of years ago which called for the Israel Experiment to be ended as it clearly wasn’t working. A year ago John followed this up with a piece that Professor Leopold Kohr had penned thirty five years ago in his daily blog in the San Juan Star. It was not called a blog back then but it had much the same style and the Kohr Columns provide an excellent model for any would-be bloggers.

The Jewish lobby and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) are two of the most powerful organisations in America. AIPAC is described in a recent report by Harvard Professor Stephen Walt as a ‘de facto agent of a foreign government [that] has a stranglehold on the US Congress’. The report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy also mentions that ‘pressure from Israel and the lobby was not only a factor behind the decision to attack Iraq but it was critical…the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.’

In The Breakdown of Nations written in 1945 Kohr explains the principle of cantonisation in the Swiss Confederation. He returns to this idea in the San Juan Star column…entitled Israel’s Tactical Error in Fourth World Review. Cantonisation, Kohr explained, is the way to address the problem of Israel and Palestine. Disbanding the Israel Experiment was not on Kohr’s agenda. Instead he wanted to move forward with a Buen Consejo approach.

For Leopold Kohr the answer was to concentrate the bulk of Israel’s Arab population in two or three large city-states in the fashion of Swiss cantons such as Geneva and Zürich, or of the Hanseatic city-states of Hamburg, Lübeck and Bremen within the framework of Imperial Germany. These could be granted complete internal autonomy while remaining externally affiliated with the rest of Israel in a common market and defence union. In this way they would remain culturally separate from Israel and politically and structurally separate from the other Arabic countries.

Settling the Palestinians in large urban concentrations would also solve a host of other ‘Palestinian problems’. More than three quarters of any city’s inhabitants earn their living by engaging in transactions with each other. So building vibrant working cities would eliminate the vexing idleness and hatred-creating problem of Palestinian unemployment.

Moreover since urban occupations yield very much higher incomes than rural occupations the urbanised Arabs would experience a higher standard of living than elsewhere in much of the Arab world. The other 25% would earn their living through increasing commercial ties with the other partners of a highly efficient Israeli Confederation. The result of this would be that the Palestinians who now have a vested interest in the destruction of Israel would in the future have a vested interest in her preservation in order to ensure the continuation of their newly won affluence.

In his article Kohr then takes the same line as he took when proposing the idea of Academic Inns. The cantonisation of Old Palestine makes obvious sense so the only question is how to finance it. To the task of building three large cities Kohr brings a similar approach to the one adopted by The Duke of Buen Consejo. Kohr reasons that if the Palestinians are to create a feeling of belonging their cities must not just be ordinary urbanisations but communities offering graceful architecture and a sophisticated style of living. They must not be glorified refugee camps in concrete perpetuating the Palestinians’ feelings of subjection. Instead they should rival the best of Israel’s own cities thereby strengthening the bonds of a union among equals. Kohr sees no reason for this to present a problem.

These new splendid Palestinian cities would not be built in the modern way with foreign aid and reinforced concrete so they end up looking like the outskirts of Babylon. Instead they would be built in the old-fashioned way…the way that Venice, Salzburg and Rome were built…with the loving hands of those who intend to live there. The way to replicate the aesthetic joys of Venice, Salzburg and Rome is to use local material beginning with the alleyways and not the superhighways. These Palestinian cities can be built with no more than the means of subsistence for a labour force that costs as much when it lies idle as when fully employed. And these Palestinian cities can be built as fast as ancient Thebes which raised itself after every war from destruction to splendour within the span of two or three years.

Would that American Jewry and its AIPAC hedge funds have the imagination in diplomacy that the State of Israel has in military strategy. Expelling the Palestinians increases the problem. Leaving the Palestinians where they are doesn’t work because there are too many of them to be absorbed in a country specifically established as a haven for the Jews.

But the cantonisation of Old Palestine and the creation of splendid Palestinian cities is an idea whose time has come. It is the solution to what has become an American problem. But there is no sign of the statesmanship necessary to deliver so creative a solution. Instead Harvard University is distancing herself from its own report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy and agreeing to the Academic Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government who authored the report stepping down to become an ordinary professor. The Congressional Order of Merit would be a better idea…and a new job heading up a new American Peace Corps and a new Marshall Plan for Old Palestine.

Some people never learn. I should not have drunk three quarters of a bottle of cheap red wine last night. Restless night and all the symptoms of a hangover as I dragged myself out of bed and got myself ready for a trip across the country at seven o’clock the morning after.

Some systems were beginning to function normally and I was firing on two cylinders by the time I caught the 0954 Ashford train from Rye. By the time I emerged from Charing Cross station to look for a Number 11 bus to Victoria Coach Station at a quarter to twelve I was starting to fire on three out of my four cylinders. I could have done with all four though as the bus driver refused to let me into the bus without a ticket and refused to sell me a ticket.

So I played the lost tourist routine until he felt sorry for me…or came to the conclusion that he could not move off while I was standing by his window without a ticket…and directed me to the ticket dispensing contraption on the pavement next to the bus stop. Well how was I to know? That wasn’t there four weeks ago when I last passed through London. Fortunately I had the necessary £1.50 of coinage to deal with the ‘no change given’ apparatus without suffering significant loss. Even more fortunately the bus driver was in good humour and waited for me to finish my transaction with the machine and return to the bus with a valid ticket.

On my £36 000 yacht the previous evening…before the intoxicating brew took its toll…I calculated that I would have an hour to spare in Victoria before my two o’clock bus left for Swindon were I to forego an hour of computer access at Rye Library from 0930 to 1030 and took the ten o’clock train rather than the eleven o’clock. Prominent on all my mental town maps is the location of internet access points and watering places…cafés for liquids in and toilets, restrooms, gentlemans or public conveniences for liquids out. The best places are where the three coincide.

I had plans to use my spare hour profitably at the Internet Café on Victoria Street to write my Thursday weblog. Duly done and duly posted I had time for my planned 20p shave at the facilities in Victoria Coach Station before settling down with half and hour to spare to enjoy two large vegetable samosas and a cup of coffee. Back firing on all four cylinders again.

Samosas remind me of Nairobi. On my two days a week teaching at the University of East Africa in the mid-seventies I would often take lunch with Dan McDonald, a Canadian Professor of Accounting at the Faculty of Commerce. Some days we would take a beer beneath the jacaranda trees of the old colonial-style Norfolk Hotel. On other occasions we would wander over to the African commercial area next to the university and lunch on samosas.

Samosas also remind me of Buckminster Fuller. It’s their shape. Triangular. In Bucky’s World of Synergetics a pyramid was not a mausoleum but the biggest piece of disinformation ever built. The real secret of the universe was the three sided tetrahedron…from this the universe is constructed. The Egyptian priesthood understood this secret cosmic accounting but wanted to keep the knowledge to themselves. So they organised the building of all these four-sided pyramids to throw lesser mortals off the scent of true enlightenment.

Nowadays you can get quite a good quality of traveller on the National Express buses…young foreign tourists and old English pensioners. And they all talk to you…sometimes quite intimate life stories. Today there was the nice well-spoken lady from Cirencester who had been to Eastbourne for a trip down memory lane. She had lived in Battersea when she was very young and remembered going to the seaside at Eastbourne for her summer holidays. Her father came from Liverpool and flew with the Royal Flying Corps…biplanes…in the First World War.

Then there was the gentleman with the Guardian under his arm and no luggage who put my empty coffee cup and discarded samosa packaging in the waste bin while I guarded his guardian. He had left Cheltenham the day before to visit an old aunt in Southend. His trip had been in vain and he had got up at four that morning to make his way home. When he got to his aunt’s house he found she had been moved into a home. He left a large bunch of daffodils with the neighbours and turned around. His aunt had Alzheimer’s and so we talked about that for a while; how the sufferer seemed to be happy enough inside their world of forgetting but that those around them…the nearest and dearest…seemed to be the real sufferers not knowing what to do for the best and remembering the person they once knew.

We all know there is a very much better way of looking after the elderly than simply shovelling money in the direction of strangers in the hope that they will look after them in a retirement home run for business not for pleasure. It is only at Christmas and Easter that the sons, daughters and grandchildren of the inmates of England’s retirement homes come in any number to visit their elderly relatives. When they arrive most have a pious and dutiful look about them of martyrs going to a grim fate. When they leave, they are all smiles of relief at the thought that they won’t have to go through that again for another few weeks or months…or even another year. The very old in the Third World have a much better time of it. They are looked after by their families in communities bustling with life…and hope.

Today was a day of virtue with eyes glued to the computer screen and messages whizzing back and forth to Stockholm by text and e-mail. In between I dashed off a 350-word translation for a hotel brochure...£60 in the kitty for that...and did clever things online. Here are a few of them.

The Llangolman BT phone bill got paid, the Annual Return for William Franklin & Sons Limited was filed online with Companies House, my Rye post office box was renewed for another 12 months for £56, £40 went off to my daughter to reimburse her for the car aerial demolished at the Cardigan Car Wash back in February and Clare was paid £111 for some recent translation work from Swedish into English.

One of the strangest arrangements on the planet is the way China is shipping cheap goods to America and Europe, making a handsome profit and taking their winnings in very dodgy bits of paper and electronic promises. Economists have no problems with all this. They tell us that it keeps interest rates and inflation low and maintains growth in the global economy. The Thinking Man in the Street is less sanguine…being distrustful of economists and smart enough to wonder what will happen when China backs out of the deal and leaves the West to its own devices. Two American Senators…Charles Schumer and Charles Grasser…are also concerned. But they plan to do something about it.

This week the Schumer and Grasser double act were in China to warn the Chinese that the US Senate will take action to stop the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. Their message is ‘Stop dumping and destroying American jobs or we will slam a 27.5% tariff on all Chinese imports!’ If the Chinese want to avoid this then the Communists must stop controlling the exchange rate between the yuan and the dollar. The yuan was revalued by two percent last July and currently stands at eight to the dollar. Presumably the two Charleys are lecturing the Chinese on The Gospel according to Ricardo in which exchange rates are free to adjust to imbalances between currencies. What fun to be a fly on the wall and hear what the Chinese have to say by way of a response. They might mention their reserves.

Seven years ago China’s reserves were worth $ 150 billion. These reserves are increasing at the rate of $17 billion a month, currently stand at $854 billion and are expected to top the trillion by the end of the year…i.e. no let up in the rate of accumulation. The actual breakdown of these reserves is China’s most closely guarded secret…after its nuclear arsenal. But somebody somewhere has guessed that three quarters of China’s reserves are in dollar-denominated assets…a third of them in US Treasury Bonds where the Central Bank of China holds $ 263 billion and is America’s biggest holder of these bonds with the Central Bank of Japan not far behind.

The key factor in the ballooning of China’s reserves is the rapid growth in the gap between China’s exports and imports. To thwart any strengthening in the Chinese yuan against the American Dollar China’s Central Bank intervenes vigorously in foreign exchange markets by trading between two and three billion dollars every day. One rumour doing the rounds is that the inscrutable Chinese Communist Party is shifting more of its reserves into euros and yen to reduce its dollar exposure. But discriminating between information and disinformation with billions of dollars at stake is no simple matter.

When Luigi Genazzini was Chief Economist on the European Development Bank’s Africa desk…we had spent two weeks in Oman counting camels and donkeys together in the mid-70s…we spent a couple of evenings when I was passing through Luxembourg pondering the ways of exchange rates. Luigi was puzzling over the Zambian economy at the time but his broader agenda was to get the bank’s economists to develop a consensus view on how to handle exchange rates. As a trained economist he knew all the official theories. But as a banker he also knew they made little sense in the real world. Our conclusions? We didn’t understand exchange rates…why they were what they are…but nor did anyone else. What to do? I had no advice for him then. And I have no advice for anyone else now.