Step One fun, plus a tiny news roundup

It's nearly Step One time! Which is to say that in about two months' time, I will be tested on anything or everything that I've learned in the first 2 years of medical school. I will then almost certainly forget half of it within one week or so.

So, the part of my brain that isn't re-learning which special bacteria requires chocolate agar (Hemophilus influenza and Neissiria meningitidis, if you're keeping track) or what a PAS stain is checking for (glycogen, Whipple disease) has been reading through the news looking desperately for an interesting story. So far it looks pretty grim. Some guy in Nevada owes the federal government a lot of money. A dude I've never heard of who owns a basketball team made some dumb comments. A missing plane is still, uh, missing.

Instead of talking about those awesome topics, I instead am linking an article by Andrew Sullivan at the Dish, regarding John Kerry's remarks about Israel. If you missed it (and I forgive you if you have) John Kerry stated that Israel was in danger of becoming an "apartheid state" along the lines of South Africa. As far as I can tell, this is pretty basic stuff: unless Israel persuades a whole lot more Jewish people to immigrate, and fast, demographics are going to turn it into a Jewish-minority state.

Nothing about that is particularly controversial, in my opinion. Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written extensively about Israel's present and future, concurs.

By 2020, the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola has predicted, Jews will make up less than forty-seven per cent of the population. If a self-sustaining Palestinian state -- one that is territorially contiguous within the West Bank -- does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority.

Which is all to say, I clearly don't understand the politics of the situation very well. Unless Israel's demographers have gone mad, the Arab population is going to become the majority group within Israel fairly soon. So if you are inclined to believe that the Jewish people deserve their own state, the only rational future seems to me for Israel to accept a second state. Waiting for demographics to force the issue seems like poor planning, and jumping on John Kerry for pointing this out seems quite frankly counterproductive.

Of course, I do assume people want a reality-based solution and not fantasy (Maybe Palestinians will be abducted by aliens! Maybe ten million Jewish people will immigrate overnight!) so I may be over-thinking things.

Finally, for a well-informed take that is more critical of Israel than I am, Juan Cole provides some good insights.