In lieu of an actual entry, here's my second column of the semester, which appeared in the college paper this past Tuesday.

My initial reaction was "it's a good suggestion, but it's not a subject I'm up to writing about." But as I began composing my return e-mail message, it occurred to me that the reasons why I wasn't up to writing about the subject might themselves be a suitable subject for a column. So here goes.

I spent roughly two years in Israel, studying there during the 1991 and 1996 school years. I kept following the news from the region for a while afterward. It wasn't hard; all I had to do was look at the "Top News" headlines on Yahoo!'s Reuters feed, and there was invariably something. For a pinpoint speck on the globe, it gets a lot of media attention. Which, incidentally, is one reason why I've never written about the country here before, and don't intend to again: I think Israel gets a disproportionate amount of attention without my help.

That, however, is a relatively minor reason. A stronger one is ignorance. I all but stopped following most of the news from Israel somewhere in the middle of the Netanyahu administration. The daily diet of bad news got to be too much. I hit "tilt." I have an emotional investment in the area. I've been there, and my brother, his wife, and their son live there, along with numerous cousins and other relatives. Sometimes, I decided, ignorance is bliss.

The situation is a complete mess.

It doesn't matter who started it. It would be nice if the more vocal members of each side would stop standing on the moral and historical correctness of their point of view, and would accept that there are multiple valid interpretations of the same data, or that the first causes are no longer relevant.

But Israel is not a place given to compromise. It attracts and creates zealots: people who are certain that they have The Truth, who come to The Promised Land to do things the right way. Savlanut -- tolerance -- is a vocabulary word there, not a way of life. And I'm not speaking of Jews vs. Arabs, or Israelis vs. Palestinians; people don't get along nearly well enough to split into just two groups. It's more like hundreds of factions, each convinced that its community is the only one to do things The Right Way, and that all other groups are heathen and must be stopped.

I'm admittedly painting with broad strokes. And I'm hardly an expert on the country, especially as my direct experiences were confined to Jerusalem and the nearby village of Telshe-Stone. With that having been said, it's also true that I'm doing my best to remain objective, editing out just what I really think of the place and many of its residents. I have my biases... which is another good reason for me to avoid the subject.

No matter how reasonable the residents of the area might have been to start with, we'd still have trouble. Conflicting ideologies and real-estate claims are no longer the biggest problems; too much blood has been shed for either side to be entirely rational. Too many people have lost family members; too many people have been raised with the belief that those on the other side are murderous savages; too many people thirst for revenge.

The flip side is that many people are tired of all the bloodshed, and I believe that the majority on both sides are ready and willing to go for a reasonable compromise if it'll enable them to live in peace. But the majority isn't the totality, and small, armed groups can be quite effective. Some on both sides won't settle for any compromise.

I confess that for some time I've had a fantasy in which the radical right on both sides -- Koach, Hamas, and so on -- would be sealed off into a large building with lots of grenades and live ammunition. They could blissfully wipe each other out, martyring themselves for the greater glory of God, and the rest of the people could live in peace.

But this is only a fantasy, neither practical nor moral. Back in the real world, there are no easy answers, no solutions guaranteed not to make matters worse.

Any workable solution would need time to work, time to iron out the details. It would require stable administrations on both sides, allowed the time and space to deal with their respective constituencies. This hasn't been granted. Arafat has been expected to fix everything immediately; his failure to wave a wand and make everything all better from the get-go has left the Israeli right unwilling to trust him on the one hand, while his perceived capitulation to the Israelis has given him trouble from the Arab right. Neither side will allow him room to deal with the other. Similarly, Netanyahu and Barak have both had to deal with precarious coalitions, knowing that any decision not liked by one group can bring down the government. American presidents are given four years in which to develop and implement their policies; Israeli leaders have no such luxury. The instability of the system, at a time when stability is paramount, is, in my opinion, the single biggest problem here, and another reason why I have nothing constructive to write on the subject.

Finally, given that any course of action at this point could easily lead to wholesale carnage, only those people whose lives are at stake have the right to decide what to do. It's easy for me to give my two cents from the relative security of my Queens apartment, saying that furthering the peace process -- while fraught with difficulties -- is the only option with a glimmer of hope. But it's not my call to make. My opinions don't matter here.

And that, in a nutshell, is why I'm not writing about the recent elections in Israel.