He may have been taking a lesson from Iraq, where the U.S. tried to “give” the Iraqis “freedom,” and look how that worked out.
Sure, they don’t accept that they can’t win, and I think they’ve got a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning.
There are NO viable Arab states, none, they are all kleptocratic states that are barely a step beyond feudal, not even a step beyond feudal in some cases. Most are resource poor without the oil, which they cannot extract without foreign technology. Israel moved into that area and took a dust bowl and proved it was fertile. Instead of using the land they have to do the same and ask the Israelis how they accomplished it they see what Israel has and want to take it thinking that it is some property of the land that made it fertile, and not the studious work of the Israeli people. The West Bank and Gaza could be as nice as Israel, but the people there would rather blame all of their problems on the Jews. So they keep breeding but they don’t do what they need to, to change their circumstances, they just keep talking about how they will fight until blah blah blah.
None of that means they are not viable. SA seems to be doing fairly well as a state. So is Egypt. So are all of the Gulf States. So was Iraq before the first Gulf War.
You cannot seriously believe it is even remotely materially possible for the Palestinians to do any of that while the occupation continues. Exhorting a change in attitude on their part is incredibly cynical and hypocritical. Changing their attitude would not make economic recovery any more realistic a possibility.
You’re mixing up your cause and effect rationales here. Instead of saying “the occupation must end before X”, you should be saying “Y must happen before the occupation will end.”
What’s Y? I’m not sure, but it looks like the beginnings of it might be happening already in the West Bank.
I think Gaza would have been a great place for an automobile factory. Access to shipping and lots of workers who would require less than Deroit income. A man might be more interested in building a state that could interact with others if he is supporting his family.
mswas was suggesting the Palestinians can take what land is left to them and make it bloom, under present conditions. They can’t. The Israelis control most of the best land. The Israelis control the water supply. The Israelis control the Palestinians’ daily personal movements. The Palestinians have no way to purchase, acquire, or otherwise get access to the agricultural and construction equipment and supplies they would need. No matter what the Palestinians do or do not do, none of that will change significantly until the occupation ends.
This sort of thing leaves the impression, rightly or wrongly, that no amount of “ending of occupation” will make a difference, for the simple reason that as a society they fundamentally don’t have their act together:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9331863/
See, in this case the Palestinians were given “access to the agricultural and construction equipment and supplies they would need” - a bunch of high-tech greenhouses intended, by the Palestinian gov’t, to kick-start their economy - yet they couldn’t stop these assets from being squandered.
You keep using the word ‘feudal’ but you clearly have no idea what it means.
Where does the Hamas Charter call for ethnic cleansing?
Who is this ‘we’ & ‘us’ you refer to?
Except that “breeding” is all they need to do. In another century, simple demographics will make modern-day Israel an obsolete concept. Israeli Jews cannot hope to out-reproduce the Arabs. Jews will soon be outnumbered by Arabs even within their own borders, and that’s something they’re going to have to face up to. All the Palestinians need to do is keep hope alive for another few generations, and they’ll outnumber the Jews inside and out of Israel. At that point, you’re likely to see actual, unvarnished Apartheid imposed if the hostility is still simmering and the Jews wish to maintain control.
This whole conflict comes down to the fact that the Palestinians do not feel that they have been defeated. As Daniel Pipes himself has said, until that happens, the war will never end.
I find it interesting how we view such a willingness to continue such fights. When the Germans were crushing England during the Blitz, we admired the Brits’ willingness to dig in for a long fight. When the Germans besieged Stalingrad, we admired the brave Russians’ willingness to starve to death rather than surrender. Even the French Resistance we admired, working against their occupiers and refusing to recognize that their nation had been completely defeated and now had a new government. But when the Japanese dug in on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and fought to the last man, we considered them insane. Likewise the Palestinians who cannot accept what they see as an occupying power.
Human beings have a history of hanging on to ideas (and dying for them) when it makes little sense to outside observers. We should stop being surprised that the Palestinians won’t quit.
Until either the Israeli Jews or the Palestinian Arabs feel that they are beaten, the war will not end. However, I don’t think that anyone in the modern world has the stomach to do what would be necessary (i.e., ruthless slaughter of innocents and externally imposed starvation on a scale not seen since the darker days of WWII) to force the Palestinians to submit. I don’t see this problem going away.
As compared to American troops surrendering in the Philippines, the French surrendering at Dunkirk?
Prove that I have no idea what it means. ;p
You are ignoring class distinctions. History has always been a story of one tribal ruling class dominating another tribal serf class. The Palestinians will outbreed the Israelis, but the Israelis will be light years beyond them technologically, that gulf is only going to widen, not lessen.
Of course, but it is possible to divide and conquer. If we can successfully support Fatah and create a divide between the West Bank and Gaza, we can show a disparity in the standard of living between the two sides. The one that digs in with a bunker mentality will continue to live in squalor while the other half becomes relatively prosperous. Think North and South Korea.
I won’t deny the subjectivity of admiration. We of course use perception as a form of persuasion to influence the political course of events. It’s part of the human condition. Historical dialectics and all that. When it plays out we’ll see what happens. I did not at all expect the current chain of events in Palestine to occur, but it did. If the Palestinian people are divided between those who see sense in doing business with the secular west, and those who adhere to medieval tribalism, they are less of a threat. As it is, I do not see any of the Islamist movements being very successful. Right now the only reason Arab countries have money at all is because foreign governments prop them up. If they did not have American and Canadian refining equipment in Saudi Arabia they wouldn’t be able to extract their oil. The Islamists piss everyone off. It’s not like China, Russia, the EU or India are terribly fond of them either. If an Islamist regime comes to power they better have a plan to get support from some foreign power to extract that oil or their fields will lie fallow.
I’m not really surprised. I just lose sympathy for their political cause. I have sympathy for their people, but I think their cause is ridiculous.
I think the onus is more on the Palestinians than the Israelis at this point. The Israelis have shown a willingness to do business and build infrastructure, but the Palestinians squander that at every turn. The Israelis are hindered by their unwillingness to wantonly murder the Palestinians and the Palestinians are hindered by their inability to wantonly murder the Israelis.
The west.
What exactly would it take for the Palestinians to feel they had been defeated?!
A “feudal” society is not simply a society with a hereditary social hierarchy. It is a society where social, political, and economic power is based on the ownership of farmland, and where most people are agricultural laborers supporting a landlord aristocracy that lives on their surplus food production. How are the modern Arab states like that?
Alright, I concede.
But that’s not enough. Even if they outbreed the Israelis and use their superior numbers to either control the government or simply overwhelm them, if they can’t put together a viable society all they’ll manage to do is turn Israel into another failed state, and then one of their neighbors will invade and take it from them. And judging by the way Arabs have treated the Palestinians in the past and today, they won’t have the same squeamishness about brutalizing the population that Israel has.
The Palestinians are doomed to be poor and downtrodden until they learn to run their own affairs properly.
Besides of which such an “outbreeding” analysis assumes that Arab Israelis maintain their higher birthrate for generations to come. Such is not a fait accomplii. If Israel operates out of an informed self interest then she will invest in educational and employment opportunities for her Arab populus. The main driver of high birth rates (with the exception of religious edicts such as for the ultra-Orthodox) is poverty. An educated and gainfully employed Arab citizenry is likely to have a similar birthrate to secular Israeli Jews.
I’m beginning to have some small glimmer of hope yet again. Olmert must realize that he has one chance and one chance only to maintain power - deliver some real positive movement towards a real peace deal with the Abbas controlled West Bank (leaving Gaza out of it for now). Abbas knows he has a small window before Olmert is gone and Bibi is then likely back. There is a clock running that may motivate each to actually do something positive. The only problems are Olmert’s documented lack of being able to see the obvious and Abbas’s impotance at delivering the goods. Okay, I said it was a small glimmer.
Well, I’m not them, but from all appearances, it would take the sort of slaughter, brutality, and dehumanization one saw in the worst parts of your WWII and post-WWII tyrranies–Nanking, Warsaw, the death camps/gulags of Germany, Japan, and the USSR. The sort of situation where the Palestinians are starving, disease-plagued, and brutalized on a daily basis by the Israelis (so that they assume every day that they will likely die, and feel totally powerless).
But, I can’t conceive of the Israelis, or anyone in the modern West, having the stomach to carry that out. Just as we have been willing to do in Iraq, the Israelis are willing to go as far as restricting food and other basic necessities of life so that the Palestinians feel the crunch, but would never cut it off totally. They’re willing to do tit-for-tat strikes against “legitimate” military targets and accept however much “collateral damage” occurs, but will not explicitly slaughter civilians until they all submit (the world won’t stand for another Dresden or Hiroshima).