Everybody knows what needs to be done. Israel needs to stop treating Palestinians like shit and Palestinians need to stop pointing weapons at their problems. One side has to “be the bigger man” and go first, though, and they’re both too goddamn prideful. So the killing and the discrimination and the oppression marches on.
Actually, we may be on the right path already.
Abbas has been controlling violence within his domain and Israel has been loosening restrictions on the WB. Rather obviously Israel can’t just allow Hamas unlimited freedom of movement and importation, or rockets will be hitting Tel Aviv the next day.
But the WB may serve as the ‘carrot’ for the people of Gaza to overthrow their thugocracy and may serve as the proof for the Israeli populace that the ideals of Oslo and Camp David and Taba were just before their time, and not impossible.
They have to want to live in peace, though. Nobody can force that on them. I remember hearing some story about how Israel gave the Arabs a bunch of greenhouses to try to help them with their agriculture and within days, the greenhouses were totally destroyed, vandalized and ruined. Just to spite the Jews, I guess. With that kind of mentality, they will never rise above their problems.
Each side also has to believe that there is a path to a peace that they can accept as just. Or is just enough.
That carrot is essential. The Israeli administration needs to make enough movement to make it clear that those who come willing to negotiate in good faith will find it rewarded. Posturing to their hard line may play well but it is not a recipe for success.
The story is actually worse than that. The greenhouses were bought by international donations, for millions of dollars, in order to ensure the peaceful transition to self-rule and viable agricultural output for the Palestinians. Some of the greenhouses were then turned into weapon smuggling tunnels, pretty much all were destroyed in one way or another.
Then again, when the reaction to Camp David was the Second Intifada and the Bridging Proposal is met with disdain by Arafat and co, it’s a bit hard to refute the claims of the hardliners. Trust is, hopefully, being built now. And if the maniacs on both sides are kept bottled up, the West Bank will be the object lesson that sways Israeli public opinion and cements the possibility of a viable Palestinian state.
There’s only one real way to peace, as I see it. Jordan has to man up and take their fair share of responsibility as well.
I think that Palestinians hav to discover non-violent resistance, like Ghandi.
Casualties are always disproportionately Palistinian (I think that last conflict had a 1:150 death ratio), making them singularly Palistinian will put Israel in a spot.
The route to peace, I think, is to first build up a cease-fire of some sort, and then somehow hold it in place for a full generation. Once you’ve got a generation of people who have grown up without the violence, then the true long-term healing process can begin. And in any such future where peace is possible at all, a peaceful one-state solution is possible.
Hey, I never said it was easy.
Israel is already “in a spot.” Nobody else in the world likes them. Everyone protests them whenever they do anything. Lots of people consider Israel an illegitimate war criminal nation; they’re never going to get the rest of the world’s sympathy.
I don’t see the Arabs adopting Gandhi-style nonviolent resistance. The Arabs are a proud people. They have always been warriors. Can you conceive of how long the peoples of Arabia have maintained this martial culture? For two thousand years they have been fighting in the desert, training horses, raising armies, refining the art of war down to a precise science.
Whereas the Jews have basically been the world’s punching bag until 50 years ago. The Arabs are simply not going to concede two thousand years of being a proud warrior people to this nation that they basically view as a ridiculous upstart, a little child dressed up as a soldier and armed with planes and guns from Daddy (the United States.) They vowed to “push the Jews into the sea” as soon as Israel was established, and they are not just going to abandon this.
Argent, I think that you perhaps oversimplify into a mythologic group of “The Arabs” when in truth there are many different cultures with various traditions contained under that umbrella, many of which have little in common … except perhaps a common dislike for the nation of Israel. 
That said I would agree that massive non-violent resistance with no significant exceptions is highly improbable.
#2 is not possible under #1.
No, this would be unwise. The first constructive step needed is for US policy to free itself from the accumulated morass of Israeli propaganda. It is necessary for the Israelis to put out such a volume of agitation because the bare unadorned facts are profoundly hostile to them.
Yet in a stunning move Obama has done just this. The issue is settlements. These facts need to be addressed so that a Palestinian state is recognised. Consequently the US presents Netanyahu and the Israelis with a simple choice: Be constructive, or don’t.
Netanyahu responds thusly: Israel is about malevolence. Settlements continue. We make US middle east policy, not you.
With this reality out in the open, the outcome is a power struggle between Obama and Netanyahu: Constructive and Malevolent. Naturally the Israelis don’t like facts and are focussed on the changing the subject away from settlements. You will see a lot of this in the US media.
Obama does not have the power to openly defy Israeli directions. However, the likely avenue is passive resistance. I.e. the Iranian nuclear program. It is one thing for Obama to actively confront Israeli conduct, but it is quite another for him to acquiesce to the conduct of the Iranians. Watch those negotiations for an indicator of a resolution in the ME.
Ah yes, damn that ZOG, Obama is powerless.
Anyways, the mention of Obama and Iran is timely.
I don’t understand why people hate the settlements so much. That’s Israel’s land. They captured it in the six-day war. Generally when a country captures land, that country’s citizens can, you know, like, live on that land. The entire world - every nation in existence - is defined by borders which were drawn up by conquest in war. Every nation in existence. But when Israel does it, it’s not allowed? Why can the entire rest of the world do certain things, but not Israel?
The thing is, the land hasn’t been officially annexed by Israel. They’re putting citizens on land that isn’t actually their national territory. Not to mention that eventually the Palestinians will have to live somewhere, and putting Israelis close to them is asking for trouble.
Israel.
Yes, the settlements policy is profoundly stupid even from–or perhaps even especially from–a Zionist point of view. Israel hasn’t annexed the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel hasn’t–thank goodness–“ethnically cleansed” those areas. Rather than simply setting up a military occupation, with troops and strictly military bases, the Israelis have put themselves in a position where they have this hugely emotionally and politically charged issue of Jews living on land that’s historically part of the “Land of Israel”, which Jewish settlers Israelis evidently find very hard to contemplate forcing out of their “homes”–yet thosse settlers are in areas which, demographically speaking, Israel cannot simply absorb into the Israeli state without Israel ceasing to be Jewish; or ceasing to be anything resembling a democracy; or unless Israel commits (at the very least) massive expropriation and the displacement of millions of people from their homes. Just because Israel militarily overran those areas did not mean they had to establish civilian settlements there–we didn’t plant several million American families all over occupied Japan and Germany after World War II.
And yes, “everybody did it” back in the Bronze Age, or even more recently than that. Back in the day the Israelis could have just killed off the men and boys and kept the womenfolk for themselves. But we are, as a species, rather past that now, which means the Israelis have caught themselves and the Palestinians in a nasty trap with the stupid settlements in the occupied territories.
But I don’t get why Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live wherever they want to live. Would anyone object to a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood on the grounds that it’s “asking for trouble?” Maybe the Arabs are the ones who need to reconcile themselves to Jews living among them.
Not really.
It would be a bit more accurate to say it is an oversimplification. As a general statement though, it is very roughly accurate. Jews were generally better tolerated, on average, in Muslim countries than corresponding Christian ones until the early modern era ( not the early 20th century ). The key word above being tolerated, which should never be conflated with anything like full equality. By modern standards said toleration was horribly discriminatory, by contemporary standards it was often better than the alternatives.
Though I think the hoary old medievalist Bernard Lewis is best taken with a small sea of salt when it comes to modern analysis ( he’s wayyy too fixated on the Kemalist vision/achievements in Turkey as an ideal ), his medieval work is still well worth reading. His The Jews of Islam ( 1984, Princeton University Press ) is a pretty balanced survey. Quote:
Whether this treatment deserves the name of tolerance depends, as already noted, on the definition of terms. If by tolerance we mean the absence of discrimination, there is one answer; if the absence of persecution, quite another. Discrimination was always there, permanent and indeed necessary, inherent in the system and institutionalized in law and practice. Persecution, that is to say, violent and active repression, was rare and atypical. Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were not normally called upon to suffer martyrdom for their faith. They were not often obliged to make the choice, which confronted Muslims and Jews in reconquered Spain, between exile, apostasy, and death. They were not subject in any major territorial or occupational restrictions, such as were the common lot of Jews in premodern Europe. There are some exceptions to these statements, but they do not affect the broad pattern until comparatively modern times and even then only in special areas, periods and cases.
But the black people in question are presumably United States citizens. Quite a few Americans seem to object to letting Mexican families move into whatever neighborhoods they wish in the United States, and while there is undoubtedly some racism behind some of those objections, fundamentally it’s a question of these being Mexican citizens–illegal immigrants–and not citizens of the United States. (Which is not to say I think it would be very practical to just merge the U.S. and Mexico into one big happy country by way of “immigration reform”).
Without getting into sticky issues of land ownership, certainly Israeli citizens (Jewish or Arab) ought to be able to move into any neighborhood in Israel they want (and can afford to buy a house in). But the West Bank and Gaza aren’t part of Israel, and if Israel waved its magic annexation wand and made them part of Israel, then by by virtue of simple demographic arithmetic, Israel would cease to be a “Jewish national home”–which would be the end of the whole Zionist enterprise and an outcome Israelis are very much opposed to.