Actually, he bought 25 books on Amazon, but he only read one and a half. He finished The Autobiography of Jordan Sparks, but he got bogged down in Basketball Teams of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
The Romans solved the “Carthaginian Problem” via utter destruction. I’m surprised the “Mideast Problem” still exists, that its cities aren’t yet glowing craters.
This. An outsider with little knowledge of an issue generally has nothing to offer that the two embattled parties themselves haven’t thought a thousand times.
I agree with everything you’ve said but I’d also add that, from the very beginning, non-Israelis and non-Palestinians have been parties to this conflict, and that’s only added to its intractability.
In fact, I would argue that’s actually the main reason is IS intractable. Israel is to a large extent resistant to a Palestinian state because they fear Arab nations will use it as a launchpad for an attack; Arab nations aren’t really interested in Palestinian statehood because Palestine is more useful to them not being a state.
Most of what people want to be Palestine could have been turned into a Palestinian state between 1948 and 1967, but Jordan annexed it (with, it must be said, considerable Palestinian support.) That very likely doomed any chance Palestine ever had.
I’m going to nitpick this a bit - the conceit in Dave isn’t that as a regular guy, he has common sense that the elite lack, it’s that Dave hasn’t had to make a bunch of morally compromising decisions in order to achieve high office. Sigourney Weaver has a scene where she describes the original president as starting out idealistic like Dave, but that the process of politicking corrupted him until he lost that original idealism, and became beholden to men like Frank Langella.