Subject: Re: kidding ourselves
Pretending as if the actual conflict is yet to arrive, he said, risks "normalizing death, violence, fear, dispossession, hunger and lack of dignity across the Middle East."

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The industrialized world (democratic or otherwise) has yet to learn these lessons:

* "peace" attained by physical coercion of one group by another isn't actual peace
* stability isn't "peace" without justice

The Western world thinks it learned since World War II that Palestinians can be treated as disposable people because, when the game of musical chairs ended after WWII, they didn't wind up controlling any resource needed by an industrialized country or geography of value to countries needing to operate global navies.

Israelis learned their position as a single toe-hold in an Islamic dominated region hostile to western ideas on government, individual rights and economic development gave them vast lattitude in how they responded to attacks on their territory, itself granted to them as part of musical chair politics stemming from two disastrous world wars.

Soviet Russia, keying off the iron-clad principal that the enemy of my enemy can be useful to me, learned that aiding countries willing to battle Israel or, at a minimum, generate constant conflict with Israel suited their geopolitical goals by triggering vast sums of western dollars to be spent in the region trying to achieve or maintain some semblance of stability to keep oil flowing.

Oil-rich Arab nations learned they could combine their own citizenry's hatred of Israel with western desires for cheap stable oil to essentially play both sides of the table. They accepted cash from western countries to develop their oil and bought loads of military gear from the west for "defense" while simultaneously funding terrorist organizations waging constaint battle against Israel, helping to maintain the sense of chronic instability and keeping western countries perpetually distracted.

Palestinians have been stuck in the middle with no territory or little useful political influence as "guests" wherever they might physically be and have had little political power even as a "governing authority" over a tiny sliver of land. They learned they would never be welcomed in Arab lands and never be welcomed as citizens / residents / voters in Israel. They learned that given the inability to establish a viable internal economy to support itself organically, accepting funds and incorporating strategies from those aligned against "western" powers was the only available economic alternative. Most importantly, Palestinians have learned that, due to violent factions within their ranks, they would always face a threat of violence as a reaction to violence originating from within their ranks.

In short, all parties learned that the "least worst" scenario available given current thinking on the part of all parties involved is nearly constant "low intensity" killing because:

* one of the parties lacks the economic resources for a traditional active war
* the other party has enough economic and military power to make an active war unnecessary for its aims
* the continual "low intensity" killing nurtures a toxic social cycle that creates a new generation of extremists on both sides every ten years
* which sustains each side's rationalization for continuing the perpetual "low intensity" conflict

Of course, that calculus changed when Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023 and Israel responded by killing over 35,000 and injuring 78,000 as of June 2024. The world hasn't assigned vocabulary to that scale of violence because all "civilized" nations thought that means had been devised to "manage" the violence at lower, prior levels and no one likes to use the G(enocide) word or contemplate the level of destruction from a nuclear conflict.

As long as any of the parties insist on looking backwards -- into actual history or their own sectarian version of history -- to justify who gets to stay where, NOTHING will alter this status quo. Unless of course, one of the parties WITH actual economic power decides to give up the charade of "proportionate response" and attempt an all-out elimination of one of the other parties. It is possible to argue Israel is doing that now, short of using an atomic bomb to level Gaza. Going down that route will certainly break the current one hundred year moral logjam but replace it with an entirely new horrendous game board.


WTH