No. of Recommendations: 3
I came up with an analogy. Not a perfect one, but perhaps illustrative. Florida is given to the Palestinians. Florida is no longer Florida, it is Palestine. Floridians are relocated (at least partially) to make room for the incoming Palestinians. How do you think that would go over with Floridians? Would there ever be peace?
Maybe. There is precedent.
I've mentioned the Partition of India from time to time. The British Raj was simply cut into two countries - one Muslim, and one non-Muslim. The countries were formed from that division in order to give two different peoples/nations two different countries.
It was horribly traumatic. Somewhere between 12 to 20 million people ended up on the "wrong" side of the line and were driven to/forced to become refugees. Most of them lost everything they had. Up to two million people died in the upheaval and violence.
But today, while relations between India and Pakistan are....fraught, to say the least, there is something approaching peace.
BTW, a rhyming piece of history took place when Bangladesh violently pulled itself out of Pakistan, as the ethnic Bengali population grew tired of the discrimination and violence that they faced as part of a multicultural and multiethnic state. They wanted their own country that was built around the Bengali nation as a people, so that they could have control over their own protection and futures. That separation was also terribly bloody and violent - the Pakistani forces committed horrors against the Bengali population in east Pakistan, resulting in many hundreds of thousands or several millions killed and hundreds of thousands of Benghali women raped. Today, their relations are difficult, but peaceful (perhaps helped by the fact that India lies between them).
[BTW, I'm well aware that this is both an example of the horrors of the artificial nation state (which is what lumped Pakistan and Bangladesh together in the first place) and an example of how nation states can be formed around in-group identities rather than vice-versa.]
Those three countries have a very different origin story and history than, say, the unifications of the various constituent states that became Germany and Italy. And together, they make up about 2 billion people - about a quarter of the world lives in just those three countries, whose nation-states were sized to fit the underlying group identities and not the other way 'round. So I am a little curious
