Nevermind, I can’t get the gif to work.
Peace can happen when both sides believe they have more to gain from peace than from conflict. Both sides seem to have chosen conflict, so nobody is going to be productive trying to stand between them.
They that sew the wind, shall rip the whirl-seam.
Isn’t the more of an example of the prisoners dilemma?
Blarg, its SOW. Sorry, grammar nazi went off.
Sew is cloth. Sowing is spreading seeds.
So, do we have that sewn up now? Or do we need some SOW to go faster?
edit: damnit! I just got pun-sniped into posting in a thread I promised myself I’d stay away from. sigh. /shakefist
I may be veering off topic, but I think your history is a bit off. As I understand it, in 1948, it wasn’t “a bunch of Jewish people displaced a bunch of Arabic Muslims and forced them into vile conditions.” I believe what actually happened was the UN/British government divided the area into Jewish and Arab states. But the Arabs weren’t happy with living next to Jews, so they enlisted the help of their neighbors from Syria, Jordan, etc to go to war. A war they lost. And then those neighbors from Syria, Jordan, etc said “no way you’re living here.” And then the Jews said “ok, you can live there, and then just come work here.” But that still wasn’t good enough for the Arabs, so they chucked missiles and blew up busses because their mandate was to push the Zionists into the sea.
As I understand it – and I could be wrong/simplistic – generations of Arab stubbornness and victimhood is what led them to the untenable situation they now find themselves in. They’ve been throwing themselves against the wall for decades and just don’t get it: Israel is stronger, richer and smarter than them. Their only option is to negotiate, but they would rather continue to throw rocks and fire missiles.
This forum can really use a like button
That particular Onion article was so ice cold, I think it’s gonna leave permanent frostbite injuries on everyone who reads it. Ouuuuch.
It’s like I’m laughing, but it hurts to laugh.
What happened in 1948 remains contested historical territory. To the Palestinians, it’s al nakba, the catastrophe; to Israelis, it’s the culmination of a thousand years of dreaming about the return of Israel. The British had received a mandate from the League of Nations to administer the area. The French had a similar sort of deal with the area we call Lebanon and Syria now. The British also used the eastern part, across the Jordan, to find a place for their Hashemite buddies from the Arab Revolt, in the area that is now Jordan.
After a while, though, trying to govern this place–which really was only valuable because it protected the Canal and a pipeline to the Gulf oil fields–became more trouble than it was worth. As Jewish immigration picked up in the years preceding WWII, and then of course with the influx of people fleeing the aftermath of the Holocaust after WWII, the Arab inhabitants of the area became increasingly concerned about what they saw, reasonably, as a mass migration of Europeans into a region that they felt was theirs. The Jews, for their part, quite reasonably, felt that they were immigrating, usually legally, to a place where, alone among pretty much every other nation except maybe the USA, they could actually live and not be subject to institutionalized anti-semitism or worse. That’s sort of a simplification, but at its root, both sides had reasonable fears and assumptions.
Where it starts to really go wrong is when the critical mass of Jewish immigrants–who unlike their Palestinian Arab neighbors were committed to building European-style political, economic, and cultural institutions because, after all, most of them were Europeans–began to realize that the only way they could build what they wanted to build (and what many felt they had to build, as an existential requirement) was to make sure they had full territorial control over as much contiguous area as possible. At the same time, the Arabs realized that the only way they could prevent this dynamic and rather effective group of immigrants from fundamentally transforming the region was by force. The British were both instigators and a force caught in the middle; they played the Arabs off of the Jews and vice versa, one day letting their anti-semitism support their support of the Palestinian Arabs, the next letting their racism about Arabs support their assistance to the Jewish Agency. And of course, they tried to respond to a growing wave of violence with the inadequate numbers of troops they had, who also were not trained or inclined to do this sort of work.
WWII, which turned Palestine into sort of an armed camp, and which siphoned off a lot of Jewish settlers who joined the British military oddly enough, put a damper on things, but the end of the war and the aforementioned migration of people fleeing the aftermath of the Final Solution, blew the lid off of things. Energized by the near total destruction of Jews in Europe, the people in Mandatory Palestine already, and the refugees and survivors who joined them, were in no mood to compromise; in their minds, desperate did not begin to describe their situation. With the Brits desperately wanting out, and the new UN being totally ineffectual, things were bound to get ugly.
The UN came up with a half-assed partition plan, that was based on some mathematical division of the territory based on population numbers, but which took no account of actual terrain, viability of population areas, or practicality. It pleased no one. Most historians these days seem to agree that the Jewish Agency under Ben Gurion at this point if not before made plans to push the Arabs out of the areas given to them by the plan, if those areas were seen to impede the formation of a viable Jewish-controlled region or where seen to be threatening if left in Palestinian hands. The Arabs, for their part, began to plan how to push the Jews out of as much of the partition area as possible. Neither side really was going to say, yeah, sure, we’ll do this. The Brits didn’t help, either, as when the partition went into effect, they pretty much literally just upped and left, turning over weapons and supplies to various parties, mostly Arab IIRC, but all in a very cavalier fashion.
The ensuing fighting was not all one sided. There were quite a few reverses for what would become Israel; what passed for the Jewish Agency’s army (Haganah, Palmach, various paramilitary (or terrorist, take your pick) groups) had its hands full initially, and some of the Arab forces were fairly competent. But it was clear that without outside intervention there was no way the disorganized local Palestinians were going to prevent the Jews from reshaping the map. For a variety of reasons, mostly associated with internal politics and regional competition, the surrounding Arab states jumped in. Because none of them trusted the others, much of their intervention wound up being a fiasco, but the folks who became Jordan and their Arab Legion (British trained and equipped) did well enough. The Jewish Agency, soon to transform into Israel, built up what would become the IDF using a variety of legal and extra-legal methods of acquiring weapons and supplies, and most importantly, managed to more or less rein in all the different parts of their armed forces and forge them into something resembling a real military. Other than the West Bank and Jerusalem, which would remain in Arab hands until 1967, they were pretty successful in redrawing the map.
In the process, of course, many thousands of Palestinians fled from their homes, and ended up as refugees. The Israelis have always claimed they left on their own, while the Arabs have always claimed they were driven out. I think the balance of evidence leans heavily towards the latter, as while there were cases of the Arab states telling Palestinians horror stories about the Jews and how they’d better run (optimistically, the Arab armies hoped to have a free-fire zone to kill Israelis without the risk of shooting Arab civilians, or at least that’s one explanation for the propaganda), it’s pretty clear now that the Israelis were very direct and deliberate about clearing Arabs out of any of the areas they wanted in their new state (and they justified this, to the extent they did, by pointing out the security implications). The situation was not the same everywhere, and some Arabs remained, but by and large, yeah, the Israelis pushed all of them out of what became the State of Israel.
Those Palestinians ended up, largely, in the West Bank, though some crossed over and started what would become the camps in Jordan (later, cities really). Their circumstances there were variable, but they didn’t get really crappy until the 1967 war and subsequent occupation.
Great summary, @TheWombat. I think this bit points up the root of the problem:
I’m sure that any number of options would have been better plans, but the key bit here is that there was no compromise. Not even an attempt, really. A hard “nope” from the Palestinian side, the Israeli side accepting but already making plans to expand past the agreement, and then fighting. And that failure to accept almost any compromise has kept going to this day, no matter what lip service is paid to peace by politicians on both sides.
The only way forward I can see is what @TheWombat said above about a significant economic turnaround. Give people a livelihood to protect, and they’re both more likely to make compromises and less likely to go blowing up their neighbors. But I have no idea how you’d make that happen, especially since the terrorism would keep coming while you’re building the changes.
That was really informative. Thanks.
Super good and well balanced summary. Kudos.
A lot of people throw shade at the British, the French, etc. Even the Romans didn’t want Jerusalem, and after the whole Christian meme took off and swallowed them up I bet they really hated it! But they were all more or less administering conquered areas.
Israel is complicated. On the one hand they invented SodaStream which I will be eternally grateful forever. Which is so funny, because hey, who else would figure out Seltzer water. Amirite? drum roll
Wasn’t there some scene in World War Z where there is a zombie outbreak and the masses scramble over the walls? That’s gotta be a symbol in the minds of a lot of people on this issue.
There had just got to be a way to resolve this. I don’t see it without a two state solution. The alternative is real genocide, which is happening on a small, slow, soul crushing scale now to the Palestinians.
Yep. Right after the refugees being admitted started singing in joy and thankfulness.
Keep in mind that my posts are just that, my take on things. There is a lot of material out there, though as you might expect much of it is highly polemical, and I encourage people to peruse a variety of sources. I find that the scholarly stuff is often your best bet for whatever passes as balance in this case, but even there the passions run so deep you will often still have to work with several different perspectives to sort of get a balanced viewpoint.
My Turkish is, um, non-existent. What does the cartoon say?
Mine is pretty poor too, but its a play on the 10 commandments,
1: You will murder… 9: You will not suffer, 10: You will feel no shame.
Thanks; that’s what I figured, something like that. What is the #tbt?
Throw back thursday?
I translated a few and they were all things like ‘you will poison’, ‘you will shed blood’, ‘you will kill’, at least that’s the kind of thing I got when I ran it through google translate, much like @sillhouette got.