Hi twfowler; Re: "What's not realistic about it? The Palestinians want to remove the state of Israel from the Middle Easy." I agree with this. But that's not what you said. What you said was: "If the other side has the goal of destroying you its hard to find common ground for negotiation." #reply-17620339 Destroying "you" and destroying "your state" are two completely different propositions. States get destroyed all the time, frequently without much in the way of bloodshed or even violence. (For example, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany.)
Re: "Sure there are some of them that well settle for less, but how would comming to some sort of agreement with the more moderate Palestinians bring about peace? Can you even indentify any moderate Palestinians that have any real power?" I don't need to identify any such. My point does not require that negotiations be convenient for Israel. In fact, the Palestinians will gain more by making the negotiations inconvenient. Instead of pleasing a single strong man in control, the task that Israelis have is to convince the Palestinian people as a whole that there is no more reason to fight.
That the Israelis are saying stuff like "pleasing the Palestinians is impossible" should be understood as an indication that the Israelis are not willing to negotiate a deal, which the Palestinian people as a whole are willing to accept. For that matter, the Palestinians are not willing to negotiate a deal that the Israeli people are willing to accept. This is why the violence is escalating. The two sides need to discover the depths of their determination, which can only be done through escalation.
Re: "The suicide bombings are horrible but the murder rate counting them is still probably less then that the murder rate in the US." I agree with your point, but I'm not entirely sure of the statistics. The murder rate in the US is about 6.8 per 100,000 people in 1998. Since Israel has about 6 million people, that would amount to about 400 per year, or 8 per week. The suicide bombings and other violence must be approaching that level, at least for the more serious months. But what is worrisome for Israel is that the Palestinians appear to be happy to continue escalation. That's why the recent article referred to suicide bombers as the "H-Bomb".
The Palestinians have limitations on how many suicide bombers they can create. Their basic limit is probably somewhere close to the natural suicide rate for the population. That might be as much as 20 per 100K, or around 1200 per year. While that's in excess of the current amount of suicide bombers, I would think that a lot of people would prefer to go out in something less than a "blaze of gory", and would insist on sleeping pills or wrist cutting. Because of this, the maximum rate of suicide bombing is probably no more than one per day.
But the problem is that one effect of the suicide bombing is to raise the hatred level, and that increases Palestinian support for other, more traditional, means of terrorism.
Re: "And if the Palestinians ever do start killing enough Israeli civilans to pose a serious threat to the state of Israel then Israel will get more serious about using its force and the US would be less likely to try and reign Israel in." And who would the Israelis use this force against? There is no Palestinian state. Military force is useless against civilians, except in violation of various international treaties. If Israel does go postal, they'll find themselves in the same position as South Africa, a world pariah. But we've argued this before. Are there any examples of a modern industrialized power doing this sort of ethnic cleansing? The only one I can think of is the Nazis in WW2, and I doubt that the Israelis will imitate them. "Never again." If they do, then the Israeli state will be dead in its heart, and the rest will follow soon after.
Re: "In Vietnam the US's power allowed us to runtinely win battles. We did not win the war because we were less determined to win then our opponent. We just didn't care about it as much. Israel is in a situation of protecting itself not some dictator it set up on the other side of the globe." This is true, but it's beside the point. More telling would be the South African situation, where the Boers also had nowhere else to go in the entire world, where they could preserve their culture. Their unique language (Afrikaans) was spoken only in South Africa. And as far as the Palestinian situation, their backs are also against the wall, a situation that was intended by their leadership and is therefore unlikely to change. This is a fight to the finish, two scorpions caught in a jar. How and why the scorpions got in there no longer matters. Both scorpions see themselves, as is common with species, as morally pure and untouched by sin. Both sides see the other as exercising illegal terror against them. They'll fight until one side or the other realizes that its life is at stake, and agrees to negotiate a surrender.
These Israelis who say they'll never negotiate a dismantling of the Israeli state are similar to the South Africans who said the same thing. It is normal human behavior (and correct theoretical game play), when in conflict, to exaggerate ones determination to win. If you don't do that, the other side will perceive your weakness and walk all over you. But let's see what the Israelis say about negotiations when the Palestinians, for example, achieve a murder rate against them of 10x or 100x the US murder rate. That would be 4000 to 40,000 homicides per year, which is well within what could be expected in a more severe civil conflict. (This is still a very low level of violence, compared to the Holocaust, which was around 2,000,000 per year for around 3 years.) If negotiations are still out of reach, perhaps when tactical nukes are introduced to the situation the Israelis will reconsider. Everyone says that they're willing to fight to the death for their principles, but the fact is that the prison camps still end up filled with people who didn't. (A near exception was the war in the Pacific, but the fact is that faced with only a few percent civilian deaths, the Japanese nevertheless surrendered.) I don't think that the Palestinians are going to cease escalating the violence, short of a deal where they substantially get their demands met.
Re: "Letting Eastern Europe go did also not make Russia less secure. ..." I agree with this. I'm not arguing that letting Palestine go will make Israel "secure". What I'm arguing is that Israel cannot be made secure. The Soviet Union couldn't be made secure either, for that matter, but don't you recall what a surprise it was when it fell without a global thermonuclear catastrophe? The expectations of genocide in the Middle East if the state of Israel falls are similarly fears unlikely to be realized. No amount of nuclear or conventional military power was able to keep the Soviet Union together, and no amount of nuclear or conventional military power will be able to keep Israel together either.
Re: "If Israel gets to a situation where they have someone to negotiate with (someone who is willing to negotiate in good faith and who has the power to stop the violence, without these things negotiation is pointless) then the difference in military power will not be a decisive factor in the negotiations." Like I said before, this is thinking inside the box. If Israel disbanded their state, the violence would end. If Israel does nothing, the violence will continue. Somewhere between those two extremes there will be a point where the violence is acceptable to both parties. That the Israelis can't find anyone to negotiate with is simply due to their inability to countenance making concessions that would likely be fatal to their state. The South Africans were in a similar bind and responded in a similar manner.
-- Carl
P.S. Links:
cnn.com |
