England and Ireland never WANTED the troubles to begin with Nadine. A set of circumstances arose where conflict exploded and it took almost 40 years to come to a peace agreement. By far the majority of people on both sides hated what was happening. Believe me, I lived through it.
First, if they didn't want it in the first place then it's completely different from the Middle East, where the Arab countries sure did want the conflict. They wanted to destroy Israel by convention war, terrorism, anything that looked like it might work.
Second, not wanting the conflict is different from being sick and tired of it enough to exert yourself to stop it. If it went on for 40 years though they didn't want it, just imagine how long the Middle East conflict will go on, when all the neighbors except Jordan DO want the conflict.
Come to think of it you also know "jack" about the average Israeli's routine seeing as you've never even been there! All you see on tv and read about are the fringe elements that unfortunately are running the show in the WB and Gaza.
Curious how "fringe" elements seem to in permanent charge of the show in so many Arab countries. How is it that they can be "fringe", yet so secure in control for so long? How is that there are so many peace-loving moderates around, yet one never hears a peep from them or sees even a small peace movement?
And you say I don't know conditions! The conditions are that policy is permanently decided by these "fringe" extremists, who maybe aren't so fringe after all, especially not after they get to spend a generation teaching every school child that their greatest aspiration in life should be to die killing Jews because Palestine is Arab land from the river to the sea. Palestinian attitudes are far more radical now then they were 20 years ago because of this teaching and because the terror wars have effectively separated the people from meeting. Israelis no longer shop on the West Bank, Gazans no longer work in Israel.
This isn't new, you know. Back when people still thought that Oslo might work out, I read a moving story from a Detroit paper about a Palestinian-American women who had moved with her family back to the West Bank in 1995. Then one day a couple of years later, her eight year-old son came home from school one day and announced, "Mom, when I grow up I want to be a shahid." She promptly moved her family back to Detroit. Smart woman. |
