Hi spiral3; Re: "Bilow your position seems to be that on the one hand no-one fights harder than when they are on their home turf and their homeland is at stake, but on the other as as long as Israel negotiates from a position of strength they will make no long term progress. How do you reconcile this."
Very good question. You're paying attention!
(1) Israel is on their "home turf", so they will fight as hard as possible.
(2) But the Palestinians and Arabs are also on their "home turf" so they will also fight as hard as possible.
"Fighting as hard as possible" more or less translates into willingness to accept pain. While it is true that countries are more powerful on the defense than on the offense, it is not true that the defense always wins. There are plenty of examples of nations or countries that are failures in defending their home territory. One that comes up in the news right now nearly constantly is the Kurds, but I would bet that 90% of the nearly 200 countries on the planet have ethnic minorities that are subjected to the laws of the majority.
The larger an ethnic group is, the larger the region that it can control. This is more than just a tautology. The very small ethnic groups can control no territory at all, while the very large ones, like the Chinese, Russians or English, control territories that include lots of small ethnic groups.
A small ethnic group is able to maintain its independence only in the absence of a large and powerful neighboring ethnic group. For example, the Kurds, with a population of 21.1 million, are held as subject peoples by 52 million Turks, 100 million Arabs, and 33 million Persians. [By "subject" I mean to describe a situation where the laws are determined by another group. This could be the simple result of democratic voting principles, with equal rights for all, or it could be a bloody thing. But the fact is that only one set of laws can govern a single place, so if two ethnic groups live there, one of them is typically going to have to live according to the laws of the other.]
If the Kurds were located instead in a region not so dominated by large ethnic groups, they would have long ago won their independence. As it is, the population of the Kurds is just slightly below the point where they're powerful enough to rule their own land. This causes their subjection to be particularly violent. Very small ethnic groups recognize the hopelessness of rebellion, so they submit to subjection relatively peacefully. For example, the Mormons, with a population of 11 million, are a peacefully subjected population in the United States. If there were 8x as many Mormons in the country, they might tend to break away, except that US cultural secularism has sanded away a lot of the differences between Mormons and other religions in the country.
The problem for Israel is that they are a small ethnic population that is attempting to subject a portion of a large ethnic population, while being adjacent to that large ethnic population. This is an inherently unstable situation, one that can be maintained by Israel's temporary economic and military advantages, but those advantages are only temporary (as has been seen over and over throughout the history of the planet).
The long term solution for Israel is for the Arabs to become so modernized that they are secularized and don't really care much about their religious and language differences with the Israelis, or their prior history. Eventually this will happen (US cultural "imperialism" is more effective than the US military and is taking over every corner of the planet, slowly but steadily), but historically, cultures become "defanged" more slowly than they gain power. So I expect the Arabs, like the Japanese or Russians, to become economically powerful before they become westernized. The same thing may happen with the Chinese.
Germany also became industrialized and powerful before it was democratized and pacified. By the way, while the Marshall plan was probably useful in helping Germany grow, I don't think it was necessary in making them become westernized. The flow of history world-wide is from primitive / nationalistic towards westernized, and Germany's time had come. So when West Germany and East Germany were reunited, the absence of a Marshall plan in East Germany did not leave the country with one half that was still stuck in Nazi ideology. Nor did the lack of a Marshall plan leave fascist Spain stuck in the past either.
Re: "At the same time you say that everyone will just get tired of conflict and eventually a peace that flows from justice will be made."
The two sides have already gone through several cycles of "peace" and "conflict". Predicting that they're going to do it again is a natural. Of course the intensity level of the conflict will increase and decrease over time.
If the intensity level went to zero and stayed there it would be important, but the fact is that even in the best of times these two sides hated each other. It's also a fact that Israel, the side which possess most of the power and therefore the only side that can create a peace, has failed to do much during the peacetimes that would still the hostilities. The settlements continue to be built, in both peace times and conflict times.
One of the feedback mechanisms that is in place is that the Palestinian bombings have tended to make Israelis more extreme. Partly that is change in individuals, but it is also partly caused by the fact that Israelis who were less extreme, and simply want to live pleasant lives, have been more likely to leave the country. A similar feedback mechanism operates on the Palestinians. The Israeli brutality has caused those Palestinians who were not fanatical about the land to leave.
The result of these continuing feedback mechanisms is that the two sides become more extreme, and negotiation becomes more difficult. But despite this, I still believe that they will go through at least one more cycle of "peace".
-- Carl |
