The only thing that makes any sense in the Israel/Palestine war is this: Palestinian Homeland Now.
Frankly, people in favor of this thing should be pounding the table and shouting down the opposition because Palestinian Homeland Now is the only thing that has any possibility of ever restoring peace to the region short of making it uninhabitable.
Restoring peace to the region may be a shibboleth. After all, various folks have been fighting over that chunk of land since we had tribes big enough to fight each other over it. The only reason to think that the fighting might ever stop is the fact that we may just maybe might have licked the war problem in Europe, and they were darn near as intractable about it.
Palestinian Homeland Now.
It'll probably have to be just the West Bank. Geographically disjunct territories will inevitable cause future problems (cf. the former East Pakistan), the question of Israel ceding any other territory aside. There will probably have to be some fairly forceful encouragement to get Israelis to move out of the West Bank settlements (but Israel shouldn't have been paying them to move there in the first place; they can damn well pay them to leave). Palestinians in places like the Gaza Strip who think that that territory ought to be part of Palestine will probably similarly have to be encouraged to move as well.
Palestinian Homeland Now.
Because, frankly, the U.S. looks like a bunch of ninnies every time we tell the Palestianians "We'll let you have your free and democratic independent state maybe sometime in the future after you've gotten rid of the guy we don't like who you freely and democratically elected a while back." I mean, isn't Kissenger subject to indictment by the International Tribunal on War Crimes for doing essentially the same thing with Pincohet in Chile?
Because, frankly, Israel's current policy looks a whole hell of a lot like certain European policies of last mid-century which led to the creation of Israel in the first place. Ain't that just a whole crapload of irony?
Palestinian Homeland Now.
It is probably the case that the U.S., particularly under the current regime, cannot meaningfully participate in finding an Israel/Palestine peace. The parties, including us, are all too set in our positions, all our petty squabbles built into inertron-coated grudges, to move. It's going to have to be somebody else who kicks the Israelis and says "Palestinian homeland now, and stop blowing up Palestinians", and who kicks the Palestinians and says "Stop blowing up Israelis, dammit, and we'll get you your homeland".
Maybe the EU can do it, although it's only been half-a-century since an awful lot of Europe thought pogroms were a pretty neat idea. The UN can't do it. Maybe the U.S. should just give Canada our chit, saying "Commit us to anything up to $N billion a year" and let Canada handle it. I trust those guys; they'll find a good solution. Israel would believe Canada if they told them that they could get the U.S. to drop aid.
And as an aside, it's quite ironic itself that it hasn't been so very long in this country since the intellectual predecessors of our modern conservative ideologues were as rapidly anti-Jew as their heirs are pro-Israel today.
Don't get me wrong in all of this. Israel is a fine country of fine people and I'm happy to have a strategic and mercantile partnership with them. They've been sorely tried in the fifty years of their country's existence and the fifty centuries of their people's existence before that. They deserve peace and happiness and fat children with the promise of a bright future.
It's just: So do the Palestinians.
This is an idea that grew out of the Afghanistan conflict, but it's just as true here: I really think that you don't find many terrorists among people who are fat and happy and have hope that their children's lives will be better than their own. Feed the Palestinians. Build them schools and roads and clean water. Give them good jobs, so they can build the next set of schools and roads and sewers. They'll stop blowing themselves up. I shouldn't need to say that people with something to lose are going to have different politics than people with nothing to lose.
Palestinian Homeland Now.
It's that simple. It's still insanely complicated, and it's going to take wiser people than I to implement, but it's the only thing that can stop the war.
Posted by Greg at August 22, 2002 10:28 AM