Thank you, I appreciate hope you are open to discussing these issues in an open and honest way.
I responded backwards to your comments/questions.
First/last: Of course the Palestinian people and their leadership needs to desire to end the conflict. I am certain that the people want peace. The leadership of the Palestinians knows, whether it is acknowledged or not, this conflict will never end if the way to peace is to push the Israel people to the sea. There is a permanent native Jewish population in Israel, that’s just a reality, regardless of what some among the Palestinians may desire. The same cannot be said for the Palestinians, they are under real threat of expulsion/extermination by the Israel government and rendering Gaza uninhabitable seems like the goal of the Gaza campaign.
As for moves towards peace, what else should the Palestinian people have to give? The UN divided their homeland in half to give part to a new state. They were not free in their homeland and they had always lived under the thumb of one foreign power or another. They were not asked if they approved or not, because it was assumed that it was against their will. Just accepting that is a very big concession towards peace.
Secondly, when discussing international relations is very tricky, if you will forgive my man-planation. Actors are collections of diverse groups, each made out of diverse individuals, each filled with a messy collection of motives, fears, ideas, instincts and memories that may or may not have free will as we understand it. It’s basically a fractal pattern of actors all acting upon each other while themselves being acted upon inside their ownheads. At some point, you need to treat groups with a degree of collectivity in order to functional understand and discuss events.
When I say Israel, I mean the State of Israel, which acts upon other entities with a singular voice. Of course there are many diverse voices in the government, and even more among the population, that goes without saying. Although when I say Palestinians, I do not means Hamas. Hamas has political and de facto control over Gaza, but Gaza is only a part of the Palestinian people and is not the totality of the conflict. Whether Hamas is a legitimate government or an army in control of Gaza is a point of debate, but i don’t see Hamas as the government of Palestine and I see them as an obstacle to peace. This may seem like a double standard, but the fact remains that Hamas is a symptom of the conflict and giving them too much credit or importance is pointless. They will be assigned to the dust bin of history soon enough, regardless of whether Israel can find peace or not.
Finally of firstly, when discussing the sources of the conflict, it must be noted that none of this is simple and, after acknowledging that The Zionists movement was the aggressor regardless of their motivation, not really a productive area of discussion. The challenge is to get from the current point of conflict to a point of peaceful coexistence in the future. The intentions, ideals, and actions of people who are dead do not have to bind the people of today.
That being said, the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians really stems from the decision within the Zionists movement deciding that it needed to create a homeland for Jews in Palestine. This of course wasn’t one simple event, disconnected for the persecution and oppression experienced by the Jewish people in Europe. But it was an affirmative action that created the current ongoing conflict. If there had chosen to create a Jewish homeland in another place, there would be an entirely different situation today. I can’t picture any other event that so clearly creates the current situation, without it being a response to decision to create a new State of Israel.
There were of cource other conflicts between Jews and Palestinians throughout recent history. But at some point, it must be acknowledged that this is unfortunately the effect of human nature, as universal as it is regrettable. Whenever an insular ethnic/cultural/religious group lives aside a more homogeneous majority, there is conflict and oppression. I don’t say this to excuse the violence or justify those guilty of such atrocities, but to recognize the universal nature and the need of all people to rise above these base impulses. It is a phenomenon that has affected the Jewish people pretty much continuously since they were dispersed through out the world, but that doesn’t mean it is solely a Jewish experience or conversely, that it occurs solely because the victims of such atrocities are Jewish.
It must be acknowledged that the current ongoing conflict is fundamentally of a different nature than the violence that came before, however the human condition of seeing the world as “us” versus “the others” is a core part of why the current conflict is occurring and how individual people and communities react to the current conflict.
The Zionists movement knew that conflict with the Palestinians was an unavoidable consequence of their plan. They knew that the conflict would last for at least one generation. David Ben Gurion expressed it as “The old will die and the young will forget.” This was an utterly foolish sentiment, as evidenced by the Jewish people’s attachment to a land that their ancestors left centuries ago. Maybe if Ben-Gurion had completed the Israeli conquest on of Palestine, there wouldn’t be an ongoing conflict, but there would be a large population of angry dispossessed people living under Israeli control.
What do you see as the source of the current conflict, and why do you feel that source matters??
