Forums

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
So Israel should be pushed into the sea?

And before you say "two-state solution," remember that a number of Israelis have called for that, and Israel has tried it before. But the players on the other side -- currently Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the like, but last time Nasser and his compatriots -- weren't so interested in that. When there was an evolution of views by one actor -- Egypt -- Israel gave up land for peace.

Some Israelis may really want eternal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, but most serious ones do not. As you have pointed out, this may be simple realism, rather than any goodness of the Israeli heart, at work -- but so what? Any realistic Palestinian would reject the notion of devoting your life to driving Israel into the sea. The forced evacuations of Gaza demonstrated that it is serious, realistic people, and not extremists relying on their view of Biblical dogma, who generally run the show in Israel. Neither Palestine nor Lebanon (nor Syria, nor Iran, nor most of the Arab world) has shown any analogous situation.

As long as governments in the Mideast are run by, or cater to, parties that refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist, there will never be peace in the mideast.

I agree with this. I just don't think that Israel is likely to be able to correct the situation by either killing off all the Palestinians or by pursuing a scorched earth policy. I am also pretty confident that the way to bring about peace is not through attacking and weakening the one government in the region likeliest to ultimately serve as a mediating force in the Arab world.

To put it in your terms, I don't think the way to peace is to push all the Palestinains into the sea either, and unless they're pushed into the sea or given a peice of their historic homeland, they will never stop fighting.