I’m seeing a lot of gloating on the right about Palestine devolving into civil war, and I’ve engaged in some myself, but frankly we all ought to be ashamed. This is the epitomy of schadenfreude, and we’re better than this.
Yes, it’s true this vindicates what the right has been saying all along: the Palestinian leadership has no interest in peace and even gives serious indications they may not be capable of peace, even with themselves. But this crisis presents a unique “teachable moment” which shouldn’t be squandered on smug declarations of unsympathy. Now is the time to point to the real lack of liberty in Gaza and the West Bank, decry what a culture of thuggishness has wrought, and support those trying to end the violence rather than mock them. Implicit in the argument that liberal democracy is the cure for Mideast ills is the notion that such irrational, deliberately stoked hatreds as the Palestinians nurture toward Israel cannot survive in a liberalized society that allows free debate.
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“Implicit in the argument that liberal democracy is the cure for Mideast ills is the notion that such irrational, deliberately stoked hatreds as the Palestinians nurture toward Israel cannot survive in a liberalized society that allows free debate.”
I hardly think Palestinian hatred needs to be “stoked” nor is it “irrational.”Israel provides any number of motivations, as is made clear in the media in every other nation but the US.
Finally, the US citizens who fled Bloody Kansas for Mexico during the Civil War did not prefer Mexican government or Mexican mores. They were trying to stay alive. Ditto the Palestinians.
Well, we could send Jimmy Carter over there so he could bring his hammer and Habitats for Humanity
building materials.
Sorry for being a bit cynical but I have been watching these scenarios since my first class in political science at the University of Detroit in 1955. Back then it was Trans-jordan, the UAR, General Nasser, and the public address announcements from the city loud speakers surrounding Israel and how Israel and the jews must all be killed and driven into the sea. They even got a young King Hussein to drive his limpid army into the west back towards Israel.
Nothing seems to have improved since those days except its been a one multi-million dollar dumping ground investment in futility. I shouldn’t say that because Jimmy Carter and Yasser got a Nobel Peace prize. Anwar Sadat was the last best hope, even, then they assassinated him.
So Dave, if there is a teachable moment here, do please, let us know.
DP,
You’re posts all too frequently remind me of a wordless cartoon drawing I saw when I was doing a graduate degree in urban and regional planning in the early 1970s.
It showed a great crowd of people walking determinedly in one direction; while in their midst was a small platform, atop which stood a professorial type figure, with a rolled up plan opened up in front of him, and his other arm and hand extended out in a direction diametrically opposite to the one the stream of people was walking toward.
I think the cartoon was entitled simply as
“Planning”.
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It has long been obvious to me that, short of the various levels of die-off that are posited for the world in the long and sad wake of the coming peaks in world production of petroleum and natural gas, the only way of restoring any semblance of order to the Middle East is one that would be effectuated by a substantive ethnic cleansing.
That was exactly what happened in during Israel’s 1948-1949 War of Independence, during which time some 650,000-700,000 Arabs fled their homes preceding the invasion by the armies of all the neighboring Arab states, and their places were taken by an even greater number of sfardi (middle eastern Jews) who were expelled or allowed to leave the various Arab states.
This was followed up after the Six-Day War in June 1967 by yet another massive flight of Arabs, this time some 275,000, who walked eastward into Transjordan over the broken bridge across the river. Their place — and more — has now been taken by new waves of Israelis who now number almost 300,000 in Judea and Samaria, plus about 150,000 in the parts of Jerusalem annexed outright by Israel in 1968.
Now Gaza truly and irrevocably has been transformed into Hamastine, while the opposing Fatah and their ancilliary gangs centered in Ramallah (located about a half-hour drive north of Jerusalem) are struggling to maintain some sort of “Palestine” in the populated western segments of Samaria in the north and Judea in the south.
But it is there that the almost 300,000 Jews of Samaria and Judea mainly live. Which is a situation such as what I see around here in western Dane County, Wisconsin; mainly urban sprawl.
So what exactly do you think is happening in such a situation, DP?
I think I know what is happening. And it is that Arabs in Judea and Samaria are emigrating, either as individuals or as family units. They know a lot better than any westerners that they have no future whatsoever in the shrinking enclaves that now make up what is left of Palestine. No employment and therefore no income. No political future except urban arab gang rule. Little water left for agriculture. No ability even to freely travel in and around their home districts. (That was killed off by the walls that went up in the wake of the suicide bombers that some of them must have thought was a good idea for getting even with the Jews, a few years ago.)
So the israelization of Judea and Samaria will continue. Possibly more so due urbanization of wealthier populations into lands of the poorer populations, in comparison to old-fashioned Zionism.
But regardless of root cause, Israel will spread from the Mediterranean sea to the Jordan river.
In the meantime, the Hamastinians have finished off what was left of the unity of the various enclaves of Arabs. Gaza now truly is Hamastine, and shall remain such. The Fatah groups will assassinate or scare out everybody in the communities under their control who have any connection with Hamas.
In time, war will come again between Egypt and Israel. And once again, for a fifth time, the Egyptian forces will be trapped in the Sinai desert by the totally mechanized army of Israel and its command of the skies across the Middle East.
This time, in its aftermath, I think they will stay in most or all of the Sinai, backed up by the reality of their nuclear weaponry, and will be unremovable by any outside powers. If any international consortium will still cares about any of that, in the coming age of After Peak Oil.
When that happens, it will not prove difficult to open the Gaza escape hatch weatward at Rafah, and send a refugee population of about one million across the Suez Canal into Egypt proper.
With that, given the passage of some centuries, the Middle East will settle into its new age of international neglect, with the various populations of the world more or less adjusted to the very different global realities that will accompany the end of cheap power that can be pumped or dug out of the ground.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
It takes more than holding elections to create a democracy. I think this is lesson to be taken away from the last few years in the Middle East.
If you have violence and lawlessness, letting people vote is unlikely to end the violence and lawlessness.
To create a democracy, you first have to establish the rule of law and create the institutions of government. When you have established a government that has a recognized monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, then you can hold elections and create a democracy. As long as there are other armed factions that a significant part of the population view as legitimate, elections are not going to do anything to end violence and lawlessness.
(Ah, Mike. What I wouldn’t give to sit out there in California and sample some of the great wines you blog about. You must be among the happiest of guys.)
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In regard to the Hamastinians, you’ve just put your finger on one of the key points that differentiates their culture from that of the Israelis. Everybody in Israel is armed to the teeth. But everybody there has a clear understanding that nobody goes to the mattresses, regardless of provocation, outside the command and discipline of Tzeva Haganat l’Yisrael, or Zahal, the Israel Defense Forces.
They confine there arguments to the floor of the Knesset, and some of their electioneering is as nasty as it was in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. (The real Daley, not his pale reflection of a son.) Violence among them is all but unheard of.
I hope they don’t pick up too many nasty tricks from the neighboring arab culture, now that the real Jews are firmly stuck once again back in the Middle East.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I don’t think the “teachable moment” has arrived yet, but it’s getting close. The people of Gaza have not yet reached a sufficient depth of despair to be willing to learn. Hamas will take them there.
There is no peaceable, benign solution to the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The underlying concept behind the state of Israel (the social concept, not the religious concept) is as a homeland for the Jews, insurance against the Russian pogroms or the murder of Jews under Hitler.
That insurances requires a specifically Jewish character for Israel and that in turn can’t be preserved without expelling the Arabs who are already citizens of Israel let alone dealing with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Dishman, the gang that actually runs the inner core of Hamas has got all the guns and killers. And they are in exaltation and not in despair.
They will not be dislodged except by a superior force. And I cannot imagine that you think anybody on the international scene is anxious to occupy Hamastine the way we invaded Iraq.
Besides. The Israelis think all this is to their advantage. And about that they certainly are correct.
Hamastine it shall remain. Until some distant day in which Israel fights Egypt for the fifth time, again takes control of Sinai, and pours the Hamastinians into Egypt proper.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Well Dave, I personally suspect that the ones who are gonna get it got it a long time ago, but the ones who haven’t gotten it never will.
To teach the student mist be willing to learn, and if he ain’t, and is determined not to, then good luck finding any moment that’s fit to learn the lesson he doesn’t wanna hear.
Speaking of which, I hate Microsoft.
I hardly think Palestinian hatred needs to be “stoked” nor is it “irrational.”Israel provides any number of motivations, as is made clear in the media in every other nation but the US.
It’s made clear here too, but what do you call all the rockets being fired into Israel? Provocation goes both ways, and if Israel were Russia or China, the Palestinians would have been removed one way or another long ago.
There’s a clear difference between the two parties: Israel wants peace, and is capable of peace. Palestine doesn’t and isn’t.
There is no peaceable, benign solution to the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
I’m surprised you would say that Dave. Palestinian leaders just have to agree to let Israel exist (which eventuality Syria, Iran and company work hard to avoid, to the Palestinian people’s great detriment). If I recall my Israeli demographics correctly, there are already 1.5 million Arabs in Israel.
To create a democracy, you first have to establish the rule of law and create the institutions of government.
You have to do all three.
It’s hard to see how Palestinians would be better off with zero democracy instead of a little.
Price,
Good observations. I ain’t on the right, but I fear I may have gloated a bit.
My neutral observation:
I, obviously, would love it for Arabs in the Middle East to practice their religion and live in peace. I’m all warm and fuzzy on that one.
The problem though, since 1948, is what I call the Arab-2 step:
1. Oppress and destabilize their own people
2. Blame 1 on Israel
The internecine fight between Hamas and Fatah, is much better, strategically, than if Hamas and Fatah were united to commit more terrorist acts against innocent Israel civilians.
I could be wrong, but Palestinians voted in Hamas. So, what does that say about a people who voluntarily support a terrorist organization? I dunno — but it doesn’t seem to me to bode well for sustained peace.
HBarnes
There are situations where you just can’t help people, no matter what you do. Sometimes it’s the situation, other times it’s the people. Sometimes you have to let people die before you can help the survivors. Sometimes you have to kill.
Now that Hamas is running the show in the Gaza Strip they’ll be looking to expand their war against Israel. Israel in turn will expand her program of repreisal and proactive actions. Expect strikes against Hamas facilities and agents. Assassinations, airstrikes, raids. There will come a day when to wear a Hamas uniform will be a death sentence. Then to carry weapons openly. To go to a mass rally will spell your doom. Either the Palestinians make peace, or they will become extinct. Their choice.
When Hernando de Soto made his tour of the American southeast back in the 16th century he encountered a number of tribes. Not one of those tribes existed just a century later. The diseases the Spaniards brought with them all unknowing so depopulated the area no social organization higher than the family could continue. All nations, all tribes and clans encountered in the interior were entirely new, formed by the descendents of those who survived the effects of de Soto’s expedition.
Now we’re seeing an ethnic group destroy itself. Will a new group form from the survivors, or will they be subsumed into other ethnicities? There will be those who will protest that this is not how it should be. But it is how things are, and no bewailing that fact is going to change things. The Palestinians had their chance for peace, and they shat upon it. They still have an opportunity for peace, but under their present leadership I doubt very much they’ll take it. Call it suicide by obstinancy, but they are doomed and a century or so from now I doubt all but the rare academic is going to even care there once was a people known as the Palestinians.
MTM,
You are not witnessing an entire ethnic group destroy itself. The Palestinians and Hamastinians all speak the dialect of common Arabic spoken by most other Arabs, and are ethnically little different from people in about half the arab states.
What you are alluding to would be the same as trying to make different ethnic groups out of white european Americans of protestant christian faith residing anywhere from southern California to northern Maine, or from Seattle to Miami.
About 150 years ago, there were just a few thousand Arabs altogether living in the portion of the Turkish empire that the British took over as “Palestine”, which then included Trans-Jordan. Jews even then were the majority population of Jerusalem, which itself was little more than a large but crummy third-world small town.
The Arabs largely came in to find jobs as the Jews began settling the land beginning in about 1870. Then as now, they migrate to where they can find work. Now, they shall migrate elsewhere for the same purpose.
Most of the stuff made up in recent decades about the sanctity of “Palestine” was set in place by people trying yet one more means of twisting the Jews. Without which, the Arabs of Gaza, Hebron and Nablus would have gotten and deserved no more attention than some tribe of Indians in Patagonia.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
mythusmage,
Interestingly, antropologists now say the same thing happened in North America, which is why the North American settlers from Europe found the continent so thinly populated when they arrived.
By and large the people doing the killing and being killed are people who have carried out murder of Israeli civilians, or have supported those who have on a practical basis, or on a moral or rhetorical basis.
So I feel no guilt enjoying their mutual slaughter at each other’s hands. None at all. The death of murderers at the hands of murderers? It is more than poetic justice.
I really think this hypothesis, which I noted here, has some relevance.
A summary:
It’s not Islam.
It’s not Palestinians.
It’s not Arabic culture.
It’s not Democracy, or lack of it.
It’s too many men between the ages of 15 and 39 as a proportion of the total number of men.
Hopefully I’m not embalming another dead thread, here.
Yours,
Wince
Tom Hawkson,
I have not yet read Baron’s link but I will tonight. As mentioned in the other thread though, I think just as much has to do with the economic opportunities that men between those ages have.
If you are arguing that it is demographics and only demographics, well that leaves only two, very uncomfortable choices as far as I can tell:
1. Live with it
2. Change those demographics
Paul,
You are correct. That is exactly what Gunnar Heinsohn concludes from his hypothesis.
Yours,
Wince
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