Discussion about this post

User's avatar
David Roseberry's avatar

This should be required reading by the media and our politicians.

Expand full comment
Refined Insights's avatar

Excellent piece. I will try to be concise although I expect inevitable failure. I am struck by the parallels of the Levant and the Middle East with the partition of India as a vast patchwork of tribes and cultures in both cases were inadvertently unified under an empire and then split up again upon independence.

For most of human history, we have been organized into either small-scale groups like tribes or supranational entities like empires. Nation-states are a modern aberration and while now regarded as the geopolitical standard, they cause certain problems: tribes are localist by nature and empires, by virtue of their size, cannot be heavy handed. When all these regions were under the supreme control of the Ottoman Empire, peace reigned by default.

But nations are intrusive. They have defined borders, they levy harsher taxes, they have stringent security considerations, they are often based on strict ethnic or religious criteria, they look less favourably on local administration, and unlike empires which must cater to disparate sets of people and therefore cultivate a semblance of impartiality, nation states are expressly clear on who they favour.

As a result, people who may have been content being ruled by an empire controlled by a different ethnicity, culture, or religion, cannot stand being part of a nation state. In addition, they set in motion a continuous process of dissolution: once people A have been granted independence, people B want their own and then of course people C and people D... It ironically turns out that countries, which themselves had to win their own independence through blood and toil, are ill-disposed to granting the same to breakaway movements in their own countries.

Moving on, with specific regard to Palestine, a few thoughts. First off, each side is stuck. Indeed, were this to be the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, the solution would be unspeakably violent but it would be a solution: one side would simply attempt to ethnically cleanse the other. It is what other settler states, most famously the United States of America, carried out in the past. It is certain that if the native American population remained as relatively large today as it did 200 years ago, it would be a very different United States.

Forbidding such abominable measures, the issue at hand is the population figures. There are five million Palestinians and nine million Israelis. If the Palestinians were a smaller minority, as the Kurds are in turkey or as the ethnic turks of Xinjiang have been in China, then they could be absorbed into Israel or silenced.

If the Israelis, on the other hand, were the small minority, then their current system of apartheid would be unsustainable as it proved to be in South Africa and Rhodesia. ( apropos of the latter, the white minority was massacred and the rest fled. In the former, they have uneasily integrated).

Here, they are relatively matched. Neither can fully subdue the other and so a lasting peace is impossible. In South Korea, the mountainous Jeju people attempted to break away and of course there was a strong separatist in Quebec in the 1980s. But as Canada and South Korea grew far more prosperous, these movements were neutralized. Separatists chose to share in a growing pie than cart off with their own slice.

Such an option does not exist here, again because of the relative population figures and the religious/tribal divide. Consider that Israel subsidizes Gaza with water, electricity, and infrastructure and that Gaza has a higher GDP per Capita than its Arab neighbours. It hasn't changed the mutual hostilities.

The best solution therefore is something akin to what prevailed in Ireland with the Good Friday argument of 1988. Unfortunately, that only happened after both sides had exhausted themselves in sporadic violence for decades and their larger neighbour intervened to act as an intermediary. Perhaps, the current instantiation of violence will finally force all sides to the bargaining table. For so long, the violence has been sporadic and intermittent as all three( Israel, Gaza and the West Bank) continue to exist in an unhappy equilibrium.

But with tensions so high and the brutalities so blatant, there is finally a chance to exit that equilibrium and seek a permanent resolution once and for all. Behind all of the bloodshed and gore, it would represent the thinnest of silver linings. They must now pull themselves out of the abyss by the most delicate of threads.

Expand full comment
48 more comments...

No posts