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Israel Prepared to move ground forces into Gaza
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Economically (>>>Strategically), it does not pays off to go to war at all. Nuking the opposition is the cheapest solution.
Your whole line of reasoning is Moralist- its intention is to minimize death.
Honk: One of my best friends was hurt from a missile landing near her last week, so I somehow doubt it.
I think we need to see how the current system handles a major, prolonged economic downturn before we get too misty about its ability to bring about world peace. In the U.S., anti-globalization sentiments are currently fueling a growing popular antipathy toward China and India. I'm curious how China especially handles the social effects of a major recession, depression.
I can see how deep economic ties could discourage war. I can also see how deep economic ties could cause wars, especially in situations where the dumbshit policies of Country A causes Countries B,C,D,F, etc. to meltdown economically.
Yeah, you're right. But it's a theory with at least some weight behind it.
I read about it, on cnn I believe, sometime last week. CNN doesn't make it true though, but I assumed it was, and the timing of the airstrikes after reading that seemed curious.
I'm not talking about America, I'm talking about the extremely antagonistic relationship between English and French in Canada that has existed for centuries. Genocide and violence occured on both sides for most of those centuries, and repression and racism and xenophobia has only (since the Quiet Revolution) been on the ebb. I think that if the English and French can reach across the aisle and put aside their differences, then there is absolutely no reason why the Palestinians and the Jews can't either.
In fact, I'd say that there has been a categorical and moral failure on both sides of the conflict not to grow the fuck up and move beyond pedestrian and extremely harmful radical (and religious) separatism. A federal, unified state, with the proper power sharing mechanisms would be viable, it would secure the futures of both the Israeli nation and the Palestinian nation, and would bring peace to that area of the world. It can be done, and your ignorance of Canadian history is not really an argument against it.
The low scale warfare where one group lobs a couple of missiles that kill a few people and another group reacts by blowing up a bunch of military shit with some collateral damage results in a lot less deaths than ethnic cleansing a whole group of people who don't want to leave and who don't really have anywhere to go.
The missing factor here, though, is that the colonial antipathy was a mirror of the French and English rivalry on the world stage. Once you removed that factor, it became a lot easier for tensions to calm. Even then, it took generations and has not completely disappeared.
In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there are still major players with a vested interest in using the two sides as proxies. As much as everyone has embraced the idea that the first step to peace in the Middle East is the solution of the Israeli issue, I have a suspicion that a genuine peace between the U.S. and Iran and the overthrow of the Saudis by a moderate replacement has to happen first.
Eh, I'd say that Britain and Ireland would be the better analogy.
Oh, Saudis will be overthrown soon. As soon as the oil stops, the whole country will revert into an utter chaos.
No doubt. It's the moderate part that's in question. One of the side benefits of America's long embrace of conservatism is that the hip young activists in the Islamic world tend to come from the crazy fundamentalist side.
The only exception to this is in Iran. While it would probably exacerbate the Arab-Persian split, a smart leader of the Free World would make peace with Iran and make it possible for that country's moderate, secular culture to push aside the fundies.
And that's the rub of it: Israel doesn't want to be a federal state, it wants to be a Jewish state. That is its purpose, and it's built into its very being(ie: right of return). They aren't going to want to change that, even though the current situation is awful.
Which is incredibly hypocritical, when you think about it...imagine if any other country in the world would do the same. Say, nobody else but French people allowed in France, everyone else are second-class citizens.
It's odd but the reasoning behind the creation of a Jewish state makes sense.
One wrong does not make a second wrong into a right.
I can see the reasoning, but what it results in is a large-scale ghetto that is in constant strife with its neighbors. Definitely a failure of longterm planning.
I have nothing against a Jewish state as long as we are talking about ethnicity. A crapload of ethnic groups have their countries, with the name of the said group being in the name of a country. I have a problem when it's ONLY Jews allowed and everybody else are being treated like crap. That Jews get better rights then others simply because they are Jewish.
Honestly, I think the idea of any X-state is a bad idea from the get-go. It encourages people to become insulated within their own ethnic group, and can lead to persecution of any minority group who happens to live in the area as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHD4UlcxwnM&eurl=http://www.google.com/reader/view/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK21qajm4lM&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Freader%2Fview%2F
The same thing countries like the US are based on. A secular, central government deriving its power from the people, in the form of a document that lists the rights of all people, regardless of ethnicity.
There is an alternative, though. Secular modern democracies that base citizenship on allegiance to the power of law seem to work fairly well, when the religious and racist types aren't mucking things up.
There really is something to be said for the idea that if you obey the law, send your kids to school and pay your taxes, then you are a good citizen.
I know. It's not a pefect system. I'm just saying that it's preferable to basing a state on X-ethnicity, wherein all other ethnicities and minority groups are allowed to continue living, so long as they go along with the majority.
But the structure of the U.S. system and most secular democracies not only allows for this to change, but change must be actively undermined to discourage it. One of the reason so many of our societal shifts occur in the courts - "activist judges" notwithstanding - is that the legal system does not recognize rights based on ethnicity or religion.
That puts those who wish to oppress in the awkward position of having to explicitly write that oppression into law. As we are seeing with the gay rights issues, that creates a target for further activism and - over the long term - becomes an embarrassment and burden, as the lawmakers must forever defend the explicitly discriminatory legislation in the court of law and international public opinion. This becomes especially difficult when the nation touts itself as a model of freedom and equality to the world.
I was actually objecting to the idea of an X-ethnicity state in general, not to Israel in specific.
You just described a form of government, not a country. Countries are more than their governing body, and I'd say that the lines on the map have a good deal more importance than you're willing to put on them. Geographic areas make much more sense to be defined by ethnicity and tribal heritage, which can be governed by a liberal secular whatever the fuck, than arbitrariness or natural resources then hoping it all works out because it's got good governance and policies.
The Kurds and Palestinians &c. deserve a state that they can call their own. That country should also be some sort of representative democracy with strong minority rights that is open to the other nations of the world. I'm done channeling Wilson.
The technical term for this is a bantustan. It's a shaky legal and rhetorical dodge for supporters, as pretty much anyone else grasps what's going on.
There isn't a single homogenous ethnic nation on the face of the earth. France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, England and Germany are all imagined entities encompassing a host of ethnicities that, at some point, came together to call themselves nations. Especially in the case of Germany and France, there was a concerted political effort to call together groups - albeit ones who shared similar linguistic roots - who had been at war a century before into a single political identity.
The modern nation-state is the next evolution of this. It seems to work quite well.
This is something a lot of people miss.
Before the Franco-Prussian war there was no such thing as a "German" in the way we think of it now, there was a loose, general ethnic identity that at times included and disincluded groups like the Dutch, Austrians, Czechs, German speaking peoples of both Germanic and Slavic descent in Poland and the Balkans, etc.
What eventually became Germans in the sense we know it today was more a consequence of history that anything else, before the 1800s there were Swabians, Prussians, Bavarians, etc. The fact that these groups were included in Germany and the Dutch and Austrians were not was due to political reasons and not any real ethnic difference.
Same with other nations, why for example is Catalonia part of Spain but Portugul is not? An accident of politics.
India didn't exist as a political entity at all before the independance movement.
The political unions always came first, then the people gradually homogenized into a group that thought of themselves as a nation later.
Now I'm not really sure if a Federal type system is the best solution here, but at this point there is a great need to bring everyone to the table. The biggest issue is the religious divide, and neither side really wants the kind of secularist state that it would take to blend the two groups together.
The religious divide was also an issue with France and Germany. Protestants and Catholics had spent centuries murdering each other in the millions and they still managed. I'd say there was more historic bad blood between those two groups than exists between Jews and Arabs.*
* The whole "at war for thousands of years" explanation for the Palestinian conflict is bogus. Islam was historically tolerant toward Jews. They had much greater freedom and acceptance in Islamic society than in Christian Europe.
If you subtract the stories of the Bible - which have extremely dubious historicity - then you really have less than a century of animosity. Going by the historic record, it would make a lot more sense for Israel to be at war with Europe than the Muslim world.
I always forget to bring this up in discussions like this. But I would say that it's simply not that cut and dried. There were anti-Jewish pogroms in Paris just as well as Palestine, just as the Jews were able to settle in the Rhineland as well as Anatolia. I think the roots of this specific conflict begin in the West with the end of WW1 and the League of Nations, and in the Middle East, with the rise of Arab Nationalism and the founding of Saudi Arabia in the late 19th century. The bungling of the Great Powers dealing with the Middle East after the war combined Arab Nationalism and Wahabbi (Saudi) fundamentalism is not exactly the best mixture for creating a modern, liberal, tolerant society.
That is true. It didn't help that the discovery of oil allowed these countries to amass great wealth without needing to modernize or liberalize their societies. The constant meddling by Western and Soviet government also seriously screwed up any efforts to grow a modern civic order.
You can add to this the fact that the rather brutal record of French, British and Ottoman colonialism created a perverse incentive for Arab nationalists to identify with Nazi Germany. A lot of the modern antisemitism in Arab society has roots in this, with the founding of Israel expanding that nugget of hate.
If you were going to move the Palestinians to quell unrest then it would have to be somewhere pretty nice and was ready to accept them. And even then it would be messy and there's a good chance enough of them wouldn't go along with it.
I'd doubt it. If anything the press about how they're totally going to overwhelm gaza with a hojillion ground forces seems to be an attempt to bring about detente. And if they learned anything from Lebanon it's not to do anything stupid like start what would be considered a war/occupation that they could be claimed to have been defeated in when they inevitably withdraw.
Did they learn anything from Lebanon?