I noticed something the other day about the debate that is now raging over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict: for the most part, it's an argument over who is The Good Guy and who is The Bad Guy. We see dueling photosets: an Israeli partisan offers a pile of gory photos of Israeli victims of Palestinian violence. Meanwhile a Palestinian partisan offers an equally gory set of photos of the Palestinian victims of Israeli violence. I shake my head in disbelief: OF COURSE this conflict is violent and gory -- what do you think happens when conflicts turn violent? I should think that the goal of both sides would be to end the violence. But no: the goal is only to prove that the other side is The Bad Guy.
This moralistic approach to foreign policy is a favorite with conservatives: they love to talk about how the USA is The Good Guy and its enemies are Bad Guys. I've always wondered what they think is going on inside the heads of their enemies. Do conservatives really believe that the enemies of the USA agree that they're the Bad Guys? Do conservatives fail to realize that, in the eyes of these enemies, it is America that is the Bad Guy? It seems odd that conservatives could fail to appreciate such a simple point.
But the problem is not limited to conservatives. The recent attack by Israel upon Gaza has produced an outpouring of anger from the left, condemning Israel as the Bad Guy. I have been surprised that some of these people rely solely on the moralistic argument.
These moralistic arguments don't solve anything; they just further the violence. After all, killing Bad Guys must be a good thing, so all we have to do is prove that the other side has some Bad Guys and voila! -- we have a simple solution to the problem.
This is precisely the thinking that is going on among many Israelis and Palestinians. They have seen the suffering and they see the other side as the Bad Guy, and they just want to bash the Bad Guy. So Israelis kill Palestinians, Palestinians kill Israelis, and the cycle of violence goes on forever.
If we're ever going to stop the killing, the first step must be to dispense with these pointless arguments over who is the Good Guy and who is the Bad Guy. Those are zero-sum arguments; they can only lead to the conclusion that one side must win and the other side must lose. And neither side will sign up for a deal that they think they are losing.
The only deal that will work is one that is win-win: something that each side sees as a victory. The two sides do not have mutually exclusive objectives. Israelis want security; Palestinians want their own country. These are not incompatible goals; a win-win solution should be easy to design. But the moralists on both sides of the conflict refuse to accept a win-win solution: they insist that the other side must lose. And that attitude will forever doom any chances of ending this conflict.
I therefore suggest that Americans put an end to these stupid arguments over who's right and who's wrong and just focus on how we can stop the killing. And when I say "we", I don't mean Israel nor do I mean Palestine. It's a waste of time to engage in wishful thinking along the lines of "If only the Palestinians would do X, then peace would be easy." Like it or not, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis are capable of doing the magic "X" that will bring peace. They've been at it for 60 years now and they have failed. They can't make peace happen. The USA is the only country that can bring peace to these two countries. And so it is "we" -- Americans -- who must take the initiative and impose a solution to end the killing.
8 comments:
"This moralistic approach to foreign policy is a favorite with conservatives: they love to talk about how the USA is The Good Guy and its enemies are Bad Guys."
An approach never more clearly articulated than by our own God-wanted-me-to-be-President, George Bush, with his "Axis of Evil": they bad, we good.
As for the Israel-Palestine win-win, it's been on the table in essence for years. The Palestinians have to have their own country; Israel has to be able to live without fear of rockets in the night, suicide bombings, assorted mayhem and neighbors who deny their right to exist.
Now if we could just get the two sides to agree.
And what is a reasonable strategy for ending this conflict?
(The only one I can come up with is spending a few trillion dollars on buying candy, education and entertainment for the palestinians so they realize life is great without control over certain locations in Jerusalem.)
One thing I've noticed about this conflict when I've talked to people about it, is the failure to schematize it in a way that makes sense. The common argument against Israel is reasonable in one sense, but misleading in another:
Person A: "Israel needs to defend itself. It's being hit by rockets."
Person B: "Hamas kills 4 people, Israel kills 1000. That's disproportionate. That's like if somebody threw a grape at me and because I was mad I threw a grenade."
The problem with this approach is that Israel is not trying to get arbitrary retribution. They are trying to staunch the flow of rockets using air power. There is a more morally acceptable but militarily unacceptable solution, which is to do this surgically and take a ton of casualties on the ground (since they'd be refraining from shooting up potential innocents and doing it all on the ground.)
And I cannot blame Israel for not wanting to take casualties. Casualties are extremely draining on morale, and unacceptable to the public.
Unfortunately, this is sensationalism at work. Hamas is to blame for starting the current aggression, but Israel is in some way, shape or form in the wrong to cause so much collateral damage. Nor is the conflict as simple as Hamas "starting it." If we stick to the media narratives, the important parts of the issues get lost to a game of statistics confined to this spate of violence.
I don't have it fully worked out, but there must not only be a two-state solution, but one that acknowledges that a city as holy (I mean that in terms of influence, I'm not Judeo-Christian/Muslim) as Jerusalem cannot be owned by a single state. Let Tel-Aviv be the Israeli capial, and Jerusalem be a holy city. That gets at the essence of the problem to some degree.
I think you are asking the wrong question, so you will never come up with a satisfactory answer.
The question you are asking is, "What political solution is there to a problem that was born out of previous political solutions?" This question does not admit the possibility of their being no political solution at all.
To put this into perspective, just examine the history of the twentieth century: One war after another, each giving rise to the next, each justified on the grounds that, in the long run, it would secure peace among nations, or at least security for the winning side.
That we are still fighting wars today seems not to have dampened the prospects of those who sell these kinds of "solutions" to the problems of humanity. Quite the contrary. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just a microcosm of the broader problem of international affairs, and of the failure of states to deliver peace.
I would suggest that you (meaning everyone, including all the Israelis and Palestinians) withdraw your support for political institutions and the violence on which they thrive. Stop believing in the fairy tale that government is a "social contract" entered into for the purpose of securing "the common good". It is not and never was. The state was born out of conquest and has always been an instrument of plunder.
This is plainly obvious once you open your eyes. But doing so is difficult. It requires you to recognize, and reject, a lifetime of unchallenged falsehoods and propaganda that are ubiquitous in the cultural fabric of society.
Once you pull your head out of the fog, you'll see that there is no political solution to the problems of war and insecurity, just as there is no criminal solution to the problem of crime. Here's the iron law that everyone tries to forget: The ends are pre-existent in the means. Or, put another way, "Your means are your ends in embryo."
People keep ignoring this because of what it implies: Each person, individually, must take personal responsibility for changing the world by first changing his own mind, and consequently his own behavior. That is hard to swallow. After all, I can only change myself, and that is no guarantee that others will change. I might get hurt.
And that's true. This is not a quick fix. But neither is politics, nor its corollary, war, as proven by history. It is insanity to keep trying what has been tried before, and expecting a different result.
Dither, you assert that there is no solution. I can certainly agree that the prospects for any solution to this conflict are dim; it's been going on now for 60 years and the prospects for peace are no brighter now than they were at any time in the past. So your cynicism does have objective support.
Nevertheless, I think that the dangers imposed by this conflict are so great that it is important for all of us to seriously consider how it might be resolved. While you are correct to point out that the situation appears unresolvable, I think that the costs of continuing lack of resolution are so high as to demand our continued efforts.
I am optimistic that this conflict will be resolved, but I fear that the resolution will not come until something truly horrific happens, at which point Americans will finally decide that they must do something about this situation. For the moment, Americans are still basking in the warm illusion that this is a conflict that doesn't seriously cost them.
Oskar, I think that the only solution will come from an imposed peace. The Israelis and Palestinians are clearly unable to resolve their differences peaceably. The Israelis are in the driver's seat here, and they are supported unconditionally by the Americans, so ultimately the resolution will come only when America imposes peace terms upon the Israelis.
Chris,
It's not that I don't think there's a solution -- just that there's no political solution. I agree with you that our efforts at finding a real solution are worthwhile, because many people are suffering and dying as a result of this conflict.
When I first read your blog entry, my thoughts were as follows:
The U.S. should just stop arming the Israelis. All expenditures for war must come out of the production of consumer goods like food, clothing, shelter and medicine. If the Israelis are forced to bear the costs of continued warfare themselves, they will have a greater incentive to make peace with the Palestinians.
So why didn't I just write that? For one, it might give the impression that I think the Israelis alone are responsible for the conflict. I don't believe that, nor do I think a more neutral stance on the part of the U.S. would necessarily end the fighting. Still, it would be worth a try. It would probably help.
More fundamentally, I just don't think the political powers involved actually want peace. This is what I was getting at in my last post. Even if you come up with a brilliant plan, it will accomplish nothing if the government won't implement it.
There are probably lots of influential people making a killing (no pun intended) on this war, as has been the case for every war. See General Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket.
The state benefits greatly by having "bad guys" with which to scare its population into submission. At no time is there less resistance to state infringements on the liberties of the people than during war.
The U.S. government has found a suitable "bad guy" du jour in the swarthy Muslim hordes. Why give that up? There are hardline factions in Israel that play this up to American audiences. The Palestinian rulers are likewise greater empowered every time a child is killed by an Israeli rocket. And, of course, Bin Laden's recruitment soars whenever Muslims are being killed.
This is a self-perpetuating cycle. The interests of the warring factions are actually joined at the hip, and are contrary to the interests of society at large. I just don't see that changing, ever. If the conflict ends, it will be because the politicos and their enablers have found bigger fish to fry, and the killing machine has moved somewhere else.
"There are probably lots of influential people making a killing...on this [Gaza] war....
"The state benefits greatly by having 'bad guys' with which to scare its population into submission. At no time is there less resistance to state infringements on the liberties of the people than during war."
Dither: Intentionally or not, you have just summarized the state of America post-9/11, along with the brilliantly-executed strategy of the Bush Administration during that time (especially the election of 2004, which should have resulted in Bush's ouster but turned him, incredibly, into a two-term president).
Were you by any chance wired into the White House?
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