Part I asked the question how not only will the Gaza War end, but the whole Arab-Israeli war? My quick answer: end oil as a valuable commodity. Let me expand:
1. First Dispel the Thousand Year War Myth
This is a clear sign of vigorous ignorance: if a blowhard says that the Arabs and Jews have been fighting for centuries, so there's no way the war will ever end, call bull-scheisse. Yes, there's been fighting in that region for centuries, but those battles (a) did not involve Jews except as victims, never as belligerents, and (b) many of the battles were between Christians and Muslims, and no matter how much both sides would like to claim otherwise, Jews and NOT interchangeable with Christians.
A side note to explain that point: Muslims seem to consider Jews and Christians part of the same category and since Jews have thrived in the western (read: Christian, usually Protestant) democracies, modern Muslims just seem to think we're the same. So the crusades were Jewish both because they were fought by infidels, and what's the difference among 'em, and because Jews and Christians work together nowadays so they must have always worked together! People who have not risen up into modernity (like most of the Muslim world) are stuck with the ahistorical Medieval frame of mind which flattens the present into a permanent past.
Now the modern Christians - in the US - identify the Jews as a form of Christian. Note, this is not done (as far as I've seen) in Europe. Not only are there gads of Catholics who have long memories of roasting Jews on open fires for their Traditional Christmases, but Europeans in general have clear Us-Them battle-lines drawn in their brains and Jews are permanently on the Them team.
But American protestants think of Jews as just another form of Christians. First of all, American Judaism is so watered down that its basically protestantism anyway. But for the fundamentalists, who see Jews as part of a religious plan, they see Jews - and Israel - as just a form of Christianity. My feeling is that a random fundamentalist Christian would be shocked to know Jews think Jesus wasn't a savior but a cranky hillbilly carpenter, at best. Fundys read the Old testament as a Christian document, and Israel is *theirs* because it's Jewish. I could elaborate more, but that should be enough for now.
So: to say that there's been Jewish-Muslim violence for centuries is to say (like Muslims) that Jews are just anti-Muslim, like the Christians, or to say (like the Fundamentalists) that the Jews are acting as Christian agents in the most recent crusade. Both these ideas are stupid and wrong. Call that bull-schiesse!
There's a third option, though, for the morons: to claim that the *region* has been in war for centuries and the Arabs and Israelis are just acting out some kind of war-curse the region engenders. Somehow these idiots think Israel is the hotel from the Shining. Morons who say this are usually atheists (or anti-religion theists) who think that religion makes people bloodthirsty and insane. And thus they depict the Arab-Israeli wars as religious conflicts.
Pardon me while I laugh derisively. These atheist dimwits (Michael Ramirez is one of them, when he's not sucking the Gooper trough) don't take the time to understand that Israel is pretty damn secular. Even though the settlers are generally Orthodox weirdos, the majority of Israel - every single Prime Minister for example - are secular. So boom goes that canard.
The bottom line is that the current Arab-Israeli conflict is about 150 years old - speaking expansively - and before 1948 the "war" was generally the Arabs massacring Jews. Since 1948 there has been the current conflict. So even give the innumeracy of the pundits and associated bellyachers, 60+ years does not equal hundreds.
And it bears repeating over and over: this is not a two sided war. As I said (somewhere) that the old slogan from the Hippie 60s was "What if they declared a war and nobody came?" is beyond stupid because of the Arab-Israeli conflict which is "what if they declared a war and only one side showed up?" There'll be a war for as long as the Arabs and/or Muslims have the *means* to destroy Israel. Because they are committed to do so, because of religion or because of some broken vision of their grandiose past. We need to take away their means...
2. The Arab-Israeli War Has Had Two Phases
From 1948-1993 the Arab-Israeli conflict must be seen in the light of the cold war. Simply put, the Western World gave a flying fig for Israel - and the world cared about the Arab states - mainly as a proxy battle between the US and the USSR. The Arab armies were aligned with the Soviets and their weaponry (and money) came from that massive part of the globe. The US supported Israel in the same way we supported South Korea, Taiwan, Greece, or the Contras.
The great tragedy of Oslo was that a point when the Cold War was over the PLO was poised to become irrelevant. All of their resources and support dried up because the Russians had bigger fish to fry. Just like we could have gotten total control of the Western Wall and of Hebron - but gave it away due to idiotic ideology - so too we could have lived without the PLO. But nooooo; Rabin-Peres took a failed organization, dazed and dashed along with the Berlin Wall, living in exile in Tunisia, and gave them an international platform.
However, one can argue that even without Israel giving the Palestinians relevance, they would have risen up on their own because of the second source of funding (and now sole source following the breakup of the Soviets): Arab oil.
Post Oslo (which is post-Berlin Wall) the Arab world maintains a relevance because they are stinking' rich off oil money.
How else can Iran fund both Hamas and Hezbollah? Why would we even care about Saddam Hussein? How is it that Muslim terrorists can be so well funded and protected? Why is it that France rolls over and kisses Arab tush? Because of oil. Oil is what protects the Palestinians and what makes the whole world listen to the raving hatred of the petro-nations that hate Israel.
Were oil to become worthless, then Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, etc wouldn't be able to fund terrorism, the world would consider the Arabs to be as important as undeveloped backwaters like Bangladesh or sub-Saharan Africa.
3. Green=Peace
Support alternative fuels! The idiot Republicans - and their poster airhead Sarah "Drill, I have Babies, Drill" Palin - talked only of ending our dependence on "foreign oil." That little world "foreign" is the rub. It sounds like an innocuous addition and that's the power of PR/Marketing - to create logical sounding slogans for unpleasant truths. (e.g. When did toilet paper become bathroom tissue?! I know there's a difference! I'm shomer shabbat: bathroom tissue is kosher on Shabbas and toilet paper ain't. Stop messing with words, Madison Avenue!! Ahem)
"Ending dependence on oil" means to switch to alternative fuels; "ending...foreign oil" still means we're dependent on oil, but it means we'll just buy more domestically. It's so stupid that people just swallowed it up: it sounds 'green' but is in fact designed to line the pockets of Texans and Alaskans. Goopers are even worse than the bathroom tissue people.
Anyway, by ending dependence on oil; if we turn the world onto cheap fuel (e.g. remember coal?) then we can end the Arab-Israeli conflict: (1) the bad guys won't have the money for weapons, and (2) the world won't need to listen to the Arabs complaining about Israel/Palestine because who listens to poor sand-farmers?
How will the war end? The Palestinians will wake up one day and realize that nobody is giving them money to kill 100 of themselves for every Israeli (the current ratio, or so it seems) and they'll then do what all petulant parasites do when the cash cow dies: they'll get jobs. They'll build roads and schools instead of bombs and will find it better for day-to-day life to actually let Israel live in peace.
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