Those nasty Jews at it again!

Ah christ you just don't get it do you, I couldn't give a flying **** that Israelis are mostly Jewish - if they all dropped Judaism, took up Scientology and continued down the same political and military path that they are on now I would still have exactly the same issues.

The issue with that particular region of the Middle East is one of power. Through whatever means the Israeli state has managed to get itself into a very powerful position with a strong military, a democracy and one of the best economies in the region. On the other hand we have the Palestinians who feel that they are powerless, they don't have a state for one, they have much lower health, economic and political means than their ethnically different neighbours - within the same land border. When you have two people living side by side, with an obvious gap in power between the two then you get political instability between the two.

If you look at Northern Ireland as an example. In the 1960's you had one group of the community, the Unionists, who had been in power for every single year since the creation of the state of Northern Ireland. You had another group, the Nationalists, who were completely excluded from the mechanisms of state. The Police force was controlled by Unionists, the state government was completely controlled by Unionists, the local councils were dominated by Unionists (quite shamefully gerrymandered in places to stop majority Nationalist populations from controlling councils), the civil service was controlled by Unionists and every major private industry including Ship Building were practically Unionist only employers.

So you had a situation where a huge chunk of the population where in the position of having a lot of power, with the other chunk of the population having very little power. What happened? Well the powerless people started demanding equal rights, they demanded they get their fair share of the power, of the wealth, of the running of the state, of the council house allocation, of the ship building jobs. Once that peaceful Civil Rights movement (during the early 1960's) was put down with brute force then extremism started to foster to the point where paramilitaries started to form (paramilitaries had always existed but could have probably been counted as dozens of individuals) which lead to virtual outbreak of Civil war in 1969.

When the Unionist population seen the restless Nationalists become ever more restless - when they seen the threat of a tiny minority of Nationalist people starting to consider going further than peaceful protest - they became worried and they started taking more extreme solutions to the unrest. We then had a spiraling downward trajectory of those with power trying to hold on to it by any means and those without taking up ever more extreme methods of trying to take power.

After 30 years of violence the 1999 Belfast agreement finally, for the most part, settled things. How did it settle things? Well it transferred power from the Unionists to the Nationalists. With direct rule from London for the best part of the 30 years the Unionists had slowly adjusted to the loss of power, to the loss of their 'Protestant state for a Protestant people'. They realised things were never going back to the Unionist dominated state of the 50's or 60's and they realised that they had to relinquish proportionate control of the state to their Nationalist neighbours.

Why did the IRA stop it's military campaign? Well because they were handed power in the new arrangement. It was clear that they had a sizeable chunk of the population behind them so the solution was to give them a sizable chunk of government to control, to bring those people who had felt that they were powerless into the mechanisms of state.

Only 60% or so of the Unionist population voted for the agreement while around 95% of Nationalists voted for it, why? Because there was a loss of power for Unionism. The Nationalists, particularly the IRA, would be brought into government and given power, the government of the Republic of Ireland would be given greater power, there would be cross border institutions set up to work on an all Ireland basis. The Irish language would be incorporated into the state, the RUC would be rebuilt into a more neutral police force (and indeed they forcefully employed more Nationalists than Unionists for a decade to fix the imbalance of power for one ethnicity within the force) and the rights of every Irish person in the state, to simply be Irish, would be enshrined in the agreement - therefore giving their nationality equal recognition as the previously dominant British nationality.

So you see the solution of the Northern Irish problem was not a military one or an economic one but a political one - and the political solution was to take absolute power from Unionism and hand a proportionate amount to Nationalism. The people who generally supported this were the people who were gaining power and the people who oppossed it were losing power (indeed the Anti-agreement Unionists only started supporting the agreement when they achieved a electoral majority within Unionism, and therefore gained power within the mechanisms of the agreement themselves).

Now back to Israel and the Palestinians. As mentioned we have a powerful state and a very very weak state - so what is the solution? Well to try make them more equal of course. Like Northern Ireland Unionists in the 60's, the Israeli population fear losing power to Palestine, they fear losing land, they fear a more powerful Palestinian military - they fear a Palestinian government with a seat on the UN. The Palestinians on the other hand demand more power for all the same reasons - they look with envy at their neighbours and feel as if their neighbour's success is at Palestine's expense (which to a large degree, in terms of land grabbing etc, it is).

There are therefore two ways to settle the issue, we try to build the Palestinian state up to match the economic, political and military might of Israel - or we reduce at least the military might of Israel to dominate it's neighbour to put the two people on a more equal footing.

It is evident that the biggest block to achieving any of the above is that Israel from a position of power is reluctant to release any of that power and let the Palestinians attempt to become a self confident, self determined people. It is obvious that Israel is using a lot of dirty tricks in it's efforts to prevent the Palestinians from becoming more powerful - by blocking even the establishment of a formal state. It is obvious that Israel will not willfully lower it's position of power in the pursuit of peace, that for the moment at least it would rather have a state of bitter war than a state where their enemies are given equal rights.

The only solution for me is for a third party to forcefully intervene and strip the Israelis from their position of dominance and put the Palestinians on a more equal footing, just like the British government (with the help of the US and Irish governments) eventually did in Northern Ireland when the two waring factions were never going to get there themselves.

 

I don't think you are worth mine or anyone else's efforts if you believe that Palestinians are happy with the status quo. I don't even know where to begin with that statement.

Actually... where do you get your figure that the Palestinians get more aid than anyone else on Earth?

 

Where does that stipulate that Palestine gets more money than every other collective group of people?

I can see a $363m figure for 2005 from all foreign countries, but don't see how that compares to the $4billion going to Israel annually from the US alone.