It's not convoluted at all. You can assign moral responsibility to both sides for their extremism. One side is propelled to use violence because they have power, and those in power can use overwhelming force at the slightest provocation (or, in some cases, invented provocation) without having to fear repercussions. The other side is propelled to use violence because of years of mistreatment and injustice (which started well before Israel officially declared itself a state), and that has fueled resentment and hatred. The great misconception is that this conflict is rooted in religious differences, and it is therefore religious fanaticism that is to blame. It makes for a nice scapegoat, and to be sure there's an element of that at place which stokes the fires, but that isn't the root of the problem.
I don't think this addresses a distinction between cause and fault, in the sense EGYPT used "cause" and I used "fault". Disagree. It is BY FAR the root of the problem. It is how each side justifies and distinguishes itself. You paint an idyllic picture above that is totally untrue. There is no aggressor in this fight - both sides have been aggressive or non-aggressive depending on the circumstances. The only consistentency is that the fundamentalists on each side keep provoking the fight into reocurring after every interlude. This recalcitrance is not made up out of thin air - it's centuries old and directly derived from each group's collectivist mentality. A mentality that urges indifferance to atrocities committed by "your" side. More importantly, this mentality is passed down to children, and the cycle repeats. You are wrong - religion is not stoking the fire, it built the damn furnace and supplies a steady stream of fuel.
That doesn't mean it is the root of the problem. Muslims and Jews have lived together in relative peace for hundreds of years in that region. It wasn't until there was a massive influx of foreigners that was threatening to put Palestinian farmers out of work and push them off of their lands that this conflict started. If instead of them being Jews, they were Muslims from Indonesia or something, then those who are angered will focus on that difference. Whenever two different groups are fighting over control of a resource, they will invariably focus on their ethnic/cultural/religious differences to fan the flames of hatred. But that sidesteps the actual problem. Nothing I said is inconsistent with that. It is absolute fact that Israel has been the dominant political, economic, and military power within Palestine since nearly its conception, and most certainly since the 60s when the US started pumping in its support. It is also fact that Palestinian Arabs have been pushed out of their homeland and into the Gaza and West Bank enclaves. It doesn't matter if it was Jews or Christians or Muslims or Communists that did it -- when a population gets completely beaten down and is over a period of decades denied their rights to self determination and return to their homeland, they will predictably strike back. It's happened throughout history, regardless of religious affiliations. Again, Muslims and Jews lived in relative peace before the influx brought about by political Zionism at the turn of the 20th century. It wasn't until Palestinians started losing their jobs and their lands with the influx of European and Russian Jews, and the possibilities of a Jewish state being imposed on them that these tensions started to flare up. That speaks not to religion as the root problem, but loss of political and economic rights. Of course, the Western media likes to play up religion as the source, because it's convenient to ignore the real issue that one group was completely getting screwed with Western complicity. So we can justify one side being pushed to the ground by claiming, "They're just being religious fanatics. The reason they are against the existence of Israel is because they hate Jews."
The Palestinian Israeli conflict is a perfect storm of issues that is fueling it. Religion, ethnicity, geography, language and resources are all part of the conflict. Religion cannot be ignored as part of it but I don't think it can be stated to be the primary reason. For the much of the conflict it was technically fought by two secular entities as the Israel is officially secular and the PLO was secular. It is only in the last 20 years that religion has come to the forefront of the fight largely because there has both a rise of militant Islam and also because Fatah has proven to be corrupt and ineffective. Considering the history of the conflict though I think it would be hard to lay this down to religion as a cause but it certainly is a sustaining factor.
Exactly After the Holocasut, if the European Jews did not feel safe in migrating to Palestine, a predominantly Muslim land back then, they would not have migrated there. There was a sense of peace and coexistance prior to that that lasted for hundreds of years.
I wrote a reply to durvursa and then realized you had already posted it for me, much more succintly. I don't think one can exclude religion from a root cause, but I will cede the point that it took a tangible alteration in lifestyle to cause that smoldering coal to reignite the forest. My motivation for proclaiming religion the (or a) root cause is simple: These are the same people, originating from the same little corner of the globe. The only distinguishing factor between them is religion. Durvursa argues that this is ancillary - any group migrating into the area, and pushing out the palestinians would have garnered animosity. But it was NOT any group - it was jews. I seriously doubt incoming indonesian muslims (to use his example) would have resulted in this same calamity. As for EGYPT's claim - it's still disengenuous. Nobody is being forced to "hate someone and wish them eradicated". There are always other options.
Muhammad's sword By Uri Avner For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian. True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favourites of the government and enjoy the fruits. In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians. There no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"? What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics reconquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust. Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes. Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith. The story about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. Uri Avnery is an Israeli author and activist. He is the head of the Israeli peace movement, "Gush Shalom". http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en
This hate and the wish of eradicating others exists on both sides on both sides from the average Joe to the leaders.
That I can agree with. But it isn't a primary factor, even today. We can strip away all the religious fanaticism from the region, and the underlying conflict still remains. I'll certainly agree that it makes things much more difficult for real solutions to the underlying conflict to be pursued. I see it a dangerous and unfortunate distraction.
I never claimed anything to the contrary. You claimed Israel caused it. I think that's an irresponsible argument.
*ahem* .. durvasa I think there would definitely be anger and resistance to any influx of a foreigners. But, you're right, it may not be exactly the same. It depends on the nature of the state the Indonesian Muslims set up. Do they specifically say its a state for peoples of Indonesian descent, and they plan to set up policies to grab huge chunks of land and make it only available to Indonesians? If so, I think the conflict could take on very much the same nature. It may be worse, because at least Jews have had a historical presence in Palestine for thousands of years.
I'm glad you make this hypothetical analogy, because it frames the whole argument I am trying to make. Ethnicity (race) is just a more primitive version of collectivism than religion. The jews would just be "foreigners" if not for their religion. A religion which, despite centuries of imperialism guided coexistance, is (like all religions) inclusive and opposed to other religions. Put the right (wrong) wackos in charge, and suddenly the inquisition rolls anew. There would not have been a struggle for resources if each groups religion had not inspired them to react as they did, regardless of who we want to posit as "starting it".
I think I understand your point, but I wouldn't put it as "religious fanaticism" that led to it. Palestinian Arabs wanted their own state, but that desire wasn't rooted in any Muslim fundamentalism. Same with the Zionists; many weren't particularly religious. I believe the leader of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, argued for a Jewish home in Argentina. I agree with the idea that religious fanaticism and racism have contributed to the "us versus them" mindset that has inflamed the conflict. But it's also natural for people to self-identify with a certain culture, race, religion, etc. I think Jews wanted their own homeland for understandable reasons -- they wanted a place where they didn't have to be the minority and live as second-class citizens. And Palestinians were fearful and resistant to a "Jewish state" being established over their lands for very understandable reasons as well. Did they not also have a right to self determination? In my opinion, a just solution would have been some sort of confederacy of autonomous, democratic communities. Instead, Israel declares itself a nation state along the lines proposed by a foreign body (the UN), and the Palestinians are left with the choice of accepting the loss of their political rights or fighting to recover it. This, to me, is the kernel of the conflict. Not religious fanaticism, and not historical religious tensions between Muslims and Jews.
Two points: 1) I think this is a good argument. I take back my "religion as sole root cause" commentary and submit to the rocketsjudoka "multiple root causes" theory. 2) The choices you present are not the only options. And "fighting" is not the same as "establishing a genocidal creed against israel". Moreover, the fighting is now completely divorced from percieved political rights transgressions anyway. Heck, the PLO turned down the option for a separate palestinian state in 2000.
I agree with you partially and my own view splits your's and Durvasa's. Religion is clearly a factor but as I noted in my post most of this conflict was fought by secular entities and has as much to do with ethnicity, culture, geography and resources as it does with religion. Among the Palestinians there is a signifigant Christian minority and within the leadership of the PLO there were Christians. Arafat for the most part avoided using Islam as a justification for the PLO's fight and instead tended to portray the PLO as Arab nationalists and Marxist revolutionaries. On Israel's part it still is officially secular and many of the most prominent Zionists such as Ben Gurion were secularists while Religious parties in the Knesset often are power brokers they have always been very small and the most radical, Kahane Chai, was banned. As far as distinguishing between Israelis and Palestinians there are many things that distinguish them than just religion. The Israelis are primarily descended from Westernized Europeans and the culture is modeled on that. Culturally and in appearance the Israelis are much more like Americans then they are to their Arab neighbors. One other factor that doesn't get as much play in coverage of the conflict is how much resources play a role in it particularly water and arable land. The Palestinians don't have an industrial base and are primarily agricultural yet Israel in many of the offers it has made of land to the Palestinians haven't given them prime agricultural land and also aren't ceding over water rights. So while its true that Israel has offered up to 95% of the West Bank to the Palestinians that 5% they keep is very important in terms of resources. So even without religion there still is very likely going to be a conflict. As for whether the conflict would've happened if the Zionists had been Muslims that still likely would've happened. Consider that some of the most bitter conflicts have been between people of the same religion. For instance just in Palestine Even though most of Fatah is muslim that hasn't stopped Hamas from routing them out of Gaza.
What genocidal creed are you referring to? There are some wackos that might be calling for all the Jews to be driven into the sea, but that was not the PLO's position. Wanting the Israeli state, as a Jewish state, to be dissolved is not the same thing as endorsing genocide. Perhaps in the future relations will improve to the point where Israeli Jews don't feel they need Israel to be a "Jewish" state, but that's not a realistic goal in the short term. And I think the vast majority of Palestinians understand that. As for the PLO turning down the Palestinian state in 2000, that doesn't mean they weren't satisfied with a two-state solution. How the state is set up and what conditions/qualifications Israel imposes were also factors in the negotiation. I could just as easily argue that the Israelis have rejected the Palestinian's attempts to conciliation (for instance, Ehud Barak cutting short the talks at Taba in 2001). Both sides have to come to an agreement, and we can't just assume that because the side without leverage refused to relent to the other sides demands that they are the extremist rejectionists.
Yes, the PLO was, by and large, secular. I was referring to Hamas and the other islamic fundamentalist whackjobs referred to in the original post by EGYPT that got this whole debate rolling. And yes, I also realize that there are numerous factors contributing to each side being idiotic about peace accords - my point was not to cast blame, but to water-down your "political reparations" argument.
lol. We agree on many things I think. For example, that you need to kick Sam Fisher's ass. Not for any dislike of Sam - I'd just like to hear him argue with you about who won for about 40 pages once he recovers. That would be good times.
