It’s hard to imagine that any human activity could bring peace to the I/P conflict. But I believe human activity will bring peace to these lands; the most awful peace possible; a peace that will render all of the conflict today into violence without purpose.
The Middle East is warming at twice the global average and by 2050 will be 4 degrees Celsius warmer as compared with the 1.5 degree mark that scientists have prescribed to save humanity. The World Bank says extreme climatic conditions will become routine and the region could face four months of scorching sun every year. According to Germany’s Max Planck Institute, many cities in the Middle East may literally become uninhabitable before the end of the century.
The Middle East Is Becoming Literally Uninhabitable
The linked article is two years old and the climate news over the past two years has been far worse than expected. It will not improve in my lifetime, or my child’s or, should she become a parent, in my grandchildren’s lifetime. Just read Pakalolo’s excellent climate diaries for far better climate coverage of anthropogenic climate change than I could ever provide. 2050 is not very distant, in my 50’s I could actually live to see this entire part of the world uninhabitable in my lifetime!
To me, the climate catastrophe makes this entire conflict so incredibly sad and pointless.
The conflict involves far more than a simple dispute over land but . . . why kill over places that will soon be nothing more than empty buildings, dead plants which could not adapt, barren of of the vast majority of animal life that can migrate? Some very hardy plants and animals will remain, but not humans.
We, humans, murder each other to control what humans cannot ever control — land, the beliefs and views of other humans, events long past that cannot be altered.
If Hamas wins, Hamas loses to the climate. They murdered babies for a potential state their own children will not inhabit.
If Israel erases Hamas from the earth — Israel will lose to anthropogenic climate change. They bomb civilians while targeting terrorists to control a place that will soon be a homeland for nobody, regardless of ethnicity or faith.
This reality turns the entire tragedy of I/P into farce; a tragedy and farce written into a nightmare of human cruelty against a backdrop of human engineered catastrophe. Thinking about it brings overwhelming, crushing depression. Why do we do this to each other? Do we even deserve, as a species, to remain on this planet if we are this short-sighted?
Anthropogenic climate change will make these lands uninhabitable and when the last living humans flee the wet bulb temperatures lethal to homo sapiens — then there will be peace and that peace will last so long as humans cannot exist on that soil.