Imagine New York City as a metaphor for the entire world. Now imagine one shitty neighborhood in the city. Now imagine one house in that shitty neighborhood. Now imagine one room in that one house. Now imagine one corner of that one room in that one house. Now imagine a dried turd sitting in that one corner of that one room of that one house of that shitty neighborhood of New York City. Now imagine two crackheads getting into an argument over whose turd it is. Now imagine that the entirety of New York City has been abuzz for half a century on the question of how to equitably divide the turd between the two crackheads. You now have an appropriate perspective on Israel/Palestine.
The United States originally recognized the state of Israel due to third-party guilt over the Holocaust - that part of the world was not yet considered highly relevant, so the thinking was less strategic than political. Unfortunately, identity politics is psychotically intense in that part of the world, so the creation of a European-expatriate Jewish state on a tiny strip of previously Arab Islamic land inflamed the entire region and led to a series of wars and an ongoing terrorist insurgency.
Naturally, since Israel was founded in a politically embarrassing way, the Soviet Union saw a political advantage and cultivated support among Arab states and Palestinian terrorist groups, so I/P turned into a Cold War issue: One that became increasingly important as the ME turned into the world's oil supply. As a result, we armed Israel to the teeth in order to balance the much larger forces of neighboring states, and the Soviet Union flooded the region with Kalashnikovs, tanks, and MiGs. This is how Israel became a large part of the US military-industrial complex portfolio, despite having virtually zero intrinsic strategic value: Worthless land, but situated adjacent to oil-rich countries that might be targets of Soviet expansionism.
Well, things have changed since the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union expired: There is zero chance of a Russian invasion of the Middle East, and Israel could annihilate the military power of all of its neighbors combined without a single additional dollar of support from the United States. They are also capable of Mutually Assured Destruction should any of their neighbors acquire nuclear weapons.
In other words, Israel doesn't actually need us, and in many cases our support is so taken for granted that we're treated with contempt. And since the Cold War is over and we directly dominate the region militarily, we don't need Israel. Furthermore, its willingness to let its enemies dictate the rules of the game frequently embarrasses us. So there's really only one constituency in the United States that seems to benefit from the arrangement: The US arms industry.
Meanwhile, Arab dictators and the Iranian theocracy use Israel as their perpetual "Goldstein" to deflect public anger away from themselves, and raise entire generations on indoctrinated bigotry. They celebrate cold-blooded murderers of the innocent as "martyrs," preach eliminationism in their official newspapers, and fund terrorism while leaving countries they denounce to pick up the tab for humanitarian assistance to Palestinians.
The Palestinians themselves have virtually no identity left apart from hatred of Israel. Every time actual peace has appeared to be a possibility, their leadership teetered on the brink of being overthrown to prevent it, and the moment democracy came into the picture the result was the election of an eliminationist terrorist group. Furthermore, with respect to the United States, the glee among Palestinians on 9/11 was spontaneous and undeniable, forcing Palestinian authorities to suppress street celebrations to avoid global condemnation.
I have sympathy for individual Palestinians who suffer, but I see nothing - nothing whatsoever - worth defending about Palestinian society collectively. Other peoples have responded to far worse treatment far more intelligently and constructively, and won freedom as a result, but the Palestinians who work sincerely for peace are singing to the deaf when they urge their people to follow: Their society has no focus or purpose other than blaming all of its problems on Israel, and to serve as mascots of WATB militant Islam abroad.
When the state of Israel was created, the Palestinians could have blended into the general milieu of Jordanian society - after all, they are technically the same people, with "Palestinian" being a neologism invented only after the creation of Israel. From that stable position, they could have worked to recover what was taken or achieve an equitable arrangement with later generations of Israelis who bear no responsibility for the actions of the past.
But no. They had to have this particular hill; that particular notch on the horizon; this particular turd of uncultivated (until Israel came along) desert shithole, because the handful of sand beneath their feet meant more than the future of their children. And the Arab world keeps supporting them in that insanity, because they would rather see innumerable generations of Palestinians suffer and die than let non-Muslims - let alone Western non-Muslims - ever take a single scrap of land from an Arabic Muslim people.
I have to be honest, were I in charge of Israel, I would have no idea how to deal with the Palestinians, because I don't believe that they have any collective intention of ever living in peace with Israel. I believe that the singular definition of that culture is hatred of Israel and an eternal quest for indiscriminate, unlimited revenge against its people whenever and wherever possible. I think Palestinians who want peace need to recognize this about their people, and find a way to change it before they can ever seriously hope to achieve what they seek. And if they find they can't change it, then they need to say at some point that their own people aren't worthy of them: That other people deserve their help more.
Israel is more subtle in its hypocrisy. It seems they caught a mild form of the cultural virus that drove its founders out of Europe in the first place: The bitter blood/land identity complex. After being horrifically victimized by a culture trying to reclaim a fictionalized geographic extent (i.e., Germany's "Mitteleuropa"), it somehow made sense to a handful of Holocaust survivors to "reclaim" Biblical Jewish lands from Arabs. Even though Israel is a lot more reasonable today than it was in those days, that strain hasn't disappeared - as evidenced by support for continued settlement activity.
Somehow they believe themselves entitled to the land because at some point in time an ancestor occupied it, and religious ideology tells them it's theirs - the exact same motivation of the Palestinians and most of their Islamic supporters (i.e., once a land goes Muslim, going back to something else is not permissible). Nowhere in this equation, on either side, is simple common sense. If the State of Israel were paid to relocate to bigger, richer, and more secure land elsewhere - if abundant, safe, prosperous land were just handed to them in the interest of world peace, and all moving expenses paid, I don't believe the Knesset would pass a resolution accepting the offer.
If every Palestinian man, woman, and child was offered a million dollars each by the world community, and the Palestinian people as a whole offered sovereign control of any contiguous land on the planet twice the size of Israel that doesn't contain Israel - all in exchange for forever relinquishing any claim to lands within the borders of Israel - I don't believe a majority would accept the offer. Furthermore, I don't believe a single state on the planet cares enough about I/P, regardless of its rhetoric, to ever make or even contribute to such an offer, and quite a few (i.e., Arab states) would support Palestinian refusal were such an offer made.
Israel and the Palestinians cling to shit that doesn't matter, and they suffer as a result, and the vast majority of what gets said on the issue is just identity politics or ideological grandstanding. The two peoples are a tiny, microscopic fraction of the global population, and their conflict is over obsolete ideologies and a little sliver of land. We've wasted enough time on these people. Israel chooses to be where it is, surrounded by bigoted nutcases, chooses to expand into Palestinian areas, and it can defend itself against its neighbors just fine without our help. The Palestinians choose to feed hatred, vengeance, and WATB victimization rather than work to make things better for their children, and that's been the case for generations.
So what's the answer? The answer is I don't care, and neither should you. The whole issue is bullshit. These people live in their own little fantasy worlds, and they're not coming out into the light of reality: They want land, and not just any land - this particular land. Land that other people currently inhabit. Not because it's good land, but simply because their ancestors lived on it 50, 500, or 5000 years ago. Because somehow that reasoning only applies to them and not to anyone else whose ancestors lived on it.
They both want to play ancient games with modern weapons, and spill the blood of others on the sand to claim that sand, so let them. I don't want that sand. Do you? I don't care when thugs shoot each other, except when innocent people are harmed, but out of all the conflicts in the world where innocent people are in danger, what would be the rational priority of I/P? Pretty low. Out of all the regions of the world where people are impoverished and need basic supplies, how do the Palestinian territories rate in terms of numbers and need? Again, pretty low. But this is the bullshit that gets international coverage.
We're forced to listen to European anti-Semites and Islamist WATBs rail against Israel for treating people unfairly who collectively profess the extermination of Israel, and then - as ironic "counterpoint" to that lunacy - we're treated to neocon apologism for Israel on behalf of its US arms contractors and apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists who want to protect Jews so they can be exterminated later by Jesus on Judgment Day. Meanwhile, another million people die in some jungle shithole because they don't have malaria drugs. Oh, and Turkey vows to "never forgive" the flotilla incident - precious, IMHO.
When it comes to I/P, say it with me: I don't give a shit. It's a hard thing for a compassionate person to say, let alone sincerely understand to be morally appropriate, but it's perfectly justified in this case: I do not care. Show me a victim on either side, I'll show you a dozen victims from a village you never heard of in a country you couldn't point out on a map. Israel/Palestine is fucking irrelevant. It's fodder for drama queens, attention whores, and ulterior agendas. Stop wasting your time caring about it, and stop wasting my time pretending I'm supposed to care about it. We've done enough. If they fix their own problems, good. If not, fuck them. This is my final word on I/P. I will not write another diary about it.