A few thoughts

When two parties have serious, long term irreconcilable conflicts in interests, unable to reach bilateral agreement, it seems to me there's five possible ways it could go:
1 - Continue at loggerheads indefinitely
2 - One side totally capitulates, giving up everything the other wants
3 - One side compromises, giving up more things in the hopes of reaching a deal
4 - One side totally overwhelms the other, simply taking everything they want
5 - One side pressures the other, taking options off the table in the hopes of forcing a deal

Which of these are the worst options?
Which of them are, relatively speaking, the 'best'?

Seems to me that indefinite conflict with no resolution is the worst, possibly rivalled by one side unilaterally overwhelming the other depending on the ratio of long- and short- term suffering in each. Between the two of them, Israel could overwhelm the Palestinians, easily, and deal with any consequent outrage from the Arab world, and potentially the rest of the world too depending on the reactions of their major partners the USA and China... but they haven't tried to do that, at least so far. They're also not particulary uncomfortabe with indefinite conflict; their living standard is one of the highest in the world despite the rocket attacks and controversy.

The 'best' outcome would presumably be unilateral compromise to reach a deal, followed by a functionally equivalent outcome reached by pressure and coercion. The latter is probably the closest to the reality we're seeing, with encroaching settlements, evictions, disproportionate response to violence and so on. Granted, this course may become a total overwhelming of Palestinian interests in the long term, if no resolution is ever forced.

I suspect that at this point Palestine is never going to get East Jerusalem or a full retreat to 1966 lines. Maybe in 90s there was a reasonable hope of a deal which was relatively 'fair' to all parties, but apparently that wasn't possible in practice, and at this point the hard fact for Palestinians is that a bad deal is likely to be better than no deal at all. No amount of blaming or finger-pointing will change that.

So inasmuch as international opinion is likely to influence either side at all, what might a constructive attitude look like? Using platitudes, condemnations and hollow resolutions trying to get the stronger side to totally reverse their so-far successful policies and undo decades of effort, back to lines which likely still wouldn't be acceptable to many Palestinians encouraged and emboldened by that support? Or a more brutal pragmatism, recognition of the fact that any prospective deal will be worse than anything contemplated in the 90s, and will only keep getting worse the longer peace is resisted?

It doesn't help when one side has sworn to eradicate the other side. Kind of hard to make ANY kind of deal, isn't it?

Mycroft said:

It doesn't help when one side has sworn to eradicate the other side. Kind of hard to make ANY kind of deal, isn't it?

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Socialism doesn't work, never has and will not. Democrats need to stop trying to push that crap down our throats. The Marxist Leninist message that spawned socialism, communism, failed and is tearing up the greatest country in history. Middle class america needs to resist the very idea of it.

Integrityrespec said:

Socialism doesn't work, never has and will not. Democrats need to stop trying to push that crap down our throats. The Marxist Leninist message that spawned socialism, communism, failed and is tearing up the greatest country in history. Middle class america needs to resist the very idea of it.

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???

What has this comment to do with the topic of this thread?

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

Mithrae said:

When two parties have serious, long term irreconcilable conflicts in interests, unable to reach bilateral agreement, it seems to me there's five possible ways it could go:
1 - Continue at loggerheads indefinitely
2 - One side totally capitulates, giving up everything the other wants
3 - One side compromises, giving up more things in the hopes of reaching a deal
4 - One side totally overwhelms the other, simply taking everything they want
5 - One side pressures the other, taking options off the table in the hopes of forcing a deal

Which of these are the worst options?
Which of them are, relatively speaking, the 'best'?

Click to expand...

Mithrae:

The worst option is #4 because it will result in either genocide or ethinic cleansing of one party or the other.

Option #1 is not much better.

The best option would be a variation of a hybrid solution mixing numbers 3 and 5 from your list. In this case the international community puts real burdensome and painful economic, political and military pressure on both sides in an effort to force both parties into a mediated bilateral negotiation or a multilateral one. Options like genocide and ethnic cleansing would be forbidden under pain of military attack by international forces far stronger than either party could resist.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

Evilroddy said:

The best option would be a variation of a hybrid solution mixing numbers 3 and 5 from your list. In this case the international community puts real burdensome and painful economic, political and military pressure on both sides in an effort to force both parties into a mediated bilateral negotiation or a multilateral one. Options like genocide and ethnic cleansing would be forbidden under pain of military attack by international forces far stronger than either party could resist.

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Certainly the international community should oppose any kind of genocide or ethnic cleansing. But the thing is that there's been bilateral and multilateral negotiations already. Trying to build an international consensus to force yet another round of negotiations would presumably carry an implicit requirement of 'fairness' which leads straight back to perpetual deadlock. Trying for a 'fair' deal didn't work out, required more concessions from each side than presumably either was really happy with and was ultimately rejected by the Palestinians followed by a round of violent uprisings in the second intifada. The way things seem to be going since and to some extent before then, there's essentially a single problem; Israel (as the side both stronger and more comfortable with no deal) gradually pressuring the Palestinians, who perhaps will eventually negotiate and accept an 'unfair' deal as preferable to no deal at all. I don't know how much either side really cares about international opinion, but inasmuch as they do, endless disproportionate condemnation of Israel's actions, keeping embassies in Tel Aviv and so on only seems likely to slow or prevent Palestinian acquiescence, bolstering false hopes that East Jerusalem or other major points of contention are somehow still on the table for them; that if they just keep the conflict going longer they can eventually get more out of it.

What you seem to be suggesting turns a single problem into many; from a PR problem requiring Palestinians to accept an 'unfair' deal as better than no deal, to a PR problem requiring both Palestinians and Israelis to accept a deal which will still require more concessions than they'd like (and in some regards will be worse than no deal for the Israeli side); from more or less unilateral Israeli pressure, to trying to build an international consensus pressuring both sides.

Aside from the practicalities, there's the moral questions too. There's no real good solution or course of action here, but some seem to be worse than others: Actively putting "real burdensome and painful economic, political and military pressure on both sides" would presumably create more hardship and suffering than is already present in the region, for however long those prospective rounds of negotiation take. Also the more heavy-handed external interventionism becomes the more dubious it seems, paternalistically telling the Palestinians that it's not simply good enough for them to accept the status quo as they are tacitly doing, or the Israelis that their concerns of security and access to holy sites aren't legitimate. If the Palestinians were making real compromising, conciliatory offers which the Israelis were rejecting then the purpose and ultimate endgame of settlement-building and so on would look a lot uglier; but as it stands they can be viewed largely as a way of applying pressure, and the Palestinians' choice not to back down on a position already proven to be untenable implies that their leadership at least still prefer having no deal for now over the realistic alternatives. What right do uninvolved countries have to tell them that they're wrong, that they must make a deal?