I have to admit, this one confuses the hell out of me.
Trying not to buy into the propoganda that both sides spout continuously, I end up thinking about the reasons that two factions will fight wars.
One popular reason is, of course, resources. It's why gangs do drive-bys and why mobsters rub each other out and why armies sometimes wander over to the next country and do some looting and pillaging. In the case of Israel and Palestine, I think we're talking about water more than anything else. The Israelis are, for the most part, westerners with western lifestyles, and us westerners use up water like there's no tomorrow. And that's okay for most of us ... I have a stream running to my house. But with Israel and Palestine, we're talking about a desert, y'know?
You've got religion, but I think this reason is generally used an excuse for something else. Fact is, people of wildly different religions live together all the time. Not much bombing going on in the United States, at least between its own people. To us, this whole "Under God," thing in the Pledge of Allegiance is kind of a joke. To other countries, it would be a reason to kill or die. I think that the reason for this is that we've got plenty of public water fountains. :)
(Okay, I'm being a little glib, but you know what I'm saying. We've got resources, and they're reasonably well-distributed in spite of my constant calls for improvement.)
It seems to me, and again I have to make allowances for the staggering amount of propoganda involved in this issue, that neither side is really interested in peace. Sure, the average citizen might be ready to not get blown up, but the leadership of both sides is more interested in using the conflict to grab more stuff, whatever the particular "stuff" they're after.
I don't think that separate states are the answer. I think that's simply a guarantee of further conflict. Imagine if the United States had been divided by the Civil War ... the Cold War would've started almost a century earlier.
But in a unified state -- a democratic unified state -- Israel pretty much disappears. There's no way that a religious minority can maintain a theocratic monopoly on a culture in a democratic state. Israel would vanish in all but name. And although I'm opposed to theocracies, Israel seems like a pretty useful thing to have around.
But maybe that's something we just have to suck up and accept. I don't know.
