No Stupid Questions

About 70 years ago European leaders decided the best thing to do with the Jewish people was give them their own country...

So they picked the holy land of three main religions, kicked out everyone that had been living there for centuries and made it a religious ethnostate.

Surprisingly the people who lived there weren't happy to be victims of an ethnic cleansing.

Picking virtually any other place on the globe and it probably would have worked itself out by now.

Cynics think that was intentionally. It's the perfect lightning rod for attacks against "the west" and the hostility leads to plenty of proxy wars while avoiding actual war in Europe again after WW2

This is a really patronising take.

Imagine if your country was 'donated' to a whole other group of people, they took over, murdered people, took your home, tortured your grandparents, you're going to be mad. It's not 'childish', it's reality.

You are speaking from an incredible place of privilege. You're nation had one of the most successful expansionist genocides in history. The reason there is still conflict in that region is because Israel's expansionist genocide is WIP.

A country with no involvement in world war 2 had its land taken as reparation for world war 2.

There are 3 outs to this conflict: Israel absorbs Palestine (and probably does a genocide), Palestine absorbs Israel (and probably does a genocide), or they start to be friends and live together.

Context matters a bit on this : Jews have been harassed for litteral millenia. After ww2 were they were harassed even more than before, they were given their original land from were they were chased millenia ago. You can argue it's partly their fault for keeping their culture and religion eventhough they're all over the world, but I think one should be free to live its life regardless of its religion.

Fast forward to today: Israel became as racist and intolerant as everyone gave them through history, so out 3 is quite not likely. Palestinians are not really better on this, because they've been chased from their homes to begin with and war took its toll, and it's now decades of apartheid to fuel hatred and resentment.

Was it for them only, Palestine would be erased and Muslims genocided or deported in the neighboring countries. But both the UN and the neighbor Muslim states are very much hostile to Israel and several wars happened so that it would be the Palestinian who would genocide and deport the Jews. But they lost, partly because Israel is supported by the USA.

Now the USA will support Israel forever. I guess they like to have an outpost in the area. So Israel won't be deleted in the foreseeable future. But UN and the USA (oddly) don't want to see Palestine erased. Which lead to parents and kids situation.

In brief, Israel and Palestine would gladly fight to the death (I guess Palestine hope for an escalation with the neighbouring countries). But UN doesn't want that (because the US want to be seen as the good guys, and no one wants the US to gain more ground than what they have with Israel). And there we are: the kids hate eachother but the parents don't want anyone to win, because each parent has a favourite child.

The deadly loop of apartheid => terrorism => apartheid needs to end, but no one wants it.

Because conservative religious people are insane, and that region involves three different and conflicting religions.

If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.

That's not going to happen, so it's going to continue to be a clusterfuck for as long as any large groups of people believe a magical being in the sky has destined the state of the region to be a given thing without compromise.

The wikipedia article on that piece of land is crazy. Religious zealots have been fighting over it since basically recorded history started.

it's like watching two children fighting over who's sandcastles can be built in the sandbox

Welcome to war.

And what do we do if children can't learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.

So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

That would be nice... only there are no adults.

PS: any adults 👽 out there... whenever you're ready, we welcome you 🛸

The conflict in the Mesopotamian region are the oldest in recorded history. These episodes of the Fall of Civilizations podcast do a pretty good job of describing the various nation states in the area and what we know about what happened to them:

• 2: The Bronze Age Collapse
• 8: The Sumerians
• 13: The Assyrians

It's important to understand that these nation states are the oldest known. They are a part of the cultural background of all human civilization. Their conflicts are not only a part of what the Middle East is today, but of what the entire world is today. Their history is our history.

Almost every major conqueror in history, and many minor ones, started conflicts in the Middle East, including Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.

Between the 7th and 11th centuries, there was a series of wars between the various Arab nations and the Eastern Roman Empire.

Following that, various European nations attempted to conquer parts of the Middle East in the Crusades.

During the 1800s, various European empires took control over various parts of the Middle East, through both military and political action, though the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the region.

WWI saw the end of the Ottoman Empire, after which the European powers carved up their territory.

During Operation Exporter in WWII a British-led force invaded Syria and Lebanon to take control from Vichy France, which had signed the Paris Accords and given territorial control to the German military. Conflict in the area continued after WWII.

This isn't an exhaustive timeline by any means. No part of our world has been fought over as often, or with as much force, as the Middle East. The feuds there are older than recorded history.

This attitude:

Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

Demonstrates an ignorance of world history. It's an arrogant point of view that suggests that the people living in the area are solely responsible for the long history of conflict, which is not the case. And the idea that Western nations could and/or should take actions in this area to "quell the infants" is absolutely delusional. The history of all such actions (such as Desert Storm I and II) has led to more destabilization and conflict in the Middle East, not less.

Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

I just want to point out that bigger stronger countries stepping in to "soothe the conflict" between two smaller countries has worked basically 0 times throughout all of history in the long run.

It’s not so much two infants irrationally arguing. Israel has owned some of this land for three generations. So the folks living there have passed it down as long as they’ve been alive. But another group owned it first, and the oldest among them remember the days before the occupiers came.

It’s like if the Cherokee decided to go full on guerrila warfare in the 1940s. Would they maybe have a point? How would it square with folks that had already been there for 80 years? It’s the settlers generational home now, too. Everyone has legitimate greivances. It’s not about settling tantrums, it’s about mediating between people that have legitimate but mutually exclusive claims.

Religion

Besides all the very interesting comments and links here about the violent history of the area, here's an answer from one Israeli guy I once asked a similar question. His take was that it is basically a mafiose environment now ... "both sides are corrupt to their core" -- the religiosity of the people would be abused by profiteers.

Basically, hate sells.

I could unpack that phrase over thousands of words about how generation after generation of Palestinians get indoctrinated, or how the leaders of the Arab nations use hating Israel as a way to show their strength and dedication. Or how generation after generation of Israelis have come to see Palestinians as something less than human. But let’s just summarize: hate sells.

The middle east has been fighting for thousands of years. Religion is a helluva thing.

Many countries in the Middle East are essentially Banana Republics. They are countries that have a large amount of wealth that comes almost entirely from exporting a natural resource. The government in these countries is less of a government and more of a group of people who control the export market. They don't rely on their citizens for support, they rely on other countries buying their exports. As long as their exports keep being purchased, the government has the money and power to do whatever it pleases.

Foreign involvement in these countries is usually to ensure the exports keep coming. The USA specifically spends a lot of money on being world police with their military because its easier to make trade deals with countries when they're not at war.

It's not that adults need to stop children from fighting. It's adults going to the gas station and getting upset the employees are spending too much time fighting and not enough time pumping gas.

A while ago I watched a video from RealLifeLore covering this topic and the TLDR is that poorly drawn borders by the British and the French separating religious groups and ethnicities will all but guarantee constant conflicts and instability in the region

Hell no. People here keep posting simplistic solutions but this area has a long bloody complex history. Many previous attempts have demonstrated there is no such solution. Trying to settle the area just means finding a new way to fucj it up more. Just no.

One highly significant area for three different world religions means there will always be religious fundamentalists who want to throw out the other two.

Zealots following Bronze Age religions. We have the same fucking problem here in the US

Apparently, zinc deficiency is very common in the Middle East, and one of the side effects can be aggression.

This led to Edward de Bono suggesting Marmite as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East, as Marmite contains high concentrations of zinc...

Israel was basically created by the West, in land that belonged entirely to Palestine. Then, decades later, with Western help, Israel had conquered half of that land, and the UN just decided to enshrine the borders at the time. Now, some more decades later, Israel has expanded way beyond those "compromise" borders, thanks to even more Western help.

There is no "internal conflict" that the West needs to help ending. It was always the West, seeking to create an allied enclave in someone else's land. Or, to build on your metaphor, this is a fight between the adults and the only child who was there from the start, because they want their own kid to play there instead.

I'll just go with what I heard a middle eastern comedian say:

"It's fucking HOT! Being hot makes you angry!"

So solve global warming, and solve the problems over there. Right?

Tl;dw - European empires fucked everything up and we're still living with the aftermath. Plus oil.

https://youtu.be/JN4mnVLP0rU?si=36-ZaPvu0vg4LN_m

Who are these magical "adults"?

Imagine having your bed taken away and being told you have a couch you are fine. You would be mad at who took your bed