Two honest questions about the Middle East.

[capri0mni]

1. From the Palastinians' point of view, what logical reason is there to recognize Isreal as a legitimate state (Becase "You must -- or else!" doesn't seem to be bringing us any closer to peace, no matter how loudly or often we say it; providing them with a clearly good reason would probably be more effective)?


2. What's so wrong with Iraq splitting into three independant states?

Comments

[pedanther]

I don't have any helpful thoughts about the first question.

On the second I suspect that there would be problems deciding who got which bit. Yes, the obvious thing is to divide it on demographic lines, so that the Sunni nation gets the bits where Sunnis live, and so on, but that will probably mean that (for instance) one of them gets more of the oilfields than the others, and the others will complain bitterly, and...

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I was just thinking that Iraq's current borders were drawn up by its colonial overlord (Queen Victoria? iirc), a century, or so, ago for reasons of convenience at the time, and beyond that have no basis on reality. So why be obsessed with maintaining them at all costs? If we have to come up with new anc creative ways of fixing what's broken, why not rethink everything -- at least for consideration?

[drox.livejournal.com]

WRT Palestine: I can't help but think that if Palestinians and Israelis were different colors from each other, the world (or maybe just the U.N.) would never have allowed the situation to continue like this for so long. Because it's really just apartheid all over again, isn't it? With the West Bank and Gaza as the "homelands" for Palestinians.

The whole world condemned apartheid (and rightfully so) while recognizing that the victims of it were committing atrocities of their own. Sanctions were imposed, and eventually apartheid went away (though the transition wasn't and isn't painless). Where is the outrage over Israel's apartheid? It seems the world looks at the atrocities that (some) Palestinians are committing and conclude that this form of apartheid is justified.

Not sure if the ANC and/or Inkatha ever claimed the Republic of South Africa had no right to exist though.

WRT Iraq, subdividing it seems to me like a horrible option. Instead of one country where a dominant group bullies the other two and commits atrocities against them, you get three. It doesn't solve the problem, it just spreads it out. Eventually these people will have to learn to get along, and splitting them up along ethnic or sectarian lines won't do that. Again, imagine if they were different colors instead of different sects. Would dividing them up still seem like a good idea?

Then again "divide and conquer" is an effective strategy if you don't care about the people and just want to extract all the oil you can while they're fighting amongst themselves.