Learn to cooperate

There are a lot of things that no government can accept from a neighbour. These include:

• Rocket attacks (against civilian or military targets)
• Suicide bombings (ditto)
• Border incursions, via tunnels, tanks, or anything else
• Air strikes
• Port blockades
• Assassination of government officials
• Establishment of colonies.

If two governments start doing these things in response to each other, and particularly if neither side gets as much out of them as they lose to the other's activities, you will end up with an intractable war, limited only by how much pain each side is prepared to inflict.

And so we get another iteration of Israeli / Palestinian military conflict. On the Israeli side we hear that "If Palestine were to lay down their guns tomorrow, there would be no war. If Israel were to lay down theirs, there would be no Israel." This is partly true; the history of the conflict shows that there are sufficient Palestinians willing to fight to destroy Israel. But that same history shows that if the Palestinians were to lay down their guns, the Israeli response would likely be to continue the creeping settlements that are turning the West Bank into Greater Israel.

Unfortunately there are many people on both sides who want nothing less than total victory and are willing to fight and die for it. As Rasib Kahn says of Iraq: "There will be no calm reasoning with Iraqis of any stripe because the march of history continues, and only sadness can convince all parties that moderation is necessary for the existence of modern nation-states."

It is a phrase the struck me deeply when I read it. Nor is this some middle eastern weakness, special to Jews or Moslems; you have only to look to the history of any continent to see it played out. If humanity can make the lesson permanent before it invents weapons powerful enough to erase our historical records, then it will have achieved something genuinely impressive.

I would love to report some simple solution, but all I have is daydreams. Barring the disaster of a total victory for one side, at some point the two groups will need to learn to trust each other, and I don't see how that will happen.

Humans who cooperate can get far more out of it than any of them has put in. The flip side of this is that humans who fight can lose far more than any of them get out of it.