Palestinian Statehood at Last ( Archived) (841)

Thinking??

The practice of pouring vast amounts of money into Palestine only works to finance and supports violence, radical Islam, terror and poverty in Gaza. Palestine has developed into an international welfare state perfectly suited for Hamas and the PA to continue terrorist operations against Israel and internal violence against their own opposition. As the linked article suggest, there is a direct connection with the fact that the Palestinians now receive more assistance, per capita, than any other place on Earth, while living in one of the most violent spaces in it. Despite the effusion of foreign aid, Palestinian productivity has declined and has increased suffering and hardship of the Palestinian people. Hamas is largely to blame by remaining overly hostile to Israel (Gaza’s largest trading partner) and launching rockets and provoking devastating responses that only further cripples the fragile society.

Apart from the partial truth in all those statements, have you written this time or is it another copy and paste. You always use capitalised letters in nouns probably following your German Spelling, so I doubt you have written all that.
Anyway, if you have, I congratulate you. You are making some progress...

II. The False Hope of Finessing War

Why did things go so badly wrong? Where lay the flaws in so promising an agreement?

Of a multiplicity of errors, the ultimate mistake lay in Yitzhak Rabin's misunderstanding of how war ends, as revealed by his catch-phrase, "One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy." The Israeli prime minister expected war to be concluded through goodwill, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents. In this spirit, his government and those of his three successors — Shimon Peres, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak — initiated an array of concessions, hoping and expecting the Palestinians to reciprocate.

They did not. In fact, Israeli concessions inflamed Palestinian hostility. Palestinians interpreted Israeli efforts to "make peace" as signals of demoralization and weakness. "Painful concessions" reduced the Palestinian awe of Israel, made the Jewish state appear vulnerable, and incited irredentist dreams of annihilation. Each Oslo-negotiated gesture by Israel further exhilarated, radicalized, and mobilized the Palestinian body politic to war. The quiet hope of 1993 to eliminate Israel gained traction, becoming a deafening demand by 2000. Venomous speech and violent actions soared. Polls and votes in recent years suggest that a mere 20 percent of Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Yitzhak Rabin's understanding that "One does not make peace with one's friends. One makes peace with one's enemy" led Arab-Israeli diplomacy fundamentally astray.
Rabin's mistake was simple and profound: One cannot "make peace with one's enemy," as he imagined. Rather, one makes peace with one's former enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to be defeated and thus give up its goals.

Wars end not through goodwill but through victory. "Let your great object [in war] be victory" observed Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist. "War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will," wrote his nineteenth-century Prussian successor, Karl von Clausewitz in 1832. Douglas MacArthur observed in 1951 that in "war, there is no substitute for victory."

Technological advancement has not altered this insight. Fighting either continues or potentially can resume so long as both sides hope to achieve their war goals. Victory consists of imposing one's will on the enemy, compelling him to give up his war ambitions. Wars typically end when one side gives up hope, when its will to fight has been crushed.

Defeat, one might think, usually follows on devastating battlefield losses, as was the case of the Axis in 1945. But that has rarely occurred during the past sixty years. Battlefield losses by the Arab states to Israel in 1948-82, by North Korea in 1953, by Saddam Hussein in 1991, and by Iraqi Sunnis in 2003 did not translate into despair and surrender. Morale and will matter more these days. Although they out-manned and out-gunned their foes, the French gave up in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War ended, notably, with barely a fatality. Crushing the enemy's will to fight, then, does not necessarily mean crushing the enemy.

Arabs and Israelis since 1948 have pursued static and opposite goals: Arabs fought to eliminate Israel; Israelis fought to win their neighbors' acceptance. Details have varied over the decades with multiple ideologies, strategies, and leading actors, but the twin goals have remained in place and unbridgeable. If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win. Either there will be no more Zionist state or it will be accepted by its neighbors. Those are the only two scenarios for ending the conflict. Anything else is unstable and a premise for further warfare.

The Arabs have pursued their war aims with patience, determination, and purpose; the exceptions to this pattern (e.g., the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties) have been operationally insignificant because they have not tamped hostility to Israel's existence. In response, Israelis sustained a formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948-93. Over time, however, as Israel developed into a wealthy country, its populace grew impatient with the humiliating, slow, boring, bitter, and expensive task of convincing Arabs to accept their political existence. By now, few in Israel still see victory as the goal; almost no major political figure on the scene today calls for victory in war. Uzi Landau, currently minister of national infrastructure, who argues that "when you're in a war you want to win the war," is the rare exception.