The instant the people under the care of UNRWA wholeheartedly embrace peaceful coexistence and a broadly secular form of nationhood, a version of this state will almost immediately appear, as if by miracle.
Ceasefires are not peace, they are an obstacle towards that end, for all they do is force a reset of the terms of on-going resistance to any mutually-viable settlement.
Those who choose to ignore or even deny this are either being very naïve or extremely disingenuous.
Other than a decisive, irreversible victory for either one of the 'sides', with all the horrors that would entail, the only way this conflict ever concludes is with a peace deal. Resistance is little more than perpetuation without any kind of reasoned objective in the medium or long terms.
And whenever I hear ‘resistance’ to describe the often un-tempered hostility of one set of combatants, I point out the bigger picture historically, which is this. The people of the Levant have spent the past millennium and a half resisting enforced Islamicisation from various external ethnic representatives of that faith. First Arabs, then Turks and now it seems, Persians as well, though up to now largely via surrogates.
This pressure was only briefly interrupted by a counter surge from the West, involving Germans and French-speaking Scandinavians in the main, and their rather stop-start attempts to forcibly re-Christianise the same region.
1500 years of war and oppression, sandwiched between these two self-regarding and enveloping civilisations. THAT is a story of resistance which has the scale which makes it worthy of primary consideration today, and not the one which is little more than a lasting expression of UN guilt for its ham-fisted attempts to break the cycle in the last century.
No comments:
Post a Comment