Communications and outcomes

One way, perhaps, to encourage better outcomes in the Middle East is to promote greater discipline in the manner that those of us outside the region habitually communicate about it. Though many of these recommendations should also apply to more direct participants.

If you genuinely want peace, then everything you say or do relating to the conflict should be heavily geared towards that objective, and in the main loaded with positive suggestions for how we might get there, rather than say, agonised gripes about present circumstances. (This especially applies to international organisations with formal responsibilities, like the UN.)

If, on the other hand, you don't wish for peace, but instead emphatically desire one side to achieve a definitive, overwhelming victory, then you are in effect hoping for a consummate humanitarian calamity (?) — and this is frankly not really a pill that can be sugared by any quantity of righteous or progressive propaganda.

And yet this 'not peace...really' sentiment in effect bifurcates into two separate options, because at present only one side is remotely capable of achieving something resembling a victory, however genocidal and pyrrhic.

So when the other side goes around chanting 'From the river to the sea' this is only a call to genocide on the theoretical level, for in practice it is far more like a call to perpetual war (or bloody-minded resistance, if one were inclined to be charitable). 

So there you have your three options...

a) Peace

b) Definitive nationhood disappointment and possible elimination for at least one side

c) Perpetual war.

And thus, if you are going to offer opinions to the world about this conflict or comment on the current circumstances, it would indeed be most helpful to the rest of us if you flag up first which of the camps you belong to. (I'm in the peace camp, by the way.)

Having an underlying intent of a) but mouthing off along the lines of either b) or c) is unhelpful in the extreme. 

It seems to me, and I may be wrong about this — though I can't see how — that the only valid path towards a form of peace is a treaty based on some kind of partition and/or sharing agreement — with built in security guarantees for all parties — plus some proper buy-in from the wider international community. 

 

So again, if it is peace you desire, either individually, organisationally or nationally, then your actions and statements should make this abundantly clear. (Hello Belize.)

There's a further triumvirate of distinctions which also need to be considered here.

1) Statements about situations and events which are more or less deliberately misleading e.g. "The West Bank is illegally occupied."

2) Statements about situations and events that are starkly factual e.g. "the West Bank is part of the sovereign territory of Israel according to international law.”

3) Statements about situations and events which favour 'ought to be' over 'is' — or at least show an understanding of this rather crucial distinction e.g. "the West Bank, or at least most of it, should become part of the sovereign territory of a new state called Palestine."

See, not so hard, is it? 

If 3) were to become the default mode, not only of international commentators with no direct connection to the conflict, but also of international bodies with a seemingly more substantive connection to it, then it strikes me that it is far more likely to spread over to those who are actually embedded within it.