May 30, 2003
Israel
Just for the hell of it, I'm going to go on record about how stupid I think Israeli security policy is."Let's increase settlement activity in contested land! That'll convince the Palestinians to stop attacking us!"
It's the insistence that Israel can't pull out until the violence stops that is the whole problem. Settlement activity is not punitive, it's provocative. There's also the issue of the settlers believing it's their rightful claim, but the way to handle that issue is not to do a disingenous end-around.
This pattern is that chess-move kind of thinking I've written about before - where you set things up so that if you fail, it strengthens your position. It's deliberately asserting a double-bind. In this case, the people behind the settlement believe it's their rightful claim. So instead of trying to negotiate, they skip that and move in. Then if there is retaliation, they can claim that settlement and occupation is a matter of punitive security.
The part that works to their benefit is that it is not true that if they simply pulled out, the retaliation would immediately disappear.
If a powerful third party like the US or the UN chose to take an active part, one possible way out would be to insist on Israel pulling out first (without abdicating claim), and in exchange, share in taking aggressive action against Palestinian terrorists who continue to sponsor attacks after the withdrawal. After the pullout is complete, peace talks can take place.
This general line of thought has been on my mind for a while. Israel-Palestine conflict is a political area I don't feel well-informed on at all, because the mass media only talks about the stupidest surface level. So it'll be interesting to see over time how my opinion on this changes... if it changes.