Frank's Musings

Right-wing Jews in Israel have been provocatively settling on land in reservations to which desperate Palestinian families have been confined under rules invented with international consent to separate equally emotional claimants to the same disputed Middle Eastern lands.  Wealthy nations in the West are being tempted, as in Afghanistan, to throw up their hands and abandon the antagonists to resolve their dispute alone, were it not for the political strength of sympathizers with Israel’s existence and the economic leverage that has been attributed to the Palestinians because of their assumed solidarity with oil-rich Arab states.

However, the political balance has begun to change. Climate change has suddenly become a more urgent and widespread concern because of the excessive global temperature increase in 2023. There have been some encouraging advances in the expanded use of non-CO2-producing sources of energy, like solar, wind, geothermal, thermonuclear, hydroelectric, and other technologies. This development has, for example, seemed to impress on major oil and gas producers, including exporting nations and commercial companies, that their future wealth depends on devoting their stores of capital to alternative enterprises, as well as to shifting their energy-producing activities to carbon-neutral, if not absorptive, methods.  The technological and entrepreneurial leadership of Israel has led oil-rich Arab countries to give serious consideration to promoting the commercial alliance of their sovereign wealth with the innovative power of Israel by perforating political barriers to collaboration between citizens and institutions from the two sides.

An important consequence of these trends is the weakening of the perceived international political power of the Palestinians to influence the outcome of their dispute with the Jewish state over the disposition of the Holy Land.  Moreover, a terrorist organization like Hamas is losing a major component of its strength, i.e., its image as the underdog fighting oppression by Israel.  Gaza and the West Bank are not only losing their appearance of victimhood in Western eyes, but also their brotherly appeal to Arab states. Commercial priorities are shoving sympathy and ethnic solidarity aside.

This recasts Israel’s military campaign against Hamas as a police action rather than a war.  Hezbollah’s choice not to join Hamas’s attack on Jewish residents of Israel is not so much a “smart” move as a display of their greater discipline. The Palestinians in Gaza, and throughout their incipient state, should ask Israel to collaborate with them to rid their lands of the scourge of Hamas terrorism. The only point of Hamas’s savage 10/7 attack was to prevent a reasonable resolution of the dilemma of competing claims on the Holy Land. Continued Hamas activity will only endanger the peaceful lives of both Israelis and Palestinians.

Of course, Hassan Nasrallah is not entirely wrong to say that the U.S. is responsible for the war in Gaza. More accurately, every member of the U.N. is no less at fault for having encouraged and ratified the establishment of the Israeli state.  Now a resolution of the competing claims on the Holy Land must be imposed by the whole society of nations.  The time for playing games tied to Israel politics has come, demoting religious fanaticism below peaceful international behavior. 

A genuine two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine problem will potentially be costly for both the current Israeli coalition and the Democratic U.S. Administration.  However, the entire world has been paying a high price, not only in expensive energy, environmental destruction, international conflict and, ultimately, in human life for protecting sectoral cultural differences.  The dualistic nature of human thought has caused stress and conflict since time began.  Perhaps we shall never escape that dilemma; the challenge is to prolong any temporary suspension of the violence preventing the peaceful coexistence of the competing nations.  That will require Palestinian reliance on Israel to assure border security and permanent termination of further and obsessive settlements by Jewish Israelis in the West Bank.  Moreover, religious fundamentalists in Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere must be enjoined from interfering in national foreign policy. 

Israel is faced with the need to eradicate Hamas, not only as the government of Gaza, but as an organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction.  The Palestinian people and world Jewry both have a justifiable claim on the territory occupied by the state of Israel—it is the homeland of the Arabs that have lived there since before the creation of Islam, and it is the traditional and internationally recognized seat of the Jewish state, which the Jewish people have sought to reclaim in order to separate themselves from discrimination in virtually every other country ever since the destruction of the Temple of David in Jerusalem.

The compromise reached by the world community in 1948 recognizing the formation of Israel under exclusive Jewish religious rule, of course, created a genuine dilemma.  Both Zionist and Arab Palestinians found themselves with irreconcilable justifications for statehood.  The de facto sovereign power over the entire region, consisting of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, of course, is no longer in actual control.  The claim of the Palestinian Arabs is only pusillanimously supported by some in the United Nations, including Russia, and only in words by the Arab League.   These competing claims on the land occupied by the Israeli state, therefore, have engendered resort to terrorist tactics by non-state organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.  It has also incentivized Israel to use indiscriminate (and some say inhumane) military means of retribution for violent attacks on its citizens.

The inevitable outcome of the current balance of power in the conflict will be the extinguishment of organized violent attacks on Israeli individuals together with the forceful imposition of a non-violent status of coexistence of Jews and Islamic Arabs in this region, regardless of the political (and financial) strength of Israel’s sympathizers.  As Barack Obama recently stated, “We are all complicit” in the creation of the irresolvable conflict between the Jews and the Muslim Arabs in the region.  With no other institutional process for deflating violent conflict, Western countries and the United Nations have no choice but to abandon their professed commitment to self-determination and force the occupants of the Israeli/Palestinian region peacefully to divvy up the territory between the two sides, without exceptions for radical extremists, and to offer compensatory funds to displaced Jewish as well as Arab Palestinian residents.