Why cant the Middle East just chill out?

3ntranced@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 131 points –

I didn't used to understand foreign involvement in wars, like the whole America-Vietnam shenanigans. But I can see why after watching this Israeli Palestine Conflict since birth.

But now it's like watching two children fighting over who's sandcastles can be built in the sandbox. And what do we do if children can't learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.

So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

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About 70 years ago European leaders decided the best thing to do with the Jewish people was give them their own country...

So they picked the holy land of three main religions, kicked out everyone that had been living there for centuries and made it a religious ethnostate.

Surprisingly the people who lived there weren't happy to be victims of an ethnic cleansing.

Picking virtually any other place on the globe and it probably would have worked itself out by now.

Cynics think that was intentionally. It's the perfect lightning rod for attacks against "the west" and the hostility leads to plenty of proxy wars while avoiding actual war in Europe again after WW2

It started even earlier, after the ottoman empire fell/dissolved, British and French diplomats basically drew lines on a map Scramble for Africa style and created new countries out of nothing.

That created tons of tension already.

Yeah, they broke up Africe with no regard to how many distinct cultures there was.

They looked at that giant ancient landmass and legitimately went "they're all Black, it doesn't matter".

The area has been a hotbed for 5000 years. The west didn't help, at any point, but conflict in the middle east is as old as history itself.

There’s also a belief among some Christians in the US (including many political leaders) that a Jewish state was necessary for the second coming of Jesus to occur. Why they’re in a hurry, I don’t know.

As one who was raised Evangelical Christian for the majority of my childhood by a devout and Republican parent, I'm pretty sure it's just a death cult.

They live their whole lives only preparing to die.

They forsake and forego a lot of random stuff in favor of rewards after death.

And if they think it'll get them any bonus, they don't care if they take everyone else with them, hence the Republican Evangelical politicians generally trying to supply the ingredients for the battle of Armageddon to happen.

Tldr; I think it's greed typical of those who would fully knowledgeably choose to be a Republican combined with the beliefs of an Evangelical trying to cash in on rewards asap, in the way a Republican typically does.

Good analysis. I guess it's deep in the conservative 'F everyone else' mindset.

There has been conflict there for centuries. It was predominantly Jewish people 1500 years earlier when they were forced out. One of the main reasons it was selected was because it was not heavily populated and that at one time it was a Jewish region before they were invaded. The history goes back millenniums.

Theyve been fighting for more than 70 years. Its fun to blame Europeans, but its not their fault.

It actually started with WW1 when Britain promised both Jews and Palestinians their own state if they overthrew the Ottomans.

Before that, Ottoman rule was oppressive to both groups relatively equally for a few hundred years.

WW2 and the whole holocaust thing just turned it from a small problem into a big problem, as millions of European Jews sought a safe haven outside of Europe, leading to the creation of a religious ethnostate in 1948.

So yeah, Europeans definitely are to blame, but Arabs and Palestinians aren't innocent either. They rejected a perfectly adequate solution by the UN in 1947.

They rejected a perfectly adequate solution by the UN in 1947.

I mean... adequate to who?

At what point did the responsibility switch?

I don't think they ever did, its always been their own fault.

Whose?

The people who live there. I thought that was pretty clear.

The people who live there. I thought that was pretty clear.

Their fault for living there?

For warring for millenia. Are you trolling or just not getting it?

Palestine wasnt involved in any war when they had their land taken

This is a really patronising take.

Imagine if your country was 'donated' to a whole other group of people, they took over, murdered people, took your home, tortured your grandparents, you're going to be mad. It's not 'childish', it's reality.

The whole Levant area has seen so many blood-soaked conquests that any claim of 'proper' or 'original' owners is wilfully and maliciously ignorant. This is also the case for pretty much every bit of solid ground. Your desire to return things to "how they were" is just you picking your fave point on a timeline of history.

Not what I said in the slightest. Current residents were and still are being displaced.

Take my own house as an example, who lived here originally? Probably some celts. Who lived here before me? Fuck knows, but they left and it tranferred to me.

If someone decided to donate my house to someone else would I be mad? Fuck yes.

So Hamas is killing Israelis who live there right now and trying to steal their houses. They should be mad as fuck and retaliate. No?

Or are you suggesting they have not lived there long enough?

You seem confused. No Israeli houses are being stolen. Hamas or representatives of them killed around 200 people at a recent event. In the same period Israel has killed 500 people, including nearly 100 children.

There is a war occurring, and people will be involved in the fighting. However this is an America funded army with bombs and planes against a few groups that are mostly using rocks.

This is a breakdown of the resources available - https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/this-is-the-imbalance-of-power-between-israel-and-palestine-in-real-terms-46651

Israel have decided that they want the gaza strip, and are blanket bombing with the explicit goal of eliminating the population there. It's brutal.

Civilians will get killed when you use them as shields. And please don't try and tell me Hamas is not using them as shields.

Also don't try and tell me Hamas is not indiscriminately sending rockets into Israel. I feel bad for the 50 percent of Palestinians who do not support Hamas but I don't feel as bad for those that do.

Oh you're deep into Israeli propaganda. Israel bomb schools and refugee centres and defend themselves by claiming that Hamas were there and 'using the children as human shields'. The funny thing is, when they go through the dead, they never find these Hamas fighters. It's almost as if they're murdering children just to punish Palestinians.

Read the article. Hamas have very few rockets, dozens maybe, and even those have short ranges. Bombing Israeli settlements is rare.

The celts were actually just so good at genocide that they fully displaced the people before them in most places they live now...

Trying to find the "original owners" of anything is stupid as history doesn't go back that far, so as you say we just need to look at current residents

Issue is, currently Jews are being displaced from their homes to Israel and Palestinians are being displaced by them, so there's underlying issues that need to be solved first

Nobody is trying to find the 'original owners', it's not relevant at all.

Jews are not being displaced from their homes. People currently moving to Israel are moving by choice, and kicking families out of their homes to do so.

Importantly mostly the people stayed after those conquests though. They were given Greek influence, then Christianized by the Roman empire and held the major Christian center of Antioch, then they were culturally Arabized by Muslim conquests. The main caveats to that rule were the Roman Jewish deportations. Largely, the DNA of the ancient peasants and the current inhabitants is the same.

Palestine was never a country…

The entire levant was part of the Ottoman Empire.

You are really missing the point here

You are speaking from an incredible place of privilege. You're nation had one of the most successful expansionist genocides in history. The reason there is still conflict in that region is because Israel's expansionist genocide is WIP.

That expansionist genocide you are referring to must be the indigenous peoples of North America, correct?

https://giphy.com/gifs/reactiongifs-crying-season-11NEJQ3pJn7Nkc

Which is funny since the guy in the video was an Italian-American posing as an American native.

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Because conservative religious people are insane, and that region involves three different and conflicting religions.

If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.

That's not going to happen, so it's going to continue to be a clusterfuck for as long as any large groups of people believe a magical being in the sky has destined the state of the region to be a given thing without compromise.

If suddenly you snapped your fingers and the entire region/world became irreligious, peace would exist there within a generation or so.

This is unlikely. The grievances between the various ethnic groups in the region are older than the Abrahamic religions, and older than the historical records that we have (see my other post). Individual people may have short memories, but cultures have very long memories. If you took the religion away, the groups would still mistrust and hate each other - the fighting has been going on since at least the Bronze Age.

Literally every region on earth has cultural histories of atrocities that have been moved beyond in the sake of peace and cohabitation.

You'd need to make a case for why this particular region would be atypical enough to be the exception, and outside of continued belief in opposing religious claims, I don't see any that would merit such a status.

Do Jews or Russians and Germans currently live in peace with each other in Germany? Are the Japanese in the US secretly planning terrorist attacks on everyone else for the internment camps of WW2? Do American tourists to Vietnam need to worry about being kidnapped and beheaded by the children of people who suffered war crimes?

It's the religions, not the history.

I think the cycle is something like this Assholes want power over others > they invent religion, which conveniently gives them power > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit > said stupid people push religion on their children > new crop of credulous people is raised > assholes want power over said idiots >... Religion... > stupid people, content being told what to do accept religious bullshit.....

It's a bit more complicated than that, as typically religion developed initially as an adaptive social evolution.

For example, early attempts at transitioning to agriculture failed because of a lack of sanitary practices, so disease ran rampant. Much later on when the transition happened again, it was around societies that had developed ideas around the importance of burying the dead, or burning the leftover parts of butchered meats "for the gods."

What you see more is evidence of alterations to religions in order to protect authoritarianism.

A good example of this is Deuteronomy 21:1-9.

The foundational ritual is one where when there was an unknown murder, the elders of the closest town needed to sacrifice one of its cows. From a sociological standpoint, this created a communal shared cost on unsolved murders occurring.

But notice what happens in 21:5.

Literally in the middle of the elders standing in the water breaking the neck of the cow, the priests - sons of Levi - show up to remind everyone that they are the ones chosen to perform rituals and pronounce judgement. And then in the very next line we're back to the elders and the cow in the water.

This line was probably a later addition to an earlier elder-driven ritual following a social shift to a priesthood based on ancestry controlling the religion.

There's a ton of things like this.

So religious practices developed from causes ranging from OCD to social evolution, and then those practices eventually get reworked to support the authorities, and then the continued survival of those religions tend to reinforce authoritarianism even after the original authorities are long dead.

There are 3 outs to this conflict: Israel absorbs Palestine (and probably does a genocide), Palestine absorbs Israel (and probably does a genocide), or they start to be friends and live together.

Context matters a bit on this : Jews have been harassed for litteral millenia. After ww2 were they were harassed even more than before, they were given their original land from were they were chased millenia ago. You can argue it's partly their fault for keeping their culture and religion eventhough they're all over the world, but I think one should be free to live its life regardless of its religion.

Fast forward to today: Israel became as racist and intolerant as everyone gave them through history, so out 3 is quite not likely. Palestinians are not really better on this, because they've been chased from their homes to begin with and war took its toll, and it's now decades of apartheid to fuel hatred and resentment.

Was it for them only, Palestine would be erased and Muslims genocided or deported in the neighboring countries. But both the UN and the neighbor Muslim states are very much hostile to Israel and several wars happened so that it would be the Palestinian who would genocide and deport the Jews. But they lost, partly because Israel is supported by the USA.

Now the USA will support Israel forever. I guess they like to have an outpost in the area. So Israel won't be deleted in the foreseeable future. But UN and the USA (oddly) don't want to see Palestine erased. Which lead to parents and kids situation.

In brief, Israel and Palestine would gladly fight to the death (I guess Palestine hope for an escalation with the neighbouring countries). But UN doesn't want that (because the US want to be seen as the good guys, and no one wants the US to gain more ground than what they have with Israel). And there we are: the kids hate eachother but the parents don't want anyone to win, because each parent has a favourite child.

The deadly loop of apartheid => terrorism => apartheid needs to end, but no one wants it.

A country with no involvement in world war 2 had its land taken as reparation for world war 2.

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Palestinian soldiers also fought with the British against the Nazis.

But none of this involvement is making it any more fair that Palestinians had to pay for the Holocaust. If anything, the opposite.

Yeah you lose me at stuff like 'controlled the territory'. It was palestinians living there, not British.

The British empire controlled a lot of regions of the world and they didn’t do it by establishing big population bases everywhere.

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Youre making me hate your side more and more for the complete disregard of uprooting people that were already living there, guilty of nothing. Yes, they were there first, and then were exiled. You wanna get exiled from your own country? No fucking empathy

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Yeah, youre advocating that Palestinians could be uprooted because they were under british control. People not involved in WW2 were uprooted and their homes given to jewish refugees. That happened, thats why palestinians are pissed, and now israel is just perpetuating more of the same. It never should have happened, those refugees shouldve been returned home where they could, taken in by allies, or if they absolutely had to have their own country give them land from germany or any country responsible for exiling their jewish population.

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the state of israel is extremist. and god a lot of people love the state of israel. I havent advocated for anything, I answered OP's question for why people in the middle east are so pissed. Even if only a few people were alive for when it was happening, it's still recent enough that first and second generations are a lot of people. Like imagine you grow up in horrible conditions because your parents were exiled from their home, from their work. And the people that did it are still attacking more of your country to exile more people.

What I advocate for is Israel needs to stop doing what it's been doing. And if you're a sane person in Israel, someone of reasonable means, not a religious fanatic that thinks you have divine purpose to live within specific geography, you move somewhere else, somewhere safer.

Are you referring to the British Empire (who was a victor of WW2) or the Ottoman Empire (who no longer existed)?

Well it was WWI in the first place, and the levant was part of the Ottoman Empire which was part of the central powers and did take part in the war.

I know there was zionist migration beforehand, but israel as a state was established after ww2.

The wikipedia article on that piece of land is crazy. Religious zealots have been fighting over it since basically recorded history started.

It freaks me out that the cradle of civilization is completely desertified and locked in an endless war, as if that’s just the inevitable result of humans being somewhere for a long time.

Not really. That only really started with the crusades. For most of history it just got traded between various empires that just wanted to control the entire region (Babylon, Persia, Macadon/Selucids, Rome, Ottomans, etc).

Yeah, the crusaders were the first ones that weren't interested in greater Syria/the greater Levant (If you don't include the Phoenician city states I guess), stupidly enough for them. It's a fine bit of territory to control if you can actually take the whole thing because of natural chokepoints, but otherwise you'll lose eventually. Ottomans just went back to what the Romans did and governed it as Syria.

it's like watching two children fighting over who's sandcastles can be built in the sandbox

Welcome to war.

And what do we do if children can't learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.

So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

That would be nice... only there are no adults.

PS: any adults 👽 out there... whenever you're ready, we welcome you 🛸

Yep. OP is wanting other children to take things away from the children. I wonder how that'd turn out. Definitely not with just more children fighting over the sandbox, right?

I'm more on the lines of Gorjira erupting from the bowels of the earth and just chowing down on anyone who doesn't play nice.

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The conflict in the Mesopotamian region are the oldest in recorded history. These episodes of the Fall of Civilizations podcast do a pretty good job of describing the various nation states in the area and what we know about what happened to them:

It's important to understand that these nation states are the oldest known. They are a part of the cultural background of all human civilization. Their conflicts are not only a part of what the Middle East is today, but of what the entire world is today. Their history is our history.

Almost every major conqueror in history, and many minor ones, started conflicts in the Middle East, including Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Genghis Khan.

Between the 7th and 11th centuries, there was a series of wars between the various Arab nations and the Eastern Roman Empire.

Following that, various European nations attempted to conquer parts of the Middle East in the Crusades.

During the 1800s, various European empires took control over various parts of the Middle East, through both military and political action, though the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the region.

WWI saw the end of the Ottoman Empire, after which the European powers carved up their territory.

During Operation Exporter in WWII a British-led force invaded Syria and Lebanon to take control from Vichy France, which had signed the Paris Accords and given territorial control to the German military. Conflict in the area continued after WWII.

This isn't an exhaustive timeline by any means. No part of our world has been fought over as often, or with as much force, as the Middle East. The feuds there are older than recorded history.

This attitude:

Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

Demonstrates an ignorance of world history. It's an arrogant point of view that suggests that the people living in the area are solely responsible for the long history of conflict, which is not the case. And the idea that Western nations could and/or should take actions in this area to "quell the infants" is absolutely delusional. The history of all such actions (such as Desert Storm I and II) has led to more destabilization and conflict in the Middle East, not less.

Non ironically old wars in the Mesopotamian region was my audio TOEFL test 3 years ago

I think the historical record basically shows that organized groups of humans (like the early nation-states) have been picking fights with each other since the first organized groups existed. We have been warring with each other since before there was a word for it. I don't know how we ever get out of it.

It is therapeutic to hear the words of reason at times like these were irrational uneducated "opinions" are flung around more than ever.

World history should be mandatory in every country and tested exhaustively. Kids are able to consume the information, as long as they're not forced to remember the absolutely useless information of it and focus on the actual point of learning history instead.

Of course it's not to the benefit of individual countries for its citizens to be fully educated, especially when their history consists of taking advantage of the whole world and causing way more misery than the one they're accusing others of.

More importantly, people should take the initiative to self educate and read books in their spare time. It's hard and time consuming, but your opinion honestly doesn't matter much when you don't know what the hell you're talking about and yet feel fully confident about it.

Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

I just want to point out that bigger stronger countries stepping in to "soothe the conflict" between two smaller countries has worked basically 0 times throughout all of history in the long run.

Errybody wanna be hegemon til its time to do hegemon shit

It depends on what you mean by "work out". If the goal is to stop conflict by eradicating a culture, that's worked many times.

Agreed, the bigger stronger countries aren't mature enough to handle themselves, let alone getting mixed in other conflicts.

But like who's the "adult" in this metaphorical dynamic? If there is no mediation, then one of two things will happen

  1. One kills and annexes the other Or 2. They continue to fight until they run out of populace and the whole area falls to irreparable socio-economic ruin.

I personally vote we let Greenland handle any and all affairs pertaining to this battle. They got a steady reign on things over there.

I don't disagree, but I doubt either side would agree. Certainly the Israels wouldn't. They've got the most international support, the superior military, and (most importantly) this war let's them do what they've wanted to do for almost a century now, wipe them out and claim all their land for themselves. They've got everything to gain and really not all that much to lose except their humanity - and countries rarely optimize their wartime strategies for that.

It’s not so much two infants irrationally arguing. Israel has owned some of this land for three generations. So the folks living there have passed it down as long as they’ve been alive. But another group owned it first, and the oldest among them remember the days before the occupiers came.

It’s like if the Cherokee decided to go full on guerrila warfare in the 1940s. Would they maybe have a point? How would it square with folks that had already been there for 80 years? It’s the settlers generational home now, too. Everyone has legitimate greivances. It’s not about settling tantrums, it’s about mediating between people that have legitimate but mutually exclusive claims.

The problem goes back further. You say "another group owned it first", but Israel say they have had that land for millennia and it was given to them by God.

Palestine did not even exist until the British randomly carved it out on a map except for a brief period under the Romans around 0BC. The Romans called it Palestine in order to remove Israel's identity.

How far back do we go?

My God said your home belongs to me so...gtfo. Please, leave something in the fridge for dinner. /s

Palestinians themselves, like Jews, descend from the ancient Hebrews. While the Jews left and (somewhat) assimilated in the lands they moved to, Palestinians were assimiliated by the Romans and Arabs. While their language and religion changed they are basically the same people.

And like any good brothers they go full Cain and Abel.

If my brother steals my house from me and leaves me in squalor...

Let's just say Christmas dinner won't be a happy one.

Part of the problem is neither group seem to have any real interest in negotiation. Both groups seem to engage in war crimes attacking civilians and other illegitimate targets.

Every couple of years they get bored and lob missiles at each other, but the "war" has essentially devolved into a stalemate where everyone's just trying to cause as much misery as possible without any real hope of victory or advancement.

I don't understand why there are any westerners there. The whole region is red flagged for UK citizens, there's no way I can get insurance to go there, I don't understand how some people do.

Israel is coming out of a political crisis from 2021that saw a huge loss in confidence on the government including a dissolution of the parliament. Now that Netanyahu is in power again, he loves that this war broke out. Nothing cements a government in power like a good war.

That's a simplistic take. There's a saying that goes something like if you don't read up, the Jewish are within their rights. If you read a bit, the Muslims are within their rights. If you study the issue you have no idea anymore.

I believe at this point everything in the media is a spin on the truth; for both sides.

How I see it, is that the ones with the money and technology have a better probability to stop the cycle. The ones with their backs against the wall have little options. Violence seldom leads to less violence.

Besides all the very interesting comments and links here about the violent history of the area, here's an answer from one Israeli guy I once asked a similar question. His take was that it is basically a mafiose environment now ... "both sides are corrupt to their core" -- the religiosity of the people would be abused by profiteers.

Basically, hate sells.

I could unpack that phrase over thousands of words about how generation after generation of Palestinians get indoctrinated, or how the leaders of the Arab nations use hating Israel as a way to show their strength and dedication. Or how generation after generation of Israelis have come to see Palestinians as something less than human. But let’s just summarize: hate sells.

Many countries in the Middle East are essentially Banana Republics. They are countries that have a large amount of wealth that comes almost entirely from exporting a natural resource. The government in these countries is less of a government and more of a group of people who control the export market. They don't rely on their citizens for support, they rely on other countries buying their exports. As long as their exports keep being purchased, the government has the money and power to do whatever it pleases.

Foreign involvement in these countries is usually to ensure the exports keep coming. The USA specifically spends a lot of money on being world police with their military because its easier to make trade deals with countries when they're not at war.

It's not that adults need to stop children from fighting. It's adults going to the gas station and getting upset the employees are spending too much time fighting and not enough time pumping gas.

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A while ago I watched a video from RealLifeLore covering this topic and the TLDR is that poorly drawn borders by the British and the French separating religious groups and ethnicities will all but guarantee constant conflicts and instability in the region

The region was defined by constant conflict and instability before Britain and France were even a twinkle in a Celtic eye.

While the bright and "civilized" Europeans were in the dark ages, the Middle East took our science and continued it, saving it from disappearing entirely.

You can believe in the barbarian narrative about them if that makes you feel better about your national history, but it's entirely untrue.

The fact that Muslims want to inihilate every Jew from the planet doesn't help either.

Hell no. People here keep posting simplistic solutions but this area has a long bloody complex history. Many previous attempts have demonstrated there is no such solution. Trying to settle the area just means finding a new way to fucj it up more. Just no.

You could just turn it all into glass. Realistically as long as it's some holy place there will never be peace unless we actually kill everyone

Zealots following Bronze Age religions. We have the same fucking problem here in the US

This is such a huge part of it. Stupid 'holy' sites provoking fanatics to unspeakable horrors.

One highly significant area for three different world religions means there will always be religious fundamentalists who want to throw out the other two.

Apparently, zinc deficiency is very common in the Middle East, and one of the side effects can be aggression.

This led to Edward de Bono suggesting Marmite as a solution to the conflict in the Middle East, as Marmite contains high concentrations of zinc...

I'll just go with what I heard a middle eastern comedian say:

"It's fucking HOT! Being hot makes you angry!"

So solve global warming, and solve the problems over there. Right?

Having been to Bahrain and Dubai, I agree with this. It's f#%k!ng hot all the time, and there's this very fine dust, like chalk dust, that picks up with the lightest breeze and just sticks to everything and makes it gritty and dirty all the time. It's miserable, and worse if you're near the coast where it's also humid because the sun is constantly boiling off the top layer of water.

If I lived over there I'd be cranky all the time too.

Imagine having your bed taken away and being told you have a couch you are fine. You would be mad at who took your bed

Because chilling out is bad for business. Can't make money with peace.

Doing that doesn't teach children to share - it teaches them to avoid getting caught because both the abuser and the victim will be punished, so even as the victim it's best to keep your abuse private.

Military intervention won't solve a thing. Changes happen when old ideas die.

This war has been going for several generations. It's surprising that the people born there even know what they're fighting for anymore. If the Holy Land is in constant war, I don't wanna know what their idea of hell looks like.

Maybe it's time for religions to adapt to modern reality and chill out.

Middle eastern people have been fighting each other for thousands of years.

They will continue to fight each other for thousands of years.

Thanks religion, which ironically Islam has its roots in Judaism, same as Christianity

If anyone is looking for a search engine term, they are all Abrahamic religions, if memory serves.

Political interests and geopolitics. You should check out “hypernormalization” by adam Curtis.

My most immature take on that whole thing is that I wish we could evacuate all the people and then nuke the everloving shit out of the land to make it uninhabitable for a few hundred years. Then let it be a weapons testing site for the world. Just take the whole fucking thing off the board.

Like I said, immature take.

I've been tangentially connected to that area for the better part of 20 years now. Nothing has changed for the better, Israel is worse than ever, Hamas is worse than ever. The assholes that dumped the jews there post ww2 did the whole world a disservice. That country should be Palestine, not Israel, but neither side behaves the way they should. So it's damn near moot at this point.

This question poses an existential challenge to its community.

(For the brain wormed: this is a stupid question)

It's a religious conflict.

They have no chill.

Currently the Jewish god is apparently stronger, but the Muslims will think theirs probably had a legitimate reason for letting Gaza get blasted to pieces. Plus their holy warriors successfully gutted several dozen slutty party animals, so they might see that as a worthwhile trade, idk. Either way it's a whole lot of nonsense and murder. Their tangled web of inconsistent dreamlogic is not to be understood, it is to be dismissed.

I don't think history is a factor in the way we think back to WW1 or WW2. Yes, it plays a role. But in my uninformed opinion it's more people just hate each other. They've lost relatives because of the other side. They can't have this happen to more people they like. Hospitals and power plants explode, people live in poverty. People die. Rockets get shot every day. Revenge takes place. I'd be pissed, too. People on both sides are living under constant attack. Religion and history gets on top and makes it yet more difficult. Politics is more focused on retaliation than compromise or working towards a solution. Agreements are short-lived and people show over and over they can't be trusted. It's a bad situation in every way.

Additionally there are some people who just like murdering civilians. And they'll do if they get the opportunity.

That happens because of those ancient decisions..

I thought the question was why they can't "chill out" now. And not how we got there?!

Bomb the entire region with pork rinds and aerosolized pig fat (offensive to both warring religions there, right?) for 6 months, and give everyone there a solid deadline to pack one small bag per adult on free one-way flights, daily, to a new 'homeland'. Canada can bequeath a region of northern Alberta-Sask-Nunavut for Jewish citizens, and.. I dunno, Argentina does the same for Palestinians. Evacuees are issued special passports granting citizenship to their respective new 'homelands'. The donor nations and new 'homeland' nations are each granted a one-time $1 trillion grant by the rest of Earth's nations to set up the new arrangements.

Oh, and finally. Death penalty for any evacuee and their descendants for 7 generations who even attempt to enter the 'other' homeland. And after that 6-month nonlethal bacon-bombing campaign, drop something over the entire 'holy land' to ensure it's uninhabitable for the next 10,000 years. No one can claim they weren't given a chance to leave by that point...

Time to take away not just the toys, but the whole damn playground.

Edit: wow, so many downvotes. Whatever, so tell me your plan to keep these two groups at bay, without any further needless deaths, geniuses.

Okay well I like your enthusiasm, but not sure big pork rind is ready to take a stand on the Israeli Palestine conflict.

They currently have no skin in the game, which is saying something because their whole game is skins. Crispy, salty, delicious skins.

yeah, blind genocide. that never went wrong

Genocide? Far from it, this proposal gives every single resident of the area a new life in a new land. Only far away from their adversary, and they can live their cultures, apart, in peace.