Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/27/jon-stewarts-solutions-for-peace-between-israel-and-gaza.html
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He made an interesting point about Saudi Arabia only spending $200M a year to support the Palestinian people (whose wellbeing they claim to care deeply about) when they also spent that same amount just for Phil Mickelson’s contract with LIV golf. The Palestinians have been cynically used as pawns by world powers for a long time now. 
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In my darker moments I think about how, in the days of the Ottomans, or the British, they would have been able to just say, “Both of you knock it off or we’ll raze everyone you own to the ground.” A horrible thing to threaten, let alone do! Today, for very good reasons, we totally disallow and disavow that option. As a side effect, we end up with many more conflicts that no one has both the real power and the legal/moral/political standing to resolve.
If the leadership of Israel and Hamas wanted peace, they’d have peace. They want other things more, and the rest of us, by paying so much attention and choosing sides but only weakly, empower them to keep going.
If we’re going to go with the “macro” view then we shouldn’t forget that the last 80 years or so since the end of WWII and the collapse of the British Empire the average human being’s odds of dying a violent death (via war or murder) have dropped precipitously to the lowest recorded rate in human history. So we shouldn’t pretend things were better or more peaceful during the days of peak colonialism.
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Very true!
My understanding is that those were mostly deaths in wars between the great powers (including conscripts from the colonies), rather than wars between parts of empires, but yes, absolutely, war has been on the decline, and I’m glad for it.
I hope whatever regime of international law comes next does even better, and resolves the side effects of the last round of post-WWII improvements. I don’t know what that will look like, and have never really seen anyone propose a plausible solution.
Huh? This conflict like most others is the direct result of colonization, not the end of colonization. WTF!
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Well, sure, but it’s an area that’s been colonized and conquered and reconquered and recolonized so many times that there is no one who can possible have a legitimate claim to be its rightful owners/rulers/inhabitants/etc. This specific conflict is absolutely a result of colonization, of Gaza by Israel. I care about that because it’s wrong. But it’s not the root problem that generated the global dynamics that created this situation, and I’d really like to not live in a world where small and/or failed states keep cropping up and doing terrible things in ways that 1) impose enormous costs on local bystanders and substantial costs on unrelated outsiders, and 2) none of those negatively affected can resolve through their own actions.
[standing patiently by while Bb queues up the post from the end of the show about Jon losing his dog. it’s THOROUGHLY heartbreaking to watch, but watch i did, and cried right along with him.]
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Only because the territorial dispute was set up by colonial powers.
“Failed states” don’t fail in a vacuum. Most were doing just fine on their own before colonial powers screwed them up with empire-building or extractive economics - things that they continue to this day.
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Al Saud are enemies of Palestinians and only can’t express themselves honestly to save face in the Muslim world.
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I 100% agree, yes.
In that vein, I’ve always been a trifle surprised at how relatively modest the Palestinian presence in the UAE is. It’s not tiny in absolute terms; but it seems odd for it to show up behind at least three countries in South America; despite the proximity and the local appetite for migrant labor(typically recruited from further away, heavily south Asian, for some reason).
Leaving and becoming precarious construction serfs in the UAE isn’t, of course, necessarily relevant to peace; it’s just kind of surprising to see such comparatively limited interaction between a nearby wealthy country with significant interest in imported labor and a Palestinian unemployment rate of 25% or so.
The various linguistic, cultural and religious ties between the UAE and the Palestinian territories probably makes it more difficult for the UAE to get away with exploiting them for slave labor compared to people from other parts of the world. A poor migrant worker from India may not even be able to read the language of their employment contract, let alone have the means to get back home from the Arabian peninsula.
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“Shouldn’t” is an understatement.
“Must not ever again”, more likely. Imperialism and colonialism are directly responsible for the fucking mess of today.
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From one Empire to the next and the next and…Odd how we don’t mind all the other lines drawn by that agreement.
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