Settlements

I was reading an article on the peace process between Israel and Palestine that continues to illustrate the difficulty that Israeli insistence on maintaining their settlements is causing the peace process.

This issue ties into my research paper, as the settlements in the West Bank are almost exclusively supplied with water that is technically Palestinian; it is drawn from the aquifer beneath the West Bank.

It's interesting to me that people are surprised that Palestinian farmers get in a huff when their water is restricted in order to better supply Israeli suburbanites.

Response

I reacted very strongly to the attitudes of the Israeli settlers in the video. Specifically, they struck me as being delusional. One woman spoke about the settlers having no hate in their hearts and how the problem was completely dependent on spiteful Palestinians. Another man mentioned the Israeli's right to the land by virtue of ancient history and tradition.

The woman's point galled me because she must have engaged in some willful act of ignorance to believe a statement like that. I recently read an article in the Economist that described the mutual antagonism between Palestinian farmers and Israeli settlers, who have taken to destroying Palestinian olive groves near their settlements. If the government targets terrorists, I can at least see where they're coming from. When citizens begin destroying one another's livelihoods, however, I have a harder time keeping quiet.

Equally frustrating was the man's assertion that the Israeli's have a greater right to the land by virtue of biblical history. His point is so fallacious it hurts. By the same logic, the descendants of Hammurabi would be able to stake a valid claim to southern Iraq and Kuwait.

Deterrence

We recently talked about deterrence in class, and it got me thinking about deterrents in the Middle East and how Israel might figure into that. Given Israel's special relationship with the United States and the arms that it makes Israel privy to, is it possible that Israel serves as an important deterrent to large scale violence in the Middle East?

Do they depend on us?

Today in class the question of whether or not Saudi Arabia and other oil producing companies are as dependent on the industrialized world that uses most of the world's petroleum. While I think that the relationship is most certainly a two-way street, and that an oil boycott would also devastate the Gulf Countries, I also don't see that happening anytime soon.

Given how the United States reacts to even the smallest tremor in the oil market and that the industrialized world has little or no framework for dealing with the rapid withdrawal of Middle Eastern oil from world markets, what are the odds that the industrialized nations of the world without their own oil supply could actually organize a coherent boycott of a country like Saudi Arabia? Slim to none is my best guess.

The history of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia speaks very strongly in favor of this notion. Despite the US' "commitment to human rights" and Saudi Arabia's ties to any number of groups looking to hurt the US, American foreign policy has been nothing if not tolerant of Saudi shenanigans since the Sauds struck oil.

Solutions?

On Tuesday we discussed the trouble that NGOs have in the Middle East, as a lot of them receive funding from Europe, which makes them suspect in the eyes of Middle Easterners. It made me think about how to finally escape the colonial dynamic that has haunted Europe's relationships with just about everywhere, and it's hard to reach any kind of definitive conclusion that seems even remotely feasible.

I suppose one solution might be to impose something like a lock-in. Withdraw completely from the region and let them settle their differences as best they will. Obviously this wouldn't work, since the Western world has a vested interest or two in the Middle East.

That the first thought that comes to my mind is "well, I suppose a nuclear apocalypse might solve the problem" is a testament to how hopeless it all seems. The article by Ian Lustic proposes that the most natural means of state building (war) is forgone at this point. The West has too much riding on stability in the Middle East to allow a natural formation of nation-states to take place, and even if it didn't, the presence of nuclear weapons makes the prospect of a difference-settling brawl pretty daunting.

So the question is, how can the Middle East attain a self-sustaining peace by artificial and moderated means that doesn't involve armed conflict?

I don't know.

War Crimes?

In a recent article by the bbc, an Israeli minister was accused of war crimes associated with a military action in Gaza in 2002.

Although the allegation itself is questionable, it is very interesting that Yaalon was advised against traveling to the United Kingdom in lieu of the accusation. Despite the fact that the UN has a long history of labeling Israeli military actions and policies both war crimes and violations of human rights, it's significant that a government official has actually run the risk of seeing substantial consequences.

Although Israeli sources claim that Yaalon took the advice in order "avoid playing into the hands of anti-Israel propaganda," the Palestinian activists responsible for the allegations still managed to leverage enough pressure to cause the cancellation of Yaalon's planned visit to the UK.

Whether he actually runs any risk of being arrested for war crimes upon his arrival in the UK is also not what interests me the most. Given that the United Kingdom and Israel have a history of close collaboration and bipartisanship, it will be very interesting to see how this incident affects their relationship.