Israel vs. Palestine vs. Big Black Cocks (plus a quick lesson on black history!)

[Mandark]

On a serious note bro, I'm just curious why the massive post when GS will just respond with a similar one liner

Same explanation I gave in the spoilered postscript.  If he's gonna play forum martyr I'm taking away his nails.

Plus this was quick to write.  Lots of text usually means I didn't spend a lot of time editing it down.

[brawndolicious]

Plus this was quick to write.  Lots of text usually means I didn't spend a lot of time editing it down.

yeah.

[AdmiralViscen]

annihilated

[Oblivion]

For posterity's sake* here's why the Shinobi Accord wouldn't work:

First, Jerusalem is kind of a huge deal for Palestinians.  They don't just want a sovereign state somewhere on some land.  They want a sovereign state in the land the identify as Palestine, and they think of Jerusalem as its capital.  It is their most significant city, culturally and politically.

Even if you could convince the Palestinian leadership to give up on Jerusalem (you couldn't), they'd immediately and completely lose legitimacy and authority in the eyes of the Palestinian street.  The leadership would be wholly unable to enforce such an agreement.

Now you have a situation in which a couple hundred thousand Palestinian Jerusalemites have to be forcibly deported from the city, presumably by Israeli and maybe US troops.  That's going to cause a very, very bloody intifada.  Not just in Jerusalem, but in all the occupied territories.  Israel, in turn, will crack down with the usual harsh measures (shutting down access and utilities, killing people).

Eventually, if it goes well, you'll have herded the Palestinians to... "a completely sovereign state elsewhere in the area".  Oh dear.  We already know that Egypt, Jordan, and the other nearby Arab states don't want to take on Palestinians as citizens, and have resisted that idea for decades.  If the new Palestine is made up of the occupied territories minus Jerusalem, then it's sharing a border with Israel and will still serve as a base for rocket and mortar fire by militant Palestinians (which will be damn near all of them at this point).

So you can't expect a sustainable peace from the Palestinian side, and you couldn't expect one from the Israelis either.  "But they just got what they wanted!"  Yep, and they did it unilaterally with force.  Rewarding Israeli irredentism will just encourage more of it.

On top of all this, the United States might as well kiss any other strategic goals in the region goodbye.  No Muslim or Arab leader in the area would want to be seen within a hundred yards of the American president after this.  Even secret, back-channel diplomacy would be tough; try convincing Iran it doesn't need a nuclear deterrent after this.  Hell, you might even see an oil crisis out of it.  That's leaving out how the EU would react.

A Palestinian evacuation of Jerusalem isn't an example of effective but callously amoral realpolitik.  It's a fantasy that only succeeds by ignoring all the pitfalls and costs that would come along with it.

It's tempting to see a quagmire like the Israeli/Palestine issue and just want to cut the Gordian knot.  But great powers redrawing maps without respect to the cultural and political histories of a region don't solve territorial disputes.  They create them.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

*To avoid the inevitable point in the future when someone cites this thread as an annihilation, and GS explains that it wasn't cause nobody seriously explained why his idea wouldn't work, and we go through the whole goddam thing again.

[close]

If you're so smart, then WHY AM I YELLING LOUDER THAN YOU?