Quote from: The Legendary Shark on 14 March, 2024, 07:51:49 PMLorenzo makes an excellent point. Where were people like me while all this was going on in the past?
Personally I didn't really understand the situation, thinking it was some ancient and complicated religious feud I simply wasn't informed enough to comment on beyond the most basic blanket condemnations of human-on-human violence.
On one level this is not a wholly inaccurate understanding. There certainly is that dimension to this conflict although it has grown inevitably far more complex over time.
There is the small matter of the Crusades to factor in as the massed ranks of European chivalry answered the papal call to 'free the holy lands' (again, this doesn't accurately describe events during this period).
If you skip forward several centuries, quite a bit of the current conflict is rooted in the machinations of the late 19th Century and the post WW1 dismantling of the Ottoman Empire. This is where Britain really comes into its own as a villain of the piece with its chicanery around many of the nations currently involved in the conflicts and tensions of the region although America and France are equally implicated with their manoeuvring around oil.
Skip forward to the post WW2 decisions in the wake of the Holocaust and you add another layer of challenge. The establishment of Israel once more as a distinct nation, rejection of a two state solution and general indifference towards Palestinians even among other nations in the region, coupled with the approach of Israel to how it approached Palestinians as well, is arguably the latest phase in this age-old problem.
Another jump to the tail-end of the 20th Century with the Iranian and Iraqi revolutions and the establishment of two nations implacably hostile to Israel ... well, you can guess how that worked out, really. The obvious hostility of both nations to America, and by default to the nation they sometimes see as America's regional proxy (although in Iran's case there is also a profound thread of Anti-Semitism) has only really been tempered by the decades long feud they were engaged in.
In Iran's case though, taking a leaf out of the Russian and American playbooks, proxy fighting has become the preferred approach over the years. As a relatively low-cost approach with limited exposure, provisioning 'freedom fighters' and other assorted groups has kept the conflict simmering.
Of course the rather aggressive approach of settler groups in Israel has not helped either. To argue that this is all the fault of Iranian-backed groups misses this dimension. In allowing such activity, the Israeli state has given credence to the grievances of groups like Hamas. As circumstances in places like the Gaza Strip have become increasingly dire, Israel has almost become a recruiting sergeant for its own enemies.
Even this is a gross over-simplification of an insanely complex issue that the greatest political minds of the last few generations have been grappling with. It is highly doubtful that these issues will resolve themselves shortly.