Reply #93: The problem is institutions, not cultures.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

The reason it's not feasible to hold the Palestinians to any standard as a group is because they don't have a functioning state. There is an entity, Israel, which does what one man tells it to, but Israel has consistently frustrated all attempts to set up a functioning Palestinian state.

The last chance for true peace in the ME died with Arafat. Israel could reduce the volume of attacks considerably by unilaterally insituting something along the lines of points 1-4 of Ayalon's Statement of Principles, and demanding that the international community do everything in its power to a) set up a Palestinian state and b) both help and demand that state to aquire a monopoly on the use of force within its borders, but that will take a lot of time, and it clearly isn't what most Israelis want.

I'm afraid I think that you underestimate the strength of support for settlements, and especially for sole control of Jerusalem, in Israel (although I'm not terribly confident of that; my belief is based on electoral results, government statements, and the fact that even here on DU a non-trivial number of posters seem to support permanent settlements and control of Jerusalem, but I don't know much about opinion polls or similar in Israel).

I'm afraid I also doubt that the fraction of Israelis who would be disgusted by images of the IDF beating up sitting Palestinians is high enough to achieve much.


Incidentally, the second (apart from the obvious that the Egyptian government had a monopoly on force within its borders) obvious difference between your 1) and your 2) and 3) is that in 1) the entire casus belli was dealt with, whereas in 2) and 3) Israel has continued to occupy the West Bank. A partial withdrawal from the West Bank would undoubtedly lead to more violence.