Adults are killed/murdered or imprisoned at an alarming rate. It’s hardly rocket science
I think terrorist is a fairly useless term in general terms at this point.
No, that has very little to do with it. Think through the math needed to achieve that. The fertility rate is estimated at 3.38, that is always going to produce a staggeringly young population.
What does have a much larger effect in pulling down the lifespan is a medical system that was overloaded long before all this started.
And the Palestinians had atrocity after atrocity slammed on them since 1947. By that token, nobody in Israel is innocent.
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That’s probably why the Israelis don’t want a single state system. The demographic changes it entails.
Israel is a state with an ageing population with birthrates largely in line with Europe.
They do subscribe to the general ideology of radica Jihadist organizations. Calling them resistances trivialises that. The extremist belief that is present overwhelmingly in Hamas and to a slightly lesser extent in Fatah should be worrying.
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Children who are taught that hatred by adults. Hatred doesn’t breed overnight.
They also have seen that hatred and aggression targeted at themselves and their families by Israel since birth. So of course they will likely feel no sympathy for those victims, because to them, they are the cause of their pain and sufferring.
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That is painfully true, but doesn’t change the simple fact that they are children. If we give up that idea, that hope that the next generation can learn something else, we live in a world of blood.
I have been lucky, my relationship with matters like this has been on paper. Apply a logical principle, and stick with it. My work was sometimes troubling, but in the end safely behind a desk thousands of kilometers away. Easy. But a good friend was in a place called the Medak Pocket, for a a few weeks the Gaza of 30 years ago. He still wears the trauma. He carried at least 8 children to safety in the midst of a firefight, but he has never managed to move past the child he carried to cover only to find that she was dead. He has deservedly received the highest peacetime decoration the country can offer, but his life has been ruined nonetheless.
If we give up the idea that children can be innocent, we live in a world of blood.
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I don’t see the next generation of Palestinian children knowing anything else. This is ~80 years of Israeli occupation. Thats like 4 generations of people who’ve grown up in that increasingly radical hate filled atmosphere.
The situation w.r.t mindsets of Israelis and Palestinians might change in the future and I do hope it does, but just don’t see how.
Both the populations have so much hate for the other that the one state solution is out of the equation. Just can’t fathom how they can co-exist now. Too many bridges burnt.
The two state solution as of now seems unworkable too. The alternative is some sort of apartheid system (ironically not unlike the regimes of Dubai etc where the expats don’t have voting rights etc). The Israelis can probably rest easier knowing that they don’t have to contend with increasing demographics of the Palestinians in the above system. Not ideal but we don’t live in such a world.
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Also lack of contraceptives. Those are banned in Islam.
Not true. Contraceptives and other birth-control measures are widely used and most often promoted by the state in most Muslim countries.
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Stand corrected. I suppose it’s a common misconception.
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I think that having money in a system is sufficient to placate most issues. In my naivety, I imagine that there is a high probability that even now that if Israel faithfully ploughed 100 M euros / month for 100 months into Gaza’s development, that there would be peace for those 100 months - possibly even longer. I was thinking 1 B euros /month but I’m not sure that would be required.
The wider arc/notion being that the children, and people in general, would quite easily look past the the current horrors and aim for a brighter future - it is the human condition. Obviously this is not testable and outcome not written in stone but surely a better option than the current strategy.
There are plenty of cautionary tales, 911 being a prominent one, where the perpetrators were mostly/relatively well off disenfranchised individuals…
That is my dismal take on where the situation is now as well. A year ago I would have said there was no real space for moderates to open up a genuine dialogue let alone negotiation, but it seems even more impossible now.
Or …
‘Benjamin Netanyahu refuses to countenance the end of the war and his own demise.’
Maybe it’s the idealist talking, but I refuse to give up on hope, even though the situation seems to be utterly hopeless. Things will continue to look to be hopeless and may even get worse until someone starts talking differently. He/she/they will face an impossible task, but if they can just endure for long enough, they will gather pace and in the end bring a change. Such things have happened many times in the history.
I admit that the appearance or resurgence of such a voice within the Palestinian spectrum is very, very bleak simply due to the fact that Israel will arrest or kill anyone who isn’t Abbas. What I find very heartening is the fact that even now there are some Israeli citizens, some pretty prominent others rather everyday folks, who are standing up for the Palestinian cause.
Despite Israel’s record of atrocities against the Palestinians, only a fraction of the Israelis are fascists. Despite widespread support for terrorist activities, only a fraction of the Palestinians are fanatics. So, the situation is impossible but not hopeless.
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You get a heart for your indomitable optimism. I only wish I could share it.
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