But you at least support a single-state solution?
Yeah, but at this point the mindset has been deeply engrained. ‘God’ is with us, truly messes things up big time.
I think there is sometimes a peculiar human reaction to war. In a full war, everyone accepts that huge numbers of people will die and more will be injured. However, when a war is prevented by imposing measures at the border that result in a far smaller number of deaths, people are far more outraged.
Nobody has denied that if Israel opened that border, terrorists would come through. Nobody has denied that there would then be attacks within Israel. Nobody has denied that this would almost certainly lead to full scale hostilities.
And yet it is argued that opening that wall is the right thing to do.
Maybe I am coming to appreciate walls!
Even the Berlin wall had the effect of containing what might otherwise have been the start of WW3. Think about it.
David
The biggest problem is, David, is that
no wall can stand forever - for the simple reason that it solves nothing, and only further enrages and embitters the people who are being imprisoned behind (as the Palestinians) or torn apart by (as the the Cold-War-era Germans) such a wall. So your hope that the prolonged forceful segregation and disfranchisement of Palestinians would somehow slowly erase their earnest support for Hamas and Hezbollah, if given enough time, is doomed to fail: this support will never wane. This is the lesson that the world's oppressors have to learn once and again, yet they always fail to learn it well: human's will to freedom and dignity is indestructible, and no amount of repression will ever crush it.
So, there is only three possible scenarios:
1) a never-ending continuation of apartheid, and thus constant collective imprisonment and torment of Palestinians - and, thus, of perpetual low-intensity war;
2) a large-scale uprising leading to a full-blown high-intensitiy war, which, due to the horrid amounts of pain and humiliation - and thus also hatred and wrath - accumulated during decades of apartheid and low-intensity warfare, will quite inevitably lead to the extremely atrocious, possibly literally genocidal, treatment of the defeated side;
3) a demolition of wall and start of the reunification and reconciliation process, that inevitably will be very long and hard, will require a immence effort and goodwill of both sides, and will be inevitably accompanied with, and thwarted by, a notable amount of violent incidents and war propaganda from both sides of the process.
You seem to desire the first scenario, David - yet, aside from being an effective approval of everyday dehumanisation and torture of the whole nation of people, will, sooner or later, lead to the scenario 2. In Russia, there is a relevant saying, "
Лучше ужасный конец, чем ужас без конца" ("The horrible end is better than a horror without end"), and people as badly tormented as Palestinians can understand it by their own ugly experience (that's why all these suicide bombings, David - not because the Palestinians are malicious fanatical Antisemites, as Israeli propaganda tries to paint them).
So, the scenario 3 is simply the only real way forward (well, unless one wishes for one side of the conflict to be simply slaughtered to the last person - which, I hope, none of us wish!). As I said already, this won't be quick, easy and painless path, to put it very mildly. It will require the prolonged and dedicated co-working of both sides, and, most importantly, the unwavering determination to proceed further by both of them despite all the obstacles, such as manifestations of violence and hositility that will unavoidably appear once the wall is demolished and the reunification-reconciliation process starts.