The decision by the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to claim a seat in the United Nations is a last ditch effort by one side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to resolve the region’s eternal crisis peacefully. The statement largely drafted by Tony Blair on behalf of the “Quartet,” which essentially gave the Israelis everything they wanted – including acceptance of settlement expansion as “facts on the ground” – was “the final blow, the final straw,” according to top Palestinian Authority official Nabil Shaath.
At the point where the world’s three great Abrahamic religions meet, there the seismic plates of civilization brush up against each other – to inevitably violent effect. The creation of a new state in the very epicenter of this seismic disturbance is just asking for an earthquake of epic proportions.
With some few exceptions, the rest of the world is amenable to transitional solutions of one sort or another – some reform, short of full-fledged libertarianism achieved overnight, which will ameliorate the crisis and help find a peaceful way out. Not in Palestine. There the only solution is radical and immediate decentralization of power, in both the occupied territories and Israel proper – that is, the separation of mutually hostile populations into mini-“states,” with each community exercising its right of secession, street-by-street. This would, at least, reduce the scale of the violence, and rob the haters of their power to impose an extremist “solution” on the rest.
The US government’s self-appointed role in the region as mediator and “peace” broker is a textbook example of how interventionism leads to the exact opposite of its ostensible objectives. We tout a “peace process” that has only produced more war and stick our noses into snake pits where they don’t belong. Then we wonder why we get bitten.
