Generally exterior forces help to keep a conflict ignited.

WIth Israel being provided with billions of pounds of funding and weaponry each year to keep it secure, it has no reason to want peace - it gets the same or less peace than now, less weapons, less land. That is not a situation that is politically condusive to a deal.

Israel is not an eternal problem - it can be solved. It just needs people opn the ground willing to budge and uncomfortable enough to not find the status quo comforting.

(yes, this also required the Palestinians to budge, but I firmly believe even Hamas is willing to accept a negotiated two state solution and has even been asking to negotiate it. The other side want it to accept this before the negotiations even start).

There is also the idea that Egypt is actively meddling and stopping The Palestinian Authority of the West Bank and Hamas from making up...

It is messy, but if you look, before it all got messed up again through foriegn intervention, Somalia a few years had managed to get itself together, get a unified government etc, except that then the Americans and Ethiopia went in to defeat it, it disintegrated and then there was more chaos. Eventually the same side was allowed back into power, except that a few splinters splintered away to make a new opposition.

Somalia is an entirely (foriegn)man made situation that could have been avoided, and there are probably some similarities in the Palestinian territories too.

The other angle to take is to question the equal legitimacy that the person seems to have for both sides - that someone suddenly decided to get up one day and carry an act of wanton murder.

Sometimes you have to ask why did a person do that?

Like that documentary (Dispatches?) on the children of Gaza and also that one where Ross Kemp went to Gaza.

There was a young girl talking about how infront of her eyes she saw her dads head blown up and the brain seep out and how other people in her house also died and how she has to live with those memories.

There was another young boy who mentioned who had been killed in his family and how he wanted revenge.

Show them those two documentaries and then ask them, do they expect those individuals to be well balanced when they are older? Should they turn the other cheek to what they have seen?

And then you can also show how peace has been tried and is being tried in much of the west bank - all is has delivered so far is more people being thrown out of their homes in East Jerusalem and More settlements being built in other parts of the West Bank, more Palestinians losing their livelihoods.

You have to give people hope, give them something to live for, a future if you don't want them to be bitter and to turn to violence and other things.

For both sides peace has to be shown to work instead of what we have now where it is seen as an opportunity to grab more land quicker.

Telling you that's not true about Israel considering war to be in its best interests. It categorically isn't in Israel's best interests to have to be on alert all the time. Up to you to consider if what I wrote is just untrue or instead if its untruth is more of a theory, but I cannot relate to that line at all and I am not someone who doesn't know.

I don't see the point of expanding this to cover what are the various factors, most of which are in full view. Nor will I respond for now to the exaggeration of what is happening on the West Bank. I do not think that I tend to exaggerate and I can't discuss with someone who does.

I am not against bias nor no I think bias is inherrently wrong.

While I do think most if not Israelis want peace, I do not think they are willing to pay the price for it.

The only time they may be willing to is when the threat without it has a greater cost than the percieved cost of trying peace.

Rawrrs question however does not require one side to be righteous and the other not to be - she just needs things she can use to show how one/both sides are not simply mindless barbarians.

@ Rawrrs - ask them to watch this and then still not be angry. (once again, since it is about children, it will not be unbiased. But at the same time it is not wrong.)

MakeMeRawr_7TeenF wrote:

Not just talking about the middle east and war though.

When someone has blatant animosity towards Muslims and says the obvious things, where do you start explaining? And how, and what?

Asking the question "why?" is always a good start. Why does the person have that animosity.

What has a burkha ever done to them?

Why did a person decide to kill himself/herself along with others?

The latter is an interesting one because recently it seems popular history in the UK has been rewritten starting in the year 2007 with the seventh of July bombings, as if that was the start of everything.

It wasn't. It was a reaction to what had happened before. It was still despicable, but that does not mean it was not have been preventable - not invadiung Iraq would have stopped it. Having a more positive impact on the Palestinians may have appeased the indivuduals. Labour losing the elections two months before may ahve also prevented it - until then it had been the people against the government and suddenly despite the massmurder, the people of the UK voted Tony Blair - who in the mind of many including mine should be tried for war crimes - back into office.

There is also a rewriting which pretends that there has not been other terrorism in the UK, committed by other groups etc.

Replying to Admin.

You wrote:

While I do think most if not Israelis want peace, I do not think they are willing to pay the price for it.

If the price is the West Bank you're mistaken. But I don't know, honestly don't know how you can talk to the maliks and the Anon1s and forget those, the other people you have met for real and spoken to about Israel, and honestly believe THAT is the problem here.

oh, I see them as troublesome, but they are a hurdle that is further up the road and not the immediate one. They can also be dealt with.

Neither of them are involved there, and Hamas is, who has/had offered "multi year peace" in exchange for the blockade to be lifted. But no one was willing to negotiate with them.

Before Hamas was elected, Arafat was the problem because he lacked credible democratic authority so Israel wanted to wait til after elections.

I find it hard to believe that Hamas made a serious offer, and don't understand why they don't offer a permanent peace. When Israel left Gaza it was because the negotiations were BS and they want out. That was a failure and a half, but one I encouraged and think was necessary. If Hamas have anything they can offer in the way of a PERMANENT peace that is welcome, but to Hamas that is defeat. Taking months or years to rearm doesn't count. And I am stunned you think Hamas is less hardline than HT. Hamas loves HT.

MakeMeRawr_7TeenF wrote:

Can we say they aren't muslims

And what about the taliban?

The taliban were ruling their own country, no matter how good or bad their rule was. Do they also have a problem with the Burmese Junta or Kim Jong Il of the same level?

MakeMeRawr_7TeenF wrote:

And the fact that there's so many Terrorists that are Muslim?

This is a matter of perception. in the UK, recently the bigger terrorist threats have been the far right, but they have been dealt with quietly and without as much sensationalism by the press.

Abroad, before the invasion of Iraq, it may have had a bloody dictator, but al qaeda did not exist there.

Somalia, they managed to get almost their shit together before "foreign intervention" (Ethiopia + USA) kicked them back to square one.

Even the recent ethnic violence in Kyrgustan recently can be traced back to a CIA back "revolution" a few years earlier (which tbh did get rid of a brutal disctator, but the new guy was not roses either, and since his ousting a few months ago, it is suggested he was behind some of the violence). More some of the people involved in ethnic violence were a branch of the military who was AFAIK being trained and funded by the US.

No doubt Muslim hands are guilty in many places, but it is not an exclusivity thing and it is not always aimed at the west either.

Saying that, I doubt any of that will help though. I am not the best person to convince others of what is happening or not here or around the world.