Possible Resolutions to the Conflict Involving Israel

Here is another posting, cleaned up a bit, of mine from a Yahoo group that I'm on called JOINint^*
Someone asked a question, and her is my rather pessimistic answer:

Please, someone, anyone, show me how we can save Israel AND make a true and lasting peace with our cousins, the Arabs?

There are two solutions that would currently work work:

• The liquidation of the state of Israel.
• The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in areas under Israeli control.

To my mind, neither are acceptable, so the question is how one finds a solution that does not involve either,

Given the current state of affairs, I do not see any positive developments.

However, the primary driver on this issue is oil, and this will be changing. Current predictions see Iran no longer exporting oil in less than 30 years, and Saudi Arabia production may very well have already peaked.

If the center of oil production moves elsewhere, and/or the world economy transitions from an oil economy, which I see as happening sooner rather than later, the interest in appeasing Arab sensibilities vanishes.

Much of this conflict is driven by the perception in the Palestinian community that time is on their side by virtue of both demographics and by what they see as significant unequivocal international support for their rights, look at your average vote in the General Assembly of the UN, and when their perception changes, a settlement will come.

Basically, when the Arabs run out of oil, no one will care about them, most of their support in the international arena has been bought in some form or another, and when the House of Saud in particular, and the Arab world in general runs out of this currency, the interest in their concerns will vanish.

Hopefully, in this transition/decline, a settlement can be reached, because if not, I see the ethnic cleansing of the disputed territories as a distinct possibility only a bit after that.

One thing that goes unremarked on is that the views of Israeli society are changing.

In 1980, if one had been at a party, and suggested ethnic cleansing Arabs, people would have looked at you like you had taken a dump in the punch bowl, and you would never have been invited back.

Today, there would doubtless be a ferocious discussion/argument, but the discussion of this tactic has become socially acceptable. This is a change in attitude that is profoundly troubling.

Note that any prediction of the future is at best imprecise. I do not see the House of Saud surviving, and in its fall there are any number of outcomes, both bad and good, that are beyond anyone's power to predict.

Certainly, this will result in a movement of the center of Arab thought, probably back to Egypt. In the early 1900s, Cairo was the center of Arab and Islamic intellectual discourse, before Saudi basically prostituted the Cairo academics and intellectuals.

^*Jewish Opinions, Ideas, and News, International It spun off from another group when it descended into right wing agitprop.