The Warpfish Chronicles

"28 years on the planet, and I still haven't figured out what's going on."

I Don't Want Peace -- April 10th, 2002

Right now, the other countries of the world are trying to negotiate a peace in the complex, tangled web of Middle East politics. However, is a peace even possible? Should we even be trying? After all, many countries in the reigion are playing both sides to further their own position. (Saudi Arabia comes to mind, offering a peace proposal with one hand, and paying the families of suicide bombers with the other.)

With all the rhetoric that has been tossed back and forth, for the last 50 years, it is nearly impossible to find common ground, except a desire to have people stop dying. And, even that desire is weakend, when Islamic papers report Jewish rituals require the blood of Christian or Muslim children under 10 years old, or when radical Zionists proclaim the need for a Greater Israel, encompassing a large swath of the Middle East.

And this is nothing new. The Middle East has been an area of contention for thousands of years, with peace only coming when an outside power has come in and enforced order on the whole region. There is so much hate, so much past history. We've seen how hard it is to create peace in Ireland -- and that's only been going on for about three hundred years! How do we deal with a battle of this magnitude, when, at its very core, two very separate populations want control of the same real estate, with no compromise possible.

I entertain schemes in my head of walling off the contending parties, keeping them completely separate from each other. Or, of evacuating everybody who just wants to build their own life, and let the zealots and militants and whoever else wants to live and die in the warzone.

A friend of mine has relatives over in Israel, and I asked him why they haven't come over to escape the war. He told me that they view it as home, and they will fight to the death to keep it. I'm sure if I knew anybody in the West Bank or Gaza, they would say the same thing. I fear, that, with these types of attitudes, with both sides wanting the land, and with no room for compromise, the war will only end when one side or the other is destroyed as a people. We are seeing another genocidal war in action, but, this one with international sponsorship, as several Middle East countries back Palestine, and the US backs Israel. Israeli F-15 fighters and Palestinian explosives have to come from somewhere, you know.

Peace is such an overused word, so abused in the region, because, everybody wants Peace, but only on their terms. In these cases, Peace is just another word for surrender. It is in many countries' best interests to keep the conflict going, because Peace on anything except their terms brings collapse and ruin.

So, let me take a stand and say that I do not want peace in the Middle East -- I just want the dying to stop. I just fear the dying will only stop when there's nobody left to die.

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