And Again

The Palestinians and the Israelis are at it again. Last I looked, a couple hundred people had been killed, a couple thousand had been injured, hostages had been taken and blame had been laid.

Peace, despite all appearances, is not a particularly difficult thing to achieve. It's peace under whatever conditions one feels the need to specify that's the hard part. And the Israel-Palestine conflict will continue until one side or the other is able to impose the conditions that it wants. My money is on Israel; the Palestinians are tenacious, but have neither the capacity or the allies to force Israel to make the level of concessions that they would want.

Maybe this isn't the correct way of looking at it, but I'm of the opinion that all of this fighting is simply a waste of time and lives.The Palestinians have no allies who are either ready, willing or able to either strongarm or entice Israel into accepting an independent Palestinian nation-state.

Which sucks for the Palestinians. Israel has boxed themselves in, policy-wise. The only way that an Israel that annexes all of the Palestinian territories could remain both Jewish and democratic would be to either expel large numbers of the Palestinians from the nation, or make them non-citizens. But at this point, the idea that eventually, both Gaza and the West Bank will be completely annexed is, as it appears to me, a foregone conclusion.

The Palestinians can fight against this all they want, but they always come out on the losing side of conflicts with Israel, and they can't afford a war of attrition. There simply aren't enough of them to sustain always having the higher casualty counts indefinitely.