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The Unreasonable Party Always Wins: Israel and Gaza
The only paid job I have ever had was teaching teenage girls how to lie. The High School in question called it “Model UN,” but I ran it like my own little fiefdom in which I dispensed wisdom and argued with students with reckless abandon.
One of the axioms I taught is that, in any brokered settlement, “The Unreasonable Party Always Wins.” This sticks in the craw, but it is true. Here are a few examples:
Imagine there are 12 matchsticks. A teacher tells two students to divide the sticks between them. The reasonable student suggests a 6/6 split. The unreasonable student claims victimhood of some kind, and says she needs all 12.
The teacher/arbiter comes in, and splits the difference! Halfway between 6 and 12 is 9, so 9 sticks go to the unreasonable party, and 3 to the reasonable party. Voila!
The very same thing happens in EVERY brokered settlement. Consider divorce: the party with the most hard-line demands wins, almost every time.
In sports, the referees end up being pushed around by the more physically aggressive team, so more fouls are called on the “nicer” team. Double standards are the net result, necessarily and every time.
Which brings us to Gaza. Hamas wants to kill all the Jews. Israel wants Hamas to stop killing Jews. So the brokered agreement, should there be one, would be to only kill half the Jews. Isn’t that only fair?
This inherent feature explains why the Arab instinctively know they should never, ever, back down from the most outrageous demands they can make. If anyone can impose a settlement, the Arabs will have moved the needle far away from any actual reasonable position.
The only way the reasonable party wins is to simply refuse to discuss the issue. Reject all intermediaries or judges or referees. In other words: make sure the situation is not brokered. Israel must do what it needs to do to end the threat to its own existence. And Israel must totally ignore the United Nations, a body that is somehow given legitimization as a democratic body, even though most of its own members came to power by ruthlessly murdering their opponents. There is no moral authority in the United Nations. Might should not Make Right, and Righteousness is not subject to majority approval.
Israel must hold absolutely firm to its position, and it must refuse all offers of “referees.”
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And after that agreement, and they’ve killed half the Jews, Hamas will immediately return to the negotiation table. They’ll want to kill all those Jews.
Because regardless of the negotiated settlement, the beliefs of the Palestinian people remain the same.
For many years I heard that pedophiles couldn’t be fixed. That opinion usually came from people in law enforcement. I questioned it because I had always believed that with enough love and support and positivity, we could fix anybody. I was wrong. They were right. The opinion of people in law enforcement was shaped by the reality of their actually having to live with these monsters in their custody in one way or another.
I think acute anti-Semitism is the same thing. It’s a pornography addiction issue.
Because of the way the human brain works, because actual physical myelin sheathing increases around nerves the more we do things, the terrorists are dangerous and cannot be fixed. These people have chosen a dark path into anti-Semitism that they consume in ever increasing amounts, in the way some people seek out pornography.
The more pornography spreads through the Internet, the more it multiplies. Apparently the same has happened with anti-Semitism.
It’s an addiction.
We cannot fix it. God can, and he will have to if he wants to, but we cannot.
And we cannot let deranged people run the world.
To a lesser degree, this happens in our own government. How often do the Dems get what they want compared to the Republicans?
This is one reason Democrats viewed Trump as such a threat. He abandoned the “Republicans are nice & polite” standard. He fought like they did.
And they didn’t like it.
All you had to do was ask them how much they weigh.
The class should’ve taken 30 seconds, tops…
I see it that Hamas has asked for an all or nothing fight to the death, while depending on mercy from Israel. How this ends will depend on the PR battle, but I am rooting for David against Goliath.
I found negotiating (tax) contracts/agreements with Asian foreign representatives the same: any agreement thought to be concluded was negotiated through the airport, until I got on the plane and a new proposal waiting when I landed. No agreement was ever final final.
Israel’s entire land mass is less than 1 percent of the land mass of Arab lands. Much less.
I’d say the unreasonable party is doing fine.
Those colonialist invaders and their bloodlust for stealing the land of others!
This comes from confusing a reason with an excuse.
”We wast to burn cities and steal sneakers because we’re really mad about George Floyd.”
”Well, okay, now we know the reason, but you’re still going to jail and spending your days on work parties cleaning graffiti and repairing windows because your reason doesn’t excuse you of responsibility for your actions.”
You would think. But I was teaching them how to lie for their country!
My girls went to the Model UN conference, and took the field. They leveraged the most unreasonable bald-faced assertions imaginable. Nobody was gutsy enough to call them out for it. Much like the Woke crowd today.
I taught game theory, the Big Lie, gaslighting (before it was a common term)… every possible way to blame the other guy for your own sins, muddy the waters, wield fallacies like rapiers… if Gerry had more self-awareness, he could give a Master Class.
It’s really sorry that he represents a considerable % of the credentialed class. In attitude and opinion. If not so dangerous it would still be tiresome.
The size of Israel and the size of the Gaza strip are critical data points in this war. The obvious solution would be to disburse the current residents of the Gaza strip throughout the Arab world. Why hasn’t that happened?
I’m guessing that, over the last seventy years, the Gaza strip, with the help of the United Nations’ teaching the residents that they were confined to this space because of the Jews in Israel, the terrorists have multiplied. Iran uses this place to develop terrorists from a young age. The rest of the Arab world knows this and treats it as a ground zero area for an Ebola-like infectious mentality. The Arabs want to contain this infection while Russia and Iran want to exploit it. Meanwhile Iran pulled the most promising terrorists out to train them in Iran for this mission. And Russia wants this conflict to divert the United States’ attention and resources away from Ukraine.
This. All my life. Most of us are good citizens. Then one weakling crybully pitches a fit, and his whining ruins the music for everyone.
And yet there sits FJB in the White House.
Spelling it Gerry rather than Jerry invites confusion with Gary, which – while perfectly understandable – is still a mistake.
Hamas has killed the 2 state solution. They’ve proven that there can be no compromise.
Israel should delete the Gaza strip, reduce Gaza city to rubble and deport all residents. Palestinians need a responsible state to govern them. Unfortunately they’ve burned all their bridges in the Arab states…
The “Palestinians” were created with those bridges pre-burned “for their convenience.”
Yes, I’ve had an example of this right here on R>. I asked: If “drive the Jews into the sea” is acceptable and right for the Palestinians to call for of the Jews, is it equally right for the Jews to call for driving the Palestinians into the sea?
And the answer I got back was similarly disjointed as your examples in your OP. The member who answered said that, yes, for those Palestinians who advocate this intention, the Jews have the right to do it as well.
But this misses that the supposedly few Palestinians who advocate this, want to drive ALL of Israel into the sea, but by the member’s reasoning the Jews are only allowed to drive the FEW Palestinians who hold that view into the sea.
He avoids answering the question more directly. But the reverse advocacy that Palestinians could rightly drive all the Jews into the sea, is that the Jews could rightly drive ALL the Palestinians into the sea. I have not yet gotten a reasonable answer to this question.
Its funny how times change – but back when the British ran Palestine, Palestinians were Jewish. Maybe support would dwindle if the lefties realize that Hamas was culturally appropriating their identify from the Jews?
The Palestinian culture is a bigger part of the problem than Hamas. I hate writing that because I want the Israelis to kill Hamas guys and then the peaceful Palestinians can make a fair peace with Israel and I can go to Gaza and eat my weight in Hummus and Hummus related food. The restaurant would be set up by an Israeli-Arab chef who came back to Gaza to improve both food safety and quality.
Doesn’t that sound fun?
A shame that I doubt it can happen. (I would tipped my waiters generously.)
Every Asia foreign representative? I think the Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong folks would be on the level.
Are you speaking of me? Because here’s our exchange:
https://ricochet.com/1506137/rescuing-the-underdog/comment-page-2/#comment-6958967
true – anybody who thought that was okay can’t make a moral objection to it happening the other way. (And vice versa.)
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Meaning: we need to be consistent.
IF it’s morally okay to drive X into the sea then it is also okay to drive Y into the sea.
But also
If it is NOT morally okay to drive X into the sea then it is also NOT okay to drive Y into the sea.
Hope that helps.
And who wants to drive whom into the sea now?
If we are not literal minded about the phrase, all too many.
Nonetheless I must applaud the correct use of whom.
There is a time to be literal minded and a time to metaphorical. But when people say what they literally mean then being literally minded is appropriate.
Okay. Drive into the sea means – I assume – kill or drive away. What do you think it means?
This makes it clearer, a bit, but it avoids providing a clear answer. For example, you use X and Y without explaining who they represent. This leaves open the interpretation of applying this turn-about only to the terrorists who committed atrocities. But the Palestinians are slaughtering all Israelis indiscriminately.
These are real world events taking shape. The Palestinian state (and presumably its allies) is currently actively engaged in fulfilling its goal of eliminating the Israeli state and ALL its Jews, and they have begun by calculated slaughter of innocent civilians. If no one stops the Palestinians, no Jew will likely survive.
The Israeli state is the only thing absolutely determined in preventing the Palestinian state from accomplishing its goals.
But the Palestinian state is crying foul, and demanding “humanitarian aid,” still with the intention of fulfilling its own goals of eliminating the Jews. This is a clear double standard. They were not concerned with humanitarian aid for Israelis when they were literally slaughtering them and trying to chop the heads off wounded Israelis with dull hoes.
My question is: Is this double standard morally allowed to stand?
Or is it justified for the Israeli state to adopt its enemies’ exact goals and to respond in kind?
X is the Israelis, Y is the Palestinians.
But the point is X and Y can be any equivalent group. In this case national group but you could extrapolate to political group as well.
You need to ask someone who does have a double standard. For example, someone who thinks it’s okay to treat Israelis and Palestinians, as a group, differently and that it’s moral to do so. I don’t believe this, but there are plenty on Ricochet who seem to. Ask them.
Are you saying that you don’t think there’s a double standard or that you don’t know whether it is allowed? Are you agnostic on the issue?