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October 29, 2023 at 5:15 PM

The Unreasonable Party Always Wins: Israel and Gaza

iWe
@iWe

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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."

This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.

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    Dr. Bastiat@drbastiat·2y
    iWe (View Post):
    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.

    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.

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    MarciN@MarciN·2y

    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.

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    Susan Quinn@SusanQuinn·2y

    To a lesser degree, this happens in our own government. How often do the Dems get what they want compared to the Republicans?

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    Dr. Bastiat@drbastiat·2y
    ReplyingtoSusan Quinn

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    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.

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    Dr. Bastiat@drbastiat·2y
    iWe (View Post):
    The only paid job I have ever had was teaching teenaged girls how to lie.

    All you had to do was ask them how much they weigh.

    The class should've taken 30 seconds, tops...

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