Peace? Yeah, right...I ain't holdin' MY breath...

There has been incessant bloodshed, terrorism, and low-through-high-grade warfare in Israel/Palestine since 1947. It is, in fact, cosmically ironic that Israel, which won its current status as a State on the back of terrorists and atop the bodies of thousands of victims of terror in the lands it now occupies, complains about terrorism against its settlement. Violence in the region is not going to stop, now, or in the foreseeable future, or ever. The reasons for this are as intractable and as insusceptible to solution (short of total genocide on one side or the other) as the conflict itself.

Primary among them is that the Israelis will not now, or in the foreseeable future, or ever, permit the establishment of an actual, viable, functioning Palestinian state; so the two-state 'solution', subject of so much vain, futile 'negotiation' for the past 50 or so years is now and always will be a 'non-starter.'

This is because, starting right after the 1967 'war,' if not even before, the State of Israel has moved aggressively to gain and maintain control over the most valuable resource in the region: water. Israel controls virtually every source for fresh water in the area. So, they also control Palestinian access to and usage of water there. Palestinian farms go dry, ancient olive orchards turn to dust, and palestinian people thirst and cannot bathe, while Israel's swimming pools glitter like tiny blue gems in the desert. In the desert, water is life, water is power, water is all. Israel has appropriated--confiscated, actually--virtually all the access to water there is there, and there is no imagineable circumstance or set of circumstances under which Israel-as-state will ever relinquish that control. Without water, no viable Palestinian state can ever emerge or long survive. If Italy operated its water supply with respect to the Vatican the way Israel controls water in the West Bank and Gaza, the Vatican would cease to exist in a matter of months--and the papal body odor would drive the pilgrims right out of St. Peter's.

The notion of a so-called 'one-state solution' is a non-starter for slightly different reasons, one of them having to do with the constitutional composition of Israel as a "Jewish" state. Left to normal demographic tendencies, a combined Israeli-Palestinian State would become majority-Palestinian within decades. Given that the Israeli Constitution also creates a putative democracy as the political machinery of the state (pace, for the moment, the apparent irreconcilability of a theocratic Constitution and a democratic polity), within some distinct and knowable number of generations, and with their different birth-rates, Palestinians (that is, non-Jews) would soon outnumber Jews, and so threaten the reality of the "Jewish" state of Israel. One cannot imagine the "Jews" allowing this to happen, either. So that avenue toward peace is also blocked.

Then there is another piece of the puzzle: money.

At present, the USofA provides Israel with between $13 MILLION and $15 MILLION EVERY DAY. A quick basic math exercise determines that this amounts to between $3.5 BILLION and $5.5 BILLION EVERY YEAR. This is a LOT more than just walking-around money in the Israeli economy. If peace ever broke out, this subsidy to the Israeli state could be drastically reduced.

Israel has thrived in the region because of US and European economic stimuli, and because they have managed to keep their antagonists in disarray. The USofA began, and continues, the ICORP* of Iraq in no small part because it removed Iraq from the field of antagonists confronting Israel over its Palestinina 'policies.' A fragmented and fractured Iraq, engaged in civil war between its competing religious factions, has no excess energy or resources to direct toward pressuring Israel to ward a humane accomodation with the Palestinians. Israel's current program of violence against Lebannon and, soon (almost certainly, at the behest of the USofA) Syria, is aimed at the same end: creating civil unrest and violent chaos, from which a coherent plan of containing Israel cannot be pursued by Israel's antagonists.

With the (passive) assistance of the USofA --which, in this case, consists of holding back and foregoing the role of honest mediator in the disputes--this policy seems to be succeeding.