Fixing the Middle East: Simple Economics

Larry, more power to you if you can draw political insight from an Adam Sandler movie, Actually, more power to you if you can sit through an Adam Sandler movie.

To correct some of your math, Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1815, so that's nearly 200 years, not over 200. And you seem to accept as factual that the English and French have hated each other for thousands of years. But neither England nor France existed 2,000 years ago. Back then, both sides of the channel were populated by Celts, with ties of language, trade and culture.

Jewish-Muslim animosity is likewise at most a century old. Jews were fully integrated into the various Arab empires, and shared similar fates at the hands of European Christians: massacred when Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, expelled or forced to convert when Spain fell in 1492.

People who argue the Israel-Palestine standoff is intractable often exaggerate the depths of its roots. But I read last year of a DNA study that suggested a large proportion of Palestinians (perhaps a majority!) are original inhabitants of that land who stayed behind and assimilated linguistically and religiously over the centuries -- and in fact genetically speaking are more "Jewish" than many recent returnees from the diaspora.

Mindboggling, and shows how weird and surreal the whole I-P clash is.

Hey Larry, I agree with the broad point that economic growth will help increase tolerance, but I think that details are much more complicated and that money alone won't solve the problems. You should read this article:

Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace...in general the greater the monetary incentive involved in the deal, the greater the disgust from respondents. Israelis and Palestinians alike often reacted as though we had asked them to sell their children. This strongly implies that using the standard approaches of “business-like negotiations” favored by Western diplomats will only backfire.

And just when you thought that the article couldn't get more relevant to your post, it mentions the Hundred Years' War between the English and the French:

Many Westerners seem to ignore these clearly expressed “irrational” preferences, because in a sensible world they ought not to exist. Diplomats hope that peace and concrete progress on material and quality-of-life matters (electricity, water, agriculture, the economy and so on) will eventually make people forget the more heartfelt issues. But this is only a recipe for another Hundred Years’ War — progress on everyday material matters will simply heighten attention on value-laden issues of “who we are and want to be.”

The relevance ends, however, at the Zohan allusion. They don't go there.