Here’s an interesting scientific paper about Palestinians and Israeli settlers. The experiments asked each group questions intended to judge how willing they were to compromise. Then, they asked the questions again, but threw in a side-offer, for example of economic aid or third-power security guarantees. Interestingly, all the groups split into two identifiable types; some…
Read More I don’t need you, I can’t buy you, I can’t hurt you…You rock. It’s interesting that blockade-running is a lasting technique of protest; Joseph Conrad did a spot on behalf of the Spanish Carlists, Erskine Childers for the IRA (although he thought he was doing it for the other side), and then, there was the saga off Bilbao in the Spanish Civil War. It’s always worth…
Read More Outside the three mile limit in ’65…This essay by Ian McEwan in the Guardian Review shows precisely why the Decent influence on British intellectual life is so damn depressing. You may think, and I would say the AaroWatch crew are guilty of this, that they are just a bunch of wankers left behind with their blogs after history moved on. But…
Read More Indecent behaviour at a police station, TPCA 1847The great Israeli historian Martin van Creveld argued, years ago, that the occupation must end because of the “power of the weak”, that eventually the degree of violence that would be needed to maintain it would destroy Israeli moral cohesion. It seems someone on the other side has read him. Within the last month we’ve…
Read More Van Creveld in GazaThe new map of the Middle East crazed wingnut Ralph Peters came up with needs a bit more battering, I think. Specifically, as well as the fact that even though in the text of the article he accepts that the Israelis ought to go back to the Green Line, and on the map he blithely…
Read More Ralph Peters: ManiacNow it’s all over, what was all the shooting about? To answer that question, we’d first need to know something of each side’s aims. Hezbollah’s were reasonably clear, at least as far as the decision to take the two soldiers prisoner went: put pressure on the Israelis to release their remaining Lebanese prisoners, and not…
Read More A war for neuroticsThe last post went a bit off-topic as the rockets got in the way of the strategy. So, a recap. Hezbollah is following, I think, a sort of fleet-in-being strategy. They want to keep their militia and their quasi-state role inside Lebanon, and anything that weakens the Lebanese government is conducive to that. Even being…
Read More Maintenance of the aim