Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliat…
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.
Nah, it's really not that complicated. Stephen Pinker and Dyer agree on this: humans are the most-social animals on the planet, save for hives; we hate hurting each other, and only do so under stress. Remove the stress, the violence will stop. Pinker also notes that nothing makes a man ready for violence, not hurts or hunger, as humiliation. And humiliation is constant. Glenn Greenwald dug up this factoid early in the Iraq War:
"In 2002, during the second Intifada, Moshe (“Boogie”) Ya’alon, the Israeli Chief of Staff (and [later] the Minister of Defense) declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
Joe Sacco's book, Palestine, tells many stories, not just of violent treatment of Palestinians, but routine, endless little humiliations. It's a recipe for inciting violence. Sacco's book ends with an image of a young boy being forced to stand in front of an IDF soldier for a long time: the soldier under an eave, the boy out in the rain, and Sacco asks, what is that boy thinking?
Read Pinker about humiliation, read Sacco about a clear policy of endless humiliations in the hope of reaching the "deepest recesses of their minds" with defeat, and my word "inevitable" for violence, is like a mathematical proof.
It beggars belief that an entire nation, whose own foundational story is that they clapped back and broke out of bondage, slavery itself, and after 400 years, would imagine that another people could be broken to harness in a few generations, but it appears to be the idea.
There are many places where you can show that people don't need their own nation-state; that's an invented "need". They need to feel secure; modest prosperity; and above all, some respect, a complete lack of humiliation. Then the violence will stop. Maybe you can only get there with the vote - I respected a fine lecture from Ali Abunimah at the U of C about how only a one-state solution will work - or only with a second nation. But if you can give people those three things, they'll stop shooting.