Cause of Middle East Conflict

1) Israel's existence is the cause of the conflict

2) Israeli imperialism is responsible for the conflict

3) Arab inability to except political reality of Israel's existence

4) Arab states exploiting Israel-Palestinian conflict for their own benefit, but to the detriment of peace

5) Islamic resistance to dominant Western influence in Middle East

6) Western inability to influence and impose diplomatic solution

7) It started when an old guy called Abraham had a son with his maidservant Hagar

8) Gah!

All of the above , and more .:shrug:

The Cause of Conflict in the Middle East goes back a loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggg time, when the Arabs sacked Jerusalem was a major key in the conflict. To the Crusaders brutal approach to handling the situation. the Death knell however, would be the partitioning of the Middle East by Geography rather than culture by the British Empire. the modern Israeli-Middle East Conflict was completely avoidable and is just a continuation of the "troubles".

Mainly
Israels existence (I'm not against it, but certain radicals are, and it wasn't unforseeable)
and your option 3) Arab inability to except political reality of Israel's existence

wich both have their roots in:

#) the incomprehensible fixation on a piece of soil on both sides.

Well historical speaking the conflict started when the Jews returned to their former homeland.

A very short history:

After a failed Jewish revolt against the Romans, a lot/most Jews fled their homeland in what is now called the diaspora and spread across the world. The Dreyfus-affaire in the 19th century changed all that and the support for a homeland grew. They bought land in their former homeland which was now under Arab control and later fought their way in. The position of the UK on the matter (UK had Palestine as a mandate after WWII IIRC) didn't approve the matter at all. Conflict was born.

Arab states fostering conflict to deflect from their own corruption and incompetence

*snip* *snip* *paste* *paste*

Arab states fostering conflict stemming from their own corruption and incompetence

Voted "Gah" for lack of multiple vote option.

B,C, D, F are all actively correct.

E implies that the West is central to the conflict and deserves a central role in resolving it (I disagree), but probably bears some truth to it anyway.

A is a reason with which I disagree, but probably does describe the perceptions/motivations of a segment of the islamic "street."


Phil:

Interesting reminder about the impact of l'affaire Dreyfus. I've always wondered how the face of the modern world would have been altered had the Ottomans not been dragged into the Great War by the captain of der Goeben. Tried to start a thread on that in the Monastery, but there were no takers.

I just noticed in the news a western journalist and an Israeli military officer taking a helicopter ride around northern Israel and he officer was lamenting about the emptiness of the streets and nearby beach. The cities and villages look very much unscath.

I find the officers statement rather incongruous considering 11+ times more Lebanese civilian casualties compared to Israel and state of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon.

Why is it that we never hear about the approximately 300 thousand settlers in 300 illegal colonies/settlements surrounding Jerusalem and the West Bank, rampant discrimination and systemic discrimination of Israeli Arabs and the repressive Israeli regime in occupied territories?

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7) It started when an old guy called Abraham had a son with his maidservant Hagar

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The world would be a very different place without Judaism, Christianity or Islam tbh. Whether or not it would be better, I can't honestly say. Would it have been more peacefull? Well, I doubt it could be much worse. There seems to have been a much more liberal view of religion prior to the rise of Christianity and Islam, so there would have been fewer faith-based conflicts at least.

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Originally Posted by Wakizashi

The Cause of Conflict in the Middle East goes back a loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggg time, when the Arabs sacked Jerusalem was a major key in the conflict. To the Crusaders brutal approach to handling the situation. the Death knell however, would be the partitioning of the Middle East by Geography rather than culture by the British Empire. the modern Israeli-Middle East Conflict was completely avoidable and is just a continuation of the "troubles".

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Hey Wakizashi, The arabs didn't sack jerusalem, the governer of the city surrendered it to them, gave the keys to the Caliph himself.

All of the above and GAH!.

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Originally Posted by AFM984

Hey Wakizashi, The arabs didn't sack jerusalem, the governer of the city surrendered it to them, gave the keys to the Caliph himself.

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Oh, sorry. But Point Being, it pissed the Christians off...

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Originally Posted by Wakizashi

Oh, sorry. But Point Being, it pissed the Christians off...

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Are you talking about when the Arabs first captured Jerusalem? Because they first captured it from the Persians around 630AD, with Jewish help. According to the Jewish Virtual Library anyway.

Also, when you talk about the partitioning of the middle east by the British, presumably you mean Iraq. Look up Gertrude Bell, who was overwhelmingly the dominant figure in said partitioning. She was well regarded by the Iraqis themselves, who maintained fresh flowers on her grave until recently. According to Iraqis there wasn't much sectarian conflict until the 2003.

yeah, except the Shi'ite uprisings after the Gulf War that were handily crushed and the Kurdish Genocide Before that... not much sectarian violence...

The whole bloody mess would be solved if Jerusalem ware nuked apart in a massive explosion. That way "The Dome of the Rock", "Solomon's Temple" and Golgota would perish forever and with them those three bloody monotheistic religions.
The cause of conflict isn't racial ( Arabs and Jews are semitic), it's religious. So with the end of religion we might see an end of conflict.

Interesting to think that three world religions would 'perish' with the destruction of Jerusalem. Especially considering Christianity is based mostly in Europe and the Americas and uses Jerusalem for little more than a pilgrimage site, Judaism has survived for centuries in exile with their population and faith mostly elsewhere, and Islam considers the city only their 3rd holiest site, after Mecca and Medina. These must be some very fragile religions if their existence depends on the existence of this city.

It would surely piss off all three to see the place go up in smoke (so I'm not sure who would do the deed--perhaps India or China, need someone with nukes and without a powerful constituency of any of the three religions), and with a big enough stretch of thinking the loss of the icon might reduce violence, but I think the issues run much deeper than control of Jerusalem, major though that is.

Not a very well-thought post this time, IMO, Cronos.

Ajax

Ajaxfetish, have you heard an Al Qaeda spokesman?
He would say he wants Jerusalem a muslim city.
Have you heard a Jewish rabbi speak about the Temple of Solomon?
He wants Jerusalem to stay Jewish.
Have you heard a Christian fundamentalist?
He wants that pilgrimage site no matter what.


The root of all evil in the Middle East isn't ethnic or political, it's religion itself.
When Jerusalem would dissapear, when The Holy Land will become again Palestine, than the world would know peace again.

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Originally Posted by Wakizashi

yeah, except the Shi'ite uprisings after the Gulf War that were handily crushed and the Kurdish Genocide Before that... not much sectarian violence...

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Were they crushed because they were Shi'ites, or were they crushed because they opposed Saddam's rule? Saddam was an old-fashioned Stalinist - he didn't distinguish between racial divides, he distinguished between people likely to support him and people likely to oppose him. Compare with Stalin's persecution of Jews, which was not racially based but was based on their social ties with the outside world (Zionism was the reason he gave).

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than the world would know peace again.

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In that region.. untill they found something else to fight about..

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Originally Posted by Wakizashi

The Cause of Conflict in the Middle East goes back a loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggg time, when the Arabs sacked Jerusalem was a major key in the conflict. To the Crusaders brutal approach to handling the situation. the Death knell however, would be the partitioning of the Middle East by Geography rather than culture by the British Empire. the modern Israeli-Middle East Conflict was completely avoidable and is just a continuation of the "troubles".

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Sacked?!

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The root of all evil in the Middle East isn't ethnic or political, it's religion itself.
When Jerusalem would dissapear, when The Holy Land will become again Palestine, than the world would know peace again.

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And what is Palestine then if there is neither Christian, Jew or Muslim?

Will it be Canaanite? Too late, population is gone...

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Originally Posted by x-dANGEr

Sacked?!

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As mentioned previously, I already stood down on that comment. It means nothing against Arabs. I just think that Sectarian Violence in the middle east has been happening for a Long LOOONG Time, and it's more an amalgamation of Jews, Christians, Muslims hating each other, rather than just "The Jewish problem".

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Originally Posted by Wakizashi

As mentioned previously, I already stood down on that comment. It means nothing against Arabs. I just think that Sectarian Violence in the middle east has been happening for a Long LOOONG Time, and it's more an amalgamation of Jews, Christians, Muslims hating each other, rather than just "The Jewish problem".

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I didn't read the whole thread.. So.. Sorry ;)

I voted #1, since it's about the single most important factor in for example #3. Personally I've never quite understood why they're willing to go into so much trouble, foster so much anti-Jewish sentiment worldwide and engage in a conflict they just plain can't win in the long run period over patches of arable land they don't really even need since their economy, society and technology ought to be quite sophisticated enough for their national economy to run smoothly without having to fight tooth and nail over farmland.

But then again, I was never good at understanding the motivation behind Eretz Yisrael, the endless whinage over the possession of the Karelian Ishtmus, Lebensraum or any other such irrational nationalist territorial aspirations steeped in irrelevant ethnic, cultural and/or sectarian mystique anyway.

People have been fighting in what is usually called the Levant for millenia, true enough, but that was always primarily because (like much of the rest of the Middle East except the deep deserts proper) it was a strategically vital crossroads and an enormously important link in trade networks around the entire Eastern Mediterranean and stretching at least as far inland as the foothills of the Iranian plateau. It's hardly a coincidence the ancient Egyptians and the assorted "Asian" (as the Egyptians called them) empires fought so often and bloodily over influence in the region or that the Seleucids and Ptolemies and later Romans and Persians (both Parthians and Sassanids) fought so many wars there. (The Muslim Arabs conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantines who'd only recently reconquered it from the Sassanids and meted out due punishement to the Jews who'd aided the latter due to being understandably disgruntled at the persecution the Byzantines had subjected them for centuries for religious reasons; as also happened in Egypt, whose Coptic populace hated the Basileus' Orthodox clergy only slightly less than his tax collectors, the locals greeted the Muslims as liberators.) The Crusades and the squabbling between the Shi'ites and Sunnis would be just about the only major conflicts where religion was an actually major factor. The Israeli land-grab is a bit more difficult to define given the peculiar (if often rather tenuous) link between religion and ethnicity in Judaism; certainly what was and is primarily fought over in practice is arable land, water deposits and similar as-such valuable (given the aridity of the region) items of geography.

Gah

Its black and its underground

That's not in the Levant though. The only valuable liquid underground there is good old H2O.

666) Fundamentalism and the ease of its use as a herd control tool for those with a desire for power.

@Watchman: Heraclios' campaign against Sassanid Persia, wich lead to the reconquest of the Levant and other territories, was religiously motivated. The Persians had taken the supposed cross of Christ upon conquering Jerusalem. Some historians call his campaign the first crusade.

One word: Religion. It has caused more conflict throughout history than anything else.

EDIT: Ok, ok, I recant. However, I still believe religion has been a major cause in many conflicts throughout history.