Well it's on again, the late twentieth century's favorite cage fight: Israel vs. the Arabs! It's always a classic match, no matter who is representing the Arabs. Recent performances by the Hezbollah in northern matches last summer were excellent –– producing spectacular TV footage and rave reviews from pundits and journalists all over the world. This summer we aren’t looking at the big time game that we had in Lebanon. No sir, the Gaza Strip is a far more pedestrian location, but don’t let Hamas fool you by their relatively poor first appearances. While they seem a simple home town team, without the big rockets that Hezbollah have –– let alone the heavy artillery and first world air force that Israel commonly deploy in these matches –– these boys have guts and determination to burn, backing from Syria and Iran, and a game plan so simple that Israel will find it very hard to beat: survival. Yes indeed, it is going to be a humdinger of a match that promises all the drama and spectacle that we have come to expect of the Middle East. Game On!

Now if as an introductory paragraph that seems somewhat sarcastic, or even insulting, then you need to think outside the square about what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip. Hateful corp-speech though that cliché might be, it is actually something that we don’t do very much.

Go through the numbers in your head. The first communal violence between Jewish settlers and Palestinians in what was then the British mandate of Palestine was in early 1920. The communal violence continued on a small scale until 1948 when we had the first real war. This was followed by another 3 major wars (1956, 1967 and 1973), a long term Israeli military intervention in Lebanon (1982-2000), dozens of skirmishes on the ground and in the air, some minor, some major, but seemingly constant, periods of resistance in the Occupied Territories (1987, 2000), and since the first one in 1952 more terrorist attacks than any one cares to remember.

I’m thirty eight and I can’t remember a time when Israel-Palestine wasn't a festering boil on the backside of the world. Every time the boil flares up again we get the articles complaining about who did what to whom in what order. We get the complaints that not enough effort has been put into diplomacy. We blame the USA, we blame Syria, we blame Iran, we blame Israel, we blame the PLO and Hamas, we blame Islam, we blame the Zionists, we blame, we blame, we blame and we blame. We blame because we want the pointless, never-ending violence to stop. We blame because we believe that all our politicians, diplomats, thinkers and soldiers should be able to find a way to stop this stupid, pointless violence. We have spent 60 years since the founding of Israel looking for a solution and not having found it we instead take comfort in sweeping generalizations that allow us to place the blame for our failure: Muslims are all corrupt, rabid terrorists who hate democracy, freedom and are dedicated to driving every last Jew into the sea; Israelis are all racist, rabid Zionists dedicated to driving every last Palestinian into exile and stealing their land.

Sure these two statements are extreme, but at their heart they are what our excuses amount to for the ongoing failure of all the peace talks, peace conferences, diplomatic missions etc. The only difference being whether you are pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, your bent generally determining who you blame. I’ve studied the conflict at university and have seen this attitude in the corridors of academia first hand. You see it every day in the newspapers and on TV, and I can't even begin to cover the range of diatribes –– foul and reasoned –– that fester on the internet.

Reasonable people, and we are the majority, find it an almost impossible situation to deal with. Both sides have good arguments, both sides have committed gross atrocities, both sides are mostly composed of good people who want quiet lives, both sides have monsters, and both sides seem to be unable to find a formula to allow them to live side by side.

With every serious diplomatic attempt at a solution –– most recently the 1993 Oslo Talks that culminated in the failed talks under President Clinton at Camp David in 2000 –– each side find good reasons to walk away. You may not agree with Arafat’s decision to abandon the 2000 talks –– the man was one unpleasant bastard –– but it is hard to fault his complaints about the right of return, the limits placed on the supposed Palestinian state or the geographic constraints Ehud Barak was insistent on. It is also hard to fault Israel’s concerns about terrorism, future security threats and the Palestinian right of return. It is also true that both sides could truthfully claim that the other side made too much out of their concerns. Possibly it is even true that one party or the other was deliberately looking to cause the talks to fail. There is always a good reason, always some truth amongst the lies and propaganda, always an excuse for the extremists on both sides to make sure everyone goes back to the fighting.

So here we are, after almost a century of violence, no further towards a solution; Israelis and Palestinians killing each other in job lots again –– the same tired arguments of moral equivalence and moral superiority being aired by the same tired protagonists and their cheer squads. Do I have a solution? Hell no, but I am getting tired of the constant belief that there is a solution. We have one country –– and a small country at that, about the size of New Jersey not counting the Occupied Territories –– and two peoples who claim that it is theirs. Maybe it is time we just accepted that there is no peaceful solution to be found? We can’t have Israel and Palestine –– we can have only one or the other –– so leave it to the historians to argue over whose fault it was and let them just fight it out once and for all.

What would this mean? Well it would mean hell on earth for the Palestinians as they would find themselves ethnically cleansed into Jordan. So bad for Jordan to then. How would the rest of the Arab world react? Not with direct violence –– Israel’s conventional military superiority would squash the rest of the Middle East like a bug –– however it would possibly see the overthrow of the Egyptian regime and possibly other pro-western governments in the region. It would likely see a new oil embargo, and in the present economic climate wouldn't that be a very bad thing? It would certainly see a huge upswing in Islamic terrorism worldwide and especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be a very very bad thing for those poor bastards who are deployed there right now. A litany of other bad things that would ensue keep occurring to me like the flashbacks of a nightmare caused by a very bad acid trip.

Crap! So I have to care. I hate that. I hate having to care what these maniacs do to each other. I hate that I can’t do anything to stop them going at each other like the main event at the CFC. If the Israelis and Palestinians are caught in a cage fight, we are all tapped in there with them. If we can’t work out how to stop them fighting then we are going to continue to get splattered by the media coverage, by the political and emotional fallout and by all the maniacs on both sides, and in their cheer squads like Al Quada, Iran, and Neocons etc., who will keep trying to pull the rest of the world into the fighting.

There is no end. The end.