I hope everyone read the long article in the Times on Sunday about the history of the conflict leading up to the war in Georgia. It is worth understanding how this war began.
But I especially hope strong partisans on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides of that conflict read it. For I suspect that their initial reaction will be like mine: both sides are responsible for this mess and both ought to be acting a whole lot more sensibly. Its is hard not to sympathize with the Georgians with the Russian Bear next door, until you see what the Georgians have been doing to their minorities and how they are provoking the Russians.
That’s more or less the way I look at the Israel-Paletinian conflict these days. I’m still a supporter of Israel’s right to exist. (And I wrote my first published article calling for a Palestinian state in 1968 when I was 13.) But I no longer can accept the Israeli narrative that blames the conflict entirely on the other side. There is a lot you can blame the Palestinians for. But the Israelis have contributed an equal share to making this awful conflict so hard to resolve.
But it is hard to see that the fault is on all sides when it is your own conflict, and you care more about one side or the other. So it would be helpful for Israeli and Palestinian partisans to look at how utterly unnecessary the Russian-Georgian war is as a way of getting outside their own dispute. A warning is in order, however, once you get outside your own side, anger at the other tends to dissipate. And you are left with tears.