Is there any way of having a less charged, tense Israel/Levant in general?

Is the situation between India and Pakistan thought to be less tense than the Middle East? Because if France collapsed into anarchy during/after World War I like Russia did, Britain might claim the whole area as a mandate. That could lead to division on more sensible ethnic lines, like on the Indian Subcontinent. It's not going to be hugs and puppies, but it will be a little less tense.
 
No Balfour declaration/failed Israel. Eliminating WWI, or preventing the Holocaust if there is WWI, could also help.

So long as you have people trying to take back land that isn't theirs through settlement and apartheid, there can be no peace in the region.

Giving us (Jews) the Holy Land was just asking for trouble from a Muslim (and Christian) population that also sees Jerusalem et. al as sacred.

Except for Mizrahim and some Sephardis, we hadn't lived there in nearly 2000 years. We have no justifiable claim on its land.
 
No Balfour declaration/failed Israel. Eliminating WWI, or preventing the Holocaust if there is WWI, could also help.

So long as you have people trying to take back land that isn't theirs through settlement and apartheid, there can be no peace in the region.

Giving us (Jews) the Holy Land was just asking for trouble from a Muslim (and Christian) population that also sees Jerusalem et. al as sacred.

Except for Mizrahim and some Sephardis, we hadn't lived there in nearly 2000 years. We have no justifiable claim on its land.

Could the mandate open it's borders to the Ashkenazim instead?
 
That's what it did. The other Jews arrived under the Ottomans -- Ashkenazi Zionists settled Israel and caused the tensions in the first place.
 
Is the situation between India and Pakistan thought to be less tense than the Middle East? Because if France collapsed into anarchy during/after World War I like Russia did, Britain might claim the whole area as a mandate. That could lead to division on more sensible ethnic lines, like on the Indian Subcontinent. It's not going to be hugs and puppies, but it will be a little less tense.

There is no such a thing as "sensible ethnic lines" to divide the Middle East along (short of large scale ethnic cleansing), nor was the Indian Partition defined by anything like that (India and Pakistan are both quite multi-ethnic by the way; and the Partition entailed massive and very painful population transfers).
The whole idea that stability can be achieved by implementing sort-of homogenous nation states have amply showed its dangerous nature everywhere it was tried outside the few areas where such states emerged by internal historical processes (that is, essentially, Western Europe; and the processes involved have been notoriously long and bloody).
 
There is no such a thing as "sensible ethnic lines" to divide the Middle East along (short of large scale ethnic cleansing), nor was the Indian Partition defined by anything like that (India and Pakistan are both quite multi-ethnic by the way; and the Partition entailed massive and very painful population transfers).
The whole idea that stability can be achieved by implementing sort-of homogenous nation states have amply showed its dangerous nature everywhere it was tried outside the few areas where such states emerged by internal historical processes (that is, essentially, Western Europe; and the processes involved have been notoriously long and bloody).

I'll add that even in places where nation-states emerged internally, stability was far from guaranteed. Rwanda and Burundi are both nation-states, based on precolonial kingdoms with their own languages (whereas in the rest of East Africa and in the eastern DRC, Swahili is widespread as a trade language). This did not prevent the Europeans from creating a Hutu vs. Tutsi ethnic distinction in them from scratch, with well-known consequences. Somalia is a nation-state, too, and it still managed to end up in permanent warlordism.

In the Levant, ethnic differences are responsible for strife in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine, but in Syria, the origin of the civil war isn't really ethnic. The spark that ignited it came from protests in Daraa, which came from large interregional inequalities. Those can happen both in nation-states like Britain and Italy and in multiethnic states like Belgium. (Andrew Odlyzko's monograph about the Railway Mania claims that the expansive rail network helped Britain avoid revolution in 1848.)

As for India, the only sensible ethnic line there is the one-nation theory.
 

Perkeo

Banned
Why is a more successful Oslo I Accord not even considered?

At the end of the day, I see no alternative to its basic patterns: two-state solution and a great deal of haggling about the borders - especially in Jerusalem - and about the compensation for confiscated land.

The success or failure of that region was always determined by the ability/inability to reach an understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims, and no POD is going to change that.
 

Perkeo

Banned
No Balfour declaration/failed Israel. Eliminating WWI, or preventing the Holocaust if there is WWI, could also help.

So long as you have people trying to take back land that isn't theirs through settlement and apartheid, there can be no peace in the region.

Giving us (Jews) the Holy Land was just asking for trouble from a Muslim (and Christian) population that also sees Jerusalem et. al as sacred.

Except for Mizrahim and some Sephardis, we hadn't lived there in nearly 2000 years. We have no justifiable claim on its land.

I don't buy that, for many reasons. The most obvious is: Israel, especially early Israel, was/is so ludicrously outnumbered that there's no way they could have won if they were really the only problem.

Successful Zionism is just the symptom, and without Israel there would be a different one.
 
Why is a more successful Oslo I Accord not even considered?

At the end of the day, I see no alternative to its basic patterns: two-state solution and a great deal of haggling about the borders - especially in Jerusalem - and about the compensation for confiscated land.

The success or failure of that region was always determined by the ability/inability to reach an understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims, and no POD is going to change that.

Oslo II is widely regarded as doomed in hindsight, especially as many now believe it was signed with crossed fingers from the start, with the Israelis never actually willing to countenance a Palestinian state (Arafat is also often accused of duplicity).
 

Perkeo

Banned
Oslo II is widely regarded as doomed in hindsight, especially as many now believe it was signed with crossed fingers from the start, with the Israelis never actually willing to countenance a Palestinian state (Arafat is also often accused of duplicity).

The Israelis did withdraw from Gaza, didn't they?
 

Perkeo

Banned
There is no such a thing as "sensible ethnic lines" to divide the Middle East along (short of large scale ethnic cleansing), nor was the Indian Partition defined by anything like that (India and Pakistan are both quite multi-ethnic by the way; and the Partition entailed massive and very painful population transfers).
The whole idea that stability can be achieved by implementing sort-of homogenous nation states have amply showed its dangerous nature everywhere it was tried outside the few areas where such states emerged by internal historical processes (that is, essentially, Western Europe; and the processes involved have been notoriously long and bloody).

I'm a bit sick of hearing what doesn't work in the middle east. The interesting question would be: What does?
 
I'm a bit sick of hearing what doesn't work in the middle east. The interesting question would be: What does?

This is a really good question. Problem is, the issues are pretty deep seated now and really difficult to address. I'd venture that some serious redistribution of wealth, for starters, would go a long way (and I do not regard the Gulf approach about throwing money at problems as really viable). Education is another matter that would need serious attention. And human rights, of course.
In short, states that actually care for their people, for a change.
 
I don't buy that, for many reasons. The most obvious is: Israel, especially early Israel, was/is so ludicrously outnumbered that there's no way they could have won if they were really the only problem.

Successful Zionism is just the symptom, and without Israel there would be a different one.

I don't buy that either for your reason and more... Israel won three wars, went from basically pariah status and surrounded and outnumbered to a tech and economic powerhouse (now with nukes). Whatever you might say about victor's justice, it is what it is and it is over. I am not a fan of blood feuds or vendettas -- the only people with justifiable claim are the people living now, who were kicked out and possibly their direct descendants not generations on generations until the end of time. At some point you have to say enough is enough. Exception for specific holy sites and so on.

If anything, Israel gave more stability in the region by uniting the Arabs together for several (unsuccessful) wars... Arab Nationalism did not fail because they failed to wipe Israel off the map, Arab Nationalism failed because they did not successfully transition from dictatorships to democracies. The POD for more stability is not no Israel, but a long living and more prescient Nasser who becomes some Putin-like figure (dictatorship through popular assent) or perhaps no invasion of Kuwait by Saddam (instead of misunderstanding the green-lit from Americans, perhaps Saddam realizes that war is not the solution no Gulf War 1 means no Gulf War 2 means no rise of terrorist / unstable states, etc.) then when Arab Spring happens, the democracies can be united and move in force instead of some moral ambiguity... under such conditions Western troops might even be welcomed as bringers of peace...
 
the three legged stool

Sykes-Picot altered to encompass a combined Lebanon-Palestine with the point of incorporating the Christian population the area along with the Jewish and Moslem populations (three legs stable, two legs not). Could be prompted by the French preempting the Balfour declaration to make up for the Dreyfuss mess.
 
Sykes-Picot altered to encompass a combined Lebanon-Palestine with the point of incorporating the Christian population the area along with the Jewish and Moslem populations (three legs stable, two legs not). Could be prompted by the French preempting the Balfour declaration to make up for the Dreyfuss mess.

Lebanon was conceived as a three-legged stool, too: Shia, Sunni, Maronite. Different birth rates created a Shia majority by the 1970s, which was not reflected in the power sharing agreements forged in the 1930s. The rest is history.

Doing something similar with Israel is problematic, since literally everyone around it speaks Arabic. You'd need to go to Iran and Turkey just to get down to 50% Arabic speakers.
 
Lebanon was conceived as a three-legged stool, too: Shia, Sunni, Maronite. Different birth rates created a Shia majority by the 1970s, which was not reflected in the power sharing agreements forged in the 1930s. The rest is history.

Doing something similar with Israel is problematic, since literally everyone around it speaks Arabic. You'd need to go to Iran and Turkey just to get down to 50% Arabic speakers.

Theoretically, you could have the Jews in Palestine pick Arabic as their official language. Arabic has been one of the culture languages of Judaism after all, and there is a fairly significant tradition of Arabic written in Hebrew script, with specifically Jewish literary variants.
The likelyhood is, of course, vanishingly small.
The early Zionist movement was overwhelmingly Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe, with Germanic Yiddish as the primary native language (alongside Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian, etc): they obviously had not cultural connection to Arabic.
The choice of Hebrew was rather logical, despite its exceptional nature and consequences, but there was an element of arbitrariness. The immigrants could have chosen to adopt a Judaic Arabic variety in recognition of the fact that they were going to share the land, and the future nation-state, with Arabic-speakers; the effort needed would have been no less than what occurred historically to enforce Hebrew.
In actual history, however, motivation to do that was non-existent. As far as I am aware, nobody ever considered such an idea.
Perhaps an earlier immigration from Arab countries would be required, but there would major obvious problems in that circumstance, since, historically, it was primarily the creation of the State of Israel that led to Arabic-speaking Jew to leave their homes (often forcibly) to go there.
Early immigration from other Arab lands to Palestine early is actually hard to conceive, everything else being historical. The factors conducive to that would also probably make Palestine the wrong place to go.
 
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