Walking to Win- Win

Fighting Fire with Water--Peace, like a River.

"We have to get away from zero-sums and into win-wins" declared the head of J-Street, the Progressive Jewish organization based in DC with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

By way of contrast, a Jewish friend in LA said "we don't negotiate with terrorists, we flatten them like a parking lot and start over." That is an understandable sentiment. We are after all in a war. However, is that the most productive strategy to eliminating the problem?
He noted that the Palestinians name streets after terrorists who sneak into people's houses and kill off babies.
Those people you can't negotiate with, he stressed. Fair enough.
But if you want to stop it you have to first understand why it is happening.

We are a generation removed from the time when the entire country was formed by moving into land owned and occupied by someone else. If that happened in this country no one would tolerate it for five seconds. Imagine if New York and New Jersey all of a sudden were told to all move to Maine or anywhere else who would have them because we have all decided that we need to move Florida and Georgia up to New York and New Jersey to accommodate all the Cubans who want to live here instead. What is New York and New Jersey going to do? Sit there or move and faaagetaboutit??

Eventually if everyone forces them to, they do move to Maine, and they try to make do, but some of them retain bitterness and resentment. They don't build up Maine, they spend a lifetime trying to get back into their homes in New York and New Jersey. They teach their children that this sort of indignity and injustice cannot go without some accountability and they teach their children that if its the last thing that they are going to do, they will make Florida and Georgia pay.

Now what. How to stop the genocide of New York and New Jersey and Kamokazzi fighting New Mainers?

The best revenge is living well. If Maine starts looking like the new paradise and its better in Maine then a lot of them will give up the ghost of the New York high life. It certainly won't be worth losing your life to die for the revenge if life in Maine is better.
So AID has to be looked at, as in USAID. Balancing development budgets has to be looked at.

And the psychology of revenge and retribution has to be examined and dealt with better.
What diffuses that?
Reparations? Expropriation remedies?
Then there is the fact that there is a particular part of New York that is sui generis and unlike any place in the world; Manhattan. Who gets Manhattan (Jerusalem.) Perhaps since the whole world trades with Manattan the whole world should get a say about who controls it. Perhaps Jerusalem should be controlled by an international body or collaboration of all the monotheistic faiths in the parts where the holy sites to all are found, with access to all for all.

Indignities, humiliations and insults breed contempt and even violence. None of that solves anything but compounds the likelihood of violence.