Conflict Irresolution

Watching the news of the day and reading about history, you learn a few things about war and conflict.

Man seems to be an irredeemably warlike creature. If you look at it from a Darwinian standpoint, the group that is willing to be stronger and more aggressive will naturally win out over groups that want to be peaceful or be left alone. Evolutionary biologists would probably disagree with me, but natural selection and survival of the fittest seems to dictate that the most warlike people will probably prevail and pass on their genes. This is the thought that leads me to not be surprised that man can't seem to evolve past war.

History's examples of invasions and wars often follow a pattern. The winner tends to completely dominate or expel and sometimes wipe out the loser. The winner often moves in and occupies the territory of the loser. While history has many examples of the loser regrouping and rebuilding and challenging the winner again, there are also many examples of the loser being utterly destroyed. My favorite example is what the Romans did to the Carthaginians after the third Punic war. Although it is probably just a myth, it was said that the Romans sowed the ground with salt after defeating Carthage so that they could never even farm and support themselves in the future - they could never rise again. Another great example is what happened to the biblical era Assyrians. They had a brutal empire that wiped out anyone that opposed them. They made examples of their rivals in order to terrorize any other groups that might be thinking of rebellion. In the end, when they were finally defeated, the rebels wiped out all the Assyrians to a degree that 200 years later, the locals did not even know who used to live there. The Greek warrior Xenophon moved through and asked who used to live in the huge empty cities that were abandoned when the Assyrians were destroyed. The locals thought that it was the Meads, the memory of the Assyrians was so well destroyed. See Dan Carlin's Hardcore History about the fall of Ninevah.

The average defeated minor group could resent their losses all they wanted, but they were powerless to do anything about it. If they weren't killed, they were usually stripped of all their possessions, and often forced out of their homeland.

If you look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you see that this pattern was disrupted. The Palestinians were not allowed to lose completely. The peace plans after the various wars and armed conflicts usually ended in a "civilized" system that let the civilian population keep their lives and stay in their land. The problem with this is that the Palestinians are still around and still want to keep the conflict open. They will never be happy until the Jews are gone. The hatred has only grown through their defeat, giving a face to the cause and a people to be championed by other enemies of Israel.

Ironically, if the Israelis had been less civilized and more brutal, and wiped out or displaced the Palestinians completely, they would not have the population of people that sit in their midst, sowing discontent.

If you look at other examples, actually, I'm thinking of Germany and Japan after WWII. In that case, the central government was defeated completely and replaced with a foreign government to rule over them. So in a sense, what we Americans fought during the war, ceased to exist when the war was over. What was left was the people, and they were governed in a manner that let them understand and believe that their welfare was important to them. I wonder if that could have ever worked in the Arab-Israeli conflict?