By Daoud Kuttab

is may be an existential question, but why, indeed, do people go to war?

One reason people and nations go to war is to settle a dispute that they are unable to resolve peacefully. The stubbornness exhibited in this case is often based on a lie that is perpetuated and repeated so much that even the party that is lying often starts believing it.

This is particularly the case in the case of an internal or civil war.

People go to war because they lie to themselves that everyone believes their lies, only to be confronted by an opposition that feels the exact opposite.

While war often happens when both parties are lying to themselves and others, often it takes one side’s lie for a war to break.

If war is therefore the result of a lie, what happens when everyone attempts to tell the truth?

First, it is often hard to know where the truth is.

Unless one has free and fair elections, it is often hard to know which side’s opinions are really representing the majority. And elections are a complicated act that require consensus on how to conduct them.

Are they based on national lists or on the one-person one-vote system? Are they about the winner takes it all or do they encourage power sharing? Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

Out of nowhere this week, two prominent individuals came out in support of the two-state solution as the best way to move the dormant Palestinian-Israeli conflict forward.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, whose organisation is part of the comatose Quartet, spoke at a special session of the UN Security Council in New York about the need for a negotiated solution. “I strongly urge the incoming government to reaffirm Israel’s commitment to the two-state solution,” Ban said.

At the same time, Noam Chomsky and the voluntarily exiled Israeli academician Ilan Pappe produced divergent points of view. While Pappe, known for research into the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, urges the scrapping of the two-state solution and the adoption of the one-state option, Chomsky backs the two-state idea.

These ideas endorsed by the UN head or the MIT professor are not new. They reflect the vast majority of worldwide political thinking as the easiest and fastest way to resolve the nearly half a century of Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.

What is new is that neither of these men gave any new direction as to how to accomplish this goal in light of the rejection of the current Israeli leader and the majority of Israelis who voted for him in last March’s Knesset election.

It is true that shortly after winning the election (largely due to the statement that there will be no Palestinian state) Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to backtrack, but it would be hard to find any respected Israeli or international figure who does not believe that what Netanyahu said on the eve of the elections is what he truly believes and what apparently most Israelis also agree with. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

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