Timelordwho wrote:
Terrorist groups require retaliation for long term survival.
No they don't. This is commonly repeated rhetoric which is based upon nothing more than a desire to oppose those who choose to fight terrorist groups.
A single group may cease to exist if it's reason for existing has ended (say they got everything they wanted). But the methods will continue and grow. Rewarding an organization which uses terrorism will only encourage the next 5 groups who want something to use terrorism as well. The problem grows as a result of that.
Punish and fight those who use it and the use of terrorism as a means to get what you want will reduce. It's that simple. Do so decisively, and you'll minimize the number of casualties. Drag it out over decades and you'll end up with a body count many many times higher.
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What do I mean by lasting peace? I mean deescalation of the combat situation and an eventual end to it.
De-escalation of combat only works if both sides believe that have gotten what they want out of the conflict (or at least that they can't gain more by continuing to fight). It's kind of the first rule of warfare.
Do you think that Hamas feels it's gotten everything it thinks it can get by using rockets and suicide bombs? If the answer is "no", then de-escalation cannot work. Period.
The vast majority of conflicts (arguably all) are only resolved by allowing them to escalate to a point where one side believes it can no longer gain a better position by continuing to fight and the other side is satisfied with the gains it has now. That's when you call for peace, send in the diplomats, and begin negotiations. Until that condition is met, any attempt to force a de-escalation of the conflict will not resolve it, but simply put it on hold. This almost always results in more loss of life over time, and certainly drags the conflict out.
In the context of recruitment for terrorism, dragging it out also tends to help recruitment, because while the conflict is ongoing, things tend to be bad for the populace in the area and there appears to be no way for things to get better. In those conditions, recruitment is going to be pretty easy.
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Putting conditional qualifiers on the concessions is an effective way of getting them to succeed. Try this type of concession: If you(Palestine) can reduce attacks on us(Israel) by terrorist cells within your country and keep them down, then we will share X resource(Be it land, or whatever). If they reduce them, then they get that concession, and if they don't they do not and if they escalate, they could lose previous conditional concessions and can point to those documents as a way of justifying their actions whatever the case.
Didn't you just say you'd studied this? This has been tried at least 3 or 4 times already. What happens every single time is that the leaders who negotiated the concessions are replaced with ones who vow to continue the conflict. Israel attempts to regain the "conditional" concessions it gave away and is labeled as aggressors (like when it rebuilds a wall, or retakes a neighborhood it gave up).
This *might* work if the international community actually remembered that what Israel gave up is supposed to be conditional on the Palestinian territories retaining the same leadership bound by their promises. But they never do, and Israel is always blamed for attempting to retake what it gave away in the last round of negotiations in which they didn't get what they were promised because of some leadership change among the Palestinians they negotiated with.
It's happened over and over. Yet, somehow, no one seems to remember that it's been tried and what happened each time. Just like you apparently can't either.
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Wow, that took a lot of work to develop a rough plan for effective international policy. I must be some kind of diplomatic savant.
Gee. If only this exact idea hadn't already been tried and failed a half dozen times already...
