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Saturday 10 January 2009

These moralistic arguments don’t solve anything; they just further the violence. After all, killing Bad Guys must be a good thing, so all we have to do is prove that the other side has some Bad Guys and voila! — we have a simple solution to the problem. This is precisely the thinking that is going on among many Israelis and Palestinians. They have seen the suffering and they see the other side as the Bad Guy, and they just want to bash the Bad Guy. So Israelis kill Palestinians, Palestinians kill Israelis, and the cycle of violence goes on forever. If we’re ever going to stop the killing, the first step must be to dispense with these pointless arguments over who is the Good Guy and who is the Bad Guy. Those are zero-sum arguments; they can only lead to the conclusion that one side must win and the other side must lose. And neither side will sign up for a deal that they think they are losing. The only deal that will work is one that is win-win: something that each side sees as a victory. The two sides do not have mutually exclusive objectives. Israelis want security; Palestinians want their own country. These are not incompatible goals; a win-win solution should be easy to design. But the moralists on both sides of the conflict refuse to accept a win-win solution: they insist that the other side must lose. Chris Crawford

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