I may dislike Israel's policy, but normalizing relations with it seems like a very practical thing and something every Middle-East country should be doing. Failing to recognize Israel as a State is just nonsense.
Well said.
The Arabs fucked up back in the day. They shouldn't have tried to annhilate Israel in the wars of the 20th century. Israel won and has done what it has done to this day.
My lack of side taking with the whole thing (which people will interpret as siding with Israel) is that the nation-states formed out of the Palestine Province of the Ottoman Empire. It wasn't Palestinean land before Israel, it was British land and before that it was Ottoman land and before that it was Mamluk Turkic land and before that I don't know.
The Arabs should have organised themselves better in that era to get what they want, or been better at the wars and defeat Israel.
Jews did organised themselves well in the era of nation-state formation, other Muslims in other places did like Turks (What makes up Turkey today was to be split between multiple European countries and Armenia, but Turks organised themsleves in such a way as to tear that plan up and redraw the map how they wanted it, still it was a compromise and large numbers of Turks remain in Greece, Bulgaria and Macedonia to this day).
One of my questions is, what is the Western Asian and Gulf Arab identity? Is it really distinct and divided into Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Lebanese etc. which are more or less nation-states formed out of Ottoman provinces. Or should logically all these Arabs be united as one supra-group the way neighbouring ethnic groups like Turks and Persians are?
And if it is the latter, then why the stress over Palestine in the grand scheme of things? Balkan Turks remain outside of Turkish borders to this day, and you could say "settlements" of Greeks, Bulgarians etc. were made in their historic homelands. But Balkan Turks are ok and aren't in a fight where they live. They either stay and obey the rules of the new rulers or leave for the ethnic majority state. When I look at it from this perspective I just don't get why this conflict didn't end a long time ago.
