<p>Good luck. There is so much bias and revisionist history regarding the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that is almost impossible to find a single seminal text or book from an author or historian without an obvious agenda.</p>
<p>Until you have more grounding in the issue, I would avoid works by Benny Morris, Robert Fisk, Ilan Pappe, and Baruch Kimmerling. I would also not read Tom Segev, Bernard Lewis or Edward Said at the beginning of an information gathering stage.</p>
<p>You might start with A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin.</p>
<p>when I was in junior high (1976) I was assigned to write a report on Palestine. Being a jewish girl, I politely told the teacher that Palestine didn’t exist. He told me I had alot to learn. That was a mind opening project. You could hand in that same report today and it would still get an A+. Nothing has changed (except Arafat is dead)</p>
<p>Giving the ‘arabs’ a Palestinian state will not satisfy them. They simply want Israel and the jews to cease to exist in any form. Israel (being the consolation prize to the jews for not completely being obliterated during the Holocaust) will remain a target forever.</p>
<p>When confronting terrorists (or Nazis, the KKK, or what have you) there is no such thing as neutral. For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good people to do nothing, as a great man once said.</p>
<p>I think it’s fair to say that Jimmy Carter has done a good deal more than “nothing” in trying to change the horrible dynamic in the Middle East. I think it’s fair to say that Jimmy Carter has done more than the entire population of CC posters to try to change that dynamic. Which I believe will do more to end terrorism than bulldozing people’s houses, building walls, and rocketing cars in busy streets. So don’t give me this crap about “good people doing nothing”.</p>
<p>Thanks, Paying3 and JHS. I’ve got some reading to do.</p>
<p>I liked mommusic’s Golda Meir quote.</p>
<p>Sometimes with respect to the drawing of national boundaries based on colonial divisions, I have viewed the process as one of musical chairs. There was a lot of jockeying for position among different lands throughout history and the end of the colonial era put an end to that in much of the world, sometimes quite arbitrarily; that’s when the music stopped. </p>
<p>When the music of boundary drawing and national assignment/formation stopped for the Kurds, for instance, they found themselves without a chair, a reasonably united people yet without a nation, scattered across Turkey, Iran, and Iraq.</p>
<p>For Israel/Palestine, it was the formation of Israel and then the 1967 War, it seems.</p>
<p>But I need to read more about what actually happened, so I appreciate the recs.</p>
<p>"I just don’t think there’s any way for that to happen except alongside a real, independent, strong Palestinian state. "</p>
<p>JHS: Do you really think that, even if the world rallied together and created a Palestinian state, that they could manage to maintain a peaceful, productive society? I am not sure the Palestinian people are unified or have a vision of what their future state would be like. The religious and tribal divisions seem to be tearing them apart before they even have a state.</p>