Friedman points out that the vote comes at a time when there is an uneasy truce between the islamist Hamas faction and the more secular Fatah which is a remnant of the old Pan-Arabic movement of days gone by. Should statehood, or at least some semblance of statehood of it, be granted then a power struggle between the two factions is certain to occur.
Add to the mix Hezbollah is southern Lebanon, both Egypt and Syria in domestic turmoil and even farther out -- Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey all who seek influence in the Middle East and you have a recipe for chaos fraught with a lot of unintended consequences.
When ever the topic is the mess of Israeli/Palestinian politics I, for obvious reasons, look for an actress with messy hair from the TV show Lost. For this article I've selected Mira Furlan who plays the older version of the character Danielle Rousseau for the honor.
Danielle was a young pregnant women who crashed on the island with a scientific expedition 16 years before the plane in the TV show crashed. After the Smoke Monster rips off the arm of one of the scientists Danielle goes bonkers and kills the rest of them, including her husband, because she thinks they have the sickness. She then gives birth to her daughter Alex, who promptly gets kidnapped by Ben who's an Other and is wearing a bad toupee (kidnapping babies is pretty much of a hobby for folks living on the island).
Danielle spends her time wandering around the jungle jibbering like a lunatic and setting traps baited with teddy bears. I guess she's to trying to recapture Alex with them. When our castaways finally arrive on the island Danielle ends up saving pregnant Claire from the Others, who had drugged Claire in an attempt to kidnap her soon to be born son Aaron. However, being drugged, Claire doesn't remember Danielle helping her.
Claire gives birth and Danielle cooks up the scheme to stampede the castaways with claims that the Others are going to attack them. As they're all running around in a panic over this news Danielle bonks Claire upside the head and kidnaps Aaron so she can trade him for Alex. Meanwhile, as that's going on the Others kidnap Walt, who is another castaway kid
As I said, kidnapping kids is a hobby on the island. In fact, we later learn that on the other side of the island two other castaway kids have already been kidnapped, but that's a story for another day. At any rate, Danielle ends up eventually joining the castaways and getting reunited with her long, lost daughter Alex. Unfortunately... well... let's just say that doesn't work out as well as could be expected.
As a bonus, after the article I've included the scene where she is first introduced. In the scene she's torturing Sayid, who is a Republican Guard torturer with a heart of gold (yea, it is every bit as goofy as it sounds), in an attempt to get information about Alex's whereabouts.
ISRAELI-ARAB CRISIS APPROACHING
By George Friedman, August 23, 2011
In September, the U.N. General Assembly will vote on whether to recognize Palestine as an independent and sovereign state with full rights in the United Nations. In many ways, this would appear to be a reasonable and logical step. Whatever the Palestinians once were, they are clearly a nation in the simplest and most important sense -- namely, they think of themselves as a nation. Nations are created by historical circumstances, and those circumstances have given rise to a Palestinian nation. Under the principle of the United Nations and the theory of the right to national self-determination, which is the moral foundation of the modern theory of nationalism, a nation has a right to a state, and that state has a place in the family of nations. In this sense, the U.N. vote will be unexceptional.
However, when the United Nations votes on Palestinian statehood, it will intersect with other realities and other historical processes. First, it is one thing to declare a Palestinian state; it is quite another thing to create one. The Palestinians are deeply divided between two views of what the Palestinian nation ought to be, a division not easily overcome. Second, this vote will come at a time when two of Israel's neighbors are coping with their own internal issues. Syria is in chaos, with an extended and significant resistance against the regime having emerged. Meanwhile, Egypt is struggling with internal tension over the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the future of the military junta that replaced him. Add to this the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the potential rise of Iranian power, and the potential recognition of a Palestinian state -- while perfectly logical in an abstract sense -- becomes an event that can force a regional crisis in the midst of ongoing regional crises. It thus is a vote that could have significant consequences.
The Palestinian Divide
Let's begin with the issue not of the right of a nation to have a state but of the nature of a Palestinian state under current circumstances. The Palestinians are split into two major factions. The first, Fatah, dominates the West Bank. Fatah derives its ideology from the older, secular Pan-Arab movement. Historically, Fatah saw the Palestinians as a state within the Arab nation. The second, Hamas, dominates Gaza. Unlike Fatah, it sees the Palestinians as forming part of a broader Islamist uprising, one in which Hamas is the dominant Islamist force of the Palestinian people.
The Pan-Arab rising is moribund. Where it once threatened the existence of Muslim states, like the Arab monarchies, it is now itself threatened. Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi all represented the old Pan-Arab vision. A much better way to understand the "Arab Spring" is that it represented the decay of such regimes that were vibrant when they came to power in the late 1960s and early 1970s but have fallen into ideological meaninglessness. Fatah is part of this grouping, and while it still speaks for Palestinian nationalism as a secular movement, beyond that it is isolated from broader trends in the region. It is both at odds with rising religiosity and simultaneously mistrusted by the monarchies it tried to overthrow. Yet it controls the Palestinian proto-state, the Palestinian National Authority, and thus will be claiming a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood. Hamas, on the other hand, is very much representative of current trends in the Islamic world and holds significant popular support, yet it is not clear that it holds a majority position in the Palestinian nation.
All nations have ideological divisions, but the Palestinians are divided over the fundamental question of the Palestinian nation's identity. Fatah sees itself as part of a secular Arab world that is on the defensive. Hamas envisions the Palestinian nation as an Islamic state forming in the context of a region-wide Islamist rising. Neither is in a position to speak authoritatively for the Palestinian people, and the things that divide them cut to the heart of the nation. As important, each has a different view of its future relations with Israel. Fatah has accepted, in practice, the idea of Israel's permanence as a state and the need of the Palestinians to accommodate themselves to the reality. Hamas has rejected it.
The U.N. decision raises the stakes in this debate within the Palestinian nation that could lead to intense conflict. As vicious as the battle between Hamas and Fatah has been, an uneasy truce has existed over recent years. Now, there could emerge an internationally legitimized state, and control of that state will matter more than ever before. Whoever controls the state defines what the Palestinians are, and it becomes increasingly difficult to suspend the argument for a temporary truce. Rather than settling anything, or putting Israel on the defensive, the vote will compel a Palestinian crisis. [continued after the jump]
