Intent to Kill

>> Israel is in a very complex military situation. It needs a military that can deal with complex problems in creative and restrained ways. It needs to be able to use appropriate and limited force.<<

I agree.

>> The problem is that its entire military is 18 to 20 years old -- including many of the people in decision-making capacities.<<

Ah, that explains much. They're all still razor-sharp from training ... haven't had time to wear down to a more versatile selection of fillet knives, steak knives, and axes. Not enough time to build experience, either.

>> Our world has become complex enough that I think that countries need militaries composed of people who are at least in their mid-twenties or older.<<

*ponder* I wouldn't throw out the younger soldiers, because they do have their uses. But I would like to see a lot more diversity in terms of age (and gender, etc.) to enable more resilient and layered response options.

>> It's not that Israel is uncivilized: Israel is rather immature, and seriously traumatized.<<

Hrm. I think I'd shuffle the order: traumatized, immature, in a lousy location, and therefore manifesting a variety of dysfunctional behaviors. The end result of that is "uncivilized" by my standard, but it's a different flavor of uncivilized than, say, a country that can't hold a government together for 10 years running or a country that is being mismanaged by a military dictator. Since the root causes are different, the effective solutions are likely to be different.

Traumatized ... is on the fringes of my expertise, and better left to experts. I can surmise that study of nonviolent conflict resolution might be helpful, along with a lot more exploration of both Judaism and Israel's positive-flow culture. You've got a chunk of land, but land doesn't make a nation. Now that you've got ground to stand on, what do you want to do with it? How do Judaism and Israel express themselves as positive concepts, rather than negative reactions to a lot of historical attempts at extermination? There's a deep well of potential there, but a lot of it is untapped or insufficiently coherent. The one thing they bullseyed was language revival. How damaged are the older Israeli people, who fled there from historic horrors? How damaged are the younger generations by that background and the neighboring disasters and what-all else? How much of that damage is reparable, and what can be done to fix it, in hopes of producing healthier and happier people and a more functional nation? Figuring that out is a lot more work, only some of which is accessible to outsiders.

Immature ... only time will solve the core of that. However, a great deal of improvement could be made by examining what other countries have done right and wrong, emulating the former and avoiding mistakes made by the latter. With the founding of America, people did that, and some of the ideas were brilliant and the ideals valiant, although the execution has often fallen far short of the aim. Judaism has a downright epic tradition of scholarly study and logical argument, the potential of which far exceeds current applications.

This raises the question: How long are other countries and the world at large willing to watch Israel flailing around like this? How long is a fair chance to launch a nation, however much damage is done in the learning process? How long is too long to wait while damage is being done, and you should've concluded already that this was not going to work and taken the knife away from the toddler? Those answers I don't have. I am past the point of being comfortable with America's continued funding of Israeli military. Humanitarian aid is different; I'd keep that going.

Then there's the problem of the Middle East in general: the Jews were given territory in a messed-up and disputed part of the world, and it's hard to develop a sane and functional nation when a lot of people in your part of the world routinely murder each other and set things on fire. But we're all stuck with that decision, unless the chaos of government evolution causes the nation to move or dissolve. That means trying to find ways for people to coexist without killing each other or setting things on fire.