For many years, academics have foisted on politicians and foreign policy makers the doctrine of conflict resolution. What makes these academics believe, for example, that conflicts between democracies and despotic Islamic regimes such as the PLO-Palestinian Authority are resolvable?

Conflict resolution in action: Oslo

Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, and Yasser Arafat at the White House, 13 September 1993. Photo: Vince Musi/The White House

It was this assumption (or wishful thinking) that culminated in the Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993, and the televised handshake of Yitzchak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn, which was applauded by three American presidents indifferent to the moral principles and national honor that were trashed by this (insincere and futile handshake).

That Agreement and that moral indifferentism have been sanctified in Israel and in America to this day, as the US-Iran Nuclear Weapons Agreement of 2016 testifies – another example of “conflict resolution,” one that costs America 15 billion dollars, and augurs, God forbid, Israel’s extinction.

The fixation on conflict resolution, independently of the political character of the parties involved, has been promoted indiscriminately by American and Israeli political scientists who, by so doing, have in effect dignified and legitimized the PLO and its successor the Palestinian Authority (PA), despite the fact that Palestinian terrorists have murdered and maimed 15,000 Jewish men, women, and children!

Malaise of modern psychology

I attribute this cynical fixation to a mental disorder permeating academia and analyzed in my essay, “The Malaise of Modern Psychology,” published in The Journal of Psychology (Vol. 126, Number 2) in March 1992.

That essay exemplifies the classical view that political science is the queen of the social sciences, because nothing affecting the distribution of virtue and vice is beyond the concern of a classical political scientist.

Political science begins on the level of ordinary experience and common sense. Having grown up in Brooklyn, New York, this University of Chicago political scientist learned that only sheltered academics raised in a soft, hedonistic, and homogeneous society would teach conflict resolution indifferent to the nature of the parties.

As for this writer, a native of multi-ethnic and multi-racial Brooklyn, where one had to bloody some noses to minimize the number of times one’s own was bloodied, it has been obvious to me that the academic prognosticators of conflict resolution are fools who probably grew up in homogeneous neighborhoods of decent kids who exemplify Rousseau’s charming idea that human nature is benevolent.

Does material security really obviate conflict?

This surrealistic idea was adopted by Karl Marx. Marx, a library or closeted man of Jewish ancestry, concocted a theory, in opposition to the Bible, that human conflict is not rooted in the deficiencies of human nature but in the poverty of nature itself.Influenced by very clever by not very profound English skeptics like David Hume and John Locke, he held that human conflict arose initially as a result of economic privation and human inequality, which led, eventually, to the development of a society consisting of “haves”and the “have-nots,” a division perpetuated by a ruling class in control of the modes of economic production. This is the source of human conflict.

Such conflict (for crypto-Marxists) can be eliminated by promoting, by means of technology, the economic well-being of a classless society. Today this non-conflictual society can be facilitated by homogenizing influence of Internet (or so I learned several years ago at a public lecture of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was expressing, perhaps unwittingly, the doctrine of “technological determinism,” which I also heard in a 1976 Los Angeles lecture of Nobel Laureate Edward Teller, father of the H-Bomb. Since Teller predicted that the influence of modern technology would eventually overcome the Arab-Israeli conflict, Bibi had eminent support for his optimism. Technological determinism coincides with Marx’s economic determinism, which make philosophical materialism triumphant!

Economics plus technology trump religion, and no wonder. Did not Marx say that religion merely consists of “phantoms of the brain”?

Since economic well-being and technology render religious values obsolete, there will be no need of policemen to maintain law and order! Here, allow me a personal note.

A personal antithesis

The present writer, having grown up in Brooklyn, understood without going to college that one does not stroll at night in lovely Central Park with a girl friend. Hence it has long been obvious to me that a lot of dangerous nonsense about conflict resolution has been taught by political scientists, none of whose wives, I trust, has ever been raped by a non-Caucasian.

Put it this way. Ignore the notorious high murder rate among blacks in Washington, D.C. We all know that social conflict is not uncommon elsewhere in the Unite States even though its citizens speak the same language, live under the same laws, and have gone to the same public schools where the Judeo-Christian concept of human dignity is entrenched. This being the case, juxtapose how much turmoil now exists in the world at large, and the fact that western nations have engaged in more than a thousand wars in the last two thousand years, which indicates that peace is little more than a preparation for war. This makes nonsense of the academic doctrine of conflict resolution.

Most remarkable, however, are the number of left-wing Jewish academics that teach this doctrine. It’s as if their intellects were impervious to the tortures inflicted on their own people throughout history!

Even in Israel, Jewish leftists exhibit a talent for turning a blind eye to the thousands of terrorist acts perpetrated against Jews since the rebirth of the State of Israel. These Jews live in denial of the love of death animating Muslims and propagated by Islamic theology. They recklessly dismiss the imperative of jihad that Islam imposes on Muslims as manifested in the recent wave of Muslim stabbing of Jews in Jerusalem.

These stabbings do not portend any politically decisive change in the “conflict resolution” policy in the Netanyahu Government. We can expect this policy to remain feeble and futile. It manifests the uncreative mentality of Israel’s political leaders.

These guardians of Israel seem to lack the imagination and shrewdness, to say nothing of the determination, to formulate a covert strategy to intensify the rivalry existing among the leaders of the various clans composing the Palestinian Authority,say by eliminating them, one-by-one, leaving tell-tale evidence incriminating each other.

Why not foster “conflict resolution” among Israel’s enemies?☼