Active in the Southwest UK, focusing on Bristol, although I’m originally from Bath and live in Chippenham. I noticed this from reading about the Universal Paperclips game in Wikipedia, and looking for similar things. I’ve been through far too many changes in the last 7 years, since 2016 when I lost my base of operations due to a government agency putting a bridge in the wrong place. They moved it in 2023, but it’s a bit late now. I was rich 2017-2018 due to circumstances beyond my control. Now I’m back to being poor again, at least it’s familiar territory.
I’m active in civil liberties, particularly fighting police misconduct, and also opposing the bedroom tax and the current attack upon refugees and Human Rights in the UK. I support the Rejoin movement, and I chair the Bristol WNBR. I network heavily in the Tech scene. I have my own exoskeleton, which I use for advertising and occasionally repairing other people’s marquees. I’ve designed a new type of FPGA, which is entirely open-source. Documenting it has slowed down, due to a PSU issue with the machine I use to log into GitHub, but I am charting progress with a discrete build via Instagram. My CV features a circuit simulator and a small database, and is 40kb with no dependencies.
I don’t think taking sides or assuming one side is more justified than the other, is constructive. Both sides are doing horrible things to each other: It’s the collective insanity of war.
Of course people have to protect themselves, and something has to be done to resolve the situation. But I don’t think the current methods are the best solution.
What can other countries do?
Many are sending weapons to the side they support—this doesn’t sound like a good way of reducing bloodshed.
Turkey is offering a neural place to hold negotiations—that seems like a good start.
Lebanon is joining in with some of the fighting—this is bizarre, as they’ve previously enjoyed 20+ years of peace, and were busy promoting tourism as central to their economy.
The Israeli state is encouraging Palestinian civilians to leave before their bombardment commences—that’s a helpful concession, but it’s mixed as they still intend violence.
It seems likely there will be a refugee crisis, both before and after the bombardment. So other countries preparing refugee camps, and the Red Crescent, UN, etc helping distribute aid, seems likely.
The root causes are a refusal to share the land, and violent actions promoting retaliation. I’ve heard it said that this is also a war for fresh water. Even without further conflict, Palestinian civilians are dependent upon foreign aid for food, water, fuel, and electricity. They must also be dependent upon outside services for communications, as the Israeli state managed to cut that off.
The logical conclusion would be to share the land, to stop killing each other, and to set up desalination plants, to supply arid inland areas from coastal regions.
But people there don’t want to behave rationally at this time—for whatever reason, so they have to get in a peaceful & cooperative frame of mind first, ie they have to rebuild trust.
I think it would help to compare to a similar impasse in Northern Ireland. While I don’t think it would be representative to say the NI conflict is over, it’s certainly calmer.
Two main things changed in NI: Negotiation leading to powersharing, and an amnesty ie forgiveness for past incursions.
Powersharing, in the form of collective decision-making, would take power away from the advocates of violence. So it would effectively be a combined government for both states, effectively turning it into one state. The first consequence would be allowing civilians from either side to settle where they chose. This would also defeat the point of violence, because either side would be shooting their own people in an exchange of fire. The second consequence would be land-sharing without moving any borders.
In NI, the British government removed its towers and fortifications along the border, so that sort of thing could be a third consequence. They didn’t wait until things had completely calmed down: They did it early, as a visible gesture of trust, and of change. It was, and is, of course reversible, so it wasn’t entirely magnanimous.
Negotiations started in NI as a series of small concessions by both sides. Things moved slowly at first, but eventually small steps turned into big ones, and then visible changes started happening. Once civilians saw changes happening, attitudes changed as well. It’s not perfect; I would say peace has been fumbled rather than planned. But it is constructive change, which is what we all want, right?
The alternative is further bloodshed, probably eventually resulting in the wiping out and occupation of the Gaza Strip, a diaspora of Palestinian civilians in neighbouring countries, and retaliations continuing along the new border, probably with support from some neighbouring countries.
I’m interested in opinions about these points, and corrections to anything I’ve got wrong, as some of the history is from my own memory, which is turn is based upon news sources which are undoubtedly biased.