Potential conflict

I had no sooner finished writing yesterday’s blog when we heard on the news about Iran’s attack on Israel. This war has caused a few arguments between Stephen and me. This latest attack is clear-cut in my eyes. Israel killed some Iranian diplomats, Iran threatened retaliation. It has done so. It has also stated that if Israel does anything else to Iran, it will retaliate in a much bigger way than it did yesterday. In my eyes, the message is clear. You hurt me, I’ve hurt you back, we are even now, no more. However, Stephen sees it quite differently and believes Israel has every right to retaliate, even though it started that particular dispute in the first place.

This to me is no different than parenting. One states clearly to their children that if they so such and such, there will be consequences. Good parenting means one does need to follow-up on those consequences, otherwise the child learns the threats are empty and thus they can do as they like. As a parent, one also teaches their children that just because one sibling hit another, it doesn’t mean that child should hit the other one back, though in families, often the children sort things like that out themselves. If the perpetrator gets hit back immediately, it acts as a good deterrent for next time they might be contemplating a similar action. So yes, maybe Iran shouldn’t have retaliated in the first place, but they have done so and made it very clear that that is all they are going to do, unless Israel causes more trouble.

Israel has a lot of allies in the western world, but from what I have read this morning, none of these want this situation to escalate any further. No one wants a larger war than is already taking place. Israel had a lot of help in deflecting the missiles fired at their country yesterday but it seems further help may not be as forthcoming if they take this situation further.

To me Iran is being very clear. This is all we are doing, unless you provoke us further. Israel has already killed a lot of Palestinians in retribution for the attack on their people in October. When does it stop?

I admit I don’t know the history of these areas. My views are very much the outsider looking in. I can see what is happening right now, in real time, not what happened 50 or 60 years ago. And that is where I have sympathy for those being attacked. The supposedly 30,000 or so people killed in Palestine wouldn’t have all been terrorists. Many of them were innocent children.

As I said before, it reminds me of parenting. If they were my children warring, I would give them a good telling off, and probably a smack or two (was legal when my kids were small), tell the dominant one to stop their bullying, and send them off to their rooms while they cooled down. I had one trick that worked really well in our household in times of conflict. And that was to play a game, where each person in the family came up with something positive and something they admired about the other person. It worked wonders. Tears and unhappiness melted away as each realised their value in the other person’s eyes.

If only the solution to this conflict in the Middle East was that simple.