Live and Let Live

My Uber driver who picked me up from Hyatt Figueroa to The Catch on Melrose Avenue has a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ex-military paratrooper said, "We (Israelis) are going nowhere, the Arabs are going nowhere. So we need to sit down and create a space where we can live and let live." According to the idea, the Arab countries in the Middle East, together with the "rich" countries of the West, with maybe "Australia," should sponsor this initiative.

Now, I am not a Middle East expert. However, the idea that everyone should realize we cannot "bomb civilizations away" as a means to sustainable peace is, historically speaking, well supported. We have learned from history that military force can win wars, but it rarely wins peace.

This isn't theoretical. As I write this, the headline is the 2026 Iran war — a conflict that began on February 28 when US and Israeli strikes killed Iran's senior leadership, and that has since drawn in missile and drone exchanges across Israel, Gulf states, and US bases throughout the region. A ceasefire was declared in April, broke down again in June, and as of this week, Israel and Iran have each "halted" attacks on each other while Israel continues striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon — with both sides publicly insisting they're ready to resume full-scale war at any moment. Months of strikes meant to "degrade" Iran's nuclear and military capacity have not produced peace; they've produced a fragile, on-again-off-again truce that nobody fully trusts, brokered not by victory but by exhausted diplomacy at a negotiating table in Switzerland and Pakistan. It is, in miniature, exactly the pattern this post is about.

After World War I, the victors imposed crushing terms on Germany through the Treaty of Versailles, confident that a defeated enemy was a pacified one. Two decades later, the resentment that treaty incubated helped fuel the rise of Hitler and a second, far deadlier war. Versailles didn't end German ambition — it just delayed and radicalized it.

The Soviet Union learned a similar lesson in Afghanistan. A decade of occupation and warfare from 1979 to 1989 failed to install a stable, friendly government. It mostly succeeded in creating the chaos that the Taliban would later rise from. The United States, despite different methods and different decades, arrived at a strikingly similar outcome: twenty years of war, and the Taliban retook power within weeks of the last American troops leaving in 2021.

Even when one side wins outright, the underlying grievances rarely disappear with the surrender. Sri Lanka's government crushed the Tamil Tigers militarily in 2009, ending decades of civil war. But ending the war isn't the same as ending the conflict — the ethnic and political tensions that produced it remain largely unresolved, simmering beneath an enforced quiet.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is itself the clearest illustration of this pattern. Since 1948, there have been wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973; two intifadas; and repeated military operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Each achieved tactical objectives. None has produced lasting peace. The closest the region ever came to a real breakthrough — the Oslo Accords — wasn't won on a battlefield. It was negotiated at a table.

That, I think, is what my driver was getting at, even if he'd never read a page of conflict-resolution theory. The closest real-world precedent for his "live and let live" model might actually be Northern Ireland. Decades of sectarian violence during the Troubles didn't end because one side defeated the other. They ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement — a negotiated political settlement that gave both communities a stake in the outcome, backed by serious international sponsorship, including the United States.

That's the part of my driver's idea I can't dismiss as naive optimism: the sponsorship model. Northern Ireland didn't broker its own peace alone — it had outside guarantors with enough credibility and resources to make the deal stick. If Gulf states, Western powers, and others were willing to underwrite a genuine "live and let live" framework for Israelis and Palestinians, with real security guarantees and economic investment on both sides, it would at least be following the only model that has ever actually worked in a conflict this entrenched.

History's verdict seems fairly consistent: bombs can suppress a conflict. They have never yet resolved one. Only a negotiated space — however imperfect, however slow — has ever actually let two peoples live.

Sometimes the clearest insight into a forty-year geopolitical stalemate comes not from a think tank, but from the front seat of an Uber on Melrose Avenue.