A complete victory, you have to acknowledge, is impossible. You’ve got two options: compromise, or keep fighting. Keep fighting until … until everyone loses. Nobody is going to win. Winning would mean flattening every building and killing or displacing every single person, and you know as well as I do that’s not victory.
There’s going to be an irredentist movement no matter what, on both sides. But irredentism is suicide, it’s a desire for the impossible victory that will turn to blood-stained dust in your hands. Reasonable, calm voices need to find a way to convince and cajole and co-opt the extremists, siphon them off and take their leadership into positions of power in moderate structures. If you do not, we will all suffer.
Subject: Palestine
Example: Northern Ireland
Secretly Ironic 