taresh solanki

Even if you have committed to a side – Israel's or the Palestinians' – you can and should stand back, every now and then, to look at the bigger picture. There are reasons the West is continuously waging wars, or fuelling them. Think of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza – all of them just in the last two decades. One is because there is *lots* of money to be made from war – or there is if you belong to the ruling class. There's money in the weapons and technology that make the fighting possible; money in the resources, largely hidden from view, that are being quietly fought over; and money in persuading you and me that we must tighten our belts to support the war effort. But there's another reason. If we weren't at war, if a new war wasn't always dominating the headlines and our passions, making us either outraged or fearful for the future, we would have the mental space and energy to think about other things. Such as how badly our societies are run, how the wealth gap just keeps growing, how incompetent our leaders seem, and how little is being done to solve the biggest problems facing us, like ecological collapse. If we weren't so convinced that we are the good guys, if we weren't so eager to cheerlead another war, we might start to understand that we are all the same, that we share one planet, that our future hangs on cooperation not conflagration. Which is precisely why we will always be at war.