Your article on the intractable conflict between Israel and the rest of the Middle East was spot on. The medieval conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in Europe, generally, and in Ireland, particularly, illustrate that peoples on both sides of a conflict have to adopt the utilitarians' "harm principle" in order to reach a reasonable accommodation of differing needs/social goals. Without the adoption of such a principle, a dogmatic "my-way-or-the-highway" approach exists. Conversely, democracy is the political mechanism that adopts that principle.

(I define democracy as "the harmonization of interests for the sake of the interests being harmonized.")

So, while modernization is surely necessary, it is actually the adoption of democratic principles in the sense in which I defined it which is the essential sine qua non for tolerance in the Middle East on both sides of the conflict.

You may well argue that democratization on the part of the Muslim countries' political leadership is essential; indeed, it is. But it is also vitally important to realize that outside forces want to keep the conflict in the Middle East alive in order to maximize their own positions of power and monetary gain.

So, just as was the case decades ago with the Non-Aligned movement, it is necessary for the states in all the Muslim world to start adopting principles of political heterodoxy in order to survive and thrive, and to minimize the acceptance of "help" from less-than-disinterested countries (the U.S., China, Russia, England, France, Iran, et al.) as their regimes start to mature.

Unless those regimes evolve, they---like the dinosaurs---are doomed, not necessarily at the hands of Israel, but by their own people.