http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/rwp06-011
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/10/MNGU156LEQ.DTL

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054252.html

http://www.http://explorersfoundation.org/notebooks/ef/pages/119.htmlgoogle.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADBF_enCA235CA236&q=ashura+child+abuse

It’s our land…By: Benjamin Netanyahu

Apparently, Benjamin Netanyahu gave an interview and was asked about Israel ‘s occupation of Arab lands.

His response was “It’s our land”. The reporter (CNN or the like) was stunned - read below “It’s our land…” It’s important information since we don’t get fair and accurate reporting from the media and facts tend to get lost in the jumble of daily events.

“Crash Course on the Arab Israeli Conflict.”

Here are overlooked facts in the current &n;bsp; Middle East situation.

These were compiled by a Christian university professor:

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem . Israel became a nation in 1312 BCE, Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel .

3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 BCE, the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 CE lasted no more than 22 years.

5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem , they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem . Mohammed never came to Jerusalem .

8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem . Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem .

9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: in 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews . Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.

10 The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.

12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab la nds to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own people’s lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel , a country no larger than the state of New Jersey .

13. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: the Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.

14. The PLO’s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel . Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.

15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

16. The UN Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel .

17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel .

18. The UN was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.

19. The UN was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives .

20. The UN was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid-like a policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role should be. What will we tell our grandchildren about we did when there was a turning point in Jewish destiny, an opportunity to make a difference?

————————————————————————————————————————

Get a free MP3 every day with the Spinner.com Toolbar. Get it Now.

————————————————————————————————————————

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG.
Version: 7.5.552 / Virus Database: 270.10.1/1868 - Release Date: 29/12/2008 10:48 AM

————————————————————————————————————————

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com
Version: 8.0.176 / Virus Database: 270.10.2/1871 - Release Date: 1/1/2009 5:01 PM

————————————————————————————————————————

Messenger wants to send you on a trip. Enter today.

————————————————————————————————————————

No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG - http://www.avg.com
Version: 8.0.176 / Virus Database: 270.10.2/1876 - Release Date: 1/5/2009 9:44 AM

War is not the answer - or two wrongs don’t make a right - or they should have given them Germany or Wyoming.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html

“A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

  If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.”

Alana,

Why is it so important for you to color the invasion of Gaza with religion ? I havent noticed anyone boiling the conflict down to religious levels - I think people are smart enough to understand that this conflict isnt about religious beliefs. It’s about turf, control and respect - simple as that.

I’ve seen your cut and paste list a few times before - authored by an apparently mysterious and still unidentified Christian university professor.

I wonder - Why would it be important to identify the anonymous author as Christian ? Wouldnt a Shinto scholar do well enough ? Or is the remark identifying the unknown author as an unknown Christian scholar meant to appeal to a given readership ?

Maybe I’m picky - but unidentified sources promoting self serving generalities as fact doesnt offer much in the way of a compelling argument. The modern nation of Israel is a constructed nation of relative youth.

If we were to judge lands as “ours” or not going back in time - then your status in Canada would be what ? Colonist ? Occupant ? Subversive white internationalist ? It’s a dead end.

Palestinians, Arabs and various semites have lived in the middle east for as long as anyone else and have legitimate historical claim to continue to live there. All of the bombing and your cutting and pasting wont change that.

Vidas

Shalom!

I had vowed to stay out of this, but…

Netanyahu’s argument includes elements of the most primitive type of primordialist nationalism one can shake a stick at. It is absolutely absurd to try to diminish Palestinian nationhood by claiming it’s newfangled or attempting to erase the distinction between Palestinians and other Arabs.

The Wikipedia article on the Palestinian people contains different views on the formation of the modern Palestinian national identity and these lines by the historian James L. Gelvin:

The fact that Palestinian nationalism developed later than Zionism and indeed in response to it does not in any way diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism or make it less valid than Zionism. All nationalisms arise in opposition to some “other.” Why else would there be the need to specify who you are? And all nationalisms are defined by what they oppose.

Modern nationalism is modern—that goes for Zionism, Palestinian nationalism, Latvian nationalism, and any nationalism, whether one fantasizes about David’s kingdom being a modern nation-state or indulges in hallucinations and fabrications about Jersika or Tālava being early Latvian states.

One would think that any Latvian would cringe at phrases like “Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity”—Rīga was never the capital of any Latvian entity prior to 1918/20, either… no Latvian political entity had ever existed. From Ernest Gellner’s famous lecture at Warwick University:

There are very, very clear cases of modernism in a sense being true. I mean, take the Estonians. At the beginning of the nineteenth century they didn’t even have a name for themselves. They were just referred to as people who lived on the land as opposed to German or Swedish burghers and aristocrats and Russian administrators. They had no ethnonym. They were just a category without any ethnic self-consciousness. Since then they’ve been brilliantly successful in creating a vibrant culture.

The compulsion some have for attempting to deprive the Palestinians of their national identity is absurd and repulsive—they have one because they think they have one, and playing “I’m ancientest, it’s mine, you’re just an Arab anyway, go melt into your brothers’ arms” ought to be confined to the theater of the absurd.

Salaam,
/P

Salaam, shalom, Peter, glad you held your nose and jumped into the fray!

I would not, and do not wish to deny any group their nationhood if their nation doesn’t wish to wipe mine out!  But they do, and “they” are not every single individual, of course, let’s not continue to trade absurdities.  The leadership tells Israel all the time they will destroy Zionism, which is the movement to let Jews have their ancestral home.  How to end the perversion that hijacks a religion into a force that would finish Hitler’s work?

One aspect that provides glimmers of hope seems to be the many fragile grass roots peace organizations, including “Mother’s for Peace in the Mideast”, among others.  I have seen the work of “ordinary” citizens of Palestine and Israel come together in peace vigils, soccer competitions, peace rallies, etc.  But how to fan the flames of peace?  How to keep us ALL safe when seductive voices of evil and death compel large populations?

The answers are for those more gifted than myself.  If, on occasion, I host interfaith discussions, spread pamphlets to share intercultural music, (the latest Arabic calligraphy/Hebrew script course for people of any origin) this seems puny and
naiively optimistic, but what else can I do?  Keep reading, writing, talking, speaking, and, of course, sometimes drop in on LOL for a banter.

But I feel so strongly the privilege of being able to do so, and thank Lilit, posthumously, for her participation and sharing her culture with me as I did mine.  We did this so much while she was alive, and I miss her voice here so very much.

In any case, running to walk dogs now…..must bundle in our lovely subzero Canadian north and tell myself, “it’s bracing!’

Sveika!

It’s not about holding my nose (I’m not the one who spoke of a supposed smell!)—it’s just that I don’t have the answers and this subject probably gets more attention than any other similar subject on the planet, ranging from dead serious analysis to ignorant mud-wrestling. For some reason everybody and his second cousin feels the need to hold forth on this conflict—even if they’ve never set foot in a book, much less Israel/Palestine.

The situation in Latvia is quite grave, and I’d rather devote what little time I have for Internet debate to Latvia. I simply couldn’t hold my tongue when I read Bibi’s rancid lines—trying to conceive of any sort of solution to the bloody problem, probably impossible no matter what, is even harder if you cloud the glass with Zionist myth. And no, that doesn’t mean I have any patience for Palestinian myth, either. Ditto Latvian or Russian myth.

Bowing out of this topic again,
/P

P.S. (Can’t resist…) I would not, and do not wish to deny any group their nationhood if their nation doesn’t wish to wipe mine out—they’re nevertheless a nation, and they would be even if the absurd contention that all of them wish to sweep the Jews into the sea were true. A person doesn’t become a beast even when consumed with hatred—he might lose his humanity, but he’s the same animal. Not a few Latvians were consumed by hatred, too (even publishing a magazine called Naids [“Hate”]). There are reams of material in which Latvians are described as undeserving of a nation-state and/or lacking nationhood, authored primarily by Germans and Russians (but even some Latvians)—that’s why stuff like what you posted resonates in such an ugly way. Zionist denial of Palestinian identity and rights long predates the current wave of radical Islamism—and though Israel hasn’t wiped out the Palestinian people, it has driven them into a corner where hatred is the likeliest outcome. Does that absolve the Palestinians of responsibility? Of course not.

Andrejs, in response to Courlander’s remarks comparing Latvians to the Palestinians, observed that many make a comparison between Israel and Latvia. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear that is that Latvia was established as the state of the people of Latvia, not the Latvian people, as I never tire of repeating—in other words, it does not compare to “the Jewish state.” People who had lived here before the First World War were invited to return, regardless of their ethnicity, and offered citizenship—a lot of Latvian anti-Semites were unhappy about that, but the referendum they initiated to prevent it failed. Large estates were redistributed in the agrarian reform, but a great deal of property—the houses in my neighborhood, for example—was returned to its owners, German, Russian, Jewish, Polish or Latvian, once they returned; the government continued to seek the rightful owners of property for years.

Shalom,
/P

Well the nose, knows, Peter, and I had fun attributing your “reluctance to jump in” to the smell of this festering issue.

I know your intellect dissects minutely, and you certainly focus on what you know best. 

After my time in Israel, living as a Jew in so many different countries with so many different types of people, I have a personal interest.  And that is to live.  In peace, if I can. 

Zionism is just as valid as let us say the movement that restored Poland to it’s national place, and if you find Bibi’s “rancid lines” offensive, my, how you must cringe when you see Hamas charter lines blaming it all on the Jews, with Jihad as the only answer….

Latvians have been truly occupied for hundreds of years, and you’re right: the redistribution of property is commendable.  What we see in Israel now is rockets having been fired non-stop for 8 years, , farther and farther into Israel, who do what any other state would do.  They got out of Gaza for peace, and they got rockets in return.    “Driven them into a corner”, indeed!  What continuous rocket fire has to do with Palestinian statehood I cannot say: it seems a peculiar form of negotiation, to me. 

I often wonder if relgion were taken out of the equasion entirely, what would substitute for a scapegoat.  Poor people world-wide?  Red heads?  Headaches incessantly, in any case.

Latvians have endured much, and it is a a state of the Latvian people.  Israel has 75%
Jewish population, even if it is technically a Jewish state.  20% are Arabs, mostly Muslim,  with Israeli citizenship, with full rights.  And of course that population is growing daily, with projections outstripping the Jewish population within 100 years.  And then what?  Pounding from within and without, including those Jews who do not agree with Israel’s policies.
Nevertheless, Israeli statutes preserve and support religious pluralism.  Again, where in any Arab state do you see a Jewish member of parliament, let alone a substantial Jewish population?  It’s troubling, Peter, and neither of us has an answer.  My hope is that we continue to ask the right questions…

Now that I opened my mouth, I’d be a weasel to run away, so—

Zionism is just as valid as let us say the movement that restored Poland to it’s national place, and if you find Bibi’s “rancid lines” offensive, my, how you must cringe when you see Hamas charter lines blaming it all on the Jews, with Jihad as the only answer….

Zionism is as valid as any other nationalism, yes—and all nationalisms tend to be laden with myths and have their dark sides. Trying to deny the existence of the Palestinian nation—those migrant Arabs who had to move their tents when we made the desert flower—is a dark side. Latvians who try to pretend that many Russians don’t have roots here are just as dark.

Zionism has its particularity, including the fact that Jews were a minority in Palestine prior to the 1948 war, and a much smaller minority when the Balfour Declaration was issued (there were “589,200 Muslims, 83,800 Jews, 71,500 Christians and 7,600 others” in Palestine in 1922 [1]), making the dream of making Palestine as Jewish as England is English a, er, questionable proposition, and making Israel quite unlike Poland, Latvia, or any other new nation-state that emerged from a similar nationalism.

The Hamas charter, which I’d read before, makes me cringe, yes—but I daresay that I don’t think most Palestinians were devoted to radical Islamism until fairly recently (in fact, I doubt that most are even now). I take the same view of Chechnya—the Chechens were moderate Muslims until not too long ago.

Latvians have been truly occupied for hundreds of years…

Not by my lights, no. The Republic of Latvia was proclaimed in 1918, and it can’t have been occupied before then because it did not exist. The Latvian nation as such, though it has roots in ancient ethnies, came into existence as a modern nation in the 1850s (it popped out of Valdemārs’ skull, if you will, as Israel did out of Herzl’s). Zionists can and do claim that Israel is the successor of an earlier political entity—one that had been wiped off the map quite some time ago—but I find that proposition dubious. Then again, I’m someone who finds Lithuanian claims that the Republic is the direct heir to Medieval Lithuania questionable, too. Even when one can prove descent—and the Jews can prove that they have a strong connection to David’s kingdom, sure—profound changes take place over the centuries. It’s not like getting a stolen car back—your vehicle wasn’t a car when it was taken, it was a donkey and a cart. The Zionists set out to set up a modern democracy, not to restore David’s kingdom. The Lithuanians set out to build a democratic republic, not the Grand Duchy.

They got out of Gaza for peace, and they got rockets in return… 

Partly true… but as long as I mentioned Chechnya—Russians love to say that they got out of Chechnya after the first war. Getting out is not enough. Ichkeria, the Chechen state, couldn’t become a viable entity, as it was left in limbo. Just as Palestinians aren’t absolved of responsibility for their nasty deeds because they’re responding to Israel’s nasty deeds, the jihadis who went into Dagestan are responsible for theirs. Russia’s response, however, was disproportionate. I don’t know whether Ichkeria would have become a decent country if it had been given recognition and support. Russia wouldn’t permit it to become a country at all.

“Driven them into a corner”, indeed!

Indeed—what’s the Gaza Strip if not a corner? Add it to whatever pieces of chopped up territory remain in the West Bank and call it half of a two-state solution?

I often wonder if relgion were taken out of the equasion entirely, what would substitute for a scapegoat.

I think you overemphasize the religious aspect—there are quite a few Palestinian Christians, as I’m sure you know. Edward Said, whose work I’m sure you adore, was a Protestant. I think the issue is primarily one of competing nationalisms.

Latvians have endured much, and it is a a state of the Latvian people.

The first article of Israel’s Basic Law: “1. The purpose of this Basic Law is to protect human dignity and liberty, in order to establish in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”

The first two articles of Latvia’s Constitution: “1. Latvia is an independent democratic republic. 2. The sovereign power of the State of Latvia is vested in the people of Latvia.”

As I’ve explained many a time, the phrase “the people of Latvia” is distinct from “the Latvian people” and the framers of the Constitution were keenly aware of this, just as those ethnocentric nationalists who thought or think that the phrase should be changed were and are keenly aware of the distinction.

20% are Arabs, mostly Muslim, with Israeli citizenship, with full rights…

Israel has made a lot of progress with regard to the rights of Israeli Arabs. Nonetheless, the controversial document adopted by National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel [2—.pdf] states: “Defining the Israeli State as a Jewish State and exploiting democracy in the service of its Jewishness excludes us, and creates tension between us and the nature and essence of the State.” I’m sure you know that there are not a few Jews who question whether a state that defines itself as Jewish can truly be a democracy.

[To be cont’d.]

[Cont’d.]

Again, where in any Arab state do you see a Jewish member of parliament, let alone a substantial Jewish population…

That line of argument only goes so far, like that of Latvians who point to Russia and how nasty it is whenever the treatment of minorities in Latvia is discussed.

...

I have considerable sympathy for Israel and it has increased as the threat of Islamism has increased globally. I find a lot of the outcry about what Israel is doing in Gaza revolting—that a “peace demonstration” in Florida included cries of “Jews to the ovens” didn’t surprise me. The people who don’t see what Hamas is—rather, who want to ignore or cover up what anybody with eyes can see—are like the people who ran out raging at the invasion of Iraq but couldn’t care less when Saddam was busy with his slaughter and will close their eyes to who perpetrates most of the killing there, or like the people who never seem to notice what the Taliban was and is but are outraged by imperialism in Afghanistan. The coalition builds schools and the Taliban blows them up because girls shouldn’t go to school—but hey, that’s incidental, what we have here is American aggression! In fact, the “get your bloody hands off Gaza” crowd mostly consists of the same people—Muslims and the post-left that’s lost all understanding of and desire for democracy, and whose primary characteristic is a rabid anti-Western stance that could only be diluted by sending them to live in some Islamist wonderland (and possibly not even then, judging by some professional “human shields” I’ve encountered).

My sympathy for Israel also relates to my continuing experience in Latvia—the fact that it is defined as belonging to the people of Latvia, which I think is important, doesn’t diminish the fact that it is the sole homeland of the Latvian people. As a nationalist—a liberal nationalist perhaps, depending upon one’s definition—I’d like to see the so-called political nation function, but I don’t have any illusions about the relationship, to my mind natural and necessary, between the ethnic nation and the civic nation. Unlike people with an allergy to nationalism (usually people who don’t know much about it or subscribe to theories in which it is portrayed as more or less evil) I don’t have a problem with certain collective inequalities; I think Latvian must be the sole official language, for example (and on that score Israel is more liberal—Arabic is official alongside Hebrew). I don’t believe that because 40% of the population (or whatever—it’s less, but that’s the figure Shtabists wave) consists of Russophones, the Russian language should get 40% of the linguistic environment. I think saying “Russians have roots in Latvia and are 40%” is disingenuous, since the roots of part of that percentage are shallow, and so on. I think—I know—that trying to balance the needs of the nation with the need for individual liberty, also imperative in a democracy, can be tricky, to put it mildly.

There’s no comparison between Latvia and Israel—we’re not at war, Latvians didn’t give birth to a major religion, I haven’t noticed any Orthodox terrorists yet, no one claims that the Prophet (PBUH) took off from a rock in Rīga, etc. Wandering around the world amongst peoples who mostly couldn’t tolerate us and seeing a large part of our nation gassed and incinerated isn’t in our experience, no matter how much vaimanoloģija we apply to our unhappy and often tragic history. Every nation is unique, and the Jews are remarkably unique. Israel has a right to exist and a right to defend itself.

Nonetheless (and I bet you were waiting for the “but”!)... I don’t have an allergy to nationalism, but I do have a bad reaction to exceptionalism. Every nation is unique—but applying for indulgences because of a suffering credential could be even trickier than balancing the needs of the nation with the rights of man. Latvia was occupied 1940-1991, Sovietized and colonized. The Garda girls aren’t the only people demanding decolonization, but most people know that making that unattainable demand, especially if it interferes with our (extremely wayward) path to becoming a “normal country,” is like beating one’s head against the wall. No less significantly, most people know that two wrongs don’t make a right, and deporting colonists (even if done kulturāli—Latvian anti-Semites loved to use that word when talking about dealing with the “Jewish problem” in the 1930s… let’s repress them, so long as it’s done kulturāli) just isn’t kosher.

I don’t see what Israel is doing at the moment except beating its head against the wall. All the spin in the world won’t change that. You get to one of the insoluble problems at the end of your last post: And of course that population is growing daily, with projections outstripping the Jewish population within 100 years.  And then what? Pounding from within and without, including those Jews who do not agree with Israel’s policies. You mean Israel is pounded by Jews who think Israel is banging its head against the wall—people like Avraham Burg or those in Peace Now?

I realize that undoing the wrongs of history—and I do think Zionists wronged the Palestinians, just as I think Palestinians have done many a wrong—isn’t possible (and whenever I forget, my buddy Makdershowitz reminds me). Burg writes of “a kind of self-justifying Sparta, a warlike state on the verge of tragedy”—to a state, that’s the equivalent of a person losing his humanity. You can believe that the Palestinians brought you to that pass—but it takes two to tango.

Shalom,
/P

I’m appreciative that someone who didn’t want to jump into the fray dived in head first.  It’s clear you see the many-layered complexity of the situation, something that drives me to despair in any black/white pseudo analysis.

“sure—profound changes take place over the centuries. It’s not like getting a stolen car back—your vehicle wasn’t a car when it was taken, it was a donkey and a cart.” 
Check it out: Most accounts of arid land or swamp pre: ‘48, suggesting agriculture and technology replaced those prestate goats and carts.  Maybe that’s one of the reasons an envious eye is cast on a and t? 

And land was bought and paid for, oh, Peter…I shan’t go on and on…anyone can check it out for themselves.

I know I’ve been threatened in Israel even before Islamofascism rose, and I know others felt threatened, as well.  Of whatever stripe.  It will not be solved until antisemitism disappears, is my final word.

wahabist et al.,

A disturbing reference to a “hundred year conflict” with regards to the recent escalating violence in Palestine has emerged in the news media. It means: Palestinian children witnessing the violence , and their fathers fighting the jews, and their grandfathers dying fighting the jews,and when I gone , my children will fight the jews.

The jews claim that , if there was no Hamas or Hezbollah there would be no problem. But there was no Hezbollah or Hamas a few years ago. Then the jewish claim was ” if there was no Jasef Arafatt around there would be no problem”.

Visu labu,