I hear Spain was pretty good to them until 1492. 
I have been watching this conflict for the past 50 years or so. Without going into detail, my conclusion is that a solution is totally intractable. The Israelis are unable to make peace and neither are the Palestinians.
Unless of course the population of both sides suddenly took massive doses of LSD and saw Buddha. Then they would wonder what they had been arguing about. Possibilities of this happening may be 0.001 percent.
When I was younger I was actually optimistic. That was when I believed most of what I read in the media. A new peace process. Hooray! How many times do we have to go through that? This last time, I think with Kerry doing the shuttling… from the first read I knew it was a doomed process. They all are.
The basic problem of the middle east is that… wait for it… they are all assholes.
Cure the assholedness and we might get a solution. It would be like the end of the Berlin wall.
Overnight.
^^ You misunderstand the issue; Israel has all the peace it needs or wants. The irritant of randomly aimed rockets is more than worth bearing for the Israeli political class in the context of long ter strategies.
What exists now basically is peace, including the rockets from one side and the occasional cage rattle from the other.
All perfectly manageable and self-serving. The nightly news won’t agree.
They most certainly were. The Americans considered getting rid of the Emperor, but decided against it - on the assumption that the emp. was mainly a figurehead that they could make use of themselves.
Oh, I dunno - fire-bombing the place to hell (or in the case of Japan, nuking the place to hell as well), then invading, killing off the leaders, and replacing them with leaders approved by the invaders? That what you think Israeli should do right now?
That particular score is worth nothing, as far as I am concerned. People do not have a genetic right to occupy a particular place, to the exclusion of others.
The Zionist claim was primarily a religious motive, though no doubt some Zionists went down the blood-and-soil route (that being very popular in the first half of the last century).
I am rather surprsied to see it advanced as a serious argument these days, though.
Irrelevant to what I said–and gets us into a pointless discussion about “Israel today”, which isn’t the same as Israel as the Zionists planned it, Israel as the British drew it up, or Israel after various wars.
I don’t answer nonsense questions.
Largely people like yourself.
As much as it justified the formation of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon etc. All countries that didn’t exist until the 1940s and were formed in the “middle of occupied land.” Your concern about the formation of Israel as opposed to the formation of those other countries seems to be that the percentage of Jews in Israel was “too high”, I take it?
What percentage of the people in the state of Iraq was in favor of its formation the year before? None of these States were created with regard to local opinions. What is your particular focus on Israel about?
Jews were arguably better treated by Muslim rulers historically, up until the mid-20th century. Christian leaders were very mercurial on Jews, inviting them, then expelling them or torturing them / converting them at the sword. Then of course a certain European leader killed 6m+ of the European Jews.
How could anyone care, realistically, how “justified” forming Israel was? “Oh, we thought it over, and you’re not a country anymore cuz you weren’t justified. Disband your regionally dominant military and everybody go choose a new country to be in.”
I’m not sure how many Americans, Canadians, Australians, or a ton of other countries would probably not want to make such a precedent.
Israelis are insane
A rocket fired from Gaza knocked out a power line in Israel that supplied electricity to 70,000 Gazans, according to the IDF Spokesman’s Office on Sunday night.
Electric company workers are fixing the line as fast as possible in the midst of the dangerous security situation.
Oh, OK so then was it really as astonishing and shocking for me to say that the Palestinians want their own state that they would probably call Palestine?
You say a lot of things but none of it ever seems particularly relevant to the point that is being made.
Well then drop some knowledge on me rather than point to a library full of books and say “read up on this before you engage in the discussion” Its odd that you would think that sort of dismissal would work in debates about Israel when it doesn’t work in debates about anything else.
And the immediately following sentence was " AFAICT, the imperial family in Japan still occupies the palace. But that’s all besides the point, your distinctions are meaningless to the point I was making. "
So how doesn’t the imperial family qualify as the leaders of Japan?
Of course I’ve heard of the war crimes tribunal.
Or just ignorant. It sounds like you know more about this than I do but I was always under the impression that the emperor ordered the surrender.
So how does a figurehead “order the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to accept the terms the Allies had set down in the Potsdam Declaration for ending the war.”
I meant the marshall plan.
Which only happened after fire-bombing the place to hell (or in the case of Japan, nuking the place to hell as well), then invading, in the process killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, killing off the leaders, and replacing them with leaders approved by the invaders. And, of course, after a period of intense denazification.
how is that pointless. You said that the Zionists bought the land. Did you mean that zionists bought SOME land and then declared a nation with national borders that mostly included the land of others? Because tahty paints a different pciture than “the zionists bought the land” when referring to Israel.
How is that a nonsense question. When you say “when THEY formed the nation” as if everyone (or even a majority of the people) who were physically present at the time were in agreement. I guess what I’m saying is that you are saying things ins a way that makes it sound like Zionists had bought all the land that is now Israel and then the people on the land decided to form the state of Israel. Thats a pretty distorted version of the truth isn’t it?
I don’t recall ever saying that. Do you have a cite or are you just mad at me?
Here we go. All criticism of Israel and zionism is anti-semitism. Thats what these arguments always come down to when the pro-Israel folks can’t hold up their end of an argument.
Were Iraq, Syria, Jordan. Lebanon, etc. created under the same circumstances as Israel? Were the circumstances even similar.
My concern about the formation of the state of Israel isn’t that the percentage of jews was too high, it is that it was too low. Jews were a minority in a land that zionists declared the establishment of a Jewish state in a land where the inhabitants were mostly not Jewish.
They stir up a lot of shit and then people like you pretend that they are on the side of the angels.
And yet I hear arguments from time to time where Israel apologists claim a long standing historical anti-semitism as the root cause of the hatred that Israel is being subjected to. As if the creation of the state of Israel and the plight of the Palestinians have nothing to do with it.
As a practical matter, might makes right (to some extent) in foreign affairs. But ignoring the origin of Israel as a source of Palestinian discontent is not going to get you closer to peace.
The “Golden Age” ended in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain kicked the Moors (forgive me if that is politically incorrect) out of Spain, along with the Jews the Muslims were treating comparatively well, and were confident to finance Christopher Colombus (or whatever his name really was).
Jews had to wear identifying symbols, and step off the sidewalk for Muslims, but they weren’t being rounded up and murdered.
So why doesn’t Israel just declare war on Palestine and get it over with?
Would Israel be able to do these things without repercussions? The fact taht Israel has the physical ability to firebomb and invade gaza doesn’t mean it has the political ability to do so.
Others in the area would get involved and I don’t know how much support Israel thinks it would would get from its allies.
This paranoia that Israelis have about the ravening hordes of Palestinians that would destroy them it given the ability to do so it overblown and an insurmountable impediment to peace.
Give Abbas a state with 1967 borders and a reasonably strong military and see if he throws it all away in a doomed attempt to drive Israel into the sea or if he uses it to exert control over his newfound country and clamp down on people who challenge his power. Add a few marshall plan type infrastructure projects and see how much the Palestinians hate you then.
You think the Palestinians are crazy bloodthirsty irrational murderers? North Korea has been ruled for generations by a series of unstable god-kings and now they have nukes. And yet they do not do do any of the crazy shit you fear from a Palestinian state.
Was it just jews that had to defer to muslims or was it christians too?