Ironically, Aussies don’t even drink very much Foster’s.
Put another way, how much to get the Israelis to voluntarily agree to being ethnically cleansed? Completely and utterly unrealistic amounts of money… then throw in the smaller moving expenses. We can likely negotiate a better deal if nobody mentions the words ethnic cleansing… ooops.
Why should they move now? They’re doing better than ever. Fifty years ago Israelis were facing off against tanks and fighter jets. Today it’s kitchenware.
I understand as Americans we expect the quick fix (oblivious to the fact that 150 years after the end of the Civil War, American prisons have plenty of interracial kitchenware shanking going on), but at this rate, in another fifty years, all the Palestinians will be doing is giving the Israelis wet willies.
As a half-Jew, I have great love and concern for the Jewish people and their future, and I view the Zionist movement as a huge mistake. There is, today, a country where Jewish people are free to be themselves and practice their religion and culture without fear of persecution: it’s called the United States of America.
The understandable sentimental attachment of some Jews to the territory of their ancient homeland has only put them in greater danger. I wish that more Israeli Jews would see that, and I particularly wish they would stop trying to encourage the Diaspora to “come home”.
It’s interesting to muse about possible alternative locations where a Jewish nation could have been founded. Unfortunately, there aren’t really any large tracts of uninhabited land left in the world, so any place you choose would result in displacement of other peoples, resentment, and the same backlash all over again. I would strongly support the establishment of a Jewish colony outside the planet Earth. If any human ethnic group can make this work, I believe the Jews can.
There are huge tracts of uninhabited land all over the world. There are just very few that are practically habitable. Anyway, calling Zionism a mistake is 20/20 hindsight. There were plenty of reasons for Jews to avoid the US prior to 1947.
You’re right that it’s 20/20 hindsight, and it’s generations too late to undo it now.
And plenty of reasons after, too. My grandfather fought in WWII, came back, settled in the south, and changed his last name to something nice and Anglo-Saxon because it wasn’t… let’s say “fashionable” to be overtly Jewish in that part of the US at that time.
You must not know very many Israeli Jews. They see it just fine. Hell, they’ve been born and bred to it. Israeli Jews are a throwback to Macabees and Sicarii*, and I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever lead to them peaceably leaving Israel.
*lest that be interpreted as a political statement, it’s not. I just named the first ancient Jewish badasses who came to mind.
Sheldon is a genius, and he couldn’t figure it out - what makes you think you can, Ralph?
Wrong thread.
If it was wrong to eject the Palestinians from the land they grew up on because someone else wanted it, then it is also wrong to eject the Israelis from the land they grew up on because someone else wants it.
Jewish badasses Samson and Jephthah came way before those.
I have a modest proposal:
Transplant all Israeli Jews to New York.
Transplant all Palestinian Muslims to Los Angeles.
Transplant other religions to Miami.
Nuke the region, until the entire Holy Land is below sea level, and all religiously significant sites are radioactive powder.
And from then on there was peace in the Middle East. The end.
Indeed, I don’t know any Israeli Jews. I just know the Jews in my father’s family, who came to America a hundred years ago and made a very nice life for themselves. Sure, there was anti-Semitism here, but it was even worse everywhere else, and it was — and is — especially bad in Palestine. So why go there? And having gone there and experienced the hatred, why stay? I don’t understand these modern “Jewish badasses” at all. Why would anyone want to live that way? Who wants to live in a bunker, constantly wondering if you’re going to be nuked by a rogue state or blown up by a terrorist?
Because it’s the only place on earth with a Jewish government.
The Jews in your family (and in mine) came to America a hundred years ago and made a nice life for themselves. But what’s a hundred years in the context of Jewish history? There have been dozens of countries and kingdoms that welcomed Jews for a century or so, and then started murdering and extorting and exiling them when they weren’t useful anymore, or when the nice king died and the mean one took over.
Israeli Jews may wonder if they’re going to get nuked by a rogue state or blown up by a terrorist, but they also live in the only Jewish nation on the planet and one of the only ones in the entire history of the planet. It’s more meaningful than you probably realize.
Saudi Arabia has more than enough wealth to move all the Palestinians lock, stock and barrel to their own homeland. They’d never even consider it because the arabs don’t want peace, they want the Jews off their precious muslim dirt. And Palestine gives their blatantly racist prejudice a level of credibility.
The Israeli Jews I know, at least some of them, are highly paid engineers. They have a VERY good life.
ETA: What Johnny Bravo said, also. It can be empowering to be part of the majority, instead of the minority, for a change.
Not only more meaningful than I realized, but apparently more meaningful than I can comprehend. Growing up as a secular Jew in the Untied States, I can’t wrap my head around the attraction of a country organized around either a religion or ethnicity. It’s not that I support the OP’s relocation plan, A “Jewish Nation” sounds just as bad to me as a “Christian Nation” or a “Muslim Nation.”