You know the “wives and girlfriends” would have had the same IDF training, right? 
“Hello, Amazon? Do you sell popcorn by the pallet? Yes, I’ll hold.”
This doesn’t at all match the information I’ve heard about IDF training from people I know who actually served in the IDF; but your third or fourth hand account sounds much more reliable…
Yeah, but would the supposed Buddhist priest making up this story know that?
Hey, I am very white Anglo and Catholic, and got my genital mutilation when I was ten days old. It is not only the Jews who are into weird shit.
I disagree with the premise, but my foreskin is gone.
(Bonus fact… a friend works in biological science, specifically in stem-cell research. Most of her lines of cells come from circumcised foreskins. Aside from some Catholics, and most - if not all Jews - many Muslims are circumcised.
Instead of wasting them… they go to valuable research into cancer, and a bunch of other genetic related diseases)
Oh yeah, I gave a different viewpoint, so I must be lying.
Say what? I certainly didn’t say you must be lying; the fact that you could be wrong without lying is precisely the problem with relying on third or fourth hand info.
No I didn’t, but you just effectively said it was double the amount of Israelis that are trained to have no empathy for the Palestinians.
Yeah… besides the fact that that goes contrary to everything I know and have experienced with Israeli army training, the IDF doesn’t have American-style bases where the families of the troops live in military housing. It’s a small country, everything is a short drive from everything else, which means that servicemembers with families live in regular cities and towns. In other words, there are no circumstances in which “wives and girlfriends” would travel to their significant others’ base, presumably at night, for a lecture, let alone without their significant others. Was your monk from the Order of the Fragrant Cow Dropping?
No, he effectively said your story makes no fucking sense.
Quit while you’re behind, dude. Either you made up that story or the monk did.
The majority of the population was Arab, not Jewish. Like 2/3 of the population, and just shortly before the war they were more than 80 percent of the population. But ended up with less of the land. I think we can see why they felt screwed.
And sorry, the idea that Israeli Jews didn’t want an ethno-state is ridiculous.
And didn’t Netanyahu say recently that EVERYONE in Gaza is Hamas, which includes little kids(!)
so who were the Amalekites, Moabites, et al (Arabs, not Muslims, Mohammed came later), who were already there when Joshua arrived “who came, and conquered”
Hamas.
/bitter sarcasm
Like it or not, Israel isn’t going anywhere. It has alliances with multiple powerful western nations. It is a regional military superpower.
The land was stolen after the UK took over the ottoman empire after WW1. But again, thats not going to change. The land wasn’t originally arab or muslim either. The arab muslims conquered it militarily in the 7th century.
It’s always been pretty much Arab (and other ethnicities), even if it hasn’t been Muslim.
I’m pretty sure the ethnic group we call “Arab” in modern times is so named as a result of the Muslim empires that came out of Arabia that conquered the Levant, North Africa, Caucasus, etc. Obviously it is now a combination of many groups that existed throughout the conqueror and conquered lands and there are still variations within.
The current Palestinians and most Israelis are both mainly descended from people who were resident in the area before that 7th C. conquest or the Roman one before it.
The Levant/Israel/Palestine are one of the places that hybrid Sapiens/Neanderthal remains have been found so I feel very confident in declaring that the area has always been a “mix” of different groups and types of people. A lot of whom would not want to admit they are actually related to a greater or lesser degree.
Determining who was there first is a pointless exercise given the history of the place.
What I would like (and I suspect most people in the region would like) is an end to the displacement and/or slaughter of one group by another, the mistreatment of one group by another.
Indeed.
The fellahin are not the descendants of the Arab conquerors, who captured Eretz Israel and Syria in the seventh century CE. The Arab victors did not destroy the agricultural population they found in the country. They expelled only the alien Byzantine rulers and did not touch the local population. Nor did the Arabs go in for settlement. Even in their former habitations, the Arabians didn’t go in for farming. They did not seek new land to settle their peasantry, which hardly existed. Their whole interest in new countries was political, religious and material: to rule, to propagate Islam and to collect taxes.
David Ben-Gurion and Yitzak Ben-Zvi, Eretz Israel in the Past and in the Present