But the Palestinians are a nation, a stateless nation. Theirs is the best claim. They’ve been living there forever, they are descendants of every people who has ever occupied Canaan, including the Hebrews/Israelites/Jews.
Then the question becomes: are they bad neighbors because of what Israel has done or are they simply bad people?
Why are those the only choices?
Its to reflect the range of options in Grotonian’s post that I responded to
What difference does it make?
If someone wants to kill me, and nothing I do will make him stop, who cares why he hates me? It’s not as if I’m going to stop defending myself.
I’m willing to make peace, but I’m not willing to die.
I can’t see anything in his post that limits the range of options.
Stateless nations lack some of the mechanisms useful in exercising sovereignty. The lack of recognition from their neighbors is a serious handicap.
The most critical thing a stateless nation lacks is defined borders.
You’re assuming nothing will make him stop.
Then there was no limit to the options I presented either
But what if the things you do make his friends want to kill you? How do you make them stop?
At this very simple and hypothetical level, I don’t care. I do what I have to, in order to survive. If that makes someone else want to kill me, I’ll have to deal with that when the time comes.
If you’re about to be killed by a member of a violent drug gang, and you have a gun and can defend yourself, do you refrain from shooting him…because the rest of the gang will then come after you? Great: he kills you. What, exactly, have you gained?
It might be more apropos to kill the gang member and then go kill his family for allowing him to become a gang member. Then you seize the family’s house and give it to one of your family members. Finally you wonder why the gang member’s extended family is pissed and coming after you. And the cycle repeats.
More seriously, it’s a tough situation. There are definitely Arabs that have no desire for peace and want to kill as many Israelis as possible; Israel must be allowed to defend itself. On the other side, Israel’s responses are inappropriate and are absolutely making the problem worse. There is no excuse for the gradual encroachment in the West Bank.
There are plenty of Palestinians who want a stable and peaceful resolution. Israel has removed their voice.
Not Israel alone, by any means. Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence, and the murder of many accused of collaboration, has also helped inflame hatreds.
Also, even among those who honestly do want a stable and peaceful solution, how many (on either side) are willing to accept a result that the other side could possibly agree to? Even if all the extremists died tomorrow, could even the moderates find a way past the question of the Right of Return or the status of Jerusalem?
The questions are so thorny, even the good guys can’t figure out answers to them!
What if someone you knew has been killed to be killed by a member of a violent drug gang. But you can’t actually identify who is a gang member and who isn’t. So you go downtown and you shoot 6 people at random. Then you shoot all the police. Then you steal the most valuable real estate you can find. Then you sell it an use the money to buy guns.
Will that result in long-term peace?
No.
They’re doing this to Palestinians. Which, despite what you may have heard, actually exist.
Here in the U.S. we have some quasi-stateless nations, those surviving Indian nations that still have some kind of organization. Their tribal governments are conquered dependencies of the U.S. but still have enough theoretical sovereignty to, e.g., get away with running casinos regardless of state law. Despite this, Indians can also vote in state and federal elections.
Of course, that’s not a model that’s ever going to work in Israel/Palestine – it depends on the conquered dependencies being to too powerless and their people too few to aspire either to rule the whole country or to gain real independence from it. The Palestinians are never going to just give up and accept the rule of an Israeli government in which they have no voice; and if they are given a voice, representation in the Knesset, they might try to use it to take over – they are not comparatively numerous enough to do so, but that might change in a few decades, and then is Israel really a Jewish state/homeland any more?
And this post answers my other question. I now know what the guy was talking about.
Nope. Not at all.
Asked and answered.
My emphasis.
I really think one of the biggest obstacles coming from the Israeli side is this insistence that any recognition come with this stipulation. IMHO, they should drop this demand if they are serious about peace. I think the extreme situation of poverty, corruption, crime, and the other problems facing the Palestinians is a big factor in their extremism. Given 20 or 30 years of equal representation in Israeli government, I don’t believe there will be a significant call to exterminate anybody, certainly not any more to the extent that we still have extremists here in the US. But the fact that they would be reminded every day that they are not true partners in a united Israeli government does not help things.
Israel should just strive to be a government, not THE Jewish homeland.
You can’t be serious? The posts say that Israel is setting up tactics and roadblocks for the Palestinians to access their land, and that, consequently Israel considers that land abandoned and occupy it. So the answers are yes and yes.
Only an idiot would do that.
(Please don’t bother going forward with this.)