Can you look at this map and say Israel does not systemically appropriate land?

YOU need to read history. Palestine, which is today claimed by two people, was home to dozens of nations in antiquity.

The colonisation project will be the end of Israel as a democratic state. Oh well... we'll just need to bomb them into good behaviour at some point in the not so distant future.

You should remember that Israel has lots of nukes to be used as needed.

Once Israel uses their nukes, the US will disengage our relationship with Israel.

No politician will survive defending Israel's use of nukes.

That's on top of stealing Palestinian property.

Goodbye Israel.

If they use one single WMD, their entire territory will be turned into a glow-in-the-dark parking lot for Saudi and Lebanese limo owners.

I agree...I say produce legal papers.

Ah, Ci, uh-uh! Methinks you are grossly underestimating the American political Congress, many who would gladly look the other way for the money AIPAC will give them. As long as AIPAC along with other Jewish Groups continue to contribute tens of thousands of dollars to the US congress individual members, Israel will have their support and only mild censorship when the Zionist nation participates in wrongdoing, the same way the US congress pay lip homage to Israel's continued settlement building. You simply don't seem to understand the hold Israel has on the US congress, do you? All candidates for the US president travels to Israel to pay homage to their leaders.

State of mind – The Invention of the Land of Israel

The Invention of the Land of Israel: from holy land to homeland, by Shlomo Sand, reviewed by Richard Kuper
August 2013

In his much acclaimed book The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009), Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argued that the idea of ‘the Jewish people’ was a contradiction. Most Jews did not originate from ancestors who lived in Judea and Samaria. Rather, Judaism was a highly successful proselytising religion in the centuries shortly before the rise of Christianity and for some centuries after. Jews were united by religious belief rather than a common ethnicity; most of them always lived in ‘the diaspora’. There simply was no mass exile in 70 CE. The idea of ‘the Jewish people’ is no less problematic than that of ‘the Christian people’ or ‘the Buddhist people’.

But Zionists see the Jewish people not just as a nation, any old nation, but a chosen one, with a homeland given to it by a jealous God in far-off times. Even secular Zionists appeal, in some sense or other, to the bible and historical right as a legitimation for today’s Israel as ‘the Jewish state’. This is the subject of Sand’s second, equally iconoclastic volume of demystification, as he now dissects the invention not of the people as such but of its homeland.

The core of the Zionist dream as expressed today is for Jews to ‘return’ to Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel. Sand is unsparing in showing how the ambiguities of the term are exploited ideologically, for this term is found nowhere in the bible before the new testament and only emerged, hesitantly, in the rabbinical tradition after the final incorporation of Judea into the Roman Palestina. It developed as a theological concept, referring to a certain sacred space, never a geopolitical area.

Something like modern day Zionism was a Christian evangelical notion before it was a Jewish one, and the idea that real Jews should actually go to live in Palestine was condemned by rabbinical Jewry, even as a yearning for Zion featured as a centrepiece of the Jewish religion. How this was transformed, and how the war between nation-state Zionism and traditional Judaism was played out is told in great detail by Sand in this fitting complement to his first volume.

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/state-of-mind-the-invention-of-the-land-of-israel/

Well, that may be the generally accepted opinion, but Israel doesn't have enough nukes to kill off all of their neighbors, and even if they did, they would end up polluting their own country.

It's a no win for Israel even if the American government ignores the breaking of another international law if and when they use nukes against their neighbors. The US can't keep fighting Europe and our other allies - just to defend Israel.

I agree, Ci, but look at how far right our government has gone. There's very little daylight between the Tea Party and Establishment Republicans. The current Republican Party along with a minority of Democrats will do anything if the price is right. This human garbage was willing to allow the US debt to default and even went so far as to shut down the government because of ObamaCare which is the law of the land. The GOP refused to extend the unemployment benefits, and have cut food stamps for the very needy. We are headed towards an Oligarchy, or perhaps, in many ways we are already there except they have not touched Medicare or Social Security yet; they are hoping, once they GOP controls the senate, to privatize these entitlements.

The current Republican Party is like the angry smelly skunk at the party refusing to go away.

Hi Nation. I remember reading this stuff way back. I agree with the general thesis.

True; that is certainly a quick way for the GOP to destroy this country. They've been working at it 24/7 for many years now, and by some miracle of karma, the US economy has maintained its own.

People just don't realize how many jobs the GOP has killed over all these years while they promise that the wealthy will create more jobs.

The only good news that I know of is that our area of the country is doing very well, with double the rate of increase in salaries and benefits, and good paying jobs continuing to grow. Over 40% of our workers are now earning over $100,000 a year. All while the GOP will not increase the federal minimum wage.

San Francisco has one of the highest minimum wage laws in the country, and their unemployment rate is 5.6%, and the US average is 6.6%.

The only people here who are trying to invade and colonize someone else's county, are the Palestinians.



The IDF provides adequate defense against Palestinian aggression.



The Palestinians are not defending themselves. They are the aggressors.

It is also a basic fact of history which has been around for 3,000 years.

Nope. It has only been the home of the Jewish people. The rest were just illegitimate invaders.

Only in your dreams. If anyone uses nuclear weapons against Israel, Israel will use nuclear weapons against them.

So you like to deny history.

Do you deny the Holocaust too?

The only ones denying history are you people who don't appreciate international laws and legal ethics.

Only in your anti-Semitic delusions.

Anti-Semitic lies from a self-hating Jew.

The only people freaky enough to "acclaim" such drivel are Neo-Nazi scum and other such riffraff.

Unlikely that Israel will ever need our help to defend themselves.

But if they did, we wouldn't have to fight Europe in order to provide that aid.