EU's Hostile Fixation on Israeli Settlements

MiT, I have the same reaction to Advocate; I don't mind exchanging ideas with him. I find him cordial most of the time, and that's saying something - especially on a2k.

You keep repeating that same refrain without any considerations for the Palestinians whose lands and property are being stolen, and with no legal rights.

Here's an English lesson for you to memorize the word "apartheid" and its meaning.

This is Bethlehem, where the Palestinians live.


Nobody in their right mind would say that the Palestinians have equality with the Jews in Israel.

That's not only segregation at its worst, it looks more like a prison that limits their movement from one place to another.

If you lost complete freedom to do as you please (check points all over Israel), your property stolen (proven over and over by international human rights organizations), and you're fenced into a prison (I took pictures of them in Israel), how would you react?

Please be honest in your answer.

MiT, I have the same reaction to Advocate; I don't mind exchanging ideas with him. I find him cordial most of the time, and that's saying something - especially on a2k.

Remember, good fences make good neighbors. They have certainly been a great success in Southern California.

In my opinion, the Palestinean situation is just another neighborhood gentrifying with a demographic that the prior inhabitants just resent. It happens all the time in the U.S.

Aged 14 at the time, Kurt was part of a Christian group called the Templers. He lived in a settlement in Jerusalem - the district still known as the German Colony today.

By the late 1940s though, the entire Templer community of seven settlements across Palestine had been deported, never to return.

They had landed two generations earlier, led by Christoph Hoffmann, a Protestant theologian from Ludwigsburg in Wuerttemberg, who believed the Second Coming of Christ could be hastened by building a spiritual Kingdom of God in the Holy Land.

Kurt's grandfather, Christian, was among several dozen people who joined Hoffmann in relocating from Germany to Haifa in Palestine in 1869.

Hoffmann had split from the Lutheran Evangelical Church in 1861, taking his cue from New Testament concepts of Christians as "temples" embodying God's spirit, and as a community acting together to build God's "temple" among mankind.

But building a community in what was then a neglected land was an immensely difficult endeavour. Much of the ground was swamp, malaria was rife and infant mortality was high.

"The Templers saw 'Zion' [Biblical synonym for Jerusalem and the Holy Land] as their second homeland," says David Kroyanker, author of The German Colony and Emek Refaim Street. "But it was like being on the moon - they came from a very developed country to nowhere."

In fact, the Templers arrived in Palestine more than a decade before the first large-scale immigration of Jewish Zionists, who fled there to escape destitution and pogroms in Russia - and in many ways they served as a model for the Jewish pioneers.

Not just Jews, there was a substantial German population as well.

...The Israeli government bumped into reality on Sunday. Like a drunk driver heading for a wall at full speed only to get a grip on himself at the last moment and hit the brakes, most government ministers came to their senses ...

What Haaretz wrote:

Quote:

...The Israeli government bumped into reality on Sunday. Like a drunk driver heading for a wall at full speed only to get a grip on himself at the last moment and hit the brakes, most government ministers came to their senses ...