Israel's Reality

One question: when will all those displacements stop?

A factor which seems to be overlook in the discussion so far is the growing international law system. The UN Charter, the Geneva conventions, etc. These forbid the forced seizure and colonization of new territory by means of war, in an attempt to take away a major incentive for war (acquisition of new territory) and promote peace... so that such types of force displacements stop. Israel was created by the UN, from which it derives its legitimacy; and they are a member of the UN and gthus signed its charter...

Edited: this means that, if Israel is legitimate, then the occupation, colonization and annexation of the West Bank and the Golan are not.

If we ever get a world government the above might mean something you know a world government that could for example force Russian to return the lands seized by force from Ukraine in the last few months.

As it is Israel have the same rights as any nation for the lands they claim the power to defend those lands as part of their nation.

The same reason that Mexico is not going to get the south west of the US back anytime soon or the Indians tribes getting their lands East of the Mississippi back.

Had the Palestinians been willing to accept peace with Israel, the displacements would have already stopped.

Since the Palestinians have refused peace, and since people like you spew outrageous lies about the peace offers, further displacements are now legitimate.

False accusations that Jews are committing unspeakable crimes is one of the more ugly aspects of anti-Semitism.



Directing the false accusations "against Israel" instead of "against Jews" does not immunize anti-Semitism from condemnation.

Crime is a matter of perspective...irrespective of legal defintions, which are based on social perspectives to start with.

For example: if you are the father of a young girl playing with a doll, who gets killed by a soldier in her own home - you will think the soldier is guilty of a crime...irrespective of whether or not he is standing in your house, 100m away, or 1 km away, launching a missile that kills your daughter.

You may be right, in the sense that Crimea is a sign of the times. The UN and its set of rules saved mankind's skin during the cold war. At the time, the only 'news worthy', enduring failure of the system of collective security was in the I/P conflict.

After the cold war, once the US became the sole superpower, it decided to make an illegal war in Iraq and the UN was undermined big time as a result. Because if the top dog does not play by the rules, why should anybody else?

So now it's Crimea and nobody moves. Next time where? The UN was treated as some old junk from the cold war, and thrown under the bus. Now that the cold war is back, what tool do we use to keep it cold?

No. Crime is a question of fact. Legal definitions are vital.



If so, that belief could well be untrue, and could merely be the product of grief-induced derangement.

If any illegal war precipitated the Crimea annexation, it was the illegal war against Serbia, in which most European states were more complicit than the US.



We build up our military forces to a degree that Russia feels that war with us will cause them unacceptable damage.

A large US troop presence in Poland and Romania would be a good start. And make both countries storage depots for some of the tactical nukes that we lease to NATO.

Also get Georgia into NATO and station US troops there too.

Get a US Navy base on the Black Sea. Station an attack submarine there, along with a few surface ships.

Ensure that our conventional forces are backed by serious nuclear forces. Go forward with the Obama Administration's plans to boost the yield of all our ballistic warheads to half-a-megaton (with new generations of warheads that are easily interchangeable between ICBM and SLBM).

No nation have ever given a **** about the UN or international laws when the matters involved their national interests nor have the UN save anyone.

In the middle of the cold war the USSR invaded Hungary for example in 1956 and of course there was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

The UK taking back the Falkland Islands in 1982 and so on.

The UN had always been toothless and it have nothing to do with the US actions in Iraq.

Legal definitions of what constitutes a crime are vital to legal people and government systems, not to invidividuals.

Those legal definitions are in turn based on social perspective.

In other words, it is perspective that makes a crime - which is why certain actions are crimes in some countries but not in others. Certainly I'm sure that you don't believe that it is a fact that a woman can't be raped unless that rape is witnessed by 4 muslim men.

You are accepting it as fact that Israel is targeting civilians (including children) and are indiscriminate in their attacks. Where is your evidence of this? It is not ipso facto that Israel is targeting civilians and children because children and civilians are dying in this conflict. Nor is the fact that homes are being destroyed proof that Israel is indiscrminante in their attacks.

You seem to ignore all of the evidence that Hamas is not only hiding themselves and their weapons within homes, hospitals and schools, they seek to maximize the number of civilian casualties for propaganda value. This may not mean you support Hamas, but refusal to believe or acknowledge they engage in these practices eliminates the reason for a high civilian death count and the destruction of homes, thereby enabling you to make your claims against Israel. And you question my logic?

I also question your humanity.

Texas is in the process of being "latinised," it's what the Democrats are counting on to turn it from solid Red to Solid Blue

But of course you meant if Texas was "latinised" by force would I roll over.

Initially no, and I might even end up dying as a result since I am a 60 year old man with a very bad back who doesn't own a gun. However the Palestinian situation is not analogous to Texas being invaded and "latinised" by Mexicans, Venezuelans or whomever, so your attempt to make a sort of “nut-shell” argument fails. Besides it is the very fact that so many Palestinians see reaching a reasonable compromise rolling over with a whimper that there is no peace.

First of all there was no formal Palestinian political entity when the Jews first startled to settle in the region, and while I realize this can be a subject of hot debate, there is nothing debatable about Texas having been a very definite political entity since 1836 and of the United States since 1845. And whether or not there is anything we can call a Palestinian history dating back thousands of years, roughly 200 years of Texan history is long enough to establish a rich heritage that people would fight to protect.

The Jews didn’t invade a sovereign state. In your hypothetical, Mexico would have to invade the United States, let alone Texas. No group of nations formed to solve the problems of the world will be granting Mexicans a homeland in Texas, the way the UN granted the Jews a homeland in Palestine.

The Jews also had to contend with hostile Arabs who could not make any argument about being displaced by them, and against who they fought and won three major wars. When a people shed blood for a land in three wars in which they are out-numbered and out-gunned, it tends to create a sense of ownership well beyond what is granted by a piece of paper typed up by an organization (even one so esteemed as the noble UN). Not that the Jews needed three wars to establish a deep cultural and historical connection to the land.

And assuming we Texans were able to drive the Mexicans out of Texas they would always have Mexico to return to, unlike the Jews, who if forced out of Israel, would be once again scattered to the winds.

In any case let’s try and conform your hypothetical to more closely resemble the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Let’s assume that after fighting the Mexicans and calling in the armies of surrounding States and maybe even Canada, on three separate occasions, the Mexican didn’t budge. What to do then?

If I were a single man without children or grandchildren, and not in any sort of leadership position within the Texan community, I probably would find it fairly easy to continue fighting the Mexicans even if the cause was hopeless, but if I felt any responsibility for other people (family, friends or neighbors), I would have to think long and hard about whether or not to continue the fight.

There’s certainly the possibility that I would simply gather up my family and what belongings we could carry in a few truck and leave Texas for New Mexico or Oklahoma, the way roughly 6.5 million Palestinians left for or were driven by war into Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and 23 other countries around the world, but what if that wasn’t possible or I just didn’t want to leave Texas?

I’d like to think that if given the choice I wouldn’t help to perpetrate an environment of violence and death in which my children and grandchildren would have to live; that at some point I would realize that the house I may have built or that maple I planted decades before wasn’t worth the lives of my children, and their children and their children and so on.

If the Mexicans left me no choice, I would have to continue to fight, but if they offered me a way out of an endless cycle of violence, I’d like to think I would swallow hard and take it, knowing that children aren’t born with metaphysical ties to a plot of land or a grove of trees and that they can make their own connections; their own sense of place and home…if they are allowed to grown up and to build something while they do.

I know that having reached such a conclusion, I would not hold on to demands that the Mexicans would never meet and so scuttle any chance of the peace I was seeking.

I’m not unsympathetic to the everyday Palestinian, the ones who are not raiding Jewish settlements and slaughtering families, strapping bombs around their chests and walking into crowded cafes or buses or firing an endless stream of rockets into civilian areas in Israel, however a majority of them in Gaza voted for Hamas, and they knew full well what sort of an organization Hamas is. The argument is made that they voted for Hamas because they were tired of the incompetence of Fatah, and I’m sure this is, in part, true, however you can’t ignore the violent and heinous ways and intent of a group simply because they can make the trains run on time.

But they did clearly end up with the short end of the historical stick, someone always does. We don’t live in a world where anything close to a pure application of justice exists. If that isn’t clear to the Palestinians then they need only look at the history of the Jews. It is incredibly ironic that in the process of gaining a homeland for themselves, another diaspora has been created. I don’t know that there was anywhere for the Jews to go where some sort of friction would not be caused, unless it was some nearly uninhabitable place where no one already lived. As it was, Israel was pretty close to such a place and obviously friction still resulted.

Still having been cast a very bad hand by the UN, the British and history, it is not incumbent upon them to shut up and take it, and I am not arguing they should and Israel hasn’t offered them only a choice of being subservient serfs or dead freedom-fighters.

So if Mexico offered me, my family and fellow Texans a homeland of our own, that was not in the middle of a geographic or economic desert, and they promised to provide us with the necessary assistance in terms of infrastructure, energy and economic support, I believe I would chose to try and build a new nation for my children and grandchildren and not condemn them to live in the old, decaying one without any real hope for the future. Clearly there wouldn’t be any cause for victory celebrations, but it wouldn’t be rolling over and whimpering either. As long as the Palestinians seek a victory and consider realistic concessions a defeat, there will never be peace, and they, more than the Israelis will suffer for years and years to come.

As far as I know the UK's actions were fully consistent with the UN charter.

Perspective comes into play when the laws are being written. But once the laws are written, whether or not a law has been violated is a question of fact.



I think that is for adultery, not rape.

The requirement for witnesses isn't because there is no crime if there is no witness. It's a judicial standard (like "beyond a reasonable doubt") that is designed to protect the innocent from wrongful conviction.

Thanks for that very considered, and I believe honest, response.

I disagree on a bunch of points but hey, we always do.

It's not a particularly human trait to put up with suffering and humiliation because 'in a few generations' everything will be better. If it's even considered the conclusion is generally 'if we take this now it will only get worse'.

Being American I'm sure the phrase 'Give me liberty or give me death.' has a resonance you can understand.

Jewish immigration to Israel since 1948 is about 3.5 million. In 2012 the total population of Israel topped just 9 million. That's a massive proportional influx. That would be like the US having about 4 times as much immigration as it has had in the same period. And that migration has meant compensationless displacement for many Palestinians. In the USA they just take your jobs, in Israel they take your houses and land too.

Nothing more dangerous than someone who thinks they have nothing to lose.

I think you missed the point Oralloy, but that's okay. People see what they want to see, and ignore what they want to ignore.

The vast majority of Jews hail from ancestors that converted to Judaism. The idea of Jewish hereditariness is religious, it's not borne out by historical or biological facts.

DNA analysis seems to prove that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews have middle eastern Y chromosomes, and X chromosomes from a local European woman. The explanation usually stated is that a gaggle of Jews from the middle east went into Europe to set up a trading post for notions and sewing needles, in the hinterlands, and the sons married local pagan women, and raised the children in the Jewish religion.

Ashkenazi Jews are just mutts, pardon the expression. Only in the biblical era where there converts from local middle eastern peoples. That is sort of a non-sequitor, since it occurred before the Diaspora. And, no one ever claimed that Jews are pedigreed Hebrews.

Today, it is just a religion that correlates to a culture that irritates some others, due to its focus on activities that might not reflect the local popular culture, such as football, tatoos, hard drinking, swaggering in a macho manner, etc., etc.

I would like a high percentage of university professors to convert to Judaism, so Jews can then reply to those that accuse them of thinking that they are "superior," "not superior, just more educated."

Why don't you ask the Fogels about humanity.