Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians since 2006 increase

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Excepting Ray's post, this thread is so full of false equivalence one could gag.

I think part of it is the ongoing belief that Israel has some sort of "original sin" it needs to atone for, and as such it's on "probation" and every sin is magnified.

I reject this idea 100%.

It is not the matter of any original sin. It is something else. Israel was founded by the people, who thought of themselves as Europeans - indeed, progressive Europeans, for the most part. It is still trying to preserve the claim of being part of the Western world. But, ironically, they used as their model what "Europe" was abandoning at that very moment. As a result, in many respects a Westerner sees in Israel his own portrait, highlighting things he is ashamed of: a nasty caricature of how he sees himself. And, of course, for the rest of the world it is just another European colonial project...

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And, of course, for the rest of the world it is just another European colonial project...

Yup.  I expect that in the long term, the stelladers will end up being as successful as the crusaders a millennium earlier were in holding onto to the Holy Land.

Actually, I sincerely hope, Israel will have a long an prosperous future Not because I like the Zionist idea - I consider it inherently flawed. But because two wrongs do not make a right. Israeli Jews have no other homeland anywhere in the world. They, over the last 2/3 of a century, managed to create an identity as strong as any. They do not need justify their existence any more than the French or the Germans do. While I do not think Israel has much to offer to a diaspora Jew, like myself, and while I do not have any self-identification with that state (which is as foreign to me as the Papua New Guinea), its existence and prosperity, clearly, are of utmost importance to the welfare, and, indeed, the lives, of its own, Israeli (not Jewish, but Israeli), people.

This is exactly why I equally sincerely hope they manage to go beyond copying the early twentieth-century European nation state and can truly become part of the Western world. Because otherwise, unfortunately, they do not have much of  a future.

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When we occupy northern Mexico and start settling people there while denying the Mexicans things like freedom of movement and the right to vote and be citizens, you can get back to me with your comparisons.

To be fair, aren't. Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and Utah all formerly part of northern Mexico?   I suspect that's part of the reason some people there are threatened by Mexican immigration.  They're afraid the Mexicans might reclaim what was originally theirs.  (Well really it was the Indians', but you know what I mean.)

Well, the US did not deny citizenship to those residents of the conquered land, who happened to be of Mexican stock. And, indeed, not doing this was a major reason for not annexing a lot more. Remember, when the treaty was signed, US army was in control of Mexico City and the US flag was flying over the National Palace. Mexican government had fled to Queretaro, and was incapable of any serious military resistance.

There was no military reason not to annex a much bigger chunk of land. But that land would have come with people (unlike the, for the most part, much more sparsely populated territory actually annexed).  And, of course, much of the population they did annex were the "uncivilized" indians - and those did not, really, live long to tell the tale (or to express any grievance), as a result.

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When we occupy northern Mexico and start settling people there while denying the Mexicans things like freedom of movement and the right to vote and be citizens, you can get back to me with your comparisons.

That's exactly what happened, Texas used to be part of Mexico, colonists came and took over, fought a war and drove the Mexicans out. Mexicans certainly don't have all those rights you listed. Since your ancestors come from outside of Texas, you would count as a colonist yourself.

Mexicans, who had lived in Texas, retained all the rights. The first vice-president of independent Texas - Lorenzo de Zavala -  had, in fact, been a cabinet member and a governor in Mexico

In any case, two things to remember:

A. this was over 150 years ago, when the standards of civilization were quite different. It is exactly what I mean by you, guys, trying to imitate the civilized world of a hundred years back. Mercifully, the world is different now: for instance, slavery has been abolished pretty much worldwide, while Jews can study and teach at universities and are not regularly subject to pogroms in Russia. I know, you might find those developments unpleasant, but I, actually, like them

B. Americans were smart enough NOT to annex the actually populated lands ("uncivilized" Indians back at the time did not really count - they could be exterminated). Given the fairly small population size on the territory they annex, there was no problem with granting everybody full citizenship.

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Jews are not "Europeans". People do not get to run us out of our homeland, occupy it for thousands of years, spend thousands of years killing us for not being properly "European" and then tar us as "European colonialists" when it comes time to hold us accountable for THEIR past sins.

Jews, of course, were the archetypal unassimilable migrants of European history. But the Jews who founded Israel were not the same Jews, who had lived in the ghetto and the shtetl. They, unlike their ancestors, were a product of a "secular eruption" from the ghetto into the European society. They were no longer willing to live on the margins of Europe - they wanted to be an equal part of it. Their view of the "normal" was what they perceived as the European norm of their own time. Except that, by the time the Zionists got what they wanted, this was not the norm, as Europe understood it itself.

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The Jews didn't decide to expel Palestinians. The Palestinians were ordered to leave by the Arab States, so that they could commit a genocide on the new state of Israel. They agreed, happily.

We were supposed to let them all march back in after that?

Perhaps, you should study history from less one-sided sources

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As much as I love this country, I've always sort of been aware that I and my family and friends may be one bad economic crisis or Presidential election where a bad person wins from having to decamp. Part of this may be that I grew up in an area with a surprising amount of anti-semitism, so I was always keenly aware that lots of people saw me as "the other".

You have little faith in US democracy, I see. If that were true, I guess, this would mean that about, say, 100% of US population were in the same position: nobody in the United States can confidently count on being a member of a majority coalition Then, again, I do not see the Amish asking for a homeland in Hesse

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Anything can happen when you're a controversial 2% of the population. It feels good to know there's an option.

There are dozens, if not hundreds small groups in the US that are a lot more controversial than the Jews at this point You yourself, probably, belong to quiet a few. I, sure, do (though, I am no longer in the US - but, hey, if anything, that should make me more worried). In fact, I would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the US who isn't.

I know exactly where your sentiments are coming from.  Unlike you, I, actually, grew up in the USSR. I did face anti-semitism myself and observed it around me. I lived in a society where anti-semitism forced our fellow-tribesmen together. These sorts of arguments were not merely a reheating of Zhabotinskyite pablum, but something I could personally relate to and develop.

Coming to the US was, actually, a shock: I had never before been in a society where Jewishness was
so much part of a norm. What surprised me at first was that, despite this fairly high level of integration and that sense of normalcy, many of my American Jewish acquaintances were retaining the defensive attitude that had been natural for me in Russia. Of course, old habits die hard, and  I did, eventually, learn was that Jewish current social status in the US is a fairly recent phenomenon historically. But, hey, it was decades-old then, and a few more decades have passed since. However uncurious you might be about the outside world, time to start noticing the changes.

In any case, there are two different readings one can make of Jewish history. One is that, since the ispravnik can screw you, you should be the ispravnik. That is the success of the Zionists: they got to be their own ispravniks.

The other reading, of course, is that of Europe's and America's Jewish liberals - and mine. Society should be organized in a way, where no ispravnik can screw anyone for being a part of any minority.  Fortunately, though US might not be quite there, it is pretty damn close. Liberal democracy is a wonderful thing.

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I fail to see how Jewish Americans are "controversial." I grew up in a part of Texas with an above-average amount of them and never saw anything "controversial" about them, nor did I observe any anti-Semitism or anti-anything else.

Though I disagree with your opponent on most important points, this particular comment made me laugh - sadly. If you have never been a part of a "controversial" minority, you would never notice My - ethnic Russian - childhood acquaintances back in the USSR used to never notice anything either: not vis-a-vis my tribe, not vis-a-vis anyone else (except, of course, for the haters themselves - those did notice ). My mother recently commented, her college classmates simply did not notice that few, if any, of the Jewish kids could go to grad school - even when their grades had been far superior to those who were admitted, and even though some of the programs at her university chose to cut the number of graduate student positions in order not to admit a Jew. You would not notice, when somebody says on the phone: "yes, we desperately need people for this job, let's schedule and interview for tomorrow, what's your name?" And then, upon hearing your name would respond: "sorry, I've just been told, we got somebody already". How would you know?

Of course, my lesson from that sort of thing has been to identify with the Israeli Arabs

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Jews are not a controversial minority in the United States, Ray. That doesn't mean that American Jews (and, in fact, all Americans) shouldn't be fervent supporters of Zionism, of course.

Of course! There are many other, much more important reasons not to support Zionism