Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians since 2006 increase

[ingemann]

The Palestinians left in the expectation that it would be better to return alive after the Arab armies conquered than to die at the hands of Irgun and Lehi terrorists like those at Deir Yassin who had foolishly believed that if they were peaceful, they could receive peace in return.  It wasn't until after Deir Yassin that the Arab governments recommend that Arabs leave before they could be killed by Zionist thugs.  If they hadn't left, I fully expect that thousands more would have been massacred at the hands of those criminals.

Not all of them left, why didn't it happen over and over again anyway?

If you look at the Israeli demographic map, you will see that most Israeli Arabs live in the north, while the massacre happened near Jerusalem and in central Israel, there are a rather limited Arab presences outside East Jerusalem.



The low presence of Arabs in south Israel are not a result of ethnic cleansing, but due to the fact that it never had any major population at all.

[ingemann]

Not all of them left, why didn't it happen over and over again anyway?

If you take a look at the maps of where Arabs live today in Israel and of the 1947 partition plan, you'll notice that almost all of them live in what under the 1947 partition plan were to be Arab areas.  So yeah, they did leave until general war broke out and they got occupied too quickly to leave.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Well, since I find the idea of carving out a Jewish State at the expense of people already living there generally stupid, doing it in Germany at least has the advantage of being a reciprocal action against people who had actually done unwarranted harm to the Jews.  The only place on Earth it wouldn't be totally stupid to carve out a new nation today is probably Antarctica or some southern islands.

Israel wasn't established as some kind of apology because of the Holocaust. It was established because Palestine had a large Jewish minority (around 1/3 in 1945, increasing to around half with the arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe before the Israeli independence), and the British grew so tired of Jewish terrorism, that they simply gave up, and asked UN to set up an independence plan for Palestine.

As for setting up a Jewish state in Germany, beside being really really stupid, it would also demand that the Allies transported 1 million Jews from Palestine to the land which had just committed genocide against them.

Of course I also see no problem placing them as an enclave between German population centre, none at all (sarcasm).
At least if you suggest this, take a place like Baden, Saar or Pfalz, which is a border area, or better yet Prussia, Farther Pomerania or Lower Silesia, which are all areas, which even today are thinly populated (and which historical was much more densely populated by the standards of the time).

[ingemann]

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.

Fair enough. I didn't know you were Jewish, incidentally.

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". 

If you feel that way, maybe your family and you should start putting your feet where you words are.

[ingemann]

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.

Fair enough. I didn't know you were Jewish, incidentally.

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". 

If you feel that way, maybe your family and you should start putting your feet where you words are.

Thats his choice and pro-Zionist Jews are of much greater value to Israel in the US than in Israel itself.

I disagree, the Religious Right deliver the true support to Israel, so whether Mr. Goldfield and other of his ilk go "home" to Israel or not make little difference for the support to Israel in USA, and so he could just as well serve Israel on the ground.