Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians since 2006 increase

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

http://www.firstpost.com/world/israeli-settler-attacks-on-palestinians-have-shot-up-un-1341099.html
Even as a Israel Supporter, I see that it doesn't look like anyone wants peace... Maybe it's time for us Americans to see if the Israelis can survive on their own?

They can. Easily. They have one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Diplomatically is another issue. The UN would undoubtedly try to strangle Israel with sanctions without the US' involvement.

Now if we're going to talk about forming policy based on this, it's worth mentioning that in the period, three times as many settlers have been killed as Palestinians in these conflicts. The number needs to be zero on both sides, but it doesn't exactly seem fair to condemn one side based on those statistics.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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%.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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.

Except that that's the problem. No one ran you out of your homeland.

I have zero sympathy for a Jew living in New Jersey who may or may not be descended from someone who was expelled from the Middle East some 1,200 years ago. If we're going to expand property rights into infinity, then you and I both need to be expelled from our homes, have our lands seized and have them given to the descendants of Native Americans.

I fail to see how you can draw an equivalency between that and a Palestinian who was personally expelled from their village by Israelis a mere 65 years ago.

It doesn't seem like you've held Germany accountable for their past sins. You seem more interested in holding the Palestinian people accountable for Germany's sins despite the fact that I'm pretty sure they never sent anyone to gas chambers or concentration camps.

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?

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

I don't even want to hear about options that were never offered. They weren't offered. Ergo, our real choice was to take our lives in our own hands and fight for our homeland, or sit there and wait for the public pressure to let up in Europe a little so we could be finished off.

And even if a homeland had been offered somewhere in Europe, it would have lasted a few years before the Soviets rolled their tanks in and the killings began anew.

It's over. The Jews won. The Jews have a country. The Jews have 300 nukes powerful enough to fend off any invader, up to and including superpowers. Despite all the impotent ranting every time a single Jew steps a toe out of line, Israel is far less of a human rights abuser than any other country within a thousand miles of it. It has faults, like any other country. But if every hate crime isn't an indictment of the very core of America, then it isn't an indictment of Israel either.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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".

Israel is far from perfect, of course, but I find that a lot of its sins are reflected in other countries, either preceded by centuries or just decades. They've got a lot to sort out over there, and I wish them all the best. I think it's still incredibly key for that refuge for Jews to exist, and I don't believe it could exist anywhere else. Other options were proposed, but none of them passed the smell test for me - they were either already populated with no actual roots for the Jews, or they were isolated and inhospitable.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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 particularly 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".

Israel is far from perfect, of course, but I find that a lot of its sins are reflected in other countries, either preceded by centuries or just decades. They've got a lot to sort out over there, and I wish them all the best. I think it's still incredibly key for that refuge for Jews to exist, and I don't believe it could exist anywhere else. Other options were proposed, but none of them passed the smell test for me - they were either already populated with no actual roots for the Jews, or they were isolated and inhospitable.

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

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.

I am fiercely loyal to my country of birth, but I am under no such illusions that they will always have the same loyalty to me.

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