PeterD wrote:Lex on Jan 13 wrote:I doubt it has ever crossed your mind that there are about 1.5 million Palestinian Israeli citizens.
Not lately, Lex, but I do know that they constitute roughly 20% of the population of Israel.
I do know also that they're treated as second-class citizens, and their few representatives in the Knesset treated as pariahs.
And yet they still have more human rights than in any other middle eastern countries, at least if they are secular in their beliefs.
PeterD wrote:By the way, what do you think crossed the minds of these second-class citizens when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni vomited these horrific remarks to students at a Tel Aviv high school, as reported by IDF Radio on Dec. 11, 2008?
"Once a Palestinian state is established, I can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and say to them 'you are citizens with equal rights, but the national solution for you is elsewhere."
Horror?
Not really. It's not exactly PC, but it's not genocidal either. Muslims find the presence of anyone not of the faith in Mecca to be anathema, so I don't see why the Israelis' "promised land" shouldn't be closed to Muslims. Turnabout's fair play.
PeterD wrote:Lex wrote:They are descendants of the Palestinians who did not fight the occupation of the former Palestine by the Israelis.
?
Was this a Freudian slip?
No. I used it in a purely denotational sense, with no connotations intended; they did (and do) occupy the land.
PeterD wrote:Lex wrote:A lot of people, here in the US and elsewhere, have this strange notion that all we have to do is appease the terrorists, and they'll leave us alone. And how should we appease them? Hand them Israel on a silver platter. Then all the bad men will leave us alone. It's ironic. We live in a mostly secular world now, and yet, even many of the secularists think that sacrificing Jews is the road to salvation.
No, Lex---no need to "sacrifice" Jews. What the Palestinians need, as Nooj so succinctly put it, is "(some of) their old places back."
But Israel is also an "old place" of the Jews. Not only that, it's their only "old place", and they have, oh, 2500 years prior claim over Muslims. And if the Israelis gave the land back lock, stock and barrel, where would they live? After that little problematic episode in Western history called the Holocaust, it seems some Jews don't trust us to give them a safe home. And seeing as how, even now, Europe is experiencing disturbingly high levels of anti-Semitism (even against Hasidic Jews, who are anti-Zionists), and the party of appeasement has been elected in the USA, I can't say that I blame them.