The real cause of the Middle East conflict

Truthtriumphs

Here's another piece that is a "must-read", by Judea Pearl, the father of
Daniel Pearl, the journalist beheaded by Islamic "fredom fighters", for the crime of being Jewish.

Dialogue of the Deaf.... written some 6 years ago, and timeless in its confirmation of the real reason why there has never been peace in the ME.

http://www.daniehttp://www.danielpearl.org/news_and_press/articles/dialogue_of_deaf.htmlpearl.org/news_and_press/articles/dialogue_of_deaf.html

Jerry

Melanie,

The most important part of your analysis are the questions it raises.

1) Why doesn't Israel stand up for its own cause?

2) Why does the West - Europe and the United States - stop persecuting Israel?

3) Why do the Palestinians refuse to make peace?

Each question has more than one answer, but each question provides an understanding of the conflict that probably is more important than the multiple answers that we may provide.

Richard

A bunch of Europeans, for reasons that remain obscure, and of dubious legality, "authorised" another bunch of Europeans to colonise a land already inhabited. The bunch of Europeans who were given the authorisation interpreted it, for reasons that are not at all obscure, to mean that they could take over the land already inhabited and set up their own state. This required, even more clearly when the bunch decided their state would be a "democracy" in which they would have a permanent majority, that the inhabitants would, one way or another, have to be persuaded to go elsewhere. Any inhabitants who resisted were "aggressors". The bunch of colonisers offered the inhabitants "concessions".

I believe Mr. Silverberg has written his stuff with a straight face. There is a certain grandeur in the intellectual perversity.

Augustus

The question is a simple one:
If the provoked war in the Middle East is genuinely about the desire of Muslim Arabs for a Palestinian state of their own on the West Bank, why did they form an organization in 1964 and draw up a covenant with no mention of liberating
either the West Bank, or Gaza, and state that their goal was
"The liberation of Palestine
'from the river to the sea'"?
And it's plain lunacy to accuse Israel of being deliberately committed to a policy of killing
Arab civilians when Palestinians
actually choose openly to admit that their tactics is to blow up
innocent Israeli civilians.

Another lunatic suggestion is that there are some five million
Arab refugees dispersed and waiting to return to a homeland which they all evacuated over sixty years ago. Those half million from the 1948 war have
miraculously morphed into another handy propaganda weapon
with which to bash Israel over the head. And the funny thing is, when those half million did
leave, no Arab country wanted anything to do with them, so they were kept in refugee camps
instead to stir up decades of hatred against the Jews, despite
the billions of dollars of aid by Ameria and Israel to relocate
them. And the irony is that while Israel resettled all the
Jewish refugees turfed out of Arab countries with no compensation for their losses of homes etc., Israel, having already contributed to resettling the Arabs in vain, may now even be expected to compensate many of their children and grandchildren in order to preserve a state of its own with a major Jewish identity. The whole disgusting episode stinks and the world should be ashamed.

Thomas

"From the very beginning of the conflict in the 1920s, Britain’s response to Arab terror against the Jews was to reward the perpetrators by offering them part of the internationally binding legal entitlement of their victims."

This is a false statement, or what we will have to learn to call, in the non-classical logic required to support Zionist ideology, a "Howard Grief"-true statement.

Greg

Almost every thing that "Richard" has written is demonstrably false, but encapsulates the attitude of the Israel-bashers who use made-up histories to justify their bigotry.

Huldah

Richard

Your comment is so full of false premises that it is hard to know where to start fisking it.

I will mention only one point.

Communities of Jews have lived in the Holy Land continuously for well over 3,000 years.

There were over 1 million Jews living in ancient communities in other parts of the region from NOrth Africa to the Middle East to Iran in 1948.

800,000 of them were forced to move to Israel by pogroms in the years around 1948 and half of Israel's Jewish citizens are their descendents.

To characterize Israel's Jews as alien interlopers in the region is part of the Big Lie Melanie so often refers to on this blog.

gary ashton

richard, with respect, you really should do some elementary research before posting such tripe.

Richard

Huldah
April 5th, 2011 4:25pm
It is fair enough for you to mention the Jews of Palestine and the other Jewish communities in the Muslim world, just in case I was ignorant of them. Neither the Jews of Palestine nor the Jews of other countries in the region had anything to do with the establishment of Israel in Palestine. I did not "characterize Israel's Jews as alien interlopers in the region". As you say, many were from Palestine and surrounding countries. Zionism nevertheless was a European colonialist project.

Richard

Greg
April 5th, 2011 3:31pm
Perhaps you are just too righteously indignant with me to attempt any of the purported demonstrations of falsehood. How cheap is righteousness then.

Richard

gary ashton
April 5th, 2011 4:30pm
With all the respect due you, do share some of your own elementary research with us. Or was this simply a slightly longer way of saying Harrumph?

Truthtriumphs

Richard
April 5th, 2011 2:20pm

"A bunch of Europeans, for reasons that remain obscure, and of dubious legality, "authorised" another bunch of Europeans to colonise a land already inhabited".

When you wrote similar historical revisionism in a previous post, I gave you a little history lesson to teach you the error of your ways.
You are evidently a slow learner, so to help you, I re-post a refutation of your outlandish claims.
Do pay attention this time round.

In 1695-1696, the Dutch scholar and cartographer, Adriaan Reland (Hadriani Relandi) , He writes: The names of settlements were mostly Hebrew, some Greek, and some Latin-Roman. No settlement had an original Muslim-Arab name with a historical root in its location. Most of the land was empty, desolate, and the inhabitants few in number and mostly concentrated in Jerusalem, Acco, Tzfat, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants were Jews and the rest Christians.
In Jerusalem there were approximately 5000 people, mostly Jews and some Christians. In Nazareth "Outside the city of Jerusalem, we saw no living object, heard no living sound. . .a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, in the highways, in the country."
In 1844, William Thackeray writes about the road from Jaffa to Jerusalem: "Now the district is quite deserted.
In 1857, the British consul in Palestine, James Finn, reported: "The country is in a considerable degree empty of inhabitants and therefore its greatest need is that of a body of population."
In 1866, W.M. Thomson writes: "How melancholy is this utter desolation. Not a house, not a trace of inhabitants, not even shepherds, to relieve the dull monotony ... Much of the country through which we have been rambling for a week appears never to have been inhabited, or even cultivated; and there are other parts, you say, still more barren."
In 1867, Charles Wyllys Elliott, president of Harvard University, wrote: "A beautiful sea lies unbosomed among the Galilean hills, in the midst of that land once possessed by Zebulon and Naphtali, Asher and Dan ... Life here was once idyllic, charming ... It was a world of ease, simplicity, and beauty; now it is a scene of desolation and misery."
In 1867, Mark Twain toured the Holy Land. This is how he described the land: "There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent - not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings. ... We had left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless ruin. These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness... A desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds. A silent, mournful expanse... the country is infested with fierce Bedouins, whose sole happiness it is, in this life, to cut and stab and mangle and murder unoffending Christians.

So, Richard, who, of the above, were liars, and if so, what was their purpose in lying?
They were witnesses to the desolation---- you were not.
And further, why would the Jews return to such a place when they could "colonise" hospitable regions of the planet....what's the reason?

And you are predictably silent about the 50% non-European Jews given sanctuary there,having been turfed out penniless from the Muslim countries where they had lived for 1,000 plus years.

As I've told you before, the Arabs conquered vast tracts of northern Africa and the Middle East with the might of the sword, but you don't have problems with that, do you?
Why not?

RPK

Richard
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after WW1 required decisions to be made, and they were by the best brains available at the time That they don't assuage your sensibilities is unfortunate but we can all find things in the past we would like to unpick
Just be thankful the Arabs in Israel have rights stability and do not have to fight for a decent life as in Tunisia Libya Egypt Yemen Bahrain Iran Parkistan etc
Couldn't help thinking that your first reply at 2.20pm mutatis mutandis could be applicable to the indigenous population in Bradford in a few years

johngerard

FAO Truthtriumphs:

Excellent post. An intellectual punch to the kidneys.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Richard: whatever your interpretation of the history, and whatever your notions of "colonisers" and their merits and demrits, we have a state of israel and we have an aspirant state of Palestine.

Are you against a two state solution?

Have you some bright ideas about how to bring peace?

Share them with us, then, why dont you?

Richard

Truthtriumphs
April 5th, 2011 5:17pm
As you are attempting, with a success that does you no credit, to erase the memory of the evidence I provided that your contentions are nonsense...

Richard

RPK
April 5th, 2011 5:53pm
Can I suggest that you make a study of what the "best brains" (you have to laugh) of the period actually determined.

Huldah

Richard you said

"Zionism nevertheless was a European colonialist project." and "A bunch of Europeans, for reasons that remain obscure, and of dubious legality, "authorised" another bunch of Europeans to colonise a land already inhabited." and "The bunch of Europeans who were given the authorisation interpreted it, for reasons that are not at all obscure, to mean that they could take over the land already inhabited and set up their own state. "

What can those statements mean other than that Israel's Jewish citizens are alien interlopers in the region?

WERE you ignorant of ancient Jewish communities in the region? Because your post indicates that you were.

Your suggestion that the world's only Jewish homeland is somehow unconnected with people from those communities, for example in Syria, Iraq or Libya is absurd, particularly in the light of the way in which their fellow countrymen treated them at the rebirth of the Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland.

Ori Halfin

You are absolutly right.
But the thing is that Arab countries have something the West is addicted to and that is oil.
Therefore the West has no leverage to act out as you suggested. This leaves the only other option and that is to put additional pressure on Israel.

That is the reason in a nut shell.

(and I didn't even say one word about antisemitism...)

Herzen

Truthtriumphs
April 5th, 2011 5:17pm

The purveyor of myths, the Nakba Denier, is back.

There ought to be a law against Nakba Denial. Instead, funnily enough, there is a law against acknowledging it!

You rely on your little collection of anecdotes. I ran out of curiosity half way through, but I'm sure Mark Twain is in there somewhere (Mark Twain!)

You reject counter-anecdotes (they can't be right because they contradict your little coterie). You reject scholarship (not biased enough, no doubt). You think tourists are to be believed before Ottoman administrators. Why? Well, if the tourists are wrong, none of their correspondents will be any the wiser. If the Ottoman officials are wrong, their superiors will ask why the tax take is lower than it should be. The landlords will ask their factors why the rent is lower than it should be. And then there are the British. Notoriously inexperienced in administering the colonies. No wonder they didn't understand what the tourists grasped immediately as the passed through.

"A land without a people for a people without a land" was false, as its perpetrator admitted.

If it were true, it would be a puzzle why the Zionists devoted so much of their deliberations to the question of "transfer".

You were found out confidently peddling pure ignorance about the Mandate. So you took a well-earned break. Now your back peddling your wares as if you had not been exposed as a fraud.

Dai of Edinburgh

Britain under Blair surrendering concessions to the IRA is indicative of the West's warped expectation that Israel should be as craven and spineless in its concessions to its cold blooded, nihilistic aggressors.

Richard

Huldah
April 5th, 2011 7:26pm
The Jewish communities of the Middle East had nothing to do with the Zionist project of founding a nation state in Palestine. Still less did the ancient Jewish communities around the Mediterranean and in Mesopotamia.

The Zionists were indeed immigrants from Europe to a land already inhabited. Only a third of them were citizens of Palestine when they declared it their state. It is a stretch to call it their homeland.

"...the rebirth of the Jewish state on the ancient Jewish homeland" - no fact you may be able to establish about the ancient Israelites gives anyone any right in the 20th century to displace the people of Palestine to create a State of Israel.

I await, with all necessary patience, the threatened fisking of false premises.

Eugene

Because it's controlled by the extreme left judiciary, academia and media who represent a negligible percentage of the population but have always kept an iron grip on the country.

Edward in the USA

Happy Nakba Herzen, and may you have many, many more!

Augustus

It really is a mystery to me why
people posting here are so keen to deny Jewish pedigree with the
land of Israel. There is abundant archaeological evidence
of ancient synagogues etc. dating back anything from 2-3 thousand years that Jews have always lived there. whereas Arabs, after numerous invasions
dating back only to the 7th Century, have no such ties to the area. And when the Romans banished the Jews from Samaria and Judaea they already had existed there for a thousand years. Then there's the Muslim lie that the Koran declares that Jerusalem is holy for Muslims. The Al-Aqsa mosque wasn't even built when the Koran was written, and Mohammed never even visited Jerusalem. But Jerusalem has always been a holy city for Jews. The Old Testament mentions Jerusalem 809
times, the Koran not once. Another lie which tries to falsify Jewish history, probably
in order to hasten their departure from the Middle East,
is to say that the Temple of Soloman isn't Jewish. In 1994,
the PA started a campaign to rewrite Jewish history (even the Nazis didn't try to do that!) by claiming that the Temple of Soloman and the Wailing wall were ruins from the Al-Aqsa Mosque. And the Al-Aqsa Mosque had been purposely built above the Temple after the Muslim invasion in order to
belittle the conquered Jews. In fact that act perfectly represented the exact same imperialistic mind with which
jihadis today want to build a mosque on Ground Zero which they had hoped to open on 11th September 2012.

Emet

Truthtriumphs

There were about 400,000 arabs living in Palestine in the mid-19 century, according to Yehoshua Porath. Porath is an historian, Zionist, and Israeli jew. He stood on the Likud list at the 1996 Knesset elections. In a review of Joan Peters' book 'From Time Immemorial' he wrote: "If the Arabs had indeed been as few as Mrs. Peters claims, one wonders why the letters, official reports, diaries, and essays of the early Zionist settlers—the “Lovers of Zion”—from the last two decades of the nineteenth century were filled with references to the Arabs surrounding them everywhere in Palestine".

In a reply to a letter discussing his review, he wrote: "We do have plausible estimates of the population in Palestine in the very thorough analysis by A. Ruppin of the economy and society of Syria and Palestine on the eve of World War I (Syrien Als Wirtschaftsgebiet, Berlin, 1917 and 1920). Professor Ruppin was an outstanding demographer and sociologist and the head of the Palestine Office of the World Zionist Organization in Palestine. No one could accuse him of superficial work or of anti-Zionist bias. His figure for the population of all Palestine (the three districts of Acre, Nablus, and Jerusalem) is 689,275, as against 425,802 in the 1893 Ottoman census, the number presented in Karpat’s article. Ruppin and all other Jewish sources I am aware of agree that the number of Jews living in Palestine just before World War I was between 80,000 and 85,000.2 That makes the number of non-Jews living in Palestine a little more 600,000, as against the Ottoman census figure of about 415,000."

Natural increase, not immigration, accounts for the increase in an indigenous Arab population, in Palestine, from about 1850 onwards. Porath's article is at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/jan/16/mrs-peterss-palestine/.

St Bruno

The Spring 2011 issue of Young Israel Viewpoint has just come out, and it deals with Zionism today.
It has many well-known contributors: Danny Ayalon, Yudi Edelstein, Nobel-Prize winner Prof. Yisroel Aumann, Melanie Phillips, the people who run LatmaTV, StandWithUs, Honest Reporting, Camera...
http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2011/04/eoz-hasbara-article-published.html
I’ve thought for a long time that in a propaganda war emotions win every time. There are too many times when Israel has intellectualised a problem rather than treating it with raw emotion as the enemies of Israel seem to do at the drop of a hat. In an incident, no matter how right you are or how your arguments portray the truth, the person to shout first and the loudest is the one people will remember as telling the truth. The BBC is good at this: shout first explain/reason later.

L. King

@Herzen

"A land w/o a people" was not a Zionist saying. It just appears on antiZionist web sites. http://meforum.org/article/1877. Nor did Zionists spend much effort at all concerning transfer. Herzl mentions it once in his PRIVATE diaries, and it was before the 1st Zionist Congress.

Palestinian Nationalism is based on the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Always has been. There are more non-Jewish Arabs in Israel today than there are Jews in ALL Arab countries put together.

In the entire Ottoman Empire in 1900 there was a total of 20,000,000 individuals. There most certainly was enough room in Israel for the Jews. The Palestinian leader, Hajj Amin Husseini did not have to call for their extermination.

Truthtriumphs

Herzen @ 8.02pm.

"A land without a people for a people without a land" was false, as its perpetrator admitted."

Where have I used those words?

"If it were true, it would be a puzzle why the Zionists devoted so much of their deliberations to the question of "transfer"."

According to whom?
Surely you are not quoting from the much-derided scribblings of the self-confessed liar and revisionist "historian" Pappe, are you?

"You were found out confidently peddling pure ignorance about the Mandate. So you took a well-earned break. Now your back peddling your wares as if you had not been exposed as a fraud".

Which particular statement of mine is fraudulent?

You're very good at ad hominem attacks....probably because you cannot counter the strength of my argument, but weak on a knowledge and understanding of the history of the ME.

You really remind me of those sour old Trots who realise that they aren't going to change the world any time soon.
Grow up, and try to mature out of your seventies, polytechnic mindset.

Davod

"1) Why doesn't Israel stand up for its own cause?"

Eugene's April 5th, 2011 8:55pm post, is pretty close to the mark. I would only add Left Wing politicians to the mix.

"Because it's controlled by the extreme left judiciary, academia and media who represent a negligible percentage of the population but have always kept an iron grip on the country."

Alex Bensky

Others have dealt adequately with Richard's assertions. I will confine myself to a couple of points:

First, if the Arabs had accepted the UN's 1947 partition plan they would have had their state and the sum total of displaced Arabs would have been none. They didn't; they started a war and they lost it. Losing to anyone else and the world would say, "Them's the breaks, guys."

Second, nearly half the population of Israel consists of people forced out of Arab lands and their descendents. The idea that Israel is merely some European sop tossed to Jews for Europe's actions is not the entire story.

gary ashton

it appears to me that there are two minds engaged in this debate, those that can't budge despite the facts, and those that are flexible and open minded enough to engage in reasonable dialogue processing alternatives and information with discretion. the later being zombies and therefore not worth arguing against, the others at least have some semblance of intelligence and therefore worth engaging.

Derek BLADES

"The problem is that Arab aggressors want to destroy the State of Israel."

Untrue. The Arab Peace Intitative, which proposes normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world has been on the table since 2002.

Melanie might also want to glance at the Palestine papers. These involve numerous concessions by the Palestinians in return for a two-state solution.

Mr Sponge

"Why is it so afraid to stand up for its own cause of truth, law and justice?"

Sounds like an echo of Camerons visit to Pakistan.

We give apkistan money whilst "looks both ways", he states that the British (though, for the record, not in MY name)are responsible for much of the worlds problems, and turns a blind eye to the suffering of Christians and other none muslims in Pakistan.

Why,why, why ?

Herzen

Edward in the USA
April 5th, 2011 9:18pm
What a truly civilised jibe!

Herzen

L. King
April 5th, 2011 11:16pm
It is a slogan thought up by Zangwill.

"Transfer" was a major component of Zionist thinking from the outset. It became more pressing and more openly talked about as time went on and it became clear that the native population would refuse to be helots in their own land. Think about it. The Zionists were less than 10% of the population in 1920. They were less than a third of the populaion in 1948 (only a third of them citizens of Palestine). The Zionists wanted to establish a "Jewish" state. They wanted a "Jewish" democracy. This would require a permanent "Jewish" majority. How to achieve it?

Palestinian nationalism was not based on anything other than the demand of the population of Palestine to exercise its right of self-determination, denied it after WW1 and again after WW2.

The size of the Ottoman Empire has nothing to do with the question of whether the Zionists had any right to displace the population of Palestine.

Herzen

Truthtriumphs
April 6th, 2011 1:06am

"Where have I used these words"? You are suddenly very faux naif! You have devoted considerable effort to scanning Zionists websites for quotes from 19th century tourists to support your contention that Palestine was a desert land with a few nomads and a few scruffy serfs. If I refer to your spurious thesis under Zangwill's slogan or (perhaps more accurately) as the poor cousin of Joan Peters' hoax, you should not in all honesty think this an excuse to avoid discussion. I have more than once given you scholarly references, which you decline to look at.

Faux naif about "transfer" as well. You cannot wish history away.

As an aside, on a previous thread you failed to substantiate that Pappe confessed himself a liar. He did no such thing. Fortuntely for you, you do not need to rely on him if you wish to study "transfer" in Zionist thinking.

If you recall (I suspect you do) you confidently, not to say contemptuously, announced that you had read the Mandate many times and it contained NOTHING about any so-called "Palestinian citizenship".

"You're very good at ad hominem attacks..." - "Grow up, and try to mature out of your seventies, polytechnic mindset". Ah, there is a whole world of irony that just passes you by.

Nachman

Just to point out that as yet no response by Richard to this

JOHN ROOSEVELT
April 5th, 2011 6:31pm

May be he hasn't a clue?

NormanC

@ Herzen "denied it after WW2" So what was the Partition Plan of 1947 which awarded a Palestinian Jewish State to the Jews and a Palestinan Arab State to the Arabs and which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected leading to six plus decades of war and terrorism.

O-Dog

Mel,
you and Mark, seem to be getting Israel's obligations confused with concessions.

Bibi's signing up to Pal statehood and the 2 state solution is hardly a concession. Israel has been working towards this end for a decade. The entire world is signed up to this objective, it's the only game in town.

Temporary cesassion of settlement expansion in selective areas, and the handover of security responsibility is also a strange 'concession'. Israel is a party to the Road Map which requires these events to happen in the first stage, before Israel and the Pals move onto the next phase. These are obligations of Israel, and not the unilateral and unreciprocated acts of generosity you make them out to be.

Derek BLADES

@ gary ashton

You wrote "it appears to me that there are two minds engaged in this debate, those that can't budge despite the facts, and those that are flexible and open minded enough to engage in reasonable dialogue processing alternatives and information with discretion. the later being zombies and therefore not worth arguing against, the others at least have some semblance of intelligence and therefore worth engaging."

I assume that "later" is a mispelling of "latter" and that by "latter" you actually meant "former".

By the way, capital letters are a useful innovation. The shift key is on the left on most keyboards.

Imshin

Richard says: "Neither the Jews of Palestine nor the Jews of other countries in the region had anything to do with the establishment of Israel in Palestine."

I think my husband's family would find that statement interesting, since they belong in that category and were very much involved in the establishment of the State of Israel.

Herzen

NormanC
April 6th, 2011 10:29am
The Palestinian Arabs rejected the partition of their homeland. As the plan's main sponsor, the US, acknowledged, to disregard this rejection would be to deny them self-determination. The US abandoned partition and was working on a temporary UN trusteeship when Israel unilaterally declared its independence. Partition had nothing to do with self-determination for Palestinians. Also, the Zionists made no secret that they did not consider themselves bound by the borders delineated in the partition, and made no secret that they considered themselve sentitled to the whole of Palestine and fully intended to take it. In the circumstances, how could Palestinians think partition an expression of their self-determination?

Richard

Imshin
April 6th, 2011 10:54am
You are of course quite right: I should not make broad generalisations that seem to refer to every individual within a given group nor subsume historical processes under a single description that seems to refer to a single event.

I doubt your relatives would have been in a position to involve themselves in the establishment of Israel if there had been no Zionist movement (very much a European and American movement) to persuade the Great Powers to let them proceed with their project in the fifty years up to 1948. - A bunch of Europeans gave a bunch of Europeans the go-ahead to colonise a land already inhabited. It had nothing to do with Mizrachi Jews. And it is even reported that many of the Jews of Palestine were not keen on the Zionists.

So your point is well taken, but I don't think it materially alters what I said.

Stephen Rothbart

Never build your castles on shifting sand, and the Arabian world is full of shifting sand.

In the book by a former leader of Mossad, Efraim Halevy,the author is mainly focused on the Middle Eastern stuation between the 2 Gulf Wars against Iraq.

The conclusion seems to be that succesive Israeli leaders made decisions, based on their own personal beliefs, that were themselves built on the actions, or in some cases, non-actions of their predecessors.

This behaviour was influenced by the rapidly shifting circumstances affecting a Muslim world in the throes of a bitter civil war led and much influenced by Iran's Shias against the Sunnis and the West.

After the Gulf War of Bush 1 against Iraq, and in order not to look like the US was anti-Muslim, the decision was made to prove this by solving the Palestinian question, and the tactic was to drag Israel, kicking and screaming, if necessary, into an accord with a divided people, who themselves were reviled and hated by their Jordanian, Syrian and Lebanese hosts.

Despite the no doubt sceptical views of those who believe anything written by a Jew, such as Silverberg or specially an ex Mossad agent like Halevy will just be biased, this book is equally balanced in its criticism of its own leaders' missed opportunities and occasional intransigence. Far from potraying Mossad as a seamless, ruthless and efficient super-hero organization, the book shows that Israel's intelligence service is as riven with uncertainties and insecurities as any other "spying" organisation would be in trying to understand the Arab mentality.

Trying to make an insecure body politic make a lasting peace with the despots and chancers running tribal and artificially constructed regimes in the Middle East will be almost impossible.

The only reasonably secure structure for the world to lean on for peace is Israel.

It is financially dependant, democratic, and split politically between Hawks and Doves. At some point, Israel has to listen.

On the other side, the Palestinians are basically an anarchy, led by gangsters and religious nuts. They have no real common history, and have grown up in such a brutalised society, fuelled by their 60 year dependence on UN handouts, so they are like an unruly, abused child, who, because it is so unmanageable, never grows up to face its responsibilities.

Impoverished, badly led, mostly unemployed and religiously intolerant, yet still the Palestinian cause has managed to turn this appalling behaviour into something that attracts the new anti-Zionist regime in the White House and across Europe, never mind the intrinsically corrupt madhouse known as the UN.

Clearly, much of this is driven by a form of anti-Semitism, as only a quick review of these and other media bloggers will amply demonstrate.

But it is also caused by the fact the West has no idea what the Middle East is about.

They think of the Arab states as representing a united people, with an underlying need to share the same democratic beliefs as they do.

So when Hamas says they want to kill all the Jews, the so-called cognecenti actually believe this is just a negotiating position.

The leaders of the Free world are out of touch, living in their Ivory Towers.

They talk to Gaddaffi and to Mubarak and to Assad, and they think they know the Middle East.

Well, now we know even these people don't understand their own people.

Faced with this shifting landscape, Israel has had no option but to hang tough.

To concede to these people, especially when coerced to by the US or the EU, is to show weakness to their enemy.

After many years of submersion in the hot bed of Middle Eastern strife and shifting loyalties, the European Israeli has understood what it takes to be part of the Arab psyche

Show weakness and you are lost. The Christian ethos of turning the other cheek does not work in this region. Only an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

The condundrum is that the more they push Israel to make a deal it does not want to make, the more it will push further away any chance of Peace.

In fact the more the leaders of the governments push on Israel the more likely they will bring about a war.

So Israel hangs tough and is blamed for the problem and the Palestinian leaders get a free ride even doing nothing but murder cheat and lie.

As Harlevy's book demonstrates, there is right and wrong on both sides.

The "conspiracy" that Israel is not interested in Peace and co-existence with the Arab world is clearly shown to be a crock of lies though.

It is just that right now, it is not clear, to either side, that any peace treaty could ever hold for long, given the shifting sands of this region.

Richard

Alex Bensky
April 6th, 2011 3:29am
"Others have dealt adequately with Richard's assertions."

The only person so far to make a good point against me that I have to concede is Imshin.

I had hoped that the others would try to make good their promises or threats to demolich what I said.

Truthtriumphs

Drek BLADES
April 6th, 2011 7:41am

"The problem is that Arab aggressors want to destroy the State of Israel."
"Untrue. The Arab Peace Intitative, which proposes normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world has been on the table since 2002".

A "peace" plan that demands the "return" to Israel of some 4.5 million Arab "refugees" (and btw, who would go to the new state of Palestine?) and their descendants, that says any deal reached is only an interim stage until Palestine is "liberated from the river to the sea", is no peace plan, but rather a surrender plan.
The only peace guaranteed would be the peace of the grave for the Israelis.

NormanC

@Herzen

So you deny the existence of the Mandate for Palestine? Which was subject to safeguarding the rights of the indiginous population (which did not include self determination because at that time no Arab nation on Earth existed which was or had ever been called Palestinian) to provide a homeland for the Jews. The country now called Jordan which was extracted by Churchill from the mandate should in reality be the Arab state you want for the Palestinians. If India and Pakistan given their terrible histories could agree to partition and a transfer of populations involing considerably more than the hundreds of thousands displaced on both sides why did the Arabs refuse. Was it because they, as perhaps do you, deny the Jews as a people any right of self determination.

NormanC

@ Richard
In the late 19th century, the rise of religious and racist anti-Semitism led to a resurgence of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe, shattering promises of equality and tolerance. This stimulated Jewish immigration to Palestine from Europe.

Simultaneously, a wave of Jews immigrated to Palestine from Yemen, Morocco, Iraq and Turkey. These Jews were unaware of Theodor Herzl's political Zionism or of European pogroms. They were motivated by the centuries-old dream of the “Return to Zion” and a fear of intolerance. Upon hearing that the gates of Palestine were open, they braved the hardships of travel and went to the Land of Israel.

there was however a continued Jewish presence in the Holy land dating back to the destruction of the Second Temple and the dispersion by the Romans.
The Zionist ideal of a return to Israel has profound religious roots. Many Jewish prayers speak of Jerusalem, Zion and the Land of Israel. The injunction not to forget Jerusalem, the site of the Temple, is a major tenet of Judaism. The Hebrew language, the Torah, laws in the Talmud, the Jewish calendar and Jewish holidays and festivals all originated in Israel and revolve around its seasons and conditions. Jews pray toward Jerusalem and recite the words “next year in Jerusalem” every Passover. Jewish religion, culture and history make clear that it is only in the land of Israel that the Jewish commonwealth can be built. Are the Arabs able to point to a similar connection?

In 1897, Jewish leaders formally organized the Zionist political movement, calling for the restoration of the Jewish national home in Palestine, where Jews could find sanctuary and self-determination, and work for the renascence of their civilization and culture.

If as you claim we usurped a Palestinian nationhood please supply evidence say of any literature by an Arab identifying himself as a Palestinian prior to 1897.
I would suggest you read this
http://israelseen.com/2010/12/27/the-jewish-people-and-their-aboriginal-rights/
Which is too long to reproduce here. having read it let me know if you still consider the Jews displaced an Arab Palestinian nationhood and if so why.

Augustus

Herzen - The more you spit out
'the Zionists' in practically every sentence you write, the more you show your ignorance of
the various waves of Jewish immigration into Palestine. You write about displacing the population of Palestine by these
bogeymen Zionists as if an army of religious zealots proceeded to ride across the malaria-
ridden swamps and desert hills and valleys shouting 'go ye Arabs, flee, get out of the way,
make room for us 'cos we're taking over all your land'. But that's not how it happened at all. For example, from the early
1920s there was the National Jewish Fund set up expressly with the intention of purchasing land in which to settle and build communities. And one of the largest land purchases of that time (40 sq.kilometres) which included the Jezreel Valley, known as the Emek, was purchased from a Lebanese absentee landlord who was asking an extortionate price
(as many absentee landlords did)
for very poor quality land. But it was paid, and the purchaser, one Ussishkin was even charged by colleagues on the Palestine
Executive for squandering money,
but later his action was approved by the Zionist Congress. Then there was the development of the land. Do you think some bountiful Garden of Eden with permanent buildings,
a supply of uninfested water, and fully developed infrastructure was what the Jewish settlers were taking over? Nothing could be further from the truth. Much money and human effort was needed on a substantial scale to enable the
people and land to flourish, and luckily, many Jews throughout the world contributed
in America, and elsewhere, to provide the funds needed.
It is far from honest to label their actions a displacement, or a takeover in the military sense of occupying by force of arms. The fact that there were about half a million Arabs and only about 65,000 Jews there by the early 1920s, and that the Jews then armed themselves was entirely due to Arab riots and attacks by them on individual settlements. A lot of those fights could have been avoided if the British authorities at the time had been dedicated
to defending the Jews and protecting the Jewish life in Palestine.

GaryL

It's the 21st century. Jews make their own decisions now. It's long past the era when others tell Jews what they should and shouldn't believe, and where they can and can't live. From some of the messages here it seems there's still too many who haven't gotten used to that. It may take a few more generations to wash away the cultural paradigms they cling to about Jews.

Palestinian rights? There are no absolute rights. If they haven't yet figured how to become a state after umpteen decades of crying foul and throwing violent tantrums, maybe it's because they're just not capable of doing it. They wasted years putting themselves under the thumb of the clown in the kaffiya. The only memorial he left behind is the security systems we all suffer at every airport.

NormanC

Natural increase, not immigration, accounts for the increase in an indigenous Arab population, in Palestine, from about 1850 onwards. Porath's article is at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1986/jan/16/mrs-peterss-palestine/
If you can quote from a critique of Mrs eters then so shall I. Paul Blair writing in Capitalismmagazine writes the following:
As with all successful disinformation, the distortions are placed within a wider context of truth; not everything Peters says is a lie. Palestine was in fact sparsely populated when Jewish colonization began. Arab nationalism did not yet exist, let alone Palestinian nationalism. When the British took over they unjustly restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine while Arabs immigrated into the territory. After the Arab violence of the late 1930s, British appeasement slowed Jewish immigration to a trickle. Ultimately, Jews who sought to escape the Holocaust were turned away from the Jewish National Home, even while “emergency arrangements” were taken to bring in Arab immigrant laborers. Had Peters let the facts speak for themselves, she would have had a dramatic, compelling story to tell."http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/world/middle-east/2135-from-time-immemorial-the-origins-of-the-arab-jewish-conflict-over-palestine-part-1-of-6.html

Truthtriumphs

Richard
April 6th, 2011 12:15pm

Imshin
April 6th, 2011 10:54am
"I doubt your relatives would have been in a position to involve themselves in the establishment of Israel if there had been no Zionist movement (very much a European and American movement)."

A Definition of Zionism:
Zionism is the national revival movement of the Jewish people. It holds that the Jews have the right to self-determination in their own national home, and the right to develop their national culture. Historically, Zionism strove to create a legally recognized national home for the Jews in their historical homeland. This goal was implemented by the creation of the State of Israel. Today, Zionism supports the existence of the state of Israel and helps to inspire a revival of Jewish national life, culture and language.

So, Zionism is a movement that started in biblical times, and there were 2 sovereign Jewish states spanning a period of more than 1,000 years, long before most other nation states existed.

Herzen

NormanC
April 6th, 2011 2:04pm
You misunderstand the Mandate. The Mandatory Power as trustee administered a state "provisionally recognised" by the League of Nations. Ultimate sovereignty vested in the population (Jewish, Muslims and Christian). The Mandate for Palestine differed from others in requiring the Mandatory Power in addition to help establish a Jewush National Home in Palestine. I do not know how Britain thought it could get round the apparent inconsistency in holding the territory in trust for its inhabitants and facilitating a "Home" for immigrants, knowing as it did that the immigrants had grand plans of usurping the locals.

No previous "Arab nation" (by which I take you to mean a sovereign state) is required for the poeple of Palestine to exercise their right to self-determination.

The Mandate that required Britain to facilitate a Jewish National Home" also allowed Britain to treat the territory east of the Jordan as separate from that west of it.

What is in question, and has to be demonstrated, is that the Jewish diaspora was a community with a right (that it wished to exercise) to self-determination expressed by establishing a sovereign state in a territory that already had a population with a right to self-determination.

Herzen

Augustus,

I will not comment on your rosy, but selective, history of Zionism.

I will however comment on terminology. The term "Zionism" has a very specific meaning. Whether I hiss it or shout it or mumble it, it is the term for the project initiated by what others have accurately called a fringe group of European Jews to establish a sovereign state for Jews in Palestine. It is the correct term for what I have been discussing. Since it is what I have been discussing, there is no surprise or mystery or anything untoward in the fact that the term has appeared regularly in what I have had to say.

john gerard

derek blades writes:

"The Arab Peace Intitative, which proposes normalisation of relations between Israel and the Arab world has been on the table since 2002".

That's the funniest thing I've ever read, Derek...You should be a stand-up with sixth form common-room/polytechnic material like that!

you're a funny guy!

Arthur Lincoln

Will there ever be peace when the Palestinians show their gratitude like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9qy4y-Y5zs

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Richard: I repeat:

whatever your interpretation of the history, and whatever your notions of "colonisers" and their merits and demrits, we have a state of israel and we have an aspirant state of Palestine.

Are you against a two state solution?

Have you some bright ideas about how to bring peace?

Share them with us, then, why dont you?

Come on, Richard, I dare you...

Trumpeldor

"From the very beginning of the conflict in the 1920s, Britain’s response to Arab terror against the Jews was to reward the perpetrators by offering them part of the internationally binding legal entitlement of their victims."

Spot on,Melanie
Many of your readers did not understand that sentence but they should hurry to buy a good Middle East unbiased history book instead of listening to crappy BBC Jews bashing discourse

Truthtrimphs

Richard
April 5th, 2011 6:48pm
Truthtriumphs

April 5th, 2011 5:17pm
"As you are attempting, with a success that does you no credit, to erase the memory of the evidence I provided that your contentions are nonsense..."

What evidence have you provided?
Show me a single contention of mine that is nonsense, and explain why.
You cannot, and that's why you resort to insults.

Augustus

Herzen - I am well aware of the meaning of Zionism, and I agree
that if you include Russia, the lovers of Zion in the 1890s may well have been a 'European fringe group'. But I was not painting a 'rosy picture', in fact the opposite. Agriculture was their pursuit, and Ussishkin
(mentioned earlier), one of the young Zionist leaders, said,
"first and foremost we desire to create a farmer class in the
Land of Israel". So just ordinary people tilling the soil. They set about spreading the Hebrew language as a spoken language in every part of life.
And they could not have chosen
a less hospitable site. It was not local Arabs who tormented them, but the malarial mosquito.
And more than half of the inhabitants of Hadera died of malaria in the first twenty years of its existence. Another lie is the sense of uniqueness
attributed to Zionism. Nationalism was gaining strength everywhere. Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Croats, were other minority groups hoping for national self-determination. And when Zionisim
proposed a national identity for the Jews, Herzl wanted to negotiate with the Ottoman government to secure the land needed for a new Jewish society
in what he called the 'old-new land'. Neither is it 'rosy' to suggest that land wasn't paid for. All the land they planted with eucalyptus groves, then draining the green swamp vegetation, turning the soil first into field and garden crops, and then to citrus fruits, was all paid for, it was never taken by armed conflict. You cannot admit that you have done the Zionist pioneers an injustice. Call them medieval if you must, call them even black-garbed clinging to piety and prayer, as many assimilated European Jews did at the time, thinking they were an exclusively religious community. But never forget that they were only establishing
and paying for, a simple place of refuge.

Richard

Truthtriumphs
April 6th, 2011 3:21pm
Truthtrimphs
April 6th, 2011 7:49pm
"What evidence have you provided?
Show me a single contention of mine that is nonsense, and explain why."

It is a question many have puzzled over. How do you manage to come back time and again as brazen as ever? I think I now understand. - You simply "forget" every previous thread as soon as you've fled from it! Thus you may arrive at a new one and apply your little repetoire afresh, as if it is uncontested truth, and not exploded myth.

By the way, you cannot turn Zionism into anything more ancient than a nineteenth century European romantic nationalist movement simply by definition or fiat.

Richard

NormanC
April 6th, 2011 2:26pm
Persecution in the Russian Empire caused emigration (rationally enough) to Britain and America, for the most part. Fear of their constituents' reaction if there were mass immigration was one of the reasons why British and American politicians supported Zionism. They thought diverting as many as they could to the Holy Land would ease the pressure. It is to be regretted for many reasons that they did not have the sense to allow free immigration from the Pale.

That Jews from Europe and the Near East went to the Holy Land before Zionism developed its political agenda is not to the point. The people of the Holy Land finally given the chance to exercise a right to self-determination would have included Muslims, Jews, and Christians.

That the Holy Land has a particular significance for Judaism is also not to the point. Religious belief does not bestow sovereignty over territory.

You require me to show that there was a "Palestinian Arab nationhood" that can trump the Jewish nationhood you claim. (To this day, the USA does not recognize the Jews as a nation.) Perhaps you mean by the term something other than the USA. What is it? What is it you think gives the Jewish citizens of many countries the right to sovereignty over a land already inhabited? The demand that the inhabitants demonstrate their "nationhood" before they are allowed to exercise their right to self-determination is curious, and not in conformity with the practice of the League of Nations or the UN, who have included the right in their charters, nor of international law as confirmed in numerous cases in the hundred plus years of Zionism's existence.

Richard

gary ashton
April 5th, 2011 4:30pm
richard, with respect, you really should do some elementary research before posting such tripe.

Richard
April 5th, 2011 5:14pm
gary ashton
April 5th, 2011 4:30pm
With all the respect due you, do share some of your own elementary research with us. Or was this simply a slightly longer way of saying Harrumph?

gary ashton
April 6th, 2011 5:46am
it appears to me that there are two minds engaged in this debate, those that can't budge despite the facts, and those that are flexible and open minded enough to engage in reasonable dialogue processing alternatives and information with discretion. the later being zombies and therefore not worth arguing against, the others at least have some semblance of intelligence and therefore worth engaging.

Despite the tangle you get yourself into, which could happen to any of us, I take it you think yourself one of those with a mind flexible and open minded etc.

And yet you have not contributed anything to the debate.

It isn't too late.

Truthtriumphs

Richard
April 6th, 2011 9:54pm
Truthtriumphs
April 6th, 2011 3:21pm
Truthtriumphs
April 6th, 2011 7:49pm
"What evidence have you provided?
Show me a single contention of mine that is nonsense, and explain why."

"It is a question many have puzzled over. How do you manage to come back time and again as brazen as ever? I think I now understand. - You simply "forget" every previous thread as soon as you've fled from it! Thus you may arrive at a new one and apply your little repetoire afresh, as if it is uncontested truth, and not exploded myth".

Are you not embarrassed by such a stupid response?
Evidently not!
I repeat the question.

Show me a single contention of mine that is nonsense, and explain why.

We are all waiting for your response.

Okey

Melanie, your headline, referring to "the Middle East Conflict" is misleading, implying as it does that there is only one conflict in that region.
In actual fact there is a myriad conflicts there: Sunni vs Shiite; Kurd vs Arab; Iran vs Araby; Hamas vs Fatah; Berber vs Arab; Muslim vs Christian; Sunni vs Alawi...and that's only for starters.

C.Gee

“A bunch of Europeans, for reasons that remain obscure, and of dubious legality, "authorised" another bunch of Europeans to colonise a land already inhabited.”

Europeans “authorized” - one way or another, by war and treaty - most of the nations in Europe, Africa, the Americas, Asia and Asia Minor. Your Fanonist Marxism was the (nineteen-sixties’ European) ideological force behind the PLO charter and the promotion and acceptance of the PLO as the “sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” Thus a European ideology authorized a metaphorical liberation of an invented state by its mythical native proletariat. By the act of recognizing the PLO, a baby (but still vicious) soviet dictatorship was created over the inhabitants of the region, in theory to include those of a real nation-state called Israel.

What do you have against Europeans? Is it a racist thing? Are you trying to establish a serious geo-political philosophy on the idea of Europe for inhabitants of Europe, Africa for the inhabitants of Africa, Asia for the inhabitants of Asia and the Middle East for the inhabitants of the Middle East?

The demography of the entire planet is the result of colonization, which, ethnographically speaking, is the migration of peoples. Prehistoric migrations over the continents established race, tribal migrations - at the beginning of history (and the writers of the Bible preserved the names at least of many tribes which might have been as lost to history as the people they identified) - established nations and empires.

Ethnographic origins are speculative. Ethnographic histories are the result - invariably, directly or indirectly, of war, including those of the nomadic tribes. Primitive, remote, isolated, newly discovered tribes have a history of migration, but it is not known except perhaps in their myths. Are we not all entitled to call Mesopotamia “home”? And is not Africa “Granny’s house”? Is there a true aboriginal population anywhere?

Even when a people is mappable, the maps change through time. Before fairly recent history ethnographic maps show not nation-states, but tribal nations (“federations” of tribes) holding sway over areas with not very clear borders. The Hebrew tribes were among the first to unite under law and establish (by conquest) a nation state in that land later called Palestine, but it was overcome by empires. Early empires were created by dominant tribes - under a charismatic leader - moving from their “original” tribal lands and conquering other tribes in their path. Borders between empires were always in flux.

The English are no longer Angles and do not inhabit original Angle land. Great Britain holds inhabitants descended from many tribes. Today, being British is a matter of law, not blood - as is being German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Russian, Israeli, American. In all these countries, the law determines rights and preferences for citizenship: persons with “blood ties” to the jurisdiction through parents who were born on “native soil” are given preferences. In Israel’s case the “blood” tie giving a right of citizenship is the mother’s national identification with the Jews. This identification is legally presumed to be traceable to the ancient nation - even though one may achieve the same national identification by conversion to Judaism, which is the ancient national law. Thus the “blood” tie is not racial and tribal, but national. Israel is ethnically diverse - more so than many European nations, and much more so than every Arab nation.

What must be understood is that “native soil” is a concept that has meaning only over national state territory. The Arabs cannot claim the land of former Ottoman empire as “native soil” merely because Arabic speaking peoples inhabited the area. In so far as a locality - a village, a valley, a farm - is where generations of a family or a clan lived, creating local collective identity with the land - the family may claim a patrimony, loosely speaking, in the land. But that patrimony does not survive the family’s detachment from the land. It disappears when the land is sold, abandoned and taken over by others, forfeited, or taken in battle. Claiming patrimony is not a claim of rights to the land in perpetuity. Patrimonial claims over particular property by certain persons cannot achieve greater legal force by being converted into national claims. Claims of patrimony may not be merged to create a legal nation of former or current property owners (“Arabs”), a collective patrimony of the land (a “native soil”), and a sovereign state (“Palestine”) of that non-constituted nation over that fictional collective patrimony. There are no “natural” national rights. There are no rights to a state emanating from being born on a piece of land. Place of birth gets you citizenship - often, but not always - but not nation-statehood.

The Jews were a nation (constituted under law) with historical ties to a certain territory. That they formed a nation-state is a legal fact. That they continued to be a nation without state territory is an historical fact. Becoming inhabitants and citizens of other nation-states does not destroy that national identity. The offer by the powers determining geo-political sovereignties of rights to the Jews to be inhabitants of Palestine on the basis of their being a nation and having had a state upon the territory of Palestine, affords Jews better legal claim to be sovereign over that territory than claims by Arabs of sovereignty (over the same territory), based upon their being there, being more numerous, being Arab and objecting to Jewish sovereignty, afford the Arab Palestinians. Of course, being there, being numerous, being Arab and objecting to Jewish sovereignty provide a basis for war, which would have trumped Israel’s claims - had the Arabs won.

Nation-statehood does not derive from the inhabitants of a territory. “Inhabitants” is a term that has no ethnographical specificity. At any given time, any given region on a map has inhabitants - the population being sparse or dense, relative to other regions. The population will have the ethnographic or demographic characteristics relevant to the powers determining geo-politics. It is these powers which impose nation-statehood upon inhabitants, by granting sovereignty to sovereigns (in almost all cases after WWI, by setting up monarchs). Inhabitants took on the national identity of the state. Kurds became Iraqi. Arabs became Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and, yes, Israeli. Had Israel been named Judea, those Arabs would be Judeans, if Jewland, Jews.

In the end, the naqba is about losing in war. People lost lives and homes in a war. The Arabs did not lose a state, or sovereignty. They failed to oust the Jews. No amount of ideological dogma can render Israel’s victory and the Arabs’ loss illegal, which appears to be the goal of the anti-Zionist faction - perhaps in the hope that some committee will overturn the result of the war. No amount of Fanonist rhetoric (Fanonism being a European movement even newer than Zionism) can change the facts that Zionism was not and is not racism, and Palestinian nationalism was and is nazism.

Johntheatheist

As with every hectare in every habitable land, the Israelis have paid for their's in blood three times and it's still not enough for the progressive Leftist enablers of deceit and war. The future dead of Palestine from the next war have spiritual inspiration and materiel from Iran and poseur leftist dhimmi support from the West, only one of which will actually be there with them as they perish.

Derek BLADES

When I recently mentioned the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, Tuttitrumps told me that “the only peace guaranteed would be the peace of the grave for the Israelis.” Here is some of what Wikipedia has to say about it:

“Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed reservations over the plan and invited Arab leaders to discuss them, but welcomed the initiative as a ‘new way of thinking, the willingness to recognize Israel as an established fact and to debate the conditions of the future solution, is a step that I can't help but appreciate.’”

“President Shimon Peres expressed satisfaction at the "u-turn" in the attitudes of Arab states toward peace with Israel as reflected in the Saudi initiative, though he did qualify his comments by saying: ‘Israel wasn't a partner to the wording of this initiative. Therefore it doesn't have to agree to every word.’”

A prime minister and a president on the one hand and Tuttitrumps on the other. Who do you think has got it right? Of course Netanyahu and the Israeli war party have rejected the Peace Initiative because it might actually lead to – well - peace.

Richard

C.Gee
April 7th, 2011 3:04am

I enjoyed your rigmarole for what it is.

I am aware that anyone who makes the mistake of engaging in debate with you is sooner or later informed by you that you are "a goatherd" (?) or they are a totalitarian Jew-hater.

Richard

Truthtriumphs
April 7th, 2011 1:20am

It is oddly enjoyable watching you huffing and puffing and bluffing.

The Mandate contains NOTHING about Palestinian citizenship.

Palestine was more or less empty desert. (See Emet
April 5th, 2011 9:37pm for a lesson based on sources you can't impugn - unlike the scholarly work you have previously resolutely ignored.)

Ilan Pappe is a "self-confessed" liar.

I refer you back to just about every contribution of yours to just about every thread.

Truthtriumphs

Drek BLADES
April 7th, 2011 8:14am

When I recently mentioned the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, Tuttitrumps told me that “the only peace guaranteed would be the peace of the grave for the Israelis.” Here is some of what Wikipedia has to say about it:"

Anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, even goons like you.

Are you denying that Abbas, President of the PA, demands the "return" to Israel of some 4.5 million Palestinian "refugees", which would mean the demise of Israel as a Jewish state---the only Jewish state?
Are you denying the contents of the Hamas Charter, which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state?
Are you denying that the PA says that any agreement is interim, prior to the restoration of Palestine to them---endorsed by the fact that school books show the region without Israel, and children are taught that Haifa, Tel Aviv etc. etc. are Palestinian cities, and will be restored to them?
If you deny the above, then you are a liar.
If you don't, then you agree that your idea of peace is one which necessitates the removal of Israel.
Your posts are a cynical ploy to present yourself as a reasonable chap, old chap.
Isn't that right?

Truthtriumphs

Richard
April 7th, 2011 9:34am
Truthtriumphs
April 7th, 2011 1:20am

"It is oddly enjoyable watching you huffing and puffing and bluffing"...

Still not a single refutation by you of any of the facts I offered.

Still waiting in anticipation, and do us all a favour... cut out the ad hominems.

Derek BLADES

Tuttitrumps asks me: "Are you denying that Abbas, President of the PA, demands the "return" to Israel of some 4.5 million Palestinian "refugees"...."

Before I decide whether or not to deny it, perhaps you could tell me where you got it from. Richard is just the latest cointributor to note that many of your "facts" turn out to be fantasies.

Incidentally, goons can indeed contribute to Wikipedia but they won't get their goonery accepted as an official entry. That is why people of good sense trust it.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Richard
April 7th, 2011 9:28am
C.Gee
April 7th, 2011 3:04am

I enjoyed your rigmarole for what it is.

"I am aware that anyone who makes the mistake of engaging in debate with you is sooner or later informed by you that you are "a goatherd" (?) or they are a totalitarian Jew-hater."

Oh dear, Richard. That response to the venerable C. Gee is pathetic..even more so than your ducking and diving from my simple question put to you several times.

I think we need to add a new term to the political lexicon:" goat-herded". It is what has happened to you on several occasions, here, but most graphically, by Mr Gee. His post to you was extraordinary. It is a piece deserving of distribution on the net - far and wide. You hardly deserve the time of such an intellect, one of such erudition.

Mr Gee: whilst noone - not even you - can justify wasting such pearls on one like Richard, please keep it wasting them. It certainly makes the light shine during these increasingly dark days...:)

Richard: YOU HAVE BEEN GOAT-HERDED!

YG

Can you BLADES and Richard show me a single state in the middle east or Europe that was created on a more justified basis than the state of Israel?
All Arab states have been created by the British and French colonialism without any regard to the population in those artificially created states.
Jordan or Saud Arabia or Bahrain are a collection of tribes with conflicting goals where one tribe controls all the others by power and occupation. Just look around what happens in the Middle east today.
Now, let’s look around in Europe. Can you name one state in Europe who is not a result of endless wars and occupation?
There is one state in the world that has all the rights and justifications to be a nation state. This state is called Israel!

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Blades: "Derek BLADES
April 7th, 2011 12:09pm
Tuttitrumps asks me: "Are you denying that Abbas, President of the PA, demands the "return" to Israel of some 4.5 million Palestinian "refugees"...."

Before I decide whether or not to deny it, perhaps you could tell me where you got it from. Richard is just the latest cointributor to note that many of your "facts" turn out to be fantasies."

Look, if Abbas, Hamas, Hizbolla, Iran, Syria, Richard, herzen, Tilly, Harold, joe and schmoe have a proposal for peace, for evrry God in the firmament's sake, PUT IT ON THE TABLE!!!!!

Thomas

C.Gee
April 7th, 2011 3:04am
It is strange,that no-one has any claim to the land they live in because people mingle and move and boundaries shift and empires enforce their arbitrary will with no pretence at justice, YET the Zionists have the right (and can insist that their right is respected and acted on) to claim on behalf of Jews everywhere and anywhere sovereignty in Palestine at the expense of its inhabitants, because the Zionists assert that the Jews constitute that mystical entity a Nation or Folk.

Rigmarole. Self-serving mumbo jumbo. So many appropriate epithets.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Richard: "Thomas
April 7th, 2011 4:03pm
C.Gee
April 7th, 2011 3:04am
It is strange,that no-one has any claim to the land they live in because people mingle and move and boundaries shift and empires enforce their arbitrary will with no pretence at justice, YET the Zionists have the right (and can insist that their right is respected and acted on) to claim on behalf of Jews everywhere and anywhere sovereignty in Palestine at the expense of its inhabitants, because the Zionists assert that the Jews constitute that mystical entity a Nation or Folk.

Rigmarole. Self-serving mumbo jumbo. So many appropriate epithe"

Yep, Richard: "Goat-hearded"!!

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Herzen: (God, I hate your name):

Please tell us your proposal for Peace with Israel - one that could stand some chance of sticking.

Do you believe in the two state solution?

How do you see the refugee issue being resolved?

How do you see Iran and other jihadi actors accomodating - if at all - the Jewish state?

Come on. Enough of your bickering about history which will play little part in any peace whatever the interpretation.

We have a fait accompli, anyway you hack it. Israel is a sovereign state and will not disappear, whatever you think of Jews, Zionists, Israelis.

Help the Palestinians, Herzen. Think about ways of achieving a meaningful peace settlement that are not based on destroying Israel in the short or long term. ..or is that a silly request?

Edward in the USA

Jordan is "Palestine" - that's the East Bank.

Stephen Rothbart

"The real cause of the Middle East conflict."

That was the heading of this piece in case no one noticed.

It was about how Obama and the appeasers of Islamic and Iranian brutality still find time to castigate Israel at every turn whether through their own speeches or at the UN or EU summits, for not doing anything to further the cause of Peace and yet never require the Palestininas to do or in their case, stop doing, anything.

That was the point.

So how come this has once again descended into yet another debate by the Zionists and anti-Zionists (I am trying to be polite here) about what happened over a century ago and then what happened over 60 years ago?

Reading Roosevelt and Truthtriumphs and Augustus engage once again with the Herzens and Richards and Pauls about each sides' point of view is getting tiring.

It is not like anyone is going to change their minds. Both sides can make a good case for their point of view. There is no black and white here.

The fact is that Israel exists legally and, by dint of continued and largely defensive warfare, has ended up occupying more land than they started with.

Despite efforts from many sides to bring about Peace, no Palestinian leader, not even Arafat, has been able to bring themselves to either recognize Israel's right to exist or to make a lasting peace. Only Arafat could have walked in to the UN with a gun in his belt and got away with it!

Sure there have been Israeli leaders happy that this happens, because being realists, they know that any peace treaty with a people that has no country or state or democratic, accountable government ain't worth the paper it is written on and will last only until a new leader comes along and tears it up.

And if the leader is Hamas, they will not tear it up, they will probably burn it.

Nevertheless, people like Blades just thinks Israel should march back to the pre-1967 borders anyway. Thus becoming the first nation in modern or probably ancient history to cede land won in war without any form of treaty or peace or recognition.

Perhaps Blades thinks Britain should withdraw from Gibralter and the Falklands, Poland from Prussia and France from Alsace and the Czechs from the Sudetanland while Israel does this remarkable act of charity.

The point is not whether Israel is legitimate. It is. Even the blessed Blades said so, so it must be true.

The question was why is the Arab/Palestinian movement given a free pass after every atrocity, and the smallest infraction by Israel brings down a hail of condemnation?

If the Palestinians think this is OK and that Israel is the bad guy whatever happens in the eyes of the whole world, no matter what they (the Palestinians) do, then they will make no concessions, make no attempt to clean up their act, and they will force the Israelis to do nothing to help them, in fact drive the Israelis into building more settlements to protect their vulnerable cities on the borders with their hostile enemies.

So let's hear from you clever guys some views on this. Some of you have brains. Use them to comment on the subject on hand, not on and endless and fruitless debate on who did what to whom when and what did they mean by it.

We have seen these comments in every blog that Melanie writes even when the subject was nothing to do with Israel.

Let me get you started. Israel is the pariah of the Middle East becasue she is the enemy of evey Islamic state in the region, on purely racist grounds.

As the world depends on oil, every so-called democratic government in the world takes the side of the Palestinians in the mistaken belief that the Arabs care one jot about them. Others take their side because, let's face it, they hate Jews.

But the Arab nations don't care about the Palestinians. They care only that a Jewish state exists in "their Muslim world" and they want it stopped.

Because the rest of the world needs oil, they take the side of the racists against the democratic, multicultural, one that does not have any oil.

It's called realpolitik. It's also hypocritical.

Kindly debate.

Thomas

In ancient times there was a little kingdom, well, sometimes two little kingdoms, but sometimes just the one.
And by some miracle this little kingdom, or these little kingdoms, as applicable, formed a NATION (constituted under law)...."constituted under law?....work with me here. And even though this kingdom (or these kingdoms) lost its/their sovereignty to a succession of empires....constituted under law? or just the sort of empires that create and destroy peoples and nations at will because it is what empires do? - its people, the Jews, for it is they, retained their historic ties to the land. And even although they became citizens of other states, they remained the same nation-state first constituted all those years ago....so, each of them is a citizen of two nation-states, or?....And many in the course of time were people who had nothing remotely to do with the little kingdom ( )...But when the Great Powers, like empires through the ages, arbitrarily created and destroyed states and peoples, and allocated this land to this people and that land to another, with no concern for justice, yet when they gave Palestine to the Jews at the expense of its inhabitants it WAS just and it was not simply the arbitrary exercise of power, although obviously it was that too - because all those years ago (well, several thousand years ago) there was a nation-state constituted under law (well, a little kingdom ( ))...And it gets better - the Nation or Folk with this legal/historical tie to the land, (or possibly mystical bond with the soil, which the law struggles to keep up with), cannot be accused of anything like racism - because anyone who converts to Judaism acquires this same legal/historical/mystical tie with the land that follows from the existence of this ancient Kingdom (etc.) and allows them to displace someone who actually lives there, because living there is irrelevant....and why Judaism?...well, once the people in the ancient kingdom(etc.) moved over to monotheism, their religion began to look quite like what is now called Judaism and the newly mono god promised this land to them (rather than the other people, the conquered, the neighbours, whatever...). So, it's not just that there was a kingdom ( ) in ancient times which was a nation-state constituted under law(?) - which would presumably only be of any use to the descendants of the people of this ancient ( ), if, indeed, even to them - but the kingdom was given by God, so anyone who converts to the appropriate religion with the appropriate God thereby acquires residency rights and...(And anyone who doesn't believe in this God nevertheless has to beleive in his promise because the people who do believe in it do believe in it...)...

It is possible to estimate the implausibility of a proposition by the number of absurdities required to be piled each upon the other, layer upon layer, in its defence.

Ann Rosen

I Thank God for Melanie Philips and those who write and speak the truth.

Truthtriumphs

C.Gee
April 7th, 2011 3:04am

A brilliant post... a class act.

You show up the opposition for what they really are.

C.Gee

“It is strange,that no-one has any claim to the land they live in because people mingle and move and boundaries shift and empires enforce their arbitrary will with no pretence at justice, YET the Zionists have the right (and can insist that their right is respected and acted on) to claim on behalf of Jews everywhere and anywhere sovereignty in Palestine at the expense of its inhabitants, because the Zionists assert that the Jews constitute that mystical entity a Nation or Folk.”

If you garble what is being said to you, it will be strange.

The Aryan of the Third Reich was a mystical (actually, mythical) concept. So was the Third Reich’s idea of the Jew. The Arab nationalists’ idea of the Arab is equivalent to Third Reich’s Aryan, as is Islam’s idea of the Muslim. The Arab and Muslim idea of the Jew is equivalent to the Third Reich’s Jew, but is categorized more often as animal, rather than sub-human. The Arabs and Muslims have borrowed some of the imagery of the Jews from Hitler’s Germany, knowing it will resonate. Supremacism is a pernicious form of political mysticism, and has been particularly bad for Jews.

There is nothing mythical about the nationhood of the Jews. The fact that it dates back thousands of years does not make it mythical. It is time ‘memorial’ - not ‘immemorial’ - as the Jews were historians, record-keepers and rememberers. And Zionism is not a supremacist mysticism. Jews gave the world equality before the law.

But it occurs to me that you are not interested in debating the issues, or you would show more awareness of the intellectual history that informs your political views. You want to play the dozens with your many appropriate epithets. Epithet away, fo' shizzle you be Thesaurus Rex.

RoMo

Stephen Rothbart: Excellent summing up in your last post April 7th. What you wrote is indisputable.

Thomas

It was all nicely summed up in the 19th century at the height of the craze for romantic nationalism exemplified by Zionism: A nation is "a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours."

Herzen

Truthtriumphs,

I'm interested in the pathology.

In an earlier thread, Richard quoted you chapter and verse to show that your made a mistake.

Have you forgotten? Or can you not bring yourself to admit a mistake?

We all make mistakes. It is best to admit to them.

Thomas

C.Gee
April 8th, 2011 2:07am
2If you garble what is being said to you..."

Ah, you weren't inconsistent, or even incoherent, or peddling myths. You were misunderstood.

Stuart Seacole Smith

Stephen Rothbart 8.48 7th April: a nice summing up overall.

But where you ended up was with a question quite similar to what J Roosevelt has repeatedly asked of Richard and others - a kind of, ok what do you suggest?

Of course, no-one here can be obliged to offer possible solutions, but the repeated and wilful failure by some here to engage on the "realpolitik" as you put it, and instead constant harking back to the legitimacy of Israel per se seems telling to me.

Here's J. Roosevelt's question to Richard again:

"...whatever your interpretation of the history, and whatever your notions of "colonisers" and their merits and demrits, we have a state of israel and we have an aspirant state of Palestine.

Are you against a two state solution?

Have you some bright ideas about how to bring peace?

Share them with us, then, why dont you?"

Surely having a think about this question is more interesting than endless debates about who exactly lived on what bit of sand first?

Herzen

Stuart Seacole Smith
April 8th, 2011 3:49pm
I have answered Mr. Roosevelt in detail more than once, only to have the question repeated with attendant impertinences. I would advise Richard not to rise to the bait.

I have also answered Mr. Rothbart, who has the great advantage over Mr. Roosevelt of courtesy - but, again, the same question is repeated after each answer. I would however have no problem advising Richard to discuss these matters with him since he is reasonable, and his opinions, as far as I have been able to tell, essentially humane.

Emet

NormanC
April 6th, 2011 3:08pm

The point is that there was an indigenous population, not an immigrant population, of Arabs. Look at the figures Porath presents. The are over 400,000 Arabs in Palestine, in 1850;600,000 in 1893. Palestine was not empty. Peter's book is worthless, though.

On Jewish immigration: I referred to a period before the British Mandate. There had not yet been a restriction on Jewish immigration.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's former Foreign Minister, has said that Israel, like nations "was born in sin." He hasn't renounced Zionism. it isn't necessary to insist
on the ultra-purity of the Zionist project to support the existence of Israel. Benny Morris, Zionist and historian, accepts that 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Peter's book, late in the day, 1984, introduces a new founding myth for The State of Israel, an empty Palestine.

Derek BLADES

Here's a thought for anyone interested in debating the issue actually raised in Ms Phillip's blog.

Yesterday's International Herald Tribune reported that Germany recently joined its other EU partners in describing settlements in the occupied territories as illegal and calling for an immediate halt to all settlement activity. Prime Minister Netanyahu telephoned Chancellor Merkel to express his disappointment. Merkel is reported to have replied "How dare you? You are the one who has disappointed us. You haven't made a single step to advance peace."

The majority view on this blog seems to be that peace in the Middle East is being undermined by a conspiracy of loonie-left, Israel-hating, swivel-eyed hypocrites working for the BBC, Sky News, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, etc., etc. who “continuously [reward] the Arab aggressors”.

What nonsense! The present Israeli government wants nothing to do with peace. The Palestine papers have shown just how far Abbas is prepared to go to achieve a settlement. Netanyahu continues his policy of illegal settlements in the certain knowledge that they will soon rule out any possibility of a two-state solution.

Stephen Rothbart

Derek Blades, your are quoting heresay as if it is irreversible truth.

The opinion of Angela Merkel as to what constitutes an effort by Israel as a step towards peace is irrelevant if she has not had the same conversation with the leaders of Hamas and the PLA about what they have done.

The whole point of this article was that no one EVER says anything to these odious terrorists, who find firing a an anti-tank missile at a bright yellow school bus quite a normal practice, along with decapitating babies in their beds.

What phone call did Merkel make to the leaders of Hamas for example?

You seem to know a lot about her conversations, did you get any intel on that one?

Hague and Clinton are running around telling everyone what a great "reformer" Assad of Syria is, even as his snipers shoot his people dead in the streets.

But in between they can still find time to castigate Israel for her responses to terrorist attacks and building settlements.

This is the whole point. Our politicians are morally and ethically bankrupt.

They have double standards.

Merkel castigates Netanyahu, but says nothing about Assad, and will not send her troops to defend Libyans under siege.

She says nothing about Hamas or PLA atrocities (the Fogels were in PLA territory), but accuses Israel of its settlement building as being an obstacle to peace and does not appear to see targeting of Jewish children as also being a possible obstruction.

You do not have to support, or even like Israel to know that this is wrong on every level.

You can even take the side of the Palestinians and know that this is wrong on every level.

It forces Israel to circle their wagons and dig in, because nothing they do will ever be good enough and nothing the Palestinians do will ever be bad enough.

The remarks of Merkel and her fellow EU leaders hinder peace not advance it.

And that, Derek, is why I fight for the Israeli cause. Not blindingly. Not my country (or in this case my ethnic allegiance) right or wrong, but because if the world's leaders do not wake up soon and see where their hypocritical, misshapen and fundamentally mistaken view on the Palestinian situation is leading, there will be no fair solution for the Palestinian people.

A people led by selfish religious bigots and cold blooded killers, who use their people as cannon fodder in their quest to rid the entire region of any person whose religion does not fit in with their own. And that includes Christians and other Muslims.

I don't care what Palestinian papers for peace you can flourish.

Actions, not words. Stop firing rockets at civilian cities and stop targeting school buses, in fact stop attacking Israel and you will see how quickly Israel will respond to that and how even more marginalised the settler movement in Israel will become.

Thomas

Stephen Rothbart
April 9th, 2011 2:19pm
Europe does not stray very far from its obedience to the US and is a staunch ally of Israel, both in its economic, military and diplomatic support. If Angela Merkel was short with Netanyahu it is because the Europeans would prefer to be dealing with a "centrist" like Livni ("centrist"! - heaven help us when such as Livni has to be considered a centrist). Netanyahu's braggadocio makes it more difficult than it need be for its friends to continue to finesse international law in Israel's favour. They all want a peace "settlement" i.e. enough token concessions to persuade the PA to sign a document confirming that the Palestinians agree to their dispossesion, imprisonment, and exile. That is all the Europeans are after. And the PA is in Israel's interest as it needs to keep offloading the majority population in Palestine to continue with its "Jewish" "democracy" - giving the Palestinians "sovereignty" over their ghettoes is one way.

The notion that Israel would give up anything very much if the Palestinians "put down their weapons" and surrendered unconditionally is fanciful. There is no evidence for it. The idea that the settlers can be marginalised is also fanciful. They have adopted the same strategy with the Israeli government as the Israeli government has with its US patron - the famous "Samson option".

Derek BLADES

Stephen Rothbart writes "Derek Blades, your are quoting heresay (sic) as if it is irreversible truth."

I was quoting the International Herald Tribune and Stephen will find the same report in the New York Times, of which the IHT is the global edition. I think Merkel probably did say the words attributed to her. But I don't know if it "irreversibly" so and I am not sure what Stephen means by that..

Once again, Stephen you miss the point. Israel is the conquering nation which has the power to do whatever it pleases in the occupied West Bank. Chancellor Merkel apparently believes that what Netanyahu should be using this position of supreme power to see how the legitimate concerns of the Palestinians can be met in a two-state solution. Instead, he encourages continued land theft by thugs from Brooklyn and Eastern Europe with the occasional religious nutter thrown in.

That disgusts most reasonable people and it should have the same effect on you.

My interpretation of Chancellor Merkel’s views on the matter – if correct – coincides with those of her colleagues in the United States, the United Kingdom and the member states of the European Union and the United Nations. Commentators writing for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, New York Times, Haaretz....take much the same view. Just out of interest Stephen, do you ever wonder if perhaps you might be out of step on this? If so, do you put it down to your superior intelligence? Or do you think that the governments and media I mentioned are engaged in an conspiracy to destroy Israel?

Victoria

Melanie, for once I find myself agreeing with you! Who'd ever thought it would happen?

Much as it defies my pro-Palestinian heart Hamas has to learn that so long as it keeps bringing up the past and failing to recognize Israel as a state they can only ever be marginalized. It's like people asking the UK to welcome a group with open arms into it's political fold that are bent on it's very demise. How can you reason with such people?

You cannot deny - perhaps one of the foremost most pro-Israeli lobbyists - that atrocities have been committed on too many occasions by BOTH Israelis and Palestinians. Both now have to learn to put the past behind them and work together for the greater good, the future. And whilst I can naturally see why Israel is reluctant to negotiate with an organization that is bent on it's destruction, the olive branch must come from someone. In my experience, many Palestinians just want a secure future for their children, like many Israelis.

I think Israel should discard this military ideology that somehow the more they bomb Gaza, the more they deny basic rights to indigenous Palestinians in the West Bank the problem of the Palestinians will just go away. This is an empty and unrealistic goal.

Rather, integration is the way forward. Both Israel and the Palestinians must start embracing their mutual values and similarities. Israel, being an incredibly innovative and entrepreneurial people, should invest in Gaza, allow Palestinians equal rights in property ownership and access to education. It's a brave move, but certainly this war is not going to be solved by bombs.

The Jewish people are wonderfully resourceful individuals, with so much history and culture shared with that of Arabs. I think you forget this sometimes. The Hebrew greeting 'Shalom' is same as the Arabic 'Salam' meaning 'peace' n'est pas? It is time to start integrating with each-other.

Stephen Rothbart

Derek, I am as interested in hearing what was quoted in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times as I am of what Merkel says,or was reported to have said.

The IHT/NYT is notorious for its pro Obama sycophantism. Obama appointed to his team Samantha Powers and Susan Rice who are notorious anti-Israeli pro-Palestinian in their views on the Middle East.

So we know, by his actions, not his words, where he stands on Israel.

Once again, I am afraid it is you that misses the point.

What exacly are those legitimate Palestinian concerns?

At the moment it is their Right of Return of 4.5 million Arabs and dividing Jerusalem into no-go areas for Jews. Good show. A suicide pact.

I could not agree with you more about many of the settlers who "behave like by thugs from Brooklyn and Eastern Europe," but I think we have many Eastern European thugs living in the UK and in Europe, involved in human slavery and drug trafficking, and no one seems terribly concerned with them either. And the last time the Israeli government kicked its settlers out of an "occupied" area, they got zilch back in reciprocation.

What disgusts me more is the shooting of an Israeli Arab of Christian and Jewish parentage by your West Bank Palestinians this week, about which very little has been reported.

So here is a bit of what happened, according to a report on the Hudson Institute NY blog by a fellow Arab-Israeli:

"Mer-Khamis, who was born to a Jewish mother and a Christian Arab citizen of Israel, was trying to promote cultural activities in the refugee camp as an alternative to suicide bombings and other forms of terror.

In the past, Mer-Khamis received death threats from Palestinians who did not like his activities and mere presence in the refugee camp. The theater he managed was firebombed twice and leaflets distributed by Palestinian activists over the past few years made it clear that the victim would be liquidated one day.

Two years ago, the Palestinian Authority disbanded a youth orchestra from the same refugee camp after its members played for a group of Holocaust survivors in Israel.

The concert was held at the Holocaust Survivors' Center in Israel as part of Good Deeds Day, an annual event organized by a group belonging to billionaire Shari Arison.

Fatah representatives in the camp called the Holocaust a "political issue" and accused conductor Wafa Younis, also an Israeli Arab citizen, of dragging the children into a political dispute.

Younis was barred from the refugee camp, and the apartment where she taught the 13-member Strings of Freedom orchestra was sealed.

Ramzi Fayyad, a spokesman for various political factions in the Jenin camp, condemned the participation of the children in the Holocaust event, saying all the groups were strongly opposed to any form of normalization with Israel."

So that is the kind of information that I rely on,Derek, not what a newspaper up to its neck in pro Obama rhetoric has to say, nor the BBC, MNSBC, CNN all of whom receive millions of dollars in advertising from Arab funded and owned businesses and communities.

Now who is the bigger thug? Who exactly is Israel's partner for Peace? Has anyone condemned the PA for this kind of behaviour?

So Merkel’s views on the matter and those of her colleagues in the United States, the United Kingdom and the member states of the European Union and the United Nations, commentators writing for the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, New York Times, Haaretz, are not my concern....not because I think I am superior in intelligence to anyone writing there or here, for sure C Gee and Herzen have shown themselves to be the ones of superior intelligence compared to me, as are many others on both sides of the divide, but because I have bothered to read what is NOT in those papers and what is NOT broadcasted on those TV stations.

And no, I do not wonder if perhaps I might be out of step on this. I am out of step.

Does that mean I am wrong and you are right?

Throughout history the Jews of diaspora have been the minority and they have been butchered and massacred by the majorities of those countries that they settled in, if such countries would even accept them. Does that make those racists right because they were in the majority? Hitler was wildly popular all over Europe, even despite or perhaps because of his racist views. Does that make his supporters right, Derek?

So, am I suprised that I am out of step, supporting a democratic nation of 4.5 million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs where religious tolerance, equality for women and gays exist, a nation that went out and lifted 250,000 black Somali Jews away from Muslim persecution, while the world stood and watched? Am I suprised that this tiny nation is always painted as the bad guy, while the baby killers, the leaders of your Paletinians who have such "concerns" kill and murder even their own people and anyone who tries to make peace with Israel, or discuss the Holocaust and ne'er a word of admonishment?

No, I don't think that the governments and media you mentioned are engaged in a conspiracy to destroy Israel?

I think that many of them are anti-Semites (even the Jews) and
I think that they would rather sell Israel down the river than lose valuable revenues and oil concessions.

That is the reality of life. Does not make it right, and it makes anyone without business dealings in the Middle East and yet shares those views, morally and ethically deficient in my opinion.

Governments behave like that. They need to find jobs for their people and get good oil deals from those that have it.

They have their excuses, however reprehensible and amoral.

What I cannot undersand is why so many ordinary people, who have no excuse, take their position unless they have a darker and more visceral motive.

Some are for sure simply ignorant of all the facts, some ill-informed because they just read those same reports you do, and some, indeed probably most, just hate Jews.

Incidentally, there is a report somewhere from a Poll ( I can't be bothered to look it up now but it does exist) that said that 70% of Americans support Israel.

That is encouraging considering only about 6% of the US is Jewish. So perhaps it's the leaders and the journalists that are out of step and not me!

Sorry if this was too long for you, Derek, but if this is accepted by the moderator, well, you know me by now!

alkan kizildel

"From the very beginning of the conflict in the 1920s, Britain’s response to Arab terror against the Jews was to reward the perpetrators "

Come come now ! In the first place it was Britain that created the State of Israel more
than anybody else...

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Herzen: why is it that all you lot run away when ased the simple questions and claim you have repeatedly answered than (at least refer us to your answers, no?).

You haven't answered me, Herzen but, anyway, let me ask you some more questions, and if you haven't the intellectual and moral courage to answer them, why not call on some of your other anti zionist "historian" friends to do so?

Here we go:

In your view, has Hamas committed Crimes Against Humanity - according to International Law - by repeatedly and unashamedly deliberately targeting civilians? This is no trick question. The Islamists - including Hamas - have glorified the killing of civilians as long as they are Jewish. They have time and again claimed responsibility for the deliberate targeting of civilians and been jubilant at their success in doing so.

Whatever your political persuasion, this fact - as Goldstone clearly said - makes Hamas liable , under International Law - to answer what has to be a cut and dried case of Crimes Against Humanity, therefore. Don't you agree?

Do you think there is any chance of a meaningful, lasting peace without Hamas and the Islamists acquiescing in it?

Okey

alkan kizildel: " Britain created the State of Israel..."
By the following means:
. forbidding Jews to immigrate to The Land of Israel.
. Forbidding Jews to buy land there.
. enabling and encouraging illegal Arab immigration into the Land.
. being complicit in the Holocaust in that Britain denied Jews refuge from Nazism in the only significant refuge, namely, the Land of Israel, and this complicity resulted in a drastic weakening of the Land's Jewish demographic base.
. persecuting Holocaust survivors mercilessly.
. fanning the flames of existing Arab racist hatred against "the sons of pigs and monkeys."
. aiding and abetting Arab aggression, especially in 1947-49.
. disarming Jewish defenders and arming Arab aggressors.
. hostile voting at the UN in the partition vote.
What a glorious record for the great British empire.

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Derek Blades: "Yesterday's International Herald Tribune reported that Germany recently joined its other EU partners in describing settlements in the occupied territories as illegal and calling for an immediate halt to all settlement activity. Prime Minister Netanyahu telephoned Chancellor Merkel to express his disappointment. Merkel is reported to have replied "How dare you? You are the one who has disappointed us. You haven't made a single step to advance peace.""

One wonders what Ms Merkel would be reported to say if asked to evaluate the legality of Hamas and other Palestinians repeated and dleiberate targeting of civilians.

Perhaps there are two digests of International Law and only you tow have access to both.

You, Herzen, Merkel et al treat the Law like a used condom, Blades, to be chucked in the sewer when aboused by those with ulterior motives.

What is it about the Hamas Charter that you think should encourage one re the prospects of peace?

JOHN ROOSEVELT

Blades et al: if sharia defines the minsets of actors like Hamas - significant enough to spoil any peace concluded by other palestinian groups who may claim to be secular or something else, what sort of peace agreement that can stand any chance of sticking do you envisage?

Let's stop all the b**lshit cavilling about the history of the region. Focus on on proposals for peace that have any significance whatsoever.

Let's get serious, lads...

Ben-Tsiyon (ha rishon)

Okey's "What a glorious record fot the great British empire".

Absolutely perfect !

famabra

A good article, but the Title is incorrect: It should be " Why the Middle East Peace Process did not, is not and can not succeed"