Jerusalem Up Against the Wall

Have any of you heard of germans commiting Telepathic Anti Semite hate crimes?

To everyone I've been involved in discussion with on this thread - I'm out. I have nothing to gain from getting drawn into this pointless "us against them" conflict. If I were to go to the Middle East, with heritage from both Russia's Jewish population and from Lebanon, neither side would see me as anything but the enemy. It's sad, because combatants on both sides are, quite literally, my distant cousins, but there is nothing to be done about it now.

I'm going to listen to those who I've talked to who advise me to leave the whole thing alone - "they've been fighting over that patch of desert for thousands of years" is the way my support network has described it - and not become collateral damage in this fight.

But I do want to express this sentiment - peace be unto you all, if you can find it.

Cry me a river. You were the one that kicked from the 20 yd-line by inferring that I was ''full of sh.t''. An ad hominum attack. Thus whining serves no useful purpose. This said,WIKIPEDIA is hardly the source of what can be construed as ''impartial'' reference,which is why I rarely refer to it. To be sure,IRGUN and MACCABEE terror organs had existed at the time of the formative years of the new Jewish state. However,they are long past,and do not exist in any present form. Add to this,and it is not the purpose of Israels IDF to deliberately seek out victims in other nations acting in a terrorist manner[i.e.LOCKERBIE,KHOBAR,9/11,WTC I,USS COLE[whose planner,al-Masri, was possibly killed this weekend in Pakistan],ACHILLE LAURO,MUNICH,and several other outrages perpetrated by either Iranians,Arabs,or Palestinians]. Pass to Rabin,and one assassin does not a national movement make. The PLO,FATAH,and HAMAS,are literal nationalist movements based in terror in which factions argue for further bloodshed,or going legit. Thus far,bloodshed carries the hour.

joe_mama, I meant the refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria. Of course, Israel has a (but not the only) responsibility for refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.

Point 1: General agreement. I'll add: a."The debacle in Lebanon" should show the importance of states taking responsibility for wars launched from their borders. b. I think the thousands of rockets launched by hizbullah have largely erased the images of tanks v small boys.

Point 2. Israel is the only party to have made any concessions so far. So far, the Pals have not lived up to their word on past agreements, e.g. Arafat was caught smuggling artillery, Fatah elements continuing to claim all of old Cis-Jordan to be Palestine (with recent schoolbook maps continuing that fiction), etc. Until the Palestinians make some concessions, I doubt that Israel will change any of it's positions.

Point 3. I doubt the accuracy of this statement. There may be enough moderates on the West Bank to negotiate a lasting peace, and enforce it against the rejectionists. However, unless the West Bankers choose to disassociate from the Gazans, this option does not seem possible in the near future.

Point 4: Mutual Assured Destruction is not a viable option.

Your root canal w/o anesthesia metaphor is apt.

I appreciate being able to discuss the topic with a rational person. Of course, you would have to be an Obama supporter, I wouldn't have though anything else. Had you engaged in virulent anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim smears I would have naturally have supposed that you back Mccain, Barr, or Nader.

2.

totally unfair,israel are the most hatred nation because they stole the land of palestine, because the british and us were behind thie zionist,the jews did these crimes,this will be never end,this is the main source of muslim hatred against the west,and it will never stop,never

doktor,

The Palestinians could have stayed and resisted the Syrian invasion, as other Muslims did. Instead they left and joined Israel's enemies. The fact that Israel's enemies have done little to develop the Palestinians in the camps, or integrate them into the larger Arab societies, is unfortunate, but not really Israel's responsibility.

Israel is the only country in the region, outside of Turkey, where Arabs and Muslims have freedom of speech and worship, and can form political parties and vote. I include Gaza and the West Bank in the unfree column. There is no Arab country that allows Jews to own land, form political parties, or vote. That Israel is heavy handed, I grieve, but the Palestinians have had 60 years of opportunities to make a workable peace agreement. There can be no peace until the Palestinians themselves agree on whether they are a tiny nation, or part of an Arabic speaking empire that spans from Morocco to Iraq as Hamas believes, or part of a greater Muslim empire spanning from Morocco to Indonesia as Hizbullah believes. Even if there were no Jews and no Israel, there would be oppression and war in Palestine, until the solution to that puzzle is found.

Are all your articles written so one-sided. A man makes a decision to kill innocent people, woman and children and you make it sound as if the only people to be sorry for are these killers and their families. The ones that make it hard on their families is the killers themselves, who leave their familieis without their bread winner. And, where at all, in your article is a description of the lives of the innocent civilians that live and visit Jerusalem, whose lives were shattered by these killers?

Vigil,

Ya, "Lebanese, Jordanians, or the Syrians, and etc" don't speak Arabic, like the Pals do, and don't live on rice, barley, lentils, mutton, & onions. Ya you guys are really distinct peoples, and couldn't possibly intermingle. Just like you couldn't intermingle with the Jews who lived in that land for the last 3,800 years.

In May, 1948 the Cis and TransJordanians, Syrians, and Egyptians, and Lebanese could have accepted the existence of Israel in the UN partition. But you angrily refused. You warned that you would all destroy the Palestinian Jews' state and all the Jewish people of Palestine if they dared to declare their independent state. You demanded that the Attlee Government get Imperial troops out of the way so that your armies could attack and 'hurl the Jews into the sea' to drown. The Attlee government evacuated their troops in 24 hours.
Then YOU attacked, and your genocidal plan backfired. You intended genocide, but it was you that was hurled back.
Look, if you were really a seperate people, why did Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Egypt send armies into the land in 1948 ? They did it because you are Arabs, just like them. So, don't try to fool people with this seperate people business.

If Pals want land, let those Arab countries that confiscated land owned by Jews, Algeria, Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and Iraq, give land to them.

NEWSWEAK plays the same Gaza Game all the other western liberal news services do. What they find in Israel,incredibly,is a leftwing that exists nowhere else in the Middle East. One sympathetic to the desires of the Palestinians. Thus they are quite able to display ''evil militaristic Jew police/army/intelligence services'' and ''good liberal-leftwinged human rights Jews''. [no such comparisons are made when regarding the Arab,for as we see,a ''liberal-leftwing''does not exist among this grouping of humans in any numbers where they would have an effective voice among their peoples. Indeed,while NEWSWEAKS scribbler was waxing maudlin in Jerusalem,Gazans were,a la WWII France and Holland,cutting off the hair and beards/moustaches of those suspected of ''collaberating''with the Israelis.[with others of where there appears to be ''hard evidence''of such ''collaberation'',they are summarily shot]. Rocker Brian Adams had to beat a fast retreat from Ramallah when he recieved death threats from HAMAS while trying to put on a ''peace concert'',which had a Palestinian artist on the Jewish side near Masada,who was the subject of zero threats from the Jews.
Obviously,the wild card remains and is still Iran. It has shut down all diplomatic overtures,or assistances held out by the UN and the EU and will go forward with its weapons-grade enrichment program. The IAEA is completely in the dark. The idea here will be to use their bomb as political leverage,even in conflicts where they are not main players with the exception of their HEZBOLLAH in places such as Israel and Lebanon. Although I have not been successful in finding out about it anywhere around here.it appears that one of their top operatives was killed by a sniper this weekend stoking further tensions between Assad and the Olmert government.