Originally posted by G-Man
- You're forgetting that today isn't the world of 55 years ago. Arab countries of the time were very weak countries. The jews would've had to fight for a country no matter where it'll be. Might as well fight against someone we can win.
- Jews didn't choose Israel because they wanted to escape wars, they chose it because it's their land. Israel is an important part of the identity of the jewish people.
- Zionism started before any of the serrounding countries existed.
- If everything I have been arguing about Jews being distinct from Israelis is true (and it is), then you're clearly quite wrong: Israel isn't isn't so important a part of the identity of the jewish people to millions of jewish people that they're compelled to live there or be citizens. If the majority (in fact, the vast majority) of Jews live outside Israel, then how is holding complete and unfettered tenure and soveriegnty over Israeli land so crucial to Judiasm?
- You persist in thinking in terms of "countries," a notion I reject, especially given the damage to natural "countries" that my colonial ancestors caused. Think in terms of "people." Although the region was under British colonial administration, people lived there.
And it was crystal clear to many - including the British government, which was promptly denounced as anti-semetic for saying so - that large numbers of the people resident in the region would not be too cool with the idea of a million new settlers arriving and creating a state with a singular religon as the basis of citizenship.
Scotland hasn't existed as a "country" since the turn of the 18th Century, yet British policymakers would be fools to pretend it wasn't a distinct national force to be considered, if not reckoned with. The Tlingit-Haida and Kwaguilth peoples were never "countries" at all - but what does that have to do with the wisdom or justice of settling millions amongst them and displacing them? Quebecers have never been "a country," and yet we seem strangely capable of agreeing that they can have certain rights and freedoms alongside ours without choosing to displace them for our own benefit.
Originally posted by G-Man
I won't answer that because that would be going too off topic, but just something you should think about on your own - Who is "them"?
Grammatically, the sentence quite clearly denoted "them" as representing "the Palestinian Authority." I'm not fool enough to be a hypocrite in the same thread...
Originally posted by G-Man
Hate towards minorities is to a large extent a result of how many of them there are. Nearly all european jews were either killed or escaped to other places, so today there are few jews and as a result there's less antisemitism. There's no knowing what antisemitism would've been like had large numbers of jews kept living in europe.
And the fact is that Israel didn't make it easier to hurt jews - the entire losses of Israel in all the wars and all the terror attacks equal to two days of the holocaust. Today jews have an army to defend them against people who want to hurt them.
First, I don't accept your notion of hate toward minorities rising or falling in relation to "quantity" - for if it were true, then Jews would be a relatively ignored minority, given their small numbers. And if anti-semitism is supposedly rising in Europe, is it because there are suddenly more Jews? The Chinese minority in British Columbia was always hated, whether it was large (now) or small (1880s), numbers were merely a convenient excuse to bring the subject up. I think Latin Americans have probably suffered less discrimination than any previous U.S. "wave" immigrant group, and yet there are more of them and their numbers are growing quickly. I should add that if this is your view, then Israel's existence is even more disturbing, because it would represent segregation as a response to racism, which is completely unacceptable and backward to me. The reverse should be encouraged: everyone's a person, get used to it. Etc.
And yes, there is a way of knowing what the numbers would be like. The "big push" to create Israel came after the Holocaust, so I don't accept the notion that casualties in the Holocaust are relevant to the issue of the current state of Israel as a form of safety from 1948 forward. What are all the casualties of Jews to race-based attacks worldwide in the last half-century? Negligible - and we both know that many of the casualties that did happen were examples of transnational terrorism by Palestinians, an unlikely event had there been no Israel. Feel free to increase that number by the same percentage increase we'd see in the number of non-Israeli jews if all Israeli jews left, to use your "numbers beget racism" formula. What are the casualties in Israel COMPARED to those casualties abroad, even after accounting for your theory that the numbers abroad would rise...?
And more to the point, no one - not you, nor I, no one - can foresee an end to the growth in Israeli casualties anytime soon, can we? Even without the occupation in "Judea and Samaria," we both know that there would have been fedeyeen plotting the same sort of thing round about now based simply on the desire for revenge for '48-'49; it would have been a natural evolution of events.
So how long before it's not a suicide bomber with TNT, and instead it's a suicide bomber with a backpack nuke? Frankly, such a result seems almost chillingly inevitable - and, for the record, it would be as sickening, unjust and horrible as the TNT variants are. But as a question of logic, and a subject for analysis, we both know that the creation of the state of Israel is the event that set that probability predictably in motion. It's the state we're stuck with now, and I'm here saying yes, I defend its right to exist, however shortsighted its current policies might be, and defend the need to stop killing regardless of those policies. But how could it possibly have been a safe or reasoned choice back then when the notion of this endless war against the "weak" arabs was entirely predictable?
R.III
