[Guardsman Bass]

trsdek, on 04 November 2009 - 11:17 PM, said:

Many Jewish Israelis have been living in Israel for thousand of years, not all of them came from Europe. From what I have read, Jews are not even allowed to own land in Jordan. Plus, what about the half million or so Jews from Arab countries kicked out after 1948. Their homes and money confiscated by Arab governments. Why is that never talked about? They too were refugees.

They're the reason why any return to the pre-1948 conditions (as well as a "return" by the descendants of the Palestinians) is not going to happen. That does not, in any way, justify what the Israelis are doing in the West Bank and Gaza today.

And the way Jews are treated in other countries has no relevance on this question - contrary to what diehard Zionists might want you to think, Israel is not the Sole Avatar of Judaism.

Quote

The only Muslim country they have rights in is (go figure) Iran. When Arab jews were kicked out they went to Israel. When Palestinians were forced out of Israel what happened to them? They were put into camps in their Arab neighbors (Lebanon, Jordan and Syria). The Arab countries pay lip service to the Palestinians and treat them like third class citizens.

That doesn't change the fact that they were originally driven out, usually by intimidation and the threat of violence (Benny Morris is a good read on this). What it does point out, though, is that there are no saints in that particular neighborhood - just a bunch of violent, immoral states.

Quote

They don;'t even want them in their own countries. Yet, many Palestinians are more educated and westernized than the majority of Arabs. You want to blame a side. Blame the Arab countries. I don;t see Egypt opening their side of the border with the Gaza Strip. I don't see an end to this conflict anytime soon, because other countries benefit from this low scale war.

I blame all the sides involved - the British, for washing their hands of the situation after wavering back and forth on the issue; the UN, for creating a Partition that split the whole area into two states (one of which was the "Jewish" state in spite of the fact that only a bare majority -if that- of its population was Jewish, and most of the land area was largely populated by the Arab population) without actually taking into accounts what the majority population thought; Israel, for using violence and intimidation in the past to drive out a chunk of the Palestinian population in 1948 (although since it was an open, defensive war they were fighting, I give them a slight pass on this, and in any case it became a population exchange after thousands of sephardic Jews were expelled from across the Middle East in response) and continuing land invasions and colonization in the West Bank today; the Arab states, for largely (Jordan was the exception) using the Palestinian refugees and their descendants as political tools; and the Palestinian leadership themselves, for making all the wrong decisions at the wrong time (had they not chosen to provoke a war, their demographic majority in two ostensibly democratic states would have led to their domination of Israel very quickly without overt ethnic cleansing in peacetime by the Jewish Israelis).