The State of "Palestine" Quiz

[catefrances]

Cate, glad you're amused.

im sure there are times during this discussion when even youve rolled your eyes and chuckled a little.

[yosi]

Maybe a little. I've gotten a lot better at keeping things in perspective and finding the humor.

Still, I do take this topic very seriously, and I just wish that I could actually have a discussion about it on this forum where there would be a real give and take, rather than just a screaming match where nobody actually listens to what anyone else is really saying. Oh well, maybe some day...

[Byrnzie]

Regarding the article about Netanyahu...planting trees is a symbolic act, nothing more. I don't put weight in symbolism.

Netanyahu: "Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here. This place will be an inseparable part of Israel for eternity".


Let me guess; my interpretation is biased?

[Byrnzie]

Maybe a little. I've gotten a lot better at keeping things in perspective and finding the humor.

Still, I do take this topic very seriously, and I just wish that I could actually have a discussion about it on this forum where there would be a real give and take, rather than just a screaming match where nobody actually listens to what anyone else is really saying. Oh well, maybe some day...

I understood perfectly well what you said and i countered it with the facts, supported by reliable sources.

I just wish we could actually have a discussion about this topic on this forum where certain people don't constantly resort to slippery lawyers tactics - bogging the discussion down in a dishonest self-serving play on semantics, personal attacks, and playing the anti-Semitism card.

[yosi]

Regarding the article about Netanyahu...planting trees is a symbolic act, nothing more. I don't put weight in symbolism.

Netanyahu: "Our message is clear: We are planting here, we will stay here, we will build here. This place will be an inseparable part of Israel for eternity".


Let me guess; my interpretation is biased?

No, I think that statement is perfectly clear. Also, as usual, beside the point. Like I said, it's a symbolic act. I don't care about symbolic acts. They aren't important (or at least they shouldn't be). What matters are concrete actions. For example, when Abu Mazen names a square in Ramallah after a suicide bomber who murdered Israelis lots of people go nuts and start screaming about how that shows that Abu Mazen isn't interested in peace because he's lionizing terrorists. I say I don't give a fuck. It's just symbolism, and it's intended for a specific target audience, namely the Palestinians who hold suicide bombers in high regard. I personally think that it's fucked up and immoral to hold suicide bombers in high regard, but really that doesn't matter at the end of the day. I don't care if a portion of Palestinian society is fucked up and immoral so long as they aren't killing Israelis. If Abu Mazen takes the practical steps necessary for peace I don't give a rats ass how many streets he names after terrorists. The same is true of Netanyahu, or any other Israeli leader. Point is, yet again, you missed the point.

[yosi]

Maybe a little. I've gotten a lot better at keeping things in perspective and finding the humor.

Still, I do take this topic very seriously, and I just wish that I could actually have a discussion about it on this forum where there would be a real give and take, rather than just a screaming match where nobody actually listens to what anyone else is really saying. Oh well, maybe some day...

I understood perfectly well what you said and i countered it with the facts, supported by reliable sources.

I just wish we could actually have a discussion about this topic on this forum where certain people don't constantly resort to slippery lawyers tactics - bogging the discussion down in a dishonest self-serving play on semantics, personal attacks, and playing the anti-Semitism card.

Of course you did. Love how you completely pull the reverse anti-semitism thing out of a clear blue sky. Nice touch. Still don't get how that flies (seems to me that, as a rule, we should try to avoid blaming the victim for pointing out racism), but whatever.

Slippery lawyers tactics...did you ever fail out of law school? Serve time in prison cause of poor representation? Lose a lawsuit? I don't get the animus towards lawyers (especially from someone so prone to droning on self-righteously about international law!). Besides, we're arguing in a written forum. The words we use matter. If anything, I'm the one pointing out semantic shenanigans on your part, since you're the one so prone to 1) blatantly and egregiously mis-stating the opinions of others, and 2) labelling your opponents historically accurate facts as "false" when you disagree with their conclusions. As Dikembe Mutombo used to say, "no, no, no."

[Byrnzie]

Of course you did. Love how you completely pull the reverse anti-semitism thing out of a clear blue sky. Nice touch. Still don't get how that flies (seems to me that, as a rule, we should try to avoid blaming the victim for pointing out racism), but whatever.

Because there's so much evidence of racism here on these Israel-Palestine threads, right?

Slippery lawyers tactics...did you ever fail out of law school? Serve time in prison cause of poor representation? Lose a lawsuit? I don't get the animus towards lawyers (especially from someone so prone to droning on self-righteously about international law!).

Are you suggesting lawyers have a good reputation?


There's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
- Jean Giraudoux

'It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour.'
- Thomas Jefferson

'A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."
- Franz Kafka

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two men are called a law firm, and three or more become a Congress.
- John Adams, in the play "1776"

Imagine the appeals, dissents and remandments, if lawyers had written 'The Ten Commandments'.
- Harry Bender

"Lawyers Are": Those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding the law.
- Jonathan Swift.

"My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the lawyer."
- Malcolm Ford, to his preschool classmates on what his father, actor Harrison Ford, does for a living.

[yosi]

Of course you did. Love how you completely pull the reverse anti-semitism thing out of a clear blue sky. Nice touch. Still don't get how that flies (seems to me that, as a rule, we should try to avoid blaming the victim for pointing out racism), but whatever.

Because there's so much evidence of racism here on these Israel-Palestine threads, right?

You brought it up. Another example of your predilection for putting words in other people's mouths, perhaps...?

Slippery lawyers tactics...did you ever fail out of law school? Serve time in prison cause of poor representation? Lose a lawsuit? I don't get the animus towards lawyers (especially from someone so prone to droning on self-righteously about international law!).

Are you suggesting lawyers have a good reputation?


There's no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
- Jean Giraudoux

'It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour.'
- Thomas Jefferson

'A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."
- Franz Kafka

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin

I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two men are called a law firm, and three or more become a Congress.
- John Adams, in the play "1776"

Imagine the appeals, dissents and remandments, if lawyers had written 'The Ten Commandments'.
- Harry Bender

"My daddy is a movie actor, and sometimes he plays the good guy, and sometimes he plays the lawyer."
- Malcolm Ford, to his preschool classmates on what his father, actor Harrison Ford, does for a living.

Oh no, you got me there!!! Quotes by famous people speaking ill of lawyers.

[catefrances]

Of course you did. Love how you completely pull the reverse anti-semitism thing out of a clear blue sky. Nice touch. Still don't get how that flies (seems to me that, as a rule, we should try to avoid blaming the victim for pointing out racism), but whatever.

Because there's so much evidence of racism here on these Israel-Palestine threads, right?

race is a construct. now.. if you want to talk ethnicism...

[VivaPalestina]

you know this reminds me of last week when i was watching the annual ANZAC day parade and remembering back to my childhood how always thered be banners from the various WW1 battalions stating where theyd fought. and there was always banners that announced one of those places was PALESTINE. so even before i knew the palestinians had major issues, palestine was a part of my consciousness. heck not just mine, but anyone who had family or knew anyone who fought there.

I'm afraid I had to look ANZAC day up...there really isn't a lot about it out there, it would be cool to find out more.

18000000 hits on googles should do it. might be best to disregard the ones about anzac cookies though. [/quote]

I did get some reliable info...I did see a few cookie recipes Thanks for sharing your story, I am glad that sign sparked your interest, I love the diversity that's on the mt.

[VivaPalestina]

The flyer I linked to provided the sources for its information. If you have a problem with what's reported, take it up with the New York Times. The information isn't any less accurate just because it was relayed through a particular organization."

The information is first of all at the very least questionable if the particular organization has been discredited as fanatical liars. The potential for said information being "less accurate" sky rockets. Second of all, in their effort to prove their revisionist history they did not bother to provide any references that are verifiable, they just expected their zionist cohorts to believe any negative propaganda, hook, line and sinker and it worked. I repeat, that I did a new york times archive search to at least have a look at the article that they credited to the nyt, but I could not find it. I can give you a shopping list that credits New York Times at the end of it, it doesn't mean that it was reported by the nyt. Without a credit to the author who wrote the article, to at least help a search, and especially from a group of proven liars, why would anyone accept it as accurate. Your first twist, remains twisted.

Your argument is logically flawed. The fact that there were attacks on medical personnel before the incidents I've brought up does not change the fact that those incidents did occur, and attacks on medical personnel subsequent to those events must be judged in light of them. Again, I'm not trying to categorically justify attacking medical personnel as a whole. I'm just pointing out that the situation today is much complicated by the fact that the neutrality of Palestinian medical personnel is, to some extent at least, in doubt.

And the turn...Again, the "facts," you presented the lancet opinion page article and the standwithus flyer remain questionable. If you believed that they occurred and that is the excuse for the targeting of ambulances, then according to B'tselem given their dates of idf targeting ambulances and your dates of the misuse of ambulances MEANS that there was (GASP) a time before THERE WAS NO REPORTED MISUSE OF AMBULANCES, BUT THEY WERE STILL BEING ATTACKED. You are spinning.

No. It's based on history.

And what history would that be? A jewish homeland refers to a religious group, they are not a biological group. There is interbreeding and jews who historically were not jews, and presently non-jews who historically were jewish. Given that, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and self-indentified zionist in his book, "The Invention of the Jewish People," there is way too much to write here on the subject, but the jist is that those who practice the jewish religion (and those that don't but are still jewish wink wink, can't leave them out, they are jewish when it comes to a homeland, but a sausage mcmuffin...not so much) that outside of a small presence, have no proven history in Palestine. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/ja ... ael-jewish

Transfer, to repeat myself once again, is not Israel's policy. Even the Livni quote you gave recognizes that (she is clearly not talking about transfer if she's explicitly reaffirming that Israeli Arabs would remain citizens of Israel with equal rights). As for anti-semitism, I always find it a little funny (and more than a little infuriating) when people blame Jews for anti-semitism. It's like blaming blacks for racism. Anti-semitism is a form of irrational bigotry. Jews are not responsible for it. And I think that after what the Jewish people have been through in our history, Zionism was (and is) a perfectly rational and legitimate response to anti-semitism (i.e., to grossly simplify, crazy bigots want to kill us, we tried to just mind our own business and assimilate, it didn't work and instead of ending anti-semitism we got the holocaust, so now we're going to take responsibility for our own defense so that such things will not ever happen to us again).

Again, you are either a blatant liar or lazy. Transfer is in no doubt israel's policy. The removal of the settlers from Gaza was to create a situation so miserable to effect a FORCED TRANSFER. To THIS DAY Palestinians are being TRANSFERRED out of their homes to make way for settlers. The UN ocha reports weekly on homes and land being destroyed, is the occupying army trying to make the environs more liveable for the Palestinians? Are you joking about the Livni quote, where is she "EXPLICITLY" reaffirming that the Palestinians would remain citizens with equal rights? (Which is another blatant lie you seem bent on perpetuating because they do not have equal rights) Are you seriously trying to dance your way out of that one? TO MAKE IT MORE CLEAR for you, "There is no question of carrying out a transfer or forcing them [Israeli Arabs] to leave," she told public radio. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7779087.stm You still don't get it, Howard Zinn or Finkelstein or anyone else criticizing the creation of the state of israel, have never blamed the jews for anti-semitism. The hidden truth of Zionism is that it does not put an end to anti-semitism, how can it when it replicates the reasoning of anti-semitism? That jews are alien to thier countries/states of their true birthplace and history and must be transferred out. The solution to anti-semitism is not usurping another nation's land. Anti-semitism did not end with the violent upheaval of Palestine and perpuating its occupation and the oppression of its people is not the path or solution to ending it. Howard Zinn, on the creation of israel: "At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States—very aggressive, violent and bigoted." http://momentmag.com/moment/issues/2010/04/Zinn.html As for taking responisbility for their own self defense, the jews were not the only group of people persecuted in the Holocaust or in a genocide, but they have been the only group to take up nuclear arms, use it as an excuse (example?) for ethnic cleansing to persecute just as they were persecuted, http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/deutsc ... ber-alles/ The self defense of israelis should not come with the price tag of Palestinian blood.

[yosi]

Regarding ANZAC...when I was travelling through Turkey a few years back I was really surprised that everywhere I went the guest books were full of notes from Australians. I couldn't figure out why (I knew about Gallipoli, but didn't put two and two together). Finally I asked the proprietor at one of the hostels I was staying at, and he explained. He said that a lot of Australians, more than just coming as tourists with a particular historical connection to the place, come to Turkey to visit the graves of familial ancestors who died at Gallipoli. Don't know how accurate that actually is, but I found it moving.

[yosi]

The flyer I linked to provided the sources for its information. If you have a problem with what's reported, take it up with the New York Times. The information isn't any less accurate just because it was relayed through a particular organization."

The information is first of all at the very least questionable if the particular organization has been discredited as fanatical liars. The potential for said information being "less accurate" sky rockets. Second of all, in their effort to prove their revisionist history they did not bother to provide any references that are verifiable, they just expected their zionist cohorts to believe any negative propaganda, hook, line and sinker and it worked. I repeat, that I did a new york times archive search to at least have a look at the article that they credited to the nyt, but I could not find it. I can give you a shopping list that credits New York Times at the end of it, it doesn't mean that it was reported by the nyt. Without a credit to the author who wrote the article, to at least help a search, and especially from a group of proven liars, why would anyone accept it as accurate. Your first twist, remains twisted.

You didn't look very hard. In the NY Times for April 12, 2002, Serge Schemann reported as follows:

"The Israeli police said today that they had found a belt with explosives in a Palestinian ambulance during a check at a roadblock inside the West Bank. The ambulance was headed toward Israel with the body of a Palestinian man, the police said, and they found the device alongside him. It was the second time in two weeks that Israel has reported finding explosives in an ambulance."

In an opinion piece (which I assume was fact-checked) published by the NY Times on April 13, 2002, Daniel Gordis wrote the following:

"Two weeks ago Israeli soldiers stopped a Palestinian ambulance with a child in the back on a stretcher, and under him soldiers found an explosive belt."

Showing that use of ambulances to aid terror actually goes back quite a bit further than the early 2000's, the NY Times published a report by Youssef M. Ibrahim on December 14, 1993, in which Mr. Ibrahim reported that:

"Early this morning a Islamic guerrilla drove an ambulance loaded with explosives into an Israeli Army jeep, killing himself and wounding an Israeli soldier."

Steven Erlanger, in a very interesting piece about the laws of war and IDF actions in Gaza, published on January 16th, 2009, reported the comments of an IDF major as follows:

"Hamas has misused ambulances and Red Crescent and United Nations symbols in the past and is doing so during this conflict, Major Lerner charged.

“We’ve had gunmen coming out of ambulances and taking up positions here in the last week; my people saw it,” he said. “So of course this makes the troops in the field very wary about any vehicles approaching them, and why coordination has to be from the top to the very bottom, all the way down the line to the unit in the field.”"

I'm sure I could go on, but I think I've made my point. Take it up with the NY Times.

Your argument is logically flawed. The fact that there were attacks on medical personnel before the incidents I've brought up does not change the fact that those incidents did occur, and attacks on medical personnel subsequent to those events must be judged in light of them. Again, I'm not trying to categorically justify attacking medical personnel as a whole. I'm just pointing out that the situation today is much complicated by the fact that the neutrality of Palestinian medical personnel is, to some extent at least, in doubt.

And the turn...Again, the "facts," you presented the lancet opinion page article and the standwithus flyer remain questionable. If you believed that they occurred and that is the excuse for the targeting of ambulances, then according to B'tselem given their dates of idf targeting ambulances and your dates of the misuse of ambulances MEANS that there was (GASP) a time before THERE WAS NO REPORTED MISUSE OF AMBULANCES, BUT THEY WERE STILL BEING ATTACKED. You are spinning.

As to the facts, see above. I'm not trying to justify anything categorically. I'm sure there have been many instances where no justification is possible. All I'm saying is that now, today, the 18 year old IDF soldier on the ground is in a really difficult position, because on the one hand he knows that ambulances are neutral and should be left alone, but on the other hand he knows that terrorists have tried to use ambulances to aid in attacks. The situation is complex, and criticisms are more fairly made on a case by case basis.

No. It's based on history.

And what history would that be? A jewish homeland refers to a religious group, they are not a biological group. There is interbreeding and jews who historically were not jews, and presently non-jews who historically were jewish. Given that, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, and self-indentified zionist in his book, "The Invention of the Jewish People," there is way too much to write here on the subject, but the jist is that those who practice the jewish religion (and those that don't but are still jewish wink wink, can't leave them out, they are jewish when it comes to a homeland, but a sausage mcmuffin...not so much) that outside of a small presence, have no proven history in Palestine. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/ja ... ael-jewish

No, you've got it wrong (as does Sand). I'll quote from Hillel Halkin's review of Sand's book, since it does a better job explaining than I could (http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-ar ... l?page=0,0):

"Judaism, whether it is nearly four thousand years old, as biblical chronology would have it, or only 2,500 years old, as the revisionist Bible critics favored by Sand maintain, is inseparable from a Jewish “national consciousness.” Believing Jews throughout the ages have never doubted for a moment that they belonged to an am yisra’el, a people of Israel--nor, in modern times, have non-believing Jews with strong Jewish identities. It is precisely this that constitutes such an identity. Far from inventing Jewish peoplehood, Zionism was a modern re-conceptualization of it that was based on its long-standing prior existence...

...
To say that Jewish national identity was rooted in religion is not to say that it was merely religious. And in any case, for someone convinced, after Anderson and Gellner, that all national identities are “imagined” ones imposed on populations at some point in their history by ruling or intellectual elites, what does any of this matter? If nationhood or peoplehood is ultimately determined by subjective perceptions, Sand is barking up the wrong tree by laboring to prove that Jews lacked the objective qualifications for it. By his own standards, all that should count is what Jews felt and thought about themselves--and in all the enormous corpus of pre-nineteenth-century Jewish literature (from which, for understandable reasons, Sand does not quote), Jewish peoplehood is never treated as anything but an unchallenged and unchallengeable fact.

...
Far from having common biblical ancestors, [Sand] argues, most contemporary Jews would discover, if they could go far back enough in time, that they have diverse non-Jewish ones.

But in fact we can go far back in time, with the help of historical DNA studies, which have burgeoned in the last twenty years, and the most disgraceful pages in Sand’s book are those in which he displays an ignorant disdain for the work that has been done in this field by serious investigators. Without the least apparent understanding of how historical genetics works or what it can tell us, he attacks some of its most distinguished practitioners, such as Batsheva Bonné-Tamir of Tel Aviv University, Karl Skorecki of the Haifa Technion, and Doron Behar of the Rappaport Institute, for “internalizing the Zionist myth” and “seeking at all costs to discover a biological homogeneity” in order to create a “new discipline” designed to confirm “the Zionist idea of the Jewish nation-race.” Having myself worked for many years on a research project with Skorecki and Behar, I can testify that this impugning of their scientific integrity is libelous.

The irony is that the genetic studies that Sand dismisses lend him a measure of support. Overall, they show that while there is a high Y-chromosome correlation with an eastern Mediterranean profile among Jewish men from most parts of the world, indicating that many of them do have common Palestinian ancestors, the mitochondrial DNA correlation of Jewish women is much lower. Or, in less technical terms: while male gentiles have on the average entered Diaspora Jewish communities in only small percentages per generation over time, female gentiles --presumably because they were local inhabitants taken for wives by Jewish men in places like Yemen or North Africa--have done so more significantly.

But again: so what? There is nothing explosive about this. Judaism has always made it clear that the Jewish people is not biologically exclusive and can be joined by outsiders. And taking Sand on his own terms, what does any of this have to do with Jewish peoplehood, or with Zionism? If our Polish Jew included among his distant ancestors Khazars who became Jews in the eighth century, and our Moroccan Jew counted seventh-century Berber tribesmen among his forbears, why should this have weakened the nineteenth-century ties between them, or their attachment to an ancient homeland from which others of their ancestors did come, or their desire to see Jewish independence restored there? Sand, who studied at the École des hautes études in Paris and has written a book on Georges Sorel, would snort derisively if told that Sorel’s fellow Frenchmen were not a people because some of their progenitors were indigenous Celts while others were Germanic or Roman invaders. Yet when it comes to the Jews, he asks us to take a similar proposition seriously."

Finally, if you think that Judaism has no proven history in Palestine you have clearly been smoking some truly powerful stuff (or you've been listening to people that either don't know the history or willfully ignore it for their own political purposes). The historical connection between Israel and the Jewish people is beyond doubt.

Transfer, to repeat myself once again, is not Israel's policy. Even the Livni quote you gave recognizes that (she is clearly not talking about transfer if she's explicitly reaffirming that Israeli Arabs would remain citizens of Israel with equal rights). As for anti-semitism, I always find it a little funny (and more than a little infuriating) when people blame Jews for anti-semitism. It's like blaming blacks for racism. Anti-semitism is a form of irrational bigotry. Jews are not responsible for it. And I think that after what the Jewish people have been through in our history, Zionism was (and is) a perfectly rational and legitimate response to anti-semitism (i.e., to grossly simplify, crazy bigots want to kill us, we tried to just mind our own business and assimilate, it didn't work and instead of ending anti-semitism we got the holocaust, so now we're going to take responsibility for our own defense so that such things will not ever happen to us again).

Again, you are either a blatant liar or lazy. Transfer is in no doubt israel's policy. The removal of the settlers from Gaza was to create a situation so miserable to effect a FORCED TRANSFER. To THIS DAY Palestinians are being TRANSFERRED out of their homes to make way for settlers. The UN ocha reports weekly on homes and land being destroyed, is the occupying army trying to make the environs more liveable for the Palestinians? Are you joking about the Livni quote, where is she "EXPLICITLY" reaffirming that the Palestinians would remain citizens with equal rights? (Which is another blatant lie you seem bent on perpetuating because they do not have equal rights) Are you seriously trying to dance your way out of that one? TO MAKE IT MORE CLEAR for you, "There is no question of carrying out a transfer or forcing them [Israeli Arabs] to leave," she told public radio. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7779087.stm

I don't consider myself a liar, nor do I think that I'm lazy (at least not intellectually). "Transfer," in the context of this conflict, has a very specific meaning, to wit, the forced expulsion of Arabs from inside Israel. Though people on the far right fringes of Israeli society have suggested that this be done, it has never been the policy of any Israeli government to do so. The proof for that is, quite simply, that it has never been done nor attempted nor even to my knowledge discussed as a plausible possibility. As for the Livni quote, perhaps your grasp of English idiom is not quite perfect, but the phrase "there is no question of..." usually means that something is emphatically NOT being considered (the BBC apparently understood this quote the same as me, since they interpreted the quote as a "clarification" of Livni's earlier more ambiguous comments, meant to address Israeli Arab concern).

You're perfectly right that Palestinians in the West Bank have been displaced in favor of settlers, though this usually involves loss of access to agricultural land, not to one's physical home. Either way it's deplorable and I firmly believe that such evictions should stop, and that all settlement construction should be halted immediately. Still, your description of these evictions as "transfer" lose the specific connotations that the term has acquired.

You still don't get it, Howard Zinn or Finkelstein or anyone else criticizing the creation of the state of israel, have never blamed the jews for anti-semitism. The hidden truth of Zionism is that it does not put an end to anti-semitism, how can it when it replicates the reasoning of anti-semitism? That jews are alien to thier countries/states of their true birthplace and history and must be transferred out. The solution to anti-semitism is not usurping another nation's land. Anti-semitism did not end with the violent upheaval of Palestine and perpuating its occupation and the oppression of its people is not the path or solution to ending it. Howard Zinn, on the creation of israel: "At the time, I thought creating Israel was a good thing, but in retrospect, it was probably the worst thing that the Jews could have done. What they did was join the nationalistic frenzy, they became privy to all of the evils that nationalism creates and became very much like the United States—very aggressive, violent and bigoted."

You should really try to learn more about Zionism (and not from the sources that you would normally go to, since they don't seem to have given you a particularly good grasp of the basics). Zionism was never meant to end anti-semitism. There is nothing that Jews can do to end anti-semitism, just as there is nothing that African Americans can do to end racism. Bigotry is irrational and does not depend on how the victim of bigotry acts. Zionism, rather, insofar as it is a response to anti-semitism (which is only one aspect of the ideology) is about protecting the Jewish people from anti-semitism, since anti-semitism, unfortunately, isn't going anywhere. As for Howard Zinn, I'm very sorry that he feels that the Jews have soiled their purity, but quite frankly I don't give a shit. I'd much rather be a people that is able to protect itself against its enemies than a pure and innocent sacrificial lamb. It's all well and good for Zinn to consider Israelis so much worse than their innocent diaspora ancestors, but quite frankly I'm sure that the six million of those ancestors who wound up as ash would have traded some of the purety that Zinn seems to care so much for to have had the power to protect themselves.

[Byrnzie]

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[Byrnzie]

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