Why is Israel getting away with these atrocities?

Israel is within its rights to retaliate against the kidnapping of one of their soldiers. Why aren't the Palestinians demanding that the soldier be given back?

According to this article
Palestine's Population During The Ottoman and The British Mandate Periods, 1800 - 1948 - Palestine Rememberedthe pretty much uninhabited wasteland population of Palestine was 411,000 in 1860, which grew to 1,308,000 by 1946. During this time the percentage of the Palestinian population that were Christians dropped from 12% prior to 1860 to 8% by 1967. These figures are apparently taken from this book:Institute for Palestine Studies |This is what I found, does anyone have different figures from other sources?

Israel is only responding to war. The Palestinians have not merely kidknapped a soldier, they have been relentlessly launching rockets and attempting other terrorist activities.If Canada launched 1,000 rockets at the US, kidknapped American soldiers, suicide bombed thousands of Americans, etc., I think we can safely assume the US would see acts of war. Indeed, a declaration of war, period.The fact is this: Those who fail to understand that Israel is a democracy like ourselves, withour system of justice, rights, government, free media and speech, sensibilities and sensitivities, and as such is as desperate for peace as would we be, and as willing to compromise as would we be, see the simple and strikingly naive narrative: The stronger nation must be in the wrong. They fail to understand, are unable to understand, that the palestinian entity is corrupt to its core, run by terrorists, has no free speech, no free media, no system of justice, and is a virtual propaganda state where the minds of people are no less subject to control than citizens of North Korea. Such a state, dedicated as it is to Israel's annihilation, will agress as long as:
* It believes it can successfully wipe Israel off the map 9as its official maps and school texts show)
* It has the the support of the Arab and Muslim world
* It has the support of the UN onside, as the majority of members states are either Islamic or want oil money or need to keep latently terrorist Islamic minorities from recruiting yet more fanatics to their terrorist cause, i.e., more 7/7's.Moral relativism has gone mad. And the Israel/Palestinian conflcit is, perhaps, its epicentre. Cause and effect critical thinking, no matter how basic, is lost. The left which can barely find the time to express outrage over the genocide of Christians by Muslims in Sudan, the annexation of Tibet by China, the wicked harassment of christians in the Arab world, the relentless suppression of democrats in the Arab world, the thousands upon thousands of innocents rapes and murdered and tortured in Arab nations, obsesses, truly obsesses, over Israel. It's like collective mental illness.Fortunately, the winds are beginning to change direction. Incredibly, I've actually heard fair newsreporting on the current matter on both the CBC and BBC. It won't last. But it indicates how a western world beginning to understand the madness of the Arab world is beginning to understand Israel's reality in a new context. That context is reality.

This war is not about the Palestinians vs Israel. It is about all the arab world and most of the ISlamic world against tiny Israel. As long as the palestinians are armed by these others, incited by these others to maintain war against Israel, they will not seek a two-state solution. Instead, they will try to make their official maps, which show no Israel, a reality rather than fantasy.

Mark Twain and others commented on how barren was the land.
A Tour of the Holy Land 1831-1910Moreover, many of the Arabs living there were nomadic. When European jews arrived, irrigated, created health and other services, created jobs, then, and only then, did large numbers of arabs move and stay. That is, to avail themselves of the oportunities now provided.However, this is not to deny that there were many arabs there (but jerusalem was largely ignored by arabs and was majority Jewish). However, to understand the bigger picture one must recognize that there very few Arab nations. instead, there was a huge land mass on which hundreds of millions of arabs lived. After the fall of the ottoman empire, 22 Arab states were created on 99.9% of the land. There was to be one tiny Jewish state. But the british reneged, wanting to keep arabs from siding with the grwoing nazi movement. Following WW ll the jews got an even tinier state than intended, a state created by the UN. The Arabs living there and alongside there were to either stay and join the Jews in building a state (some did, which is why there aer 1 million Arabs in israel), or create their own state. That they declined to to do, choosing to remain either egyptian or jordanian. Only after Israel won those lands in the 67 war did Arabs suddenly claim a desire and right to a state there. Mind you, the Palestinian Liberation Army was created 3 years before that war, in 1964. what was it they wanted to liberate? Yes, then as now, they wanted israeld and and buried.

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Well, now there's a piece of PC propaganda for you.

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Heh. Hello to you, too, Faith.-

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The area called Palestine was pretty much uninhabited wasteland until the Israelis started developing it.

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Yeah. So was North America when the English arrived. And Australia and South Africa. I'm pretty used to hearing this one.-

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The population was sparse and scattered, including nomadic groups.

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So it wasn't uninhabited? Sparse and scattered, if true, probably because the land was supporting as many people as it could under the noamdic lifestyle. Then other people came from outside the area with a different lifestyle, fenced off portions of the land, and made the indigenous nomadic lifestyle difficult if not impossible.-

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It had no national identity.

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Irrelevant. There were people living there. Other people came from outside the area. The people living there already couldn't maintain their lifestyle and were reduced to second class status.-

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Also, there were Jews living there too, who were just as much "the indigenous population" as any other groups, and had been there ever since the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.

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Irrelevant. I wasn't speaking of the indigenous Jews, who, at any rate, made up a very small portion of the population. I was referring to the white Europeans who came in and settled -- who just happened to be Jewish, but certainly not indigenous to the area.-

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The Jews bought land when necessary....

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Heh. I like the "when necessary" part. Of course, the Europeans in North America, South Africa, and Australia also acquired land by legal means "when necessary". The indigenous populations usually came to agreements to part with their land as a result of violence, threat of violence, or the complete disruption of their lives caused by the immigrants.-

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...paid for the labor of much of the indigenous population, plus many who flocked into the area because of the work opportunity.

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It is always interesting to hear of people "voluntarily" working for wages after their ingigenous cultures were disrupted or destroyed called "work opportunity".Funny thing is, I don't disagree with most of what you said in your post. I just find it either irrelevant, or the usual "spin" put onto the same old colonial enterprise that is so common in European history.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

Hey steve, I have to disagree to some extent. What you say about the Palestinians is true enough not to dispute, but this is also fueled and inflamed by Isreals overreactions. Isreal is also part of the problem.Terrorist acts per se are not the tactics of war, but the tactics of politics, used by a portion of the population that has been disenfranchised and oppressed. There is no army of terrorists, and even if all the terrorists were captured or killed there would be new ones to take their place so long as the disenfranchisement and oppression continues.The indescriminant bombing of civilian areas with no regard for who is killed is also another kind of terrorism -- oppression by terror. All it does is contribute to continued terrorism from the other side.The current policy is one that Isreal has followed for 50 some odd years now, and it has not shown any success. There comes a point when you need to ask certain questions: If it is NOT working then it IS time to try something else.The US had an opportunity to do {something else} in Afghanistan before the Botch Administration blew it by invading Iraq. Now it looks like the only "plan" they have is to repeat all the mistakes of Isreal in dealing with the issue with the net result that we now have three countries in political chaos\turmoil instead of one.Want to end terrorism? Then end the causes of people turning to terrorism. When terrorists can no longer recruit new candidates the end of terrorism will eventually (within a lifetime) happen.Look at the difference between England's reaction to "7/7" and the US (Botch Administration) to "9/11" -- not only was there no over-reaction (let's go invade a country that has nothing to do with the issue) but they are now working to de-fuse future occurances by working within the communities.When did the terrorist actions of the IRA end?It seems to me that England should be the model for dealing with terrorism rather than Isreal.But that's just my opinion eh?Edited by RAZD, : added "enough"Edited by RAZD, : typo

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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Those are not a few terrorists; they are the government itself. They are fatah, they are Hamas.In that Israel still survives, we can say israeli tactics are working. Were it merely the palestinians Israel battles, then there would have been peace long, long ago. But there isn't peace because all the arab and islamic world encourages, ensures in fact, that this war goes on and on. If Israel were willing to fight as would any other nation, that is, all-out war, that would also bring the conflict to a close. But Israel is too sensitive. Israel has many times sent its soldiers to die on the ground to protect innocent palestinians, rather than do what NATO did in Serbia: relentlessly bomb from the air, no matter who dies.

I repeat -- what brought the IRA terrorism (fully funded and supplied by Irish in the US and other "outside countries" btw) to an end?

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
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Razd, what you and so many are not understanding is that by and large the oppression and terrorism perpetrated on the Palestinians and for that matter of all totalitarian Islamic states, like communism, comes from their own governments and in their case, the clergy. They are under an oppressive despotic tyranny equally as bad if not worse than communism to the extent that to convert out of it is a capitol crime. You're in it for life. You opt out, you die or somehow escape. You either support Jihad or you get persecuted or killed. From preschool through high school hatred of the infidel, the West and Israel are indoctrinated into you.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW ---- Jesus said, "When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draws near." Luke 21:28

The problem is that treaty is not in the vocabulary of an invisible militant religious multifaceted army of ununiformed multitudes indoctrinated from early childhood, eager to die in the commited drive for world (abe: conquest). Edited by Buzsaw, : No reason given.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW ---- Jesus said, "When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption draws near." Luke 21:28

N Ireland was not at war with GB. "Palestine" is at war with israel. The IRA's foreign backers were not nation states, but various individuals only. The IRA did not have the support of the UN, because nearly 1/2 the the UN was Irish and held mostly everyone else ransom with oil money and supply. The Irish did not dispute GB's right to exist (school texts did not show GB as "occupied" Irish territory). The palestinians do not accept Israel's right to exist and see all Israel as occupied Arab land. The majority of Irish wanted peace. The majority of Palestinians only want peace if that means Israel dies.Better analogy: What brought Nazi Germany down?We're speaking of war, not terrorism. Those rockets raining down on Israel are sanctioned by the government.

"The irony goes unnoticed -- while we are hammering away to punish those who brought the horrors of last September here, we restrain the Israelis from the same retaliation. Not the same thing, of course -- We are We, They are They. While we mourn and seethe at September 11th, we don't notice that Israel has a September 11th sometimes every day."

I like you too, Chirop, you old commie. I guess there's nothing much more to say. I'm sure you know how I'd answer the rest of your post. Cheers.

But you were talking about the complete destruction of Israel - they all die.Look at the actual effectiveness of 9/11 in terms of number of people killed. Given that in 2001 there were 42,196 deaths on US roads it was about a month's worth of traffic fatalities. You simply can't annihilate a country using such techniques.If the attack had been the detonation of a nuclear device I would contend that Afghanistan (and possibly Iraq) would have suffered nuclear retaliation - and in the case of the former with some justification.If some Arab or Islamic group actually manages to come up with a way to destroy Israel you can bet the farm that Mecca, Medina etc. along with some of the Arab capitals are going to be glowing in the dark for the forseeable future. This is what guarantees Israel is not going to be destroyed. It will continue to suffer losses to terrorist attacks, but at a relatively low level. As has been pointed out upthread, the Israelis are - unsurprisingly - outkilling the Palestinians by quite a rate.

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