Why is Israel the good guys????

Yes, that was the same for my parent's family.One of the funniest things I have ever seen, was when all of the Protestant members of my family turned out for the funeral of my Catholic grandfather. I think the only catholics in attendance were his widow (my step-grandmother) and the priest.It was like watching a star trek episode where one set of aliens try to understand the rituals of another set of aliens. Hilarity ensues.And yes, this is a funeral I am talking about.------------------
holmes

Yeah... I think of my Dad's family, and all I can picture is the Family Guy bit where Lois says, "your grandfather was never comfortable with the fact that I'm not Catholic."The scene cuts to Peter and Lois' wedding, as they leave the church. We see their car, which has the "just married" sign on it, and below is a crudely written cardboard sign which reads, "to a protestant whore."

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It was like watching a star trek episode where one set of aliens try to understand the rituals of another set of aliens. Hilarity ensues.

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I love moments like that. At my brother's wedding, they played hava nagila, and hoisted my brother and his wife up on chairs. Watching my sister-in-law's VERY Catholic family try and pick it up as they went was one of the funniest things I've ever seen. (In a charming "oh! Other cultures! How intriguing!" kind of way.)

Oh yeah I forgot to mention... One quick glance at my college roommate dispelled any stereotype that blacks had enormous wangs. Yet the girls kept coming for it, and staying around even after they got a REALLY GOOD LOOK at it.What was bizarre to me is that they did so even though he was clearly hung as well as me (once they got a look) AND he wouldn't go down on them. Then you seriously would have gotten a kick out of that funeral. The priest actually started getting irate and saying very loudly "NOW YOU CAN READ THE NEXT LINE... NOW. PLEASE READ THE LINE... OKAY I'LL READ IT AND YOU READ WITH ME, BUT NEXT TIME..."------------------
holmes

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What was bizarre to me is that they did so even though he was clearly hung as well as me (once they got a look) AND he wouldn't go down on them.

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I'll never understand why 1) a guy wouldn't go down on a girl, or 2) why a girl would stay with a guy who won't go down on her.

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Then you seriously would have gotten a kick out of that funeral. The priest actually started getting irate and saying very loudly "NOW YOU CAN READ THE NEXT LINE... NOW. PLEASE READ THE LINE... OKAY I'LL READ IT AND YOU READ WITH ME, BUT NEXT TIME..."

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Never fuck with a Catholic priest.That's not an altar boy joke. Honest....Okay, I think we're skirting the edge of derailing the thread now...

Hi, Holmes!Wow! All I can say is that your post is absolutely breathtaking in both its length and in the degree of rabid pro-Arab bias displayed.I'm not pro-Israel. The biases in both your position and the rabid pro-Israel position are equally abhorent to me. I think you really need someone as rabidly pro-Israel as you are pro-Arab to do this up right. Maybe after you both exhaust yourselves on each others bulwarks you'll realize that neither side has a monopoly on either truth or martyrdom.--Percy

I'm getting tired of watching their 3000 year old war on TV anyway.[This message has been edited by Prozacman, 10-24-2003]

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and no, I certainly don't have fucking horns. (Honestly... had to explain that last one to an especially thick girl once who was meeting her first Jew.)

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I bet she was disappointed. It reduces the options...Now if you'll excuse me, as a generic white American, I need to get down to my SUV in time to drop the kids off at day-care and go league bowling this evening with the local chapter of the NRA.(BTW, I hate that stereotype about Jewish = Pro-Israel, too It's really hurt the people who don't like what Israel has done, because every time we comment on it, we're accused of anti-semitism. My bridesmaid is half Jewish, and hates how militarily overaggressive Israel has been.)------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 10-24-2003]

1. You did not just reference a map of the initial partition plan. You referenced a pro-Israel commentary on the partition plan, from an Israeli lobbying group.2. Seing as you're referencing such things, it makes one question where you get your information from. If one is reading information from Israeli lobby websites, it would only be fair to read live descriptions of what is going on in the territories, from international observers.3. If you're not getting your information from lobbying sites, it's recommendable that you don't use them as references. If I made a reference to electronicintifada.org, would you think that was balanced?By the way, how familiar are you with the (rejected by the zionists) Peel Commission Plan, the 1947 partition resolution, and the later brutal ethnic cleansing of over 800,000 from their homes on Ben Gurion's orders (including Yitzak Rabin's own memoirs about his involvement in 50,000 of them (the towns of Lydda and Ramle))?Also, I should add, I don't recall whether it was you or someone else who claimed that there were more Jews in Palestine than Arabs. There were more Jews in the *Jewish partition* than Arabs, and not by a huge number; according to Ben Gurion, about 60% of Israel would have been Jewish (pre-expulsion).------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."[This message has been edited by Rei, 10-24-2003]

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The biases in both your position and the rabid pro-Israel position are equally abhorent to me. I think you really need someone as rabidly pro-Israel as you are pro-Arab to do this up right.

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Care to qualify what these are, or are you just going to assert that they're there?------------------
"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."

????? Did you miss the part where:1) I said that Arabs who sold their lands had no right to claim them back (much less retake them by force),2) said that Jews had the right to form their own state... including Israel? It was the methods used, not the ends that I am arguing against,3) said that Arabs should not be using violence (ie. arabs that use that method are wrong)?How is this position rabidly pro-Arab? To tell the truth the Israelis have done wonders with the territories that they owned and Arabs ought to (especially at this point) be emulating those things and concentrate on improving the lands they have, rather than putting all their energy into regaining land.However, and this is where my only rabidness comes in, hardline Israelis are continuing encroachments via illegal settlements, and refusing to allow refugees back to their homes. This is not to mention Sharon's dual policy of preemptive assassinations and punishing all Palestinians for the actions of extremists.The US... as the rest of the world has already recognized... needs to put pressure on Israel to change these realities. Is the rest of the world rabidly pro-Arab or something (I get my information from international sources)?Many Israelis say the same things I have (some of my sources)... they are rabid pro-Arab?Moshe Dyan, one of the major Israeli generals who helped form Israel, verbally recognized the things I said. He was rabid pro-Arab?Was it my capitalization of words? I use that as a quick way to emphasize words (there is no one button italics option). If you think I was yelling at you, this was not the case. I use exclamation marks for yelling.Why not address some of the most important points raised by my post:1) In the UN process, was the creation of a Jewish state up for negotiation (ie, were the Zionists willing to accept the creation of a multicultural state)?2) If not, how is that different from Arab unwillingness to accept a solely Jewish state?3) Were the plans for Israel (ie borders, etc) not the work of British officials paying back Jews in the region for their assistance against the turks/germans?4) Did those plans not (by necessity of having to create a coherent national border) involve trapping Arabs as minorities within a Jewish state? This is correct, but that does not mean that there is no objective truth to be discovered as to what methods were used to create the state of Israel, whether these were legitimate methods, and whether methods currently being used to maintain that state are legitimate.The methods currently being used by Arabs to end the state of Israel are wrong. Even that intent (though I may empathize with their feelings) is impractical.I'm rabid pro-Arab?------------------
holmes[This message has been edited by holmes, 10-24-2003]

There wasn't any "good land" in Palestine before the Jews started migrating back there and began reclaiming the land from the desert. There were no orange groves or olive groves or anything. Read what Mark Twain wrote about Palestine when he visited there and you'll get the idea about what the Jews found when they arrived. If you are basing what the Jews "took" from the Arabs by what you see in Israel today than you are naive indeed. The vast majority of the Arabs that evacuated Israel when the first war started were recent arrivals themselves.The Jews had turned the worthless land back into something and made it a nice place to live. Of course people will take notice and want to move there, jobs and food and services and all the rest. After the war, the Jews invited the displaced Arabs back into the land to live and you go do the homework and find out what happened to the few who accepted the offer and who did it to them.

Yes, but the resentment was fostered by the way the jews aquired the land. Leveriging the economy with US and Europen wealth, buying out palestinian buissnesses etc. then to add insult to injury, being declared a state despite the predominantly arab population.It's all very fucked up it seems. And to tell you the truth, the more I read about the issue. I agree, there is no good guy The feeling I get from this the more I look into it it's a profound feeling of disgust and shame. It is shamefull to me that this sort of thing goes in in the world today, in a world with so much knowledge, technology, etc. People can squable over dirt and a handfull of myths to the detriment of their very own humanity.It seems like Gulivers travels to me. The liliputians are at war because they like to crach their eggs bottom side first. Shamefull.

You need to get your facts straight. What I said was: I thought finding the map was important because it shows how small a part of the originally planned Arab state Israel took in the 1948-1949 Arab/Israeli war. Google found the map for me, it found it at only one webpage, and the page has no anchors by which I could position the link at the map. You gotta beef, talk to Google, or complain to your pro-Arab sites that their history sections are either incomplete or not indexed by Google. Heck, blame me if you want, maybe there were better search terms than the ones I thought of and the map can be found at plenty of neutral sites. But quit this silly "you're getting your information from biased sites" garbage. I haven't gotten information about Arab/Israel affairs from anywhere other than the daily news for over a decade. (If your answer is, "Aren't you aware that all the major news outlets are controlled by the Jews?" then all I can do is roll my eyes. Did you know that the evolutionists have secret fossil factories where they manufacture the fossils they seed in the ground before they "discover" them?)I earlier stated that I thought Jews might have outnumbered Arabs in Palestine ("it is quite possible that Jews outnumbered Arabs in the region" in Message 22), and now I wish that I had read the page upon which I found the map, because looking at that page again and this time reading it I notice that it has some demographic information, beginning right after the map. It says that my speculation was wrong: "The Arabs constituted a majority of the population in Palestine as a whole-1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews." It goes on to make pro-Israel apologies for why Arabs outnumbered Jews, but I assume the numbers are correct.You and Holmes and the other pro-Arab apologists ought to get together with the pro-Israel apologists - it'd be a lot of fun to watch. I see no reason that I should engage with extremists on either side. By the way, is there anything, anything at all, that you blame the Arabs for?If you or Holmes or anyone decide you'd like to engage in a shared search for common ground, then in that case I'm available for discussion. But I'm not really interested in this rabid "dispute everything, concede nothing, I'm right, you're wrong" stuff. In human affairs there's always plenty of blame to go around.--Percy

So much has happened in the last 40 years that has compounded the hate on both sides that it is easier for me to try to understand the formation of the universe than to try to talk about this subject.I cannot even imagine the genuine hatred that these people have for each other, I mean I have some very bad pent up anger for a former supervisor I had 12 years ago, but that's as close as I can come to that kind of anger and I'm not even scratching the surface.Well, let me clarify, if the Washington Huskies go down today to USC (University of Spoiled Children), I'll be pissed off enough to go claim the Temple Mount for myself. I'll fly a huge "W" flag from the top of the Dome of the Rock Mosque, and start ethnic clensing all non-huskies fans from the middle east.[This message has been edited by Lizard Breath, 10-25-2003]

Did you read my post #40?I readily admit that there is blame to go around in the Israeli-Palestinian issue.YOU said that Arabs could not claim that Israel had no right to exist. That is a position which concedes nothing.My argument has been that the nature and methods of the creation of the State of Israel (as it stands now) gives Arabs plenty of reason to make such a claim.In my last post I stated that Israelis... including Moshe Dayan... are some of my references to this issue. I cannot fathom how these people are rabid pro-Arab, or using their arguments makes me rabid pro-Arab.Whether there is any use in Palestinians pursuing such claims, and how to go about handling such claims are completely separate issues. In this we can see even greater problems on both sides. Extremists on both sides have cloaked themselves in this situation, and truly anti-Jewish organizations (they want no Jews, not just no Israel) have entered the picture on the Palestinian side.Please address the points I made in #40. They are not extremist positions, but rather points of fact surrounding how Israel was founded. If true then they are grounds for Arab claims that Israel had no rights to its claim... which IS seperate on where to go from there.The US certainly had no rights to claim most of its property, especially everything west of the Mississippi. The Native Americans have real grounds to claim that the US had no right to exist on those lands (especially at that time).Pragmatism means that the way to address such claims now is not another NativeAmerican-U.S. war. Neither does it mean I as a US citizen do not have a right to be a US citizen on this land.I feel the same is true for Israelis.------------------
holmes