Is The Palestinian Problem Overrated?

Some think it is.

True, perhaps, but violence always gets ratings.

Comments

[DANEgerus]

36 flashpoints in the world and only 1 Israel.
But all 36 involve Muslims...
You do the math

;)

[Phoenix]

ugh. Couldn't make it through the article. How boring are these people? I'm at the point where I wish a plague on them.

[seekeronos]

Israel should have pushed all of the Palestinians into the sea, or into the Gaza strip, over forty years ago at the conclusion of the Six-Day war.

[Dennis]

Americans talking about the the outside world. That´s like Paris Hilton talking about string theory :)

[Dennis]

You don´t know anything about Palestine and the horror going on there. You justify the killings of them because they are muslims. Is´n that a little racist? Even your media is biased and owned by the jews. The whole world can´t stand you because of your stupidity and ignorance and you have got the biggest army in the world. That´s just terrible.

[Phoenix]

What crap, Dennis. It isn't because they are Muslims. It's because they are brainwashed against hard work, Jews, and deep into violence to solve problems. They live to hate. I don't care what stupid religion they are: They are mindless.

[Dennis]

In Israel the media is censored by the military. Now that´s brainwashing. Why are jews any more hard working than palestinians. That doesn´t make any sense because israelis live on money transfered from the US. Did you know that? The Israeli army is one of cruelest ones on the planet. When palestinian children (down to 6 years old) throw rocks at their tanks they shot back to murder them. Last year in Libanon they used white phosphorus (paid by the US government) on civilians. "They live to hate" you say. You are talking about yourself. How are you able to wake up in the morning, eat your breakfast and remember to breath and still be so ignorant. No wonder the whole world hates your stupid foreign policy. Just take a look at your president and his staff!

[Phoenix]

Um. So you're from Mars, Dennis?

The U.S. gave the Palestinians over 1.3 BILLION dollars in the last couple of years. It was for the people. You know - humanitarian aid. The U.S. is sending them 50 million now. Humanitarian aid. The Jews work. They built up their country and it's a productive democracy. Yep. They have a 'cruel' military, as you say. They kind of have to have one of those militaries that shoot to kill because they're surrounded by people who bomb to kill indiscriminately. The Jews like the idea of staying alive.

Go bleed to death over the arrogant Palestinians if you want. They refuse to work. They are totally dependent on us for money. And they live to kill Jews. I'm thinking you're a Palestinian, perhaps? Why don't you tell your compatriots that there is more to life than hating with the kind of violent hatred that only religious intolerance can evoke. They bore me.

[Dennis]

I´m Icelandic and living in Denmark. In both countries and in most other countries people can see what´s going on. Why do Americans never ask the question "Why do suicide bombers take their own live and why are they so mad". That´s because Israel took their land and have killed many Palestinians over the years. You don´t fix the problem by treating them like dogs. It´s obvious that you don´t think of Palestinians as humans.

Total funding by US taxpayer to Israel is more than 4 billion US dollars per year.

[Fred Beloit]

Oh no you don't, Dennis. Those suicide bombers are just after virgin pooty that they have been promised is just waiting for them in that big oasis in the sky, those horny devils. Tell me something Dennis? Why would a just god reward someone for murdering women and children instead of soldiers? Do you favor murdering women and children, my friend?

[seekeronos]

Typical arrogance from a Euro-twit too inflated on his own self-perceived intelligence, blah-balh-blah.

Look, you brainwashed, mutton-chomping, Jew-hating dhimmi:

...if Israel and her Army were to always be forced to "play nice" (which, actually ... it did in the Lebanon conflagration that Hezbollah used much fauxtography and misinformation to malign those nasty Joooooos) ... there would be no more Israel.

Newsflash, dimbulb: Israel is not going anywhere, it is on its rightful land, and there never was, nor will there ever be, such a thing as "Palestine" or a so-called "Palestinian" ethnicity. All they really are is a "refuse people", that is, a bunch of rabble-rousers and good-for-nothings that Jordan and the other post-Balfour Arab nations refused to have inside their borders.

And Israel (which has its rights to the land established by treaty) is well within her rights to shoot at people stupid enough to throw rocks and grenades at armed soldiers. If six-year old kids are really doing this, then their mummy and daddy should have done a better job of teaching their kids not to get in the way of armed soldiers or tanks.

But it doesn't work like that, because their Islamically-deranged, brainwashed parents are the same folks who dress up their babies and toddlers in bomb belts and guns or other terrorist garb or as "brave musselmen jihad warriors" and post them to YouTube

Bloody stupid!

And that is the reason why Europe is doomed to be overrun by the Muslims and turned into the rump end of the latest Caliphate, unless folks on over on your side of the pond decides to wake up to the reality.

But with exemplars of multi-culti idiocy such as yourself abounding in the corridors of European power, such a wake-up doesn't seem very likely.

[Dennis]

Hmmm...No I don´t favor murdering of women and children. We are debating about if Israel should use so much military power and who´s land this is (were Israel is now). In 2000 years this land had been Palestinian land, until after ww2 the UK and the US felt pity for jews (understandible). So they decided to give them that land were Palestinians were already living. Which is not very fair against Palestinians because they had nothing to do with ww2. So this is realy the UK and the US fault. Clearly what the US and Israel are doing now isn´t making things better. It´s getting worse every day. Why can´t the US and Israel see that they are creating more and more terrorists by treating the people of those nations in the middle east so badly.

[seekeronos]

I disagree. How are we bady "treating" anyone in the Middle East badly? And even if we are mal-treating Arabs and Muslims by way of our activities (the Occupation of Iraq), this has little to do with the non-nation of Palestine.

I say again, that there simply is no such nation or ethnicity of "Palestinians". Unlike Israel, there is no clear-cut link between the ancient peoples of Gaza (the Phillistines) and the Arabs who have adopted the name "Filastiniyya" (Arabic phoneticized "Palestine").

Rather, they are cast-offs from Arabs and Arabic-speaking tribes that were there from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, and later its various component nations (Trans/Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt) which had expatriate citizens in those areas when Israel was formed by Armistice treaty in 1948 following the Israeli War of Independence.

The Jews won that war, and seventeen other Arab nations lost - quite so getting their rear-ends handed to them at that. And perhaps there was significant US and UK backing for it: it gave the US an ally in the region from which to counterweight the Arabs, who were more often than not operating under the advice and arms of the Soviet Union; also, there is a significant population of Jews in the USA who desired their brothers to dwell in reasonable safety, having escaped Hitler's ovens.

Lastly, God promises a blessing on those nations and peoples who help and are a "blessing" to the Jews (God's Chosen People). Likewise, there is a curse on those nations who hinder and persecute the Jews (look at the Arab peoples, who have never managed to recover what political power as a unitary state they had as the Caliphate, and the bulk of whom live in squalor -- not because of our political meddling, but because a few of their rulers have seen fit to keep their masses as far from their money and capital-generating resources as possible).

So, who is a Palestinian?

To be accurate, a "Palestinian" is a person of Arabic descent who lived in the Levant. It is not a unique sub-ethnicity or nationality of Arabs, such as "Syrian" (derived from the ancient Assyrians) or "Jordanian" derived from various Arab tribes that have lived in that region from antiquity) or even Egyptians (whose identity from ancient times can hardly be disputed).

The Jews certainly have more of a right to that land - even if we take away the Biblical promises regarding how God gave that land to the Jews, there is still the verifiable historic evidence that the Jews (Israel) had been in that land from roughly 3400 BC ~ ca. 580 BC (captivity in Babylon) followed by a limited return to the Land of Judah from ca. 530 BC until ca. AD 125, when the Diaspora was made effectively complete by the Romans who utterly subjugated the region, due to persistent Jewish revolts against the overlording authorities.

The region then passed from Roman control (Judaea) to the Byzantine Empire to various Caliphates to the Crusader States back to the Caliphates which gave rise to the Ottomans, finally broken up into the British Mandates which became the various Arab states we know today.

All in all, the Jews were in the region for a good 3,000+ years, and then marginally so for another 500 years until the Diaspora reduced the Jewish population in the Levant to a bare minimum. Then the Romans and their successor states controlled it until the rise of Islam another 500 years later.

So, calling it from approx. the 7th Century to the end of the 11th Century, the Levant was ruled by Muslims and Caliphs of various stripes and allegiances, until Jerusalem was captured during the First Crusade (AD 1099). The Crusaders States existed and declined until Salah-Al-Din (Saladin) conquered Jerusalem for the Caliphate in the late 12th Century (ca. AD 1187) and finally the fall of Acre in 1291, where Sultan Khalil _exterminated_ all the Christians (and probably all but a small population of Jewish dhimmis who had no use for the Catholic crusaders).

The Muslims ruled the Levant from thence until the early 20th century, for a total of about 900~1000 years, which is hardly equivalent to the 3500 years the land was held by a majority Jewish population.

So who displaced whom? And when it comes to maltreatment and human cruelty, the Muslims are experts at it, offering conquered peoples either conversion to Islam (and thus, extinction of their own cultural and religious identity), dhimmitude (second-class subject-hood), or death.

If it were not for Israel's military and her will to use it, the Arabs would have over run the region, killing every Jew in sight.

[Dennis]

Seekeronos: Now I´m almost speechless. You can´t bring god into this and what the bible says. Palestinians don´t care what god said to the jews and where are all the Palestinians supposed to go? Palestine is a nation just as much as America and alot older nation. How did you Americans get your land again? By wiping out the Indians and take their country. So if the Indians had enough weapons they could murder you all and take their land back and you would be OK with that because that´s what you do. You would propably try to fight back even if you only had rocks to throw. Remember that Palestinians have been on their soil much longer than you do.

I would say that killing 200.000 to 600.000 (most civilians) Iraqis is treating them badly. There´s one thing I´ve always wanted to ask an American who´s in favor of this war. If you imagine that you are an Iraqi and a US soldier killed someone in your family. You react by getting a gun to fight back to the invasion. Then you are defined as a terrorist because you´re fighting back and not a part of any army. Then you´re murdered by the US army and you being killed will be presented as a success all over the news in the western world. One more terrorist down. Is that fair? Most of your "terrorists" are only protecting their country and never had anything to do with Saddam.