As long as extremists on both sides have an "ALL-OR-NOTHING" attitude we will see no peace.

[shaayecanaan]

6. You're trying too hard...

just relax. You don't have to come up with a nice, safe, mainstream liberal position on everything. Its more or less impossible anyway.

If I were a Jewish Israeli, I would want to kill the Gazans I suppose. It would be annoying having to run for shelter all the time and it would take serious time out of my day.

On the other hand, if I were a Palestinian, I'd want to kill the Israelis even more. They came and took my father's land, and then even occupied the tiny rump of territory that we'd managed to keep for themselves. Even today, they assert some entitlement to the 19% of historical Palestine not yet annexed by Israel, as though having the other 81% was not already enough for them. All the killing doesn't help either, but it is not the main problem. The problem is that the Palestinians were a peasant society, and they lost their land.

It is easy for you and I to be pious liberals because our forefathers did all the dirty work before us. They killed all the Indians, raped all their women and took all their land, making it possible for people like you or I to live a nice lifestyle without even the lingering sensation that we are doing so essentially at the expense of those poor red bastards who got the knife all those years ago. But even still, if the ghost of that poor red bastard were to knock on your door and ask for his land back, you're not going to give it to him, are you?

Machiavelli said that men should either be treated generously or destroyed. The problem is that the Palestinians have not been treated generously or destroyed, and are reacting accordingly.

Now, it is possible that Israel may elect to treat them generously, but I doubt it. The political wind seems to be drifting the other way. They will probably destroy them, I think, at some point, although that is subject to global warming or some other calamity not finishing off all the rest of us first.

I can hardly begrudge them that, in a way, as every other nation was founded on the death and destruction of its previous inhabitants, so why not Israel?

I suppose the lingering annoyance that I have is that a large number of Jewish Israelis seem to consider themselves categorically more moral than everyone else (all that "light unto the nations" crap), and that somehow the establishment of Israel was not as bad as South Africa, or Canada/Australia/the US. Einstein pourned scorn on the notion:-

And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

It is probably the Palestinians now that are protected from the worst outrages by having a lack of power. You cannot, however, make the mistake of believing the weak to be more moral than the strong, or by thinking that things would improve if the strong decided to be nicer to the weak. "Moral agency" arguments are complete bullshit when applied to such huge groups of people, inevitably the law of averages dictates that there are equal numbers of arseholes in both groups.

It is the same when people on this forum imply that the poor are more moral than the rich, or that Black people are more moral that white. The Apache chief Geronimo used to toss white babies up in the air before impaling them on his knife. About 2000 white Arikaner farmers have been murdered by Black nationalists since the end of apartheid. You can't expect the weak to behave more nobly than the strong, they'll always disappoint you.

The best thing that you can hope for is that the weak eventually become strong enough that the strong think twice before kicking the shit out of them. You never know, it might happen.