It seems as though I was booted off but never told.

OK, who are Palestinians? The Philistines? When did they get there? What area they inhabited?

a LITERARY connection to land through book, and an authentic physical connection to the habitat. You can take the Torah away from the European Jew,

So this is core and crux to the goal of drawing lines on the map

So the border of Israel and Palestine must follow the border of Jews and Philistine? At which period?

genocide of the pre-Jewish populace by the Chosen People is also a good part of the Jewish narrative.

Seriously, if we take millenia-old events as grounds for the contemporary political legitimacy, we might get into curious puzzles. Almost no one sits where they are known to had come from. Affording that kind of legitimation to Jews, we must do no less for all others. And they're aplenty.

Yet at the same time, the issue of terrorism is equally nonsensical. Palestinians use terror because they have no other instruments. Palestinians go after those targets that are available. The alternative is accept the eternity of occupation and sit quiet.

"here" was on their very chests.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade. During eruptions of violence, the mantra of diplomats and editorialists is the need for a two-state solution. It sounds so simple: if two peoples cannot share the land, they must divide it. This seemed obvious to some outsiders even before the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews prompted the United Nations in 1947 to call for the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine. In 1937 a British royal commission concluded that “an irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country.” The answer had to be partition.

The fact that the Arabs rejected the UN’s partition plan of 60 years ago has long given ideological comfort to Israel and its supporters. Abba Eban, an Israeli foreign minister, quipped that the Palestinians “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. Israel’s story is that the Arabs have muffed at least four chances to have a Palestinian state. They could have said yes to partition in 1947. They could have made peace after the war of 1947-48. They had another chance after Israel routed its neighbours in 1967 (“We are just waiting for a telephone call,” said Moshe Dayan, Israel’s hero of that war). They had yet another in 2000 when Ehud Barak, now Israel’s defence minister and then its prime minister, offered the Palestinians a state at Bill Clinton’s fateful summit at Camp David.

This story of Israeli acceptance and Arab rejection is not just a yarn convenient to Israel’s supporters. It is worth remembering that it was not until 1988, a full 40 years after Israel’s birth, that Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) renounced its goal of liberating the whole of Palestine from the river to the sea. All the same, the truth is much more shaded than the Israeli account allows. There have been missed opportunities, and long periods of rejection, on Israel’s part, too.

Look again at those missed opportunities. At the time of the UN partition resolution, the Jews of Palestine numbered only 600,000 and the Arabs more than twice that number. Most of the Jews were incomers. Although partition might have been the wiser choice for the Palestinians, it did not strike them as remotely fair. In the subsequent war, more than 600,000 of Palestine’s Arabs fled or were put to flight. Afterwards, disinclined either to take them back or return the extra land it had gained in battle, Israel was relieved that the Arab states, traumatised by the rout, made no serious offer of peace. Many of the refugees have been stuck ever since in a sad finger of dunes, the Gaza Strip, pointing at the bright lights of Tel Aviv.


After the ignominious defeat of 1967, the Arab states again rejected the idea of peace with Israel. That was, indeed, a wasted opportunity. But even though the Israel of 1967 discussed how much of the West Bank it was ready to trade for peace, the Likud governments of the late 1970s and 1980s wanted it all. For Israel fell in love with the territories it had occupied.

This was the period of Israeli rejection. Israeli prime ministers such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir asserted a God-given right to a “greater Israel” that included the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in which Israeli governments of all stripes continued to plant (illegal) settlements. In some Israeli minds the Palestinians became a non-people, to be fobbed off with self-government under Israeli or perhaps Jordanian supervision. It took an explosion of Palestinian resistance, in the intifada (uprising) of the late 1980s and the far more lethal one of 2001-03, to convince Israel that this was an illusion.


What bearing does all this history have on the foul events unfolding right now in Gaza? The point is that there have been precious few moments over the past century during which both sides have embraced the idea of two states at the same time.

Who said WE'VE ever tried to mitigate collateral damage?

All one has to do is look at the official civillian death toll in Iraq to prove that point.

Oh wait... there isn't an official death toll because we honestly have NO idea how many people died as a result of the invasion...

here's the short list of the anyones: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Oman, Qatar, Fatah...KSA...Ever heard of the Arab League Plan? Plenty of those "willing to accept". Plenty.

I hate this little "true-ism" because we've seen it proven wrong before.

If Hamas didn't have the support of Arab countries, Israel would have destroyed them and the land they occupy already. Conversely, if Israel didn't have the support of the US, they wouldn't be here anymore.

The point is, neither party in this war deserves to win because neither show restraint in their tactics.

Dropping 6000lbs of bombs on people for every rocket, or teaching your kids to be suicide bombers is not behavior worthy of Darwanistic survival.

They don't use civilians as shields, they use BUILDINGS as cover without evacuating civilians aforehead. ANY lightly armed force in the world would behave like that; yes, ANY, including Western guerillas if they ever were to counter an overwhelming foe on their OWN territory. The only difference is that Western society would not generally put any resistance after its state machine is knocked out. If some smartass patriot tells you he would wage a regular war on the streets of the Soviet-occupied Munich, Rome, Nantes, Bristol, Toronto or Boston, that he would look for empty buildings and spaces and shoot at the MIGs only after making sure no civilian is in the three-mile radius, don't take the bastard seriously.