Its hard to get top dog nations to think themselves nto the position of third worlders.  For example, the energy sapping existence in sub-Saharan lands, the poor soil, the lack of modern support like electricity, water, sewage….  We in the west cannot relly appreciate how impossible ‘normal’ life is under these conditions.

Here’s another exercise in imagination I found on another board…..

Lets imagine its 2100 and that for some reason (whatever, global warming, energy deficit….) the US starts to break up.   The UN decides against the wishes of all  Americans that half of Florida should be given over to the Cuban/Latino population.  Not just any half.  The best half.  And they drive the American population out into the swamps and scrublands.  Except for the people who get a minimal share of  budget support, but are ‘needed’ as cheap labour – people who become ‘trash’ in the land of the Floridans.    Stop there for a second.  So what do YOU think you would do?  What do you think your neighbours would do?  Roll over and say, ‘but of course I’ll give up my home, of course they deserve to take my land’?

I know what I’d do.  And if the Floridans react by attempting to smash my will?  If they make my wife, children, grandparents suffer by collapsing the economy through preventing free movement, closing borders?  If they send their ‘settlers’ to take what little good land there is?  What then would I do?  What sort of things would I say in anger?  What would YOU do?       Then they start to pull down your houses, grub up your farms, cut off your water, close roads and stop fishing boats from working because people have started resisting?  What would YOU do? 


I'm sure that some who want to avoid using their imagination (and minds) will refuse to address the question. Will attack the thought experiment...  but the question remains: in this situation, what would YOU do?

Yet you are happy to answer hypotheticals on behalf of Israel....

The hypothetical asks you to examine how you think you - and by projection, others - would react to various situations.   You refusal to examine your own mindset speaks volumes.

They could just move.  Lousiana and Mississippii have beautiful sunny weather for all the old people to spend their retirement in.  No biggie. 

For Florida? The only ones who would be entitled to using the term "ancestral homeland" would be the Native Americans and you know how that ended up.  I am sure the retirees are not extended the same privilege to use that excuse.

O yea, ok.... well every scenario might need a tweak or two.... Two additional point:  the new Floridans (the 'incomers'  have some ancient text - like the Book of Mormon - that says they have a divine right to the land; and, due to their treating the non-native american inhabitants of the state as sub-human, they can't move because they've not even got as much money as, errr, the native americans.

Or also what if the other neighboring states would rather not share their land with the displaced floridans?

That is the crux of the Palestinian problem. They have nowhere to go, including their own ancestral lands which they may have owned for centuries. There is also the landless displaced that had no land even before Israel was established, who earned their living cropsharing.....

That is absolutely correct Oswald. Certainly the Arabs don't want anything to do with them, and are just happy that Israel has the finger pointed there rather than on them.

Interesting reading here. A working paper by John J. Mearsheimer of the Department of Political Science,
University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University which can be reached at http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Research/wpaper.nsf/rwp/RWP06-011/$File/rwp_06_011_walt.pdf

Here are some excrepts:
 p1: "The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security.
Instead, the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the “Israel Lobby.” Other special interest groups have managed to skew U.S. foreign policy in directions they favored, but no lobby has managed to divert U.S. foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that U.S. and Israeli interests are essentially identical."

p. 10.: "the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. Ben‐Gurion saw the problem clearly, writing in 1941 that “it is impossible to imagine general evacuation [of the Arab population] without compulsion, and brutal compulsion.”33 Or as Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it, “the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century.”34
This opportunity came in 1947‐48, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.35 Israeli officials have long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but careful scholarship (much of it by Israeli historians like Morris) have demolished this myth. In fact, most Arab leaders urged the Palestinian population to stay home, but fear of violent death at the hands of Zionist forces led most of them to flee.36 After the war, Israel barred the return of the Palestinian exiles."

p11.: "The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel’s leaders. As Ben‐Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti‐Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”37
Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions.38 Prime Minister Golda Meir famously remarked that “there was no such thing as a Palestinian,” and even Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords, nonetheless opposed creating a full‐fledged Palestinian state.39 Pressure from extremist violence and the growing Palestinian population has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from some of the occupied territories and to explore territorial compromise, but no Israeli government has been willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state of their own. Even Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David in July 2000 would only have given the Palestinians a disarmed and dismembered set of “Bantustans” under de facto Israeli control."

p11-12: "The final moral argument portrays Israel as a country that has sought peace at every turn and showed great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. This narrative—which is endlessly repeated by Israeli leaders and American apologists such as Alan Dershowitz—is yet another myth.41 In terms of actual behavior, Israel’s conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents.
Israeli scholarship shows that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs.42 The Arab inhabitants did resist the Zionists’ encroachments, which is hardly surprising given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab lands. The Zionists responded vigorously, and 11
neither side owns the moral high ground during this period. This same scholarship also reveals that the creation of Israel in 1947‐48 involved explicit acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres, and rapes by Jews.43
Furthermore, Israel’s subsequent conduct towards its Arab adversaries and its Palestinian subjects has often been brutal, belying any claim to morally superior conduct. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2,700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed.44 The IDF conducted numerous cross‐border raids against its neighbors in the early 1950s, and though these actions were portrayed as defensive responses, they were actually part of a broader effort to expand Israel’s borders. Israel’s expansionist ambitions also led it to join Britain and France in attacking Egypt in 1956, and Israel withdrew from the lands it had conquered only in the face of intense U.S. pressure. 45
The IDF also murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners‐of‐war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars.46 In 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly‐conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.47 It was also complicit in the massacre of 700 innocent Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and an Israeli investigatory commission found then‐Defence Minister Sharon “personally responsible” for these atrocities"




There is much, much more, I really reccomend that those interested read the mentioned working paper, which incidentially an academic research, unlike what realityman keeps on repeating just like a broken record.....