An Arab war of aggression in 1967? I don't suppose that may have been an attempt by them to get back their own land that they had been driven off in 1948, when the Israelis forced the majority of landholders in the land claimed as Israel by the Zionists terrorising women and children and murdering those who stood their ground?

Your lies and propaganda are 60 years too late and far too transparent, the rest of the world knows the truth of your deliberate treachery, how your country re enacted the worst excesses of the Nazis only a few years before.

If Syria gave half of Israel to the starving Ethiopians and backed them with endless money and military aid, would you not fight to defend the country of your birth?

Originally Posted by David Ben Gurion

“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”

Even your most famous leaders freely admit that Isael has no legitimacy in the eyes of the world. Nor does it deserve it.

I notice also that your rambling diatribe completely disregards the sole question posed as the subject of this debate.

Originally Posted by IDF_5173

Hmmm!
With a great chance of being nominated as a Israeli version of Joseph Goebbels, then I would still say this:

Make no mistake. The Palestinians are still fighting to destroy Israel. The primary obstacle to a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is neither Jewish settlements, Palestinian refugees or the issue of future borders. The conflict has nothing to do with orcupation or security fence, but only with Arab reluctance to accept any Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine, however small the part may be.

Only after Israel in 1967struck back an Arab war of aggression on three fronts and took control of Gaza and West Bank, began the Palestinian Arabs (who was now "Palestinians") to claim these areas. But the price - recognition of the Jewish state's right to exist - was too high.

The Oslo process in the 1990s capsized when Arafat in the summer of 2000 rejected a plan that would have given Palestinians Gaza and almost all of the West Bank as a state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The reasion was that they were not prepared to recognize Jewish claim to parts of Jerusalem or would cede the right to flood Israel with the descendants of Palestinian refugees, which would eventually undermine Israel's Jewish identity. If you believe that the "moderate" leadership under Mahmoud Abbas has turned past intransigence you are wrong.

Also in an interview shown on the TV station Al-Jazeera 27th March 2010 Saeb Erekat, Palestinian chief negotiator for both Arafat and Abbas, throws yet more light on the "moderate" Fatah's position on the two state solution. According to Erekat Arafat said to Clinton: "I will not be a traitor. Someone will come and liberate Jerusalem after 10, 50 or 100 years. Jerusalem will not be other than the capital of the Palestinian state, and there's nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif [the Arabic name for the Temple Mount] except Allah. "(Al-Jazeera, March 27, 2009).

By continuing to refuse to recognize any kind of Jewish connection to what the Jews for a millennia have considered their holiest place, by constantly working against the very core of two-state solution, namely the division of Palestine into both a Jewish and an Arab state , the Palestinian leadership blocks the peaceful solution that the vast majority of Israelis and presumably also the majority of Palestinians crave.

Okay gentleman that was it, now I've said my opinion, so now it is time to get into cover for the incoming artillery fire.

The problem with your argument is that it is one sided, lets be realistic the area has been "holiest" place for Christendom for over a millennium as well but I am pretty certain there would be an outcry if a 10th Crusade rolled through the doors to claim it back, the fact is that that particular bit of dirt has been fought over and claimed by countless nations and empires in the last 4000 years.

Anyway rather than go through the whole repetitive counter argument I will ask just one question, if the roles were reversed what would you do.

Lets say Egypt (lets not get into the whole Canaanite thing) decided to take back its long lost province and in doing so decided that all the Israelis could have a couple of motley unproductive bits of dirt (say the west bank or gaza strip) would you:
A) Say well it was Egyptian land lets just suck it up make the most of our dirt.
B) Fight back?

Israel's steady decline to the status of "Pariah State" around the world, is well described in an article featured in Haaretz, by Tony Judt, the Professor of history at NYU.

"Israel, the country that wouldn't grow up" http://israelblog.com/1147619908/

I particularly likes the analogy, "Israel is like Serbia with nukes"

When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized – but then responds to its critics with loud cries of “anti-Semitism” – it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don’t like these things it is because you don’t like Jews. In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.

Wow......... Herr Goebbels would be proud of you senojekips!!!

Monty B. I find the criticism against Israel rather one-sided. Where do you get your information from? From the Western medias? Any of you who understand Arabic? Reading Arabic newspapers? Watching Arabic television? Then you would see the hatred being preached against Israel!

I know well the importance which the holy site means to Christianity. As a side note, I can tell I am not a Jew, but belong to the small minority of Christians Israelis.

In Israel, there has long been a solid, democratic majority of two-state solution. But as long as the Arabs require Israeli withdrawal without delivering peace in return, then the process is going nowhere. The first thing that must happen is that the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority must stop brainwashing its people that there should exist a solution which does not imply Arab recognition of the Jewish state. Either way, Israel lies where it lies. Without such recognition, any Israeli withdrawal will simply be seen as a displacement of the front line in the war against Israel.

I can see things from the other side and the answer to your question is quite logical, it becomes B.

But it is the Palestinians who, by refusing to offer Israel peace, security and recognition and refusing to live up to Resolution 242, thereby blocking a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

Originally Posted by IDF_5173

Wow......... Herr Goebbels would be proud of you senojekips!!!

Dr Goebbels indeed,.... considering that nearly all of what I quoted was the work of noted Jewish academics and Statesmen,... you talk out of your hat, and I also notice that you have not attempted to provide the smallest evidence that my statements were incorrect. I'm enormously surprised you have not dragged out the old "Anti Semite" defence.

I can also tell you that I AM of Jewish descent but I am an Atheist by choice, so your lack of any kind of morality holds absolutely no surprises for me.

Still you have made no attempt to answer the question posed by the original poster. Denials mean nothing unless you can provide credible evidence to back your propagandist line.

Your "two state solution" is ludicrous and is not a solution for anyone, other than the Israelis. You effectively offer the palestinians the chance to commit cultural suicide or be killed,... either way, they lose their lands, and have the gall to offer this as a solution.

Originally Posted by The country that wouldn't grow up

Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever. It has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis – like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents – are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government’s mistaken policies.

To the extent that one can even talk about international law, then the UN Security Council Resolution 242, is the legal basis to legitimize Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The Resolution from 1967 created the framework for all subsequent peace initiatives following the motto "land for peace" by requiring the withdrawal of Israel against Arab security guarantees and recognition of Israel. In addition, they will arrange that the final demarcation shall be determined by negotiation. The two countries together with Israel that has been willing to abide by the resolution requirements were Egypt and Jordan.

Do not need much imagination to imagine what would happen if Israel without security guaranties withdrew from the West Bank, located right next to the great city of Jerusalem. The Jewish neighborhoods would obviously be bombed just as they were when Jordan launched its attack on the city in 1967.

You talk about 1967 with total disregard for Israeli treachery, dispossession, beatings harassment and gratuitous murder of women and children prior to that date. It is as if you think that this problem started in 1967???... I'm afraid not, or is that all they teach you in Israeli schools.

If you worry about withdrawing from the West Bank, imagine what will happen when Israel is finally forced by International pressure to recognise the Palestinians as rightful owners of the land as happened in South Africa and to a lesser degree in Australia. Fifteen years ago if you were to suggest that this would happen you would have been laughed at,... today we see the truth of the matter.

You still have not addressed the subject of the thread???....

Israelis Behaving Badly

Originally Posted by IDF_5173

Wow......... Herr Goebbels would be proud of you senojekips!!!

Monty B. I find the criticism against Israel rather one-sided. Where do you get your information from? From the Western medias? Any of you who understand Arabic? Reading Arabic newspapers? Watching Arabic television? Then you would see the hatred being preached against Israel!

I know well the importance which the holy site means to Christianity. As a side note, I can tell I am not a Jew, but belong to the small minority of Christians Israelis.

In Israel, there has long been a solid, democratic majority of two-state solution. But as long as the Arabs require Israeli withdrawal without delivering peace in return, then the process is going nowhere. The first thing that must happen is that the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority must stop brainwashing its people that there should exist a solution which does not imply Arab recognition of the Jewish state. Either way, Israel lies where it lies. Without such recognition, any Israeli withdrawal will simply be seen as a displacement of the front line in the war against Israel.

I can see things from the other side and the answer to your question is quite logical, it becomes B.

But it is the Palestinians who, by refusing to offer Israel peace, security and recognition and refusing to live up to Resolution 242, thereby blocking a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

Sorry but MontyB is right on this, you opinion is extremely one-sided.

You used the term Joseph Goebbels for Senorjekips, let me use another Nazi word you might be familiar with: LEBENSRAUM

LEBENSRAUM (living space) is the act of kicking a native population off their own land using violence and putting your own population in their place. Its what the Germans did to the Poles in 1939 and its exactly what the Israeli Settlers protected by the IDF is doing to the Palestinians on the West Bank. And Worse your lunatic Prime Minister has made it clear that he will continue to further steal Palestinian land by expanding the illegal settlements. I am not surprised you are so familiar with the Nazis, you've done quite well following in their footsteps.

And it will end badly for you. Mark my words. I am an American, and in States (thanks to the internet and the videos Senojekips posted) people are no longer believing the fairy tale that Israel is somehow an innocent victim. Even in America patience amongst the public is running out. Yes Palestinians have killed innocent Israelis, but the Israelis have killed far more innocent Palestinians by about 100 to 1. You remember that last incursion into Gaza? 50 Israelis killed, 1200 Palestinians killed, many of which were kids.

Israel is digging its own grave, because at some point Israel will have no friends, tons of enemies, and some crazy Arab terrorist detonating a Nuke in Downtown Tel Aviv. And the sad truth is when that happens, nobody else will feel sorry for you.

Originally Posted by IDF_5173

But it is the Palestinians who, by refusing to offer Israel peace, security and recognition and refusing to live up to Resolution 242, thereby blocking a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

Ok but here is the problem a 2 state solution will only work if both states are viable and I seriously doubt that anyone with an ounce of understanding believes that the proposed Palestinian state has any viability at all (half a dozen chunks of unwanted land spread all over the place can not function as a country), it failed with Pakistan (East and West) and will fail here.

I would suggest that most people being offered nothing when they had it all may as well carry on fighting, I also suspect that this is exactly what an element of Israel is banking on because as I have said in the past I do not believe either side is negotiating in good faith here.

Originally Posted by IDF_5173

I can tell I am not a Jew, but belong to the small minority of Christians Israelis.

Messianic Judaism ?