No doubt that part pf the motivation for allowing settlements is that the more they build, the harder it will be to undo. Theodor Herzel the founder if Zionism recognized that when Jews became the minority no matter were they lived, they were persecuted. He envisioned a state were Jews are the majority. This is the mindset of current day.

Frozen settlement building and withdrawing your forces is just nonsense. Offer an olive branch. Give up the Jewish settlements. Give all the disputed land back with full autonomy. The should never happened in the first place - it's not their land.

Israel has made no serious attempt at redressing the Palestinian grievances.
Israel is billed as the Jewish homeland. Any Jew can come and live there. The defining characteristic of Israel is that it's for Jews. Are we really going to be this silly? Do you think their Arab Palestinian population is pushing for the hardline Jewish version?

Do you believe Israel should dismantle it's settlements before the Palestians recognize their right to exist?

Those settlements don't have a right to exist, so yes.

Look at it from a legal perspective. If your neighbor says the land you're on is his, and that you don't have a right to live where you do, that doesn't mean you can go and take 2/3 of his land and build on it, keeping him at bay with guns, and moving your friends in. Can you imagine anything that would piss off your neighbor and his allies more, and harden their stance against you? The Israeli situation with settlements is ridiculous and indefensible, regardless of the other side.

I'm speaking of Israel's right to exist even if they were to give up the settlements.

your hero's VP disagrees

Why should I care what Mike Pence thinks? Is he responding to my direct argument? And I'm not sure why you'd substitute Mike Pence's thoughts for your own.

That's a hilarious video by the way.

I fully agree with your position; I'm just afraid that we can expect the opposite policy for the next four years.

Oh yeah Trump is 2000% Israel and has always been, transparently so...which is just incredible if you look at how often the media called him an antisemite on zero (in fact, opposite) evidence and how many Jewish people were afraid. Full reality distortion field/fake news.

I think Trump "gets it" though, and has the best chance of any president ever of securing peace. He's a master deal maker and negotiator. He understand people and what you have to do to get them to agree. Obama seriously harmed his chances though with that UN move. Killed momentum and a position of strength.

People whom have hated on Trump bigly, like Al Gore and Mitt Romney, have come down from the elevator at Trump tower and had nice things to say about him. Trump clearly has a way of influencing people. Maybe he can do the same in the middle east.

Which Westerners gave Jews guns in 1948, or 1967 for that matter?

You state no concessions have been made, you are simply wrong. If you don't consider withdrawing forces from 98% of the populated areas of the west bank, freezing settlement building and removing all civilians and military from Gaza entirely to be concessions, you are simply not interested in understanding the reality.

The things you ignore are the definition of concessions. They were largely made as exactly that and were part of negotiated agreements that required reciprocity.

I thought we were talking about how to solve the situation. Your plan for Israel to completely withdraw from the West Bank is for Israel to completely withdraw from the West Bank (and "then see what happens", lol). The situation is the situation whether you like it or not. Pretending no concessions have ever been made is dishonest and not the basis for an honest conversation.

You basically have no idea what you are talking about.

And your insistence on using "Jews" and "Jewish" instead of "Israel" and "Israeli" betrays your ignorance and bigotry.

Also simply wrong. You don't even know the basic facts.

Post the map of the 1947 UN partition plan.

And the Arabs were fully consulted during this process. What was their position regarding the original partition plan? What was the zionist position re the original plan?

The lines that are "very favourable" were drawn as the result of the Arabs losing 2 wars they started themselves, having rejected any compromise at any stage previously.

Goater,

I don't disagree with any of your points but insinuating bigotry for framing the participants as "Jewish" rather than "Israeli" is counter-productive.

It's not wrong to frame the conflict that way. Many Muslims in the Middle East want to exterminate the Jews there; they don't want to exterminate Israelis, some of whom are Arab, Druze, etc. Furthermore, not all Arabs want to exterminate the Jews, some are pragmatic, Christian, etc..

There is plenty of real anti-Semitism in the world today. It doesn't help my cause as a Jew when institutions like the SPLC and the ADL cry wolf every time someone says something ignorant.

Tooth,

When the state of Israel declared its independence, many Jews living in Muslim ruled countries were forced to give up their property and were expelled...after thousands of years of living there. Are those countries going to unilaterally return all Jewish property including land to their rightful owners? We all know the answer to that.

As a practical matter, those demanding the disbanding of settlements are saying that Jews in the Middle East are only allowed to live within the 1967 borders.

In 1948 the Israelis acquired arms through back-channels, but the 1967 war was waged with French-supplied aircraft, British-supplied tanks and American small arms. As a result of the war, both Britain and France placed an embargo on further arms deals (France would not sell the Mirage V jet and Britain would not sell the Chieftain tank), so the US and the domestic Israeli arms industry took over.

There's no giving there. Toothy's implication seemed to be that the west, likely he meant the US, backed Israel militarily in 48 and surely in 67. But, in 48 Jews smuggled weapons through a British embargo and despite a ban on arms sales, let alone gifts, from the US. In 67 Israel bought weapons from France like a lot of the world was doing.

US arms sales and gifts primarily started after that, largely by Nixon as part of the cold war in response to the Soviet Union providing arms to several Arab Nations.

That's largely true and unfortunate but it doesn't really follow that Israel should be building housing settlements in the West Bank.

If we are talking about the history up to independence, "Jews" is fine. It is not fine when talking about the State of Israel today for obvious reasons. In my opinion, framing things generally in this way is counterproductive.

No-one respectable talks about Israeli policy as "the Jews doing this and that" today.

Things like this just sound bad:

At best its inaccurate and overly general, considers all Jews alike and puts too much emphasis on religion's role in the conflict.

And I did clearly give him the benefit of the doubt in my first post, but he has decided to stick with his terminology for unconvincing reasons. To be clear, I don't think he is an anti-semite at all, but his framing of the characteristics of Israeli policy as "Jewish" reveals bias. What is the problem with using the completely normal and uncontroversial term "Israeli"?

I guess I could see remaining agnostic on the issue but I don't know why after saying the Jews need to swallow their insane arrogance that you would think he is specifically not an anti-semite.

Edit: no, I guess I can't really see remaining agnostic on it either.

Because other than using Jews instead of Israelis his posts show nothing that would indicate he is.

I assume he is just over hyping the role of religion on the Israeli side based on his surface level understating of the conflict and doesn't realise how his posts come across.

Edit: I am happy to withdraw the bigot comment - I should have used "bias" or something less accusatory and controversial.

That's quite generous. I am sure he knows that not all Jews are Israelis and not all Israelis are Jews and that many Jews in Israel and outside of Israel are against the Israeli settlements and also that arrogance is a classic anti-Semitic insult.

True, but then Israeli industry doesn't hand weapons to the government for nothing either.

It was actually Lyndon Johnson who put through the 'Peace Echo' programme to supply Israel with F-4Es in early 1968, simply because France wouldn't sell the Mirage V and the Israelis needed to upgrade their air force as the Arabs and their Soviet sponsors reacted to the 1967 debacle. Senator Robert Kennedy's support for the programme was apparently his assassin's motive.

The F-4E earned its keep in the Yom Kippur War (as did the old British Centurion tank, still going strong), but Peace Echo did put the US on a bit of a slippery slope. True, there was Peace Icarus and Peace Diamond, in which the US gifted formidable Phantoms to both Greece and Turkey, but that was in the interests of a balance between fellow NATO members. Whereas the amount and quality of free US weaponry supplied to Israel has probably created a regional imbalance and may have distorted Israel's policy and internal politics (in the direction of fearless belligerence).

Microbet: Yeah, maybe. But I am also quite sensitive about people throwing around the "anti Semite" label, especially online where misunderstandings are easy and especially on this forum in threads about this topic (which I have avoided posting in for probably 5 years now).

I see lots of people who just read or listen to the wrong things and don't understand what they are saying. I suppose I'll reserve judgment...

Tooothy can correct this if he wants but my impression of his characterization was along the lines of the West imposed the hapless Jews on the area. But the truth is more along the lines of the United Nations voted to recognize Israel and the Jews, and later other Israelis, defended the country with little outside support other than from private citizens until after the 67 War.