bigbadwolf said:
These are puerile questions. "Rights" don't exist inherently. Force of arms decides. Did the American Indians have a "right" to their homeland? Apparently not. Did the Poles? Stalin and Hitler thought otherwise. Do the Iraqis? The US thinks otherwise. Do the Palestinians? The Israelis think otherwise. These moral arguments of who has a "right to exist" should be used on the brain-dead. They have nothing to do with what happens on the ground. Israel has superiority of force over the Palestinians and has absolutely no incentive to make a deal with them. That's why the talks go nowhere.
It has now become clear where you stand. The questions posed to you were not puerile and it is cowardly of you not to answer them. Why not just come out and say that you believe Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.
If you prefer, you can engage in mental masturbation like the Arabs who say Israel has a right to exist and then condition it upon the right to return for 4 million above-average Arab procreators which would indubitably have the effect of destroying Israel as a Jewish state.
What is so offensive to the Arabs and Islamists about the maintenance of one Jewish state? History can be disputed and one can argue who has a better claim to the land, but in any case one has to admit the Jews have some historical connection with the land. Israel came into existence as a nation state legally at the end of WW II validated with the authority of the UN. After the severe diminuation of territory originally designated as Israel in the Balfour, Sykes Pichot documents, etc (especially land that was ceded to Jordan) the state of Israel, however its borders are drawn, occupies 1/2 of 1% of the mideast land mass. Contrast this with the facts that there are over 50 states that have Islam as the official religion, 22 other mideast states almost exclusively Arab and/or Islamic occupying the other 99 1/2 % of the land, and a handful of sharia law states that are true Islamic theocracies (in which governance is co-opted by theologians).
If anything is puerile it is the cartoon you link and the silly spurious insinuation it purports to depict any profound truths or immoral treatment of Palestine by the US. There are reasons Israel has received more US aid than Palestine. It has been an American ally since its creation whereas the Arabs of the region sided with Germany during WW II. Unlike the sheikdoms and monarchies that existed in the region, Israel became a democratic society state from its inception so Americans, Jews and non-Jews, felt an affinity not existent with Arab theocrats and monarchs who sided with our WW II enemies. Israel was not the protagonist in the 1948 war.
None of the neighboring Arab states ,e.g. Jordan, Syria, Egypt ever agreed that there would be a new, separate Arab state. They would have gobbled up the land that was designated as the new Palestinian state if they had been victorious in 1948 and no Palestine would come into existence.
None did come into existence until the mid 1960s when the PLO was formed under Arafat (obviously there was no entity to receive aid). The PLO charter provided that Israel did not have the right to exist. No ethical person would support an entity that denied the right of Israel to exist. The PLO maintained that position throughout the 70s, 80s and the early 90s until the Oslo accords in the late 1990s. Why should the US have provided aid to such a belligerent?
Soon after Oslo was signed and Rabin and Arafat shook hands, Arafat rejected an offer that would have returned 97% of the west bank territory and compromised on Jerusalem. Then Hamas sabotaged Oslo before it could be further pursued. Hamas and Hezbollah both deny the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and have rejected all agreements signed by the PLO. Make those facts into a cartoon!
I don't know the exact numbers, but I believe Egypt has been receiving an awful lot of US aid since it made peace with Israel. Probably Jordan too. Hell, the US has been pumping tens of billions of aid into Islamic Pakistan and sharia Afghanistan so it can not seriously be argued it is anti-Arab or anti-Islam in the disbursement of foreign aid.
p.s. I believe Israel, itself, has furnished not insignificant aid to the PLA and Gazans, a fact which goes unnoticed.
p.p.s. Your observations regarding might makes right (and in the case of Germany/Poland, the USSR/satelite nations and USA/Iraq only temporarily at that) are inapposite. If anything, Israel should be motivated to make peace before its neighbors go nuclear.
It is absolutely absurd to argue the Israelis do not want peace. They would be willing to give up almost all the territory occupied as a result of the 1967 war, probably make reparations to Arabs that abandoned property in the 1940s, and compromise on Jerusalem. That will not be enough for Hamas - it will never abandon the right for Arabs to become citizens of Israel and to thereby destroy the Jewish state...probably turning it into a theocracy in a matter of decades. Sorry Charley...to that Israel will not agree and nor should any serious person. Or at least, one who believes that a small Jewish state occupying 1/2 % of the landmass surrounded by Arabs and Islamic states should have the right to continued existence.
