As for the wanting peace stuff, yeah, I think if someone offered every Arab in Israel the $300,000 necessary to migrate to a South American country and buy citizenship there, they’d do it, and Israel would be rid of its nasty “Arab problem” forever. Of course, that isn’t going to happen. Any more than Israel is going to allow the South African style “Bantu-stans” that they’ve carved out in the Gaza Strip and West Bank for their Arab majority to ever be truly independent. As long as they are a minority forcing their will at gunpoint upon a majority, there is never going to be peace in the Middle East.
-BT
]]>Support for militants is really based on Israeli actions. If there were some period of stability, the moderate voices might have a chance to be heard. It is difficult to be reasonable when you are being shot at or bombed.
]]>Israel is doomed because of demographics. The European Jews who have settled in Israel are not having the number of children that the Israeli Arabs are having. Israel will be a minority Jewish state in 20 years if nothing changes. They can adapt, or they can commit suicide by continuing with this stupidity. The influx from East Europe has moved the date out slightly, but this is inevitable without even considering the Palestinians.
Trying to cut up the West Bank to steal the water is becoming obvious to everyone. The attack on Lebanon and military incompetence has eroded Israeli support among American Jews. There were too many unbiased witnesses in Lebanon taking pictures and sharing them; there are too many Lebanese Christians in the United States to combat propaganda. What happened can’t be hidden like actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, there were too many foreigners killed by Israeli bombs.
After this it is going to be hard to get $3 billion a year from a US budget that is leaking red ink all over everything. Israel is too close to the neocons and Bush, and it is going to hurt them.
]]>Setting up “Bantu-stans” did not satisfy the black majority in South Africa, and it will not satisfy the Arab majority in Israel either. They might accept it as a temporary measure, but the only satisfactory solution in the long term, as far as they are concerned, is a Lebanese-style multi-cultural society where the Jewish minority is in much the same situation as the Maronite Christian minority in Lebanon. It’s just sad that it’s going to take complete and utter military defeat as the U.S. loses its ability to support Israel militarily and economically before that can happen, because the Israeli Jews, unlike the South African whites, refuse to see the reality that maintaining an apartheid society in Palestine where the majority-Arab population is relgated to “Bantu-stans” is not a long-term sustainable project. In South Africa they handled the transition without bloodshed. In Israel, my suspicion is that there will be much blood running in the streets before this is all through — blood that could have been prevented if there was anybody sane left in Israel to look at the writing on the wall that says that the United States is on its way to has-been status and thus Israel will shortly lose the only thing currently keeping it afloat.
-BT
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