Conker, next time please respond outside of the 'quote' brackets (I had to copy and paste quote brackets to reconstruct your responses rather than just quoting you).
"What does this have to do with anything? The discussion is about Israel/Palestine. And at present Israel is the only nation occupying Palestine, no other nation lays claim to any Palestinian land."
I've noticed it's a common tactic for Israel supporters to try and bring up how badly Palestinians have been treated by others or other conflicts as if this is somehow justification for Israel's current subjugation of Palestine
I'm simply interested in the personal psychology of many of those who berate Israel with such zeal. I don't intend my questions -- nor what they imply about such people to the extent that these people aren't consistent in their criticism of those who harm Palestinians -- as a defense of Israel's actions.
In any case, I'd be curious to know what the basis is of your claim that the land under discussion is inherently 'Palestinian.' Assuming the 'occupation' narrative to be accurate, the brutally reductionistic reality of the situation is that one group of apes has moved in and taken land where previously another group resided; what remains once the latter are gone to say that the land is still theirs? Further, how long do the traces of this mysterious force remain before the land can now be deeded to the occupiers? Until you explicate what this force is, you are being rather cryptic when the reality on the ground is that the land is Israeli in all the relevant respects (I encourage you to go and see).
Note that this isn't a justification for such occupation. Perhaps you, I, and the world community abhor such actions and wish to punish Israel accordingly. The important point is that this moral component has no effect on the reality on the ground, which is that for all intents and purposes the land is Israeli; unless, that is, you wish to submit similar arguments that Tibet is really 'still Tibetan' or that large swathes of North America are really 'still Indian.' Without some sort of compelling argument your claim that the land is 'still Palestinian' is false. And I think it's important to let the facts on the ground dictate the world community's discourse and decision making going forward, not just ideals.
Without provocation? Well there is the small matter of the 500,000 million Israeli civilians that Israel has transferred outside of it's internationally recognised borders into the occupied regions and the small matter of the people that have been run out of their homes to accommodate this.
Oh and there isn't a government in the world that recognises Israel's right to build settlements in any part of the occupied territories.
Well, as is usually the case in international relations, there is the reality on the ground and the rational calculus each state must engage in on the basis of that reality, and then there are moral considerations. The two may coalesce, but often they diverge (hint: states almost always behave rationally at the expense of moral considerations).
You're letting the notion of international law do a lot of legwork for you by presuming that it dictates what is right and wrong. Well, as I've just said above, what is right and wrong is often irrelevant to how countries behave, so in that respect the international community's opinion is irrelevant. But, more importantly, what is it about international dictums about borders and all the rest that makes them authoritative, i.e., morally binding? It seems to me that the U.N. isn't even a genuinely supranational organization anyway (look at who founded it, why, and how it has generally functioned to promote Western interests across its history) -- it is dominated by state interests. So, we've got an instance of state interest vs. state interest, not some magically binding moral force over state interest. Maybe the one form of state interest is more authoritative because more states are involved, but I don't think you wanted to argue from popularity in making the claims you did.
That is good that you have witnessed Arabs and Jews living together in peace, shows it is possible. I don't think anyone(well definitely not neutrals anyway) has a problem with Jews per se. it is simply the actions of the Israeli government that most right minded people find abhorrent, and I think there is a growing number of Israeli Jews that are also appalled at what it is being done in their name in Palestine.
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I haven't a mind-reading device so I can't disprove your claim that 'nobody that is neutral has a problem with Jews' (paraphrase), but nonetheless I think it is almost certainly false and that in fact, if the situation entailed two Muslim populations (say), there'd be drastically less interest in the conflict.
Still, the spirit of your post is accurate: polls show that increasingly, both Jew and Palestinian want an end to the violence.
