Yeah, I see what you're saying. I wouldn't say Ireland has sorted out the troubles, but there's certainly less violence these days. I stopped in Derry earlier this year for a few hours... genuinely frightening place.

i support what you are doing fugazifan. i teach private drawing classes in a jewish family in antwerp (there's a large jewish community here, with the whole diamond district) and they are very pro-israel, to them it seems like it's just their land anyway and the palestinian citizens just need to find another place to live. i've always found this quite hard to cope with.

The Likud and other right-wing parties are just as much to blame for the unrest.
They should also be included in the equation, if we are to mention Hamas.

Not quite. Till the very end he still smuggled weapons through neighboring countries with money he got to feed and house his people. The only difference is that now his wife and henchmen run the show.

If you ask me, Arafat got his last chance to make peace at the 2000 Camp David Summit, but typically turned down all the options that were offered to him by Clinton and Barak.

almost the entire world sees Israel as a global pariah. Wonder why? Operation Cast Lead.

I for one have nothing but admiration for Israel, especially in dealing with the Arab nations refusal to recognise the country or its right to exist, calling for its destruction. Time and time again the Arab nations tried, but failed miserably in their attempts due to the brillant achievements of the Israeli armed forces, which wowed the world.

speaking of wowing-- wow, your history books were printed in the 1970s! i know you want to "keep it simple", but let's not overdo it.

how about some catching up.

after the yom kippur war, where israel was in its greates danger ever, yet managed to kick egypt and syria's ass, it began its rise as the predominant military power of the region. thanks to american armaments, it gained total air supremacy which gave them the upper hand in every conflict since. they also have nukes, where their neighbors don't.

in 1979, israel and egypt made peace, israel returned the sinai, egypt recognized the right of israel to exist, etc etc.

in 1994, israel made peace with jordan. jordan had already kicked out the PLO in 1970 with israeli backing when syria started to meddle. jordan was basically cool with israel since then and peace discussions started in the 80s.

meanwhile though, the PLO had gone into exile in Lebanon, along with hundreds of thousands of palestinian refugees that were there since 1948 and Israel made the huge blunder to invade Lebanon in order to destroy them. it was a clusterfuck and a massacre and an abusive unjustified war-- a preentive war. until then israel had fought only defensive wars, that was the first time that they were on the offensive, the pig arick sharon allowed the sabra and chatilla massacre, and israel and lost the moral high ground it had held until then.

so at this point israel can do whatever it wants to its neighbors, it's no longer in the mortal danger it once was, and while there are threats from abroad, the greats danger i believe comes from the radical factions within-- the israeli terrorists like that asshole who when into a mosque in hebron and started killing random people, like yigal amir who killed Rabin when he was aiming to make peace with the PLO, like their fucking enablers in the right wing like the swine Bibi Netanhayu, former furniture salesman and current prime minister and the ideological heir of the terrorist organization Irgun, which Ben Gurion had to defeat when he created the state of Israel.

the danger comes from within because there are parties who have a stake in keeping the war going forever, at all costs, and while they talk of wanting peace on the international front they do all kinds of maneuvers in order to grab more and more land from the palestinians, disregarding any rights they might have, and radicalizing them because they see no other option than to become suicide bombers when they grow up.

sure, there are terrorists on the other side, there is Hamas, there is Hezbollah, there were the fucking suicide bombings of markets and coffeehouses and buses that pushed the israeli public away from the idea of peace into the notion that perpetual oppression of its potential enemies was a key to their survival.

and so it has been since then-- while the israeli military is careful to protect civilians when it makes incursions into palestitian territory (or once again Lebanon), it also helps to radicalize those civilians into electing Hamas to the government because they see no hope of peace.

A total clusterfuck. But Israel has the total and complete upper hand in this situation. The problem is, israeli extremists are corroding their democracy from within, alienating the world community (not that the "world community" ever does much, but still), and are putting themselves in a situation that if they ever once accidentally drop their guard, they could be totally destroyed. Iranian nukes are where the threat is coming from and Iran uses the Palestinians as their excuse for regional domination, even while they don't give two shits about them.

Anyway, there is no simple answer to this, just wanted to point that out-- there's a reason that the war has gone one from the early 20th century until today (1948 was not the beginning, as I suppose you know).

suchfriends, i tried replying to your PM earlier but your shitbox was full. message is lost now. but if i recall i was saying that i basically agree with you and that's what i was trying to say here-- that the pursuit of right wing solutions and the heavy weight of extremists in the knesset is painting israel into a very dangerous corner. anyway thats that.

sure go ahead and burst my bubble

my mom sent me that earlier today. nice article.

The point I was making was, we must never, ever forget that the Arab nations were hellbent on destroying Israel. We're talking veritable genocide here. It's truly pathetic that bleeding heart liberals disregards that historical fact when asininely trying to score political points that fall in line with their PC dogmas when discussing Israel. One can only liken the Arab nations response to the creation of Israel to the Holocaust of WW2.

Palestinians=

Unfortunately for the Palestinians, there was no Battle of the Little Big Horn.