Speaking of Israel...

[Pannonian]

I don't understand how you treat the two parties as equal. There are two aspects where I find this flawed.

First, at root, to me, this is a problem of legitimacy. Some people legitimately own all those lands, and have owned it for a very long time. Suddenly, others took over it, colonized it, and have been there de facto for the last what 90 years? Do you truly believe they both have equal right to the lands in dispute?

This isn't even a matter of politics to me. Say an old man owned half of Haifa, and was forcefully expelled from Haifa, but still has all the legal documents which prove he owns half of Haifa. Isn't it his right then to want his land back? What say does anyone in the world have to "rightfully" take over his land?

Second, does proportion even matter at all? For example, is it sound to paint all people who kill with the same color without looking into the details? I think doing that is a very superficial way of weighing things, it reflects absence of reality and too much book-reading. The devil is in the detail.

What's also truly disturbing is the hypocrisy the civilized modern world shows when dealing with this crisis in comparison to others. What happened, I don't get it.. How did I miss the world-wide convention on founding a country in some innocent people's land, expelling the original people, and then basing that country on a strictly racist hierarchy, and turning a blind eye to whatever evil shit that country does from then on?

Also, let's stop kidding ourselves. The country in question probably has the most allies in the region, contrary to the popular stigma, which goes "oh they're backed against the wall etc., poor them."

Excuse my deficiency of expression. My last post was unfair to most of the posters here, but then I really didn't address most of them with it. Sorry about that misunderstanding.

Some of us have an even less hypocritical and less high pedestalled position than yourself. You complain about taking stuff from people and you call it stealing. Fair enough, but then what's your position on taking stuff back from the Israelis in order to restore it to the Palestinians? At what stage does taking and giving become righteous and principled in your eyes? Who decides what to give and what to take, and who enforces it to your satisfaction? If you're not just riding a high horse, but have a practical position, please answer these questions.

As for me, I care not who has what nor who kills whom. They're not me and mine, what they do doesn't affect me. I only wish there was an even lesser chance of what they do affecting me. I put forward a position earlier considering international law, but only as an academic point since, as I said, I care not enough to enforce it. If you want us to take a position of principle, explain why we should care enough to do so.

Just so you can have a point of reference and something to accuse me of, I'm a Brit, so you can drag up all the stuff about us illegally giving the Jews what wasn't ours to give. And you know what? I don't care that we did. I didn't do it, nor anyone in my generation. It's long past the stage where it's in our power to do anything about it, and since we can't do anything about it, why should we be bothered? The question is, what's in it for us now that we should back one side or the other? I don't think Israel offers anything that we don't already have, and Palestine offers even less. And if anyone tries the guilt argument on us, that's just an argument for us to care even less. We've done worse elsewhere, and if we can't be bothered to feel guilty about them, there's even less chance that we can be bothered to feel guilty about a patch of sand where everyone hates us anyway.