Reply #34: Well, it should be up to the Israelis to decide

[DuctapeFatwa]

Most people, Israeli and otherwise, are more interested in taking care of their families and watching their kids grow than in invading, occupying, committing atrocities or selling guns.

Whether Israel has a homeland and becomes a respectable country should be the decision of those folks.

One of the fundamental misunderstandings is that people tend to paint the entire conflict as something mysterious and somehow connected to religion.

It is not. It is first and foremost a situation where Europeans invaded a country, and occupied it and embarked on a campaign of aggression, hostility and ethnic cleansing directed against the people who lived there.

That was done a lot in times past, and a look around the world today will show you that it is not a practice that leaves a positive legacy or a good result for anybody.

Israel is not fighting terrorism, it is fighting resistance to an invasion and an occupation.

Palestine is not fighting infidels or Zionism, it is fighting an invader and an occupier. Whatever the respective religious beliefs of the combatants, the basic facts do not change.

If there is a complicating factor, it is Sugar Daddy.

It is very possible, even probable, that if, in the aftermath of WWII, that the issue of Jewish refugees who wished to move to the Middle East could have been effected in a peaceful negotiated manner, establishing a new state that had a chance to BE a state.

If the US had been, or were today, truly interested in helping Israel become a sustainable state, it would be encouraged to be independent, responsible, a good neighbor, etc. instead of forming its policy for the entire region around the Kissinger quote "Why should the Arabs have the oil?"

Bottom line, peace and stability are not as profitable as war and chaos.