All the land of Israel belongs to the Jews, no such thing as a Palestian unless he is a Jew, a arafat lie since the 1960's. Tell the other arabs to take in their brothers and leave the Jews alone.

"All the land of Israel belongs to the Jews,"

Because "the Jews" say so, and because they wrote a fairy-tale book where THEY quote God telling them that?

Is that your argument?

"no such thing as a Palestian unless he is a Jew,"

The Mandate for PALESTINE of 1921 and the Partition Plan of 1946 both said something completely different but, hey, why let facts get in the way of your faith, hey?

"a arafat lie since the 1960's."

Odd that, since the Mandate for PALESTINE was established in 1921....

"Tell the other arabs to take in their brothers and leave the Jews alone."

Noooooo, but you can go and tell them. But let me know what they say, OK?

Johnboy,,,Benfox is right its is the Jews land and God say's so not the Jews..''O ye seed of Abraham his servant,ye children of Jacob HIS CHOSEN.He is the Lord our God:his judgments are in all the earth.He hath REMEMBERED HIS COVENANT FOR EVER,the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.Which covenant he made with Abraham,and his oath unto Issac;And confirmed the same unto Jacob for a law,and to Israel FOR AN EVERLASTING COVENANT:Saying,Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan,the LOT OF YOUR INHERITANCE:''Psalms c 104 vs 6-11.KJV...The Torah and the Holy Bible are not ''fairy tail booKs'' for your information, but the inspired WORD OF GOD ,written by men from God..''For the fool hath said ''their is no God''..

You are quoting from a book written by..... Jews..... in which the authors of that book suggest that God is a Real Estate Agent who has one single client.... Jews.

Excuse me for being monumentally unimpressed by that argument.

BEN, if you want to insist that the Torah is a legal document that acts as the deeds to a property deal then I have one question for you: who witnessed it?

After all, legal documents aren't legal unless there are independent witnesses willing to testify that they saw "God" scribble his signature on the bottom of the parchment.

Because it does appear to me that the only witnesses you have who claim that this promise is legit also happen to be the very same people who are claiming to be the sole beneficiaries of that promise.

Which - as I'm sure even you will agree - hardly qualifies them as "independent witnesses".

Sorry, Ben. There is no Santa Claus. There is no Tooth Fairy. There are no Gods. But there are lots of Arabs and many of them are Palestinians.

Giving away land that belongs to Israel, isn't going to bring peace, the arabs show that every time out. Now the arabs want more land, why, they don't know how to work it to grow anything but, hate trees. Kick the arabs out of Israel and you will be secure, can't trust any muslim, they live by a book of lie's.

Your right Benfox ,land for peace doesn't work.Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians and what did they do?They let Hamas in to attack Israel with 7,ooo rockets..Land for peace is a farce because the Palestinian terrorist will never accept Israel as a Nation,so then let there Israel do what it needs to do to defend herself..

If you're going to state..." If we're going to be subjected to hilariously-easy-to-disprove neocon talking points, can we at LEAST get some diversity in here?", perhaps you should at least TRY to prove your point?

Come on, if it's so "hilariously-easy-to-disprove", then...maybe take a moment to disprove it?

"And you're right, Elliot. Israel's colonizing of its neighbors is a clear indication of their government's desire for peace"

What you do not understand is that intent is not always an absolute. Sure, that's the intent, I think most would agree, but that does not mean that this is the beginning and end of the reality. For instance, over 60% of Israelis have stated that they have no problem with conforming with the Geneva Maps, and since those maps repreesent generally a 1:1 land swap, BECAUSE Israel is a democracy, IF the Palestinians actually man-up and stop the manipulations and propaganda and instead simply agree to talks, the Israeli people will agree to leaving the settlements.

But, I suppose, since it's so "hilariously-easy-to-disprove" these points, you proably can take a few moments to do so?

The reality? The Palestinians cannot make peace because of the schism between Fatah/Hamas. That's a reality. Abbas cannot make a deal without the inclusion of the opinion of 1.5million of his people. PLUS, there's the Iran/Syria influence on Abbas which he is not strong enough to just ignore.

Please jump in - make it easy on me with your reasoning, 'eh?

Typical anti-Semite drivel. You'll be gone long, long before Israel.

If anything dire happens to Israel. Farewell to the rest of the world that allows it.

Your response conveys a clear misunderstanding not only of Israel, but the history and circumstances of the Jewish people (note I said "people", a widely used expression).

As much as you might like to think so, Israel is not a creature of the US military/industrial complex. From 1948-1967, when Israel fought three wars and absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, aid from the US ranged from minimal to non-existent. The total for those 19 years was $1.2 billion, of which over $850 million was in the form of loans (all of which was repaid). The first military aid grants did not occur until 1974, AFTER the last full scale war it fought with the Arabs.. After averaging in $3-$3.5 billion range during the 1990's (slightly over $4 billion in 2000), US military aid to Israel has averaged around $2.5 billion (source: Congressional Research Service). In real dollars, this represents a decline in the value aid Israel has received when inflation is taken into account. Israel's current budget is the equivalent of slightly over US$75 billion (NS313 billion). US aid represents roughly 3% of that total - while important, hardly a gamechanger. Contrast this with aid to the PA ($600 million this year from the US alone), where the government would collapse if not for outside contributions.

As for Israel being an "interloper state", Jews can trace their cultural and national history in the area back thousands of years (the Jewish inhabitants of the Israeli village of Peki'in can trace their presence back to the times of King David) This is where Christianity was born and where it was a predominant religion for almost half a millenia until the Arab/Muslim invasions of the 6th century. Strictly speaking, the Arabs should be considered the interlopers, not the Jews. And speaking of interlopers, what would you consider the Hashemite dyansty in Jordan, who were given their kingdom as a sop for losing Arabia to the Saudis? They've only been there since 1922.

A study of Jewish history reveals that after the forced conversion of the Nabateans by the Hasmoneans (descendants of the Maccabees) there is no record of any major conversion to Judaism until the kingdom of the Khazars, some 1000 years later (the Khazars disappeared by the end of the 10th century) and none after that. There have been studies done by researchers at the University of Arizona (2000) and the University College London (2002), among others, that document the genetic linkage of Eastern European Jews, to Jews from the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. As such, Jews hold a unique position as being at once a religion as well as an ethnicity. To classify them strictly as either one is a mistake.

With reference to the "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs by Jews from what is now Israel, most of those who left did so on their own. Indeed, many left on their own or at the instruction of their leadership.

The commander of the Arab Legion, Sir John Baggot Glubb, noted that “Villages were frequently abandoned even before they were threatened by the progress of war” (London Daily Mail, August 12, 1948).

Benny Morris, among the first of Israel's "revisionist" historians could not find evidence supporting that any more than 2% of the total of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 fighting were forced out of their homes by Israeli forces (see, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem").

As for the absorption of refugees, if Israel could absorb over 800,000 Jews forced out of Arab countries after 1948 (in effect doubling its population), why can't the Arab world absorb Palestinianrefugees? Indeed, why are they still discriminated against, deprived of rights and even refused citizenship by countries where they have resided for over three generations? If Israel had forcibly expelled 250,000 Palestinians the way Kuwait did in 1991, it would have been excoriated, by even its staunchest allies. The response to the Kuwaiti action was silence, if not outright sympathy for Kuwait (BTW, most of these Palestinians were allowed by Israel to move to the West Bank). After WWII, ethnic Germans were expelled from Central and Eastern European communities where they had lived for centuries and absorbed by Germany (both East and West) as dictated by the Potsdam declaration. After the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims fled their longtime homes and were absorbed by India and Pakistan respectively. As a matter of fact, I can think of no other refugee situation in history where host countries refused any attempt to not only absorb refugees of similar ehtnic and religious backgrounds but insisted that they remain in national limbo for over half a century.

Obviously your statements are not "plain truths", but pure fiction.

Why do people leave their homes, their villages, their olive groves to go into exile? Because they are terrified. Terrified by whom? By the advancing Zionists, who gave them good reasons to be terrified. Look up Menachem Begin.

"If anything dire happens to Israel. Farewell to the rest of the world that allows it."

The survivors of the USS Liberty beg to differ.

"A study of Jewish history reveals that after the forced conversion of the Nabateans by the Hasmoneans (descendants of the Maccabees) there is no record of any major conversion to Judaism until the kingdom of the Khazars, some 1000 years later (the Khazars disappeared by the end of the 10th century) and none after that."

Are you on drugs? There was extensive conversion during the Roman Empire. See "The Invention of the Jewish People" by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand.

You say,

"Your attempt to create a "blood and soil" justification for the insertion of this artificial state is scientifically and historically laughable. For one thing, as the Jewish scriptures assert, the Jews themselves were invaders, displacing indigenous peoples, sometimes with Jehovah-commanded genocide."

Scientifically and historically laughable? Of all the peoples that inhabited this land before the Jewish 'invasion' how many are still around? What link is there between these ancient peoples and Israel's present day inhabitants? The answer to both questions is none. TheJews, on the other hand, have maintained continual cultural, religious and ethnic links to this land for thousands of years, through sovereignty and exile, right up to present times. The Jewish community in Hebron, for example, could trace its history back 3,000 years until they were ethnically cleansed by local Arabs in 1929. Jews have been the largest single group in Jerusalem since before 1850 and an outright majority since the end of the 19th century. There were good sized Jewish communitites in Safed and Tiberias as well. The Arab population, until the 20th century considered themselves either Syrians or Ottoman subjects. The idea of a Palestinian Arab national identity didn't really take hold until the 1930's.

You added..."The original idea was the historically ignorant idea that the West could insert a group of mostly Eastern European immigrants into the very place where Christian Crusaders set up their kingdom, and that would spread American influence and progress in the area, because they are all "Semites." ".

The concept of Zionism has been around since the destruction of the Second Temple. It was rearticulated from a primarily religious to a more secular concept by a group of Europeans, led by theodore Herzl and Max Nordau. And in aside from the Balfour Declaration, there were also agreements with the Saudis on Arab self determination. That the West later backtracked on these was more a function of their greed than anything else (they also backtracked on their agreements with the Jews). and the Americans were originally against the idea of the Balfour Declaration (the King-Crane fact finding commission set up by President Wilson after WWI was made up of the former agent for Standard Oil in Arabia and a former college president from Ohio recommended against the creation of a Jewish state). In the following years, the US State Dept was consistently and vocally opposed to the idea. It was only Truman's overriding of State's instruction to the UN delegation that turned a "no' on partition to a "yes".So your premise about support for the creation of the state of Israel as a jumping off point for the spread of US influence without any basis in fact.

"--The US has made israel into the dominant military force in its neighborhood'

israel was the dominant military force in the neighborhood by 1967, years before they received the first dollar of US military aid.

"--US intelligence agencies get massive amounts of otherwise unobtainable information from Israel"

The US also gets otherwise unobtainable intelligence from its other allies. For example, a great deal of US intelligence on Afghanistan is supplied by Pakistan, clearly unobtainable from other sources. During WWII, the US received otherwise unobtainable intelligence on the Germans from various European partisan and underground organizations.

"--The US operates highly sophisticated "listening" technology in Israel"

They do the same thing in a host of other countries, including Eastern European members of NATO, and virtually every country in the world where US armed forces are based. Based on your logic, Japan should also be a "creature of the US military-industrial complex" because it too hosts US "listening technology".

"--The US military stockpiles weapons there for contingencies'

As they do in Kuwait and the Gulf emirates. They also stockpile weapons in Germany, Japan and the UK. And let us not forget Diego Garcia.

"-The military/industrial firms use Israel as a test-bed for new weapons systems and uses Israeli scientists to make improvements"

You mean the same way as they tested the first Abrams tanks on the plains of (then) West Germany (the 120mm cannon on the M-1 was developed in Germany as an improvement on the previous US 90 and 105mm)? The same way they developed the universal NATO assault rifle ammunition rounds along with countries like the UK and Germany?

"-The US frequently uses Israel to arm its little troublemakers around the globe, as it did most recently in Georgia, and as it's done often in Latin America"

Israel sells arms throughout the world, just as the US does. Those arms are primarily of Israeli design and manufacture. With regard to Georgia, Israel halted arms shipments to the country upon the outbreak of its war with Russia.

Actually, what you have proven is that Israel is no more a 'creature of the US military/industrial complex" than any other US ally, and that the US does not engage in any other activities with Israel than those it engages in with its other allies.

"And, I repeat, demanding that Arab states absorb the people displaced by Israel's ethnic cleansing is like the Third Reich's decree that Jews had to reimburse German insurance firms for Kristallnacht damage."

Aside from the fact that Israel did not engage in ethnic cleansing, your statement has no basis in either fact or logic. As a matter of fact, their was a $200 million resettlement fund set up by the UN for the purpose of absorbing Palestinian refugees into the populations of the countries to which they fled. the fund went untouched. As late as 1993, Israel was the 4th largest Middle Eastern donor to UNRWA after Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morrocco. Until 1973. it was the largest. It still contributes more money than Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, where the bulk of Palestinian refugees and their descendants still live. Since you have such sympathy for the Palestinians, I'm surprised that you haven't voiced outrage over their deprivation of rights in the Arab world (in Lebanon for example, in addition to being barred from citizenship, Palestinians are prohibited from owning property and barred from working in many professions). Then again, maybe your sympathy for Palestinians doesn't extend much beyond their usefulness in demonizing Israel.

You also never answered my question about whether you considered Hashemites "interlopers" in Jordan.

Clearly, the level of your knowledge about the history of the Middle East, or US involvement there isn't nearly what you think it is.

The conversion of the Nabateans occurred at roughly the same time as the ocnversion of others in the Roman Empire, the latter of which was by no means forcible. The trend towards the conversion of Pagans to Judaism pretty much ended with the destruction of the Second Temple and the ensuing Roman crackdown on Jews within the Empire. This in part paved the way for mass conversions to Christianity that followed, starting at the end of the 1st century CE.

And Shlomo Sand is by no means the final word on Jewish history. Try modern France - that's the subject he teaches as a professor at Tel Aviv University.

Your contention that the descendants of "pre-Jewish" population live in Lebanon is based on exactly what evidence?

I never said anything about "yearning". What I was talking about was the central place the Holy Land plays in Jewish history, culture and literature. I also brought up no legal precedent for the Jewish claim to the land, only an historical one. And what would you say is the historical basis for the Arab claim to this land - that they lived on it? Eskimos have lived in Siberia for centuries and at one time constituted an overwhelming majority of the population. Do you believe that gives them a particular historical claim to the land over their current caucasian, turkic and chinese neighbors? The truth is that both Jews and Arabs have a claim to the land and they must both learn to live on it side by side.

Insofar as the "yearning" of overseas Chinese to live in China, they can go back and no one will stop them. They can also become Chinese citizens if they so desire. It seems that you would deprive "overseas" Jews of this right.

Jews, like other groups, migrated to other parts of the world for a variety of reasons. Among them are forced exile from previous invasions , natural disasters, business reasons or just plain wanderlust. I wasn't aware that Jews needed reasons that were different than those of anyone else.

You may be amused by Jews praying at the Western Wall - that's up to you. And regardless of why you think Herod rebuilt the Temple, the fact of the matter is that it was considered by Jews of the time as well as early Christians as a monument to God's glory, not Herod's. Bear in mind that a Jewish Temple sat on that site for the better part of a millenia before Herod came to power.

The Balfour Declaration was sponsored by a man whio saw advantages in the recreation of a Jewish state, but mostly it was the culmination of a long history in Britain that supported the restoration of a Jewish state, starting with Sir Henry Finch in hiis book, "The World's Great Restoration." published in 1621. Some of the greatest proponents of a Jewish state in the Holy Land were eminent 19th century Britons such as Lord Lindsay, Lord Shaftesbury Lord Palmerston, Lord Manchester, George Eliot, Holman Hunt, Sir Charles Warren and Hall Caine, among others. I'm sure that there were anti-Semites who saw a new Jewish state as a way to rid Europe of its Jews, but those men I mentioned were, if anything, Judeophiles, who even made it a point to learn Biblical Hebrew. As for the supposed anti-Semitism of Lord balfour, one of his closest friends was Israel's first president, Chaim Weizman, whoi was instrumental in convincing Balfour that the Jewish homeland belonged in the Middle East and not Uganda.

I guess in your opinion, anyone who cooperates in any way with the US is a tool of its "military and intelligence/ community". Among the countries that have recently cooperated in some manner with the US are, Russia, China (PRC), India, Pakistan, South Korea, Kuwait, Japan, Greece, South Africa, Yemen, Nigeria and Turkey. Do you consider all these countries to be tools of the US?

As to your continuing allegation about Israeli 'ethnic cleansing'. Who are your historians? Ilan Pappe, who by his own admission tailors history to his own opinion? Can you give me a single instance of a Palestinian who was forced to leave his home by the Israeli government so that they could build communities in and around Jerusalem? Just so you know, There have been numerous instances recently of Arab families moving into Jewish negihborhoods built on the formerly Jordanian side of the 1967 border like Pisgat Ze'ev and French Hill. How does that square with your claim that they are being ethnically cleansed, if they can move into Jewish neighborhoods with no opposition from the ogvernment?

Now you call Israel a 'millstone" that is far too much trouble for the "small returns " our intelligence services receive.. In your post of 11/22, 5:59 AM you said that "--US intelligence agencies get massive amounts of otherwise unobtainable information from Israel". Which is it?

If you consider Israel and Jordan to be "colonial artifacts", God only knows what you must think of the countries of Latin America, with their large ruling elites that are mostly of Spanish and Portuguese ancestry. Even the Castro brothers and Hugo Chavez are descended from Europeans.

I think your problem is that, contrary to what you want us to believe, you do let your personal prejudices get in the way.

What new settlements have been built lately? Before Obamam made it so, when were settlements ever an obstacle to negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians?

I assume that "AF tank woman" and "Puma slipper woman" are new US combat systems that we'll soon be donating to Israel?

Or the Black & Tans?

hopefully I will not make any mistakes and cut all the right cables while dismantling IED

Unfortunately for you HRIS the entire world community including USA deems the settlements illegal. The only country that does not is Israel. Maybe you should move there

Not only does the world agree that the settlements are illegal, even the best of arguments would suggest that it's *Israeli* land, not Jewish land. It's not the same thing.

Would the above sum up your views then?

that pretty much all i think of them. And as I support Bush and Blair and all their wars it would not be honest for me to just talk, that is why I am joining the Army.

I wish you well. I believe you're a fool and a puppet but I wish you well.

thanks

Agree. And the god botherers pick the bloodthirsty quotes from their own books - they leave out the bits that might require them to do something positive.

"That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah."

"And as you would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them; for this is the law and the prophets."

"Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you."