There is some serious misinformation going on in this thread.
CaptKirby said:
Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights in the June 1967 War against Egypt and assorted Middle Eastern countries. This action was immediately deemed illegal by the U.N. They gave back the Sinai Peninsula in the Camp David Accords in 1978. Eleven years later! They gave back the Gaza Strip (for the most part) more recently. However, they are still illegally occupying the West Bank, ruining millions of Palestinian lives, whether that be of refugees, or that of Palestinians still living in the West Bank and being persecuted daily.
The occupation of these territories is a means to an end, and it always was a means to an end. Before the 1967 war, the Arab nations refused to recognize Israel as even existing, and didn't even consider having any sort of peaceful relations with it. If Israel would have withdrawn from the territories in 1967 instead of holding them, there would be no reason at all for the Arab nations to want peace with it. Proof for that is that Israel has never annexed these territories, recognizing that their final status would be decided in peace negotiations. The UN (not that I would regard the UN as anything objective or meaningful in this conflict) recognized this in Resolution 242, calling for a "land for peace" solution. The peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan follow this principle. The Gaza Strip was evacuated in 2005 in an attempt, to quote then-Israeli PM Sharon "to break the stalemate with the Palestinians and reinvigorate the peace process". So yeah.
CaptKirby said:
They are forced to go through checkpoints on any drive, where they have guns pointed in their face.
The Palestinians do suffer from this, but lets not bring it out of context. The checkpoints only came after years of terrorist attacks within Israel. They save lives. The potential attackers cannot be identified from the innocent Palestinians so they all have to be checked.
CaptKirby said:
It is also certainly a racial opression for many of these young, militant Israelis forced into the position of patrolling these checkpoints.
The Israelis and Palestinians are from the same race, there is no racism involved there. This is a nationalistic, political conflict. Some people want to color it as a racial war, a religious conflict or what not. These are usually the people who have an interest of having it continue. This is majorly about land. Also I wouldn't call it an oppression - face it, if the Israeli government hadn't taken these measures to ensure it's security there would be bombings here daily. Every single day there's a list of around 50 different threats gathered by intelligence. If nothing would be done, they would all succeed. There are also not as many young militant Israelis as you seem to think. I'm sure the average 18 year old has better things to do than stand in these checkpoints for 18 hours a day, the come home for two days after two weeks. This is a long, endless war. The only solution is political.
CaptKirby said:
The U.S. not only has funded Israel (1/5th of our foreign aid in the last 40 years) to the point they are the Middle Eastern superpower, but we have now engaged in a similar occupation. This makes me so mad at Israel.
Israel was a Middle-Eastern superpower before the US had really become it's primary ally. Only after the 1967 victory, and the alignment of the Arab nations with the Soviets, Israel and the US became close allies. It's not US aid that made Israel what it is. Israel is a country the size of Rhode Island and without many natural resources that has a Western European economy. This is not done with F-16s. It's primarily because of a focus on education and technology - Israel has the highest academic degree per capita, patents per capita and scientifc paper per capita rates in the world.
Now, about the war in Iraq, this is not really Israel's buisness. If some of the guys at AIPAC support it, it doesn't mean that the people or government here do. Most agree that it was a bad idea since it strenghtened Iran and hurt Western-Muslim relations. To say that the war in Iraq is somehow Israel's doing is really quite dumb. You elected that dumbass (twice), not us. Another thing is that people here actually believed your President when he said Iraq had WMDs, so the government spent millions of dollars refreshing the protective gear of every citizen. I had to carry a gas mask to school for about a week and a half in March 2003. So yeah, not our fault.
CaptKirby said:
Well, I feel as if most of the people choosing to live in Israel must probably be Jewish, although I have not seen any official statistic (I mean, to move to the new Israel homeland in 1948, why would you have bothered if you were not an ardent believer in Judaism?). I have no ill will toward them for their religion, nor any problem with Israelis in general, I just see this religious occupation and opression as appalling. The religious opression is not carried out by all Israelis, but it is a substantial portion that support it...
Okay this is a major point here. Being a Jew has many definitions. It's a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality and a culture all together. Israel is a secular, democratic state. Most of it's citizens are Jews, but most aren't all that religious at all. Why bother if you aren't an ardent believer? because this is the only place where you're not a minority, because you have historical ties with the land, because this is the Jewish homeland and being a Jew doesn't necessarily have much to do with being an ardent believer in the Jewish faith. You seem to think that Israel is religiously motivated, and that really isn't case. We have our share of religious fanatics assholes, but they're a small minority. Also, around 70% of Israeli citizens accept a Palestinian state and the land for peace principle. This was in the platform of every elected government in the last 20 years.
flashfox said:
Well, isn't the offical population count include those in the Gaza strip?
I personally am mad at the Bush administration and Israel for cutting off funding for Hamas. If they are elected to power, you have no right to remove money because you don't like them.
It's rather hypocritical to promote democracy but remove funding when the people who are elected are the people you dislike.
First of all, no, the population count you see in this thread doesn't count the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The territories weren't annexed so the people living in them are not considered Israeli citizens (except for the Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and a small number of Druze in the Golan Heights).
Secondly, why the hell would Israel fund Hamas? They would use the money against it. No one in Hamas would even say the word "Israel". Why fund an enemy faction?
Also, the Oslo Accords (the agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization) have recognition as the first condition. By not recognizing Israel and any agreements with it, the Hamas government effectively rendered the Oslo Accords (and the whole peace process, nice) null and void. Since the funding for the Palestinian Authority is part of that agreement, Israel really doesn't owe them anything. It's nice that they had free elections (the only ones in the Arab world), but they made the wrong choice, lol.
