* 'Jews!=Israelis'
I completely agree. Most Jews, in fact, don't live in Israel. And there is a broad range of opinion among Jews about Israel, ranging from the radical kill-em-all Gun Zionism espoused by folks like Putin to the "Israel is an offense against God!" of Neturei Karta and everything in between. The problem with sticking to the term Israelis or Zionists is that not all of them are Jewish, and it is impossible to discuss the inherent discrimination of Israeli law and society without dealing with the fact that the beneficiaries happen to be Jewish. The phrase "Israeli only settlements" is inaccurate, for example, because non-Jewish Israelis aren't allowed to live there.
* "I think the Camp David proposal of 2000 by Ehud Barak was a great solution"
What charity. "Here. You can have 80% of the 22% of the land we agreed to leave you six years ago. Oh, and that land is essentially cut up into four pieces. We'll give you 10% back in a few years if we feel like it. We also have a few minor additional conditions for you, like we get to keep most of the military bases and settlements we built on your land. You're also not allowed to have a military yourself, control your airspace, and you can't complain about us sucking your water wells dry to fill our swimming pools. We're willing to make a huge sacrifice and give you a few ghetto areas in what used to be Palestinian East Jerusalem, and we'll squeeze a US embassy in there so you can call it your capital, but these ghettos are going to be completely surrounded by Jewish-only neighborhoods. And don't even think about policing your own borders - we'll do that for you. I see you're looking at me funny. What's that? You don't like this? Why, you're such an obstructionist! Why do you hate peace so much?"
http://www.socialismtoday.org/50/camp_david.html
http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=7317&jid=1&href=fulltext
http://www.gush-shalom.org/generous/generous.html
* 'Israel never forced anyone to leave'
Yitzach Rabin wrote in his memoirs:
"We had to grapple with a troublesome problem, for whose solution we could not draw upon any previous experience: the fate of the civilian population of Lod and Ramle, numbering some 50,000...B[en]. G[urion]. waved his hand in a gesture which said, "Drive them out!"
"The population of Lod did not leave willingly. There was no way of avoiding the use of force and warning shots in order to make the inhabitants march the ten to fifteen miles to the point where they met up with the [Jordanian] Legion. The inhabitants of Rami watched and learned the lesson. Their leaders agreed to evacuate voluntarily, on condition that the evacuation was carried out by vehicles."
Interestingly, this passage (which I've edited for brevity) was censored from the first edition of Rabin's memoirs, and only appeared in the second edition (which I'm reading from) as an appendix. One of the Palestinians expelled from Lydda was a young George Habbash, a Christian who would go on to lead the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and the most feared anti-Israel terrorist of the 60s and 70s.
Joseph Weitz, Land Director for the Jewish National Fund (and responsible for managing the settlement of Jews in Palestine) wrote in 1940 in his diary:
"We shall not achieve our goal of being an independent people with the Arabs in this small country. The only solution is a Palestine, at least Western Palestine (west of the Jordan river) without Arabs.... And there is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them; not one village, not one tribe, should be left.... Only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb the millions of our own brethren."
There are tons of other very clear proofs of deliberate explusion. See particularly Benny Morris' "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949", which is entirely devoted to this question. (This is also the source for the IDF admission that 70% of Palestinians were driven out by force)
* 'Only 3000 Palestinians were killed by Israel in 1948'
7-800,000 Palestinians were driven from 350-500 villages by force or threat of force. There were a number of massacres, many with body counts in the hundreds. Many of the refugees were elderly, and died during the lengthy forced marches to unoccupied territory. It is true that a number is impossible to reach, but to suggest that it was less than half of one percent of the affected population is absurd. The website you reference doesn't bother to source the claim (it also gives two completely different numbers for Israeli deaths in the '67 War), so I'm still wondering where this magical 3,000 number comes from. As I've said, a real number is impossible to derive, but the suggestion that twice as many Israelis than Palestinians died when there were no mass expulsion of hundreds of Jewish villages and settlements is absurd.
* "Why can't Jews have 1 Country, when the Arabs have 22? The Palestinians have never had and didn't want a country until it became a way to hurt Israel."
I'm not a big fan of nationalism, so I really couldn't care less about which flag flies over which particular piece of dirt. I wouldn't necessarily care if there were 22 Jewish and 1 Arab countries. I just want people to be treated justly with respect to their lives, property, and freedom. If that can be done under under an explicitly Jewish state, that's fine with me. To some extent, this has already been done with the Palestinians who were granted Israeli citizenship (although there are obviously still many problems with the inherently racial/sectarian foundations of Israeli law and society, and many still view the citizenship of Arab Israelis as a betrayal of the Zionist ideal). I think granting full citizenship to Palestinians in the occupied territories would be a step forward in the situation, but of course that kind of limited equality is considered synonymous with "destroying Israel".
* "Hamas wants to kill all Jews! It's in their manifesto!"
The Hamas charter can be read here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp
Some (though not all) of the negative characterizations of it here seem to be false. I highly recommend that anyone interested enough to be reading this far take a gander at it. Interestingly, I see some Marxist influence in parts of it. While it does explicitly call for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an overtly Islamic government, it also says that "Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions - Islam, Christianity and Judaism - to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam. Past and present history are the best witness to that." History does indeed witness that; it was under the care of an overtly Islamic Ottoman state that the seeds of Zionism first sprouted and started to bear fruit (see below).
I would also note that Hamas has moderated its positions over the years; in recent years it has hinted that it might be willing to accept a two-state solution:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/22/israelandthepalestinians.usa
* "Please provide a cite [for the Ottomans enforcing and protecting Zionist land purchases]."
See "The Gun and the Olive Branch" by David Hirst. Page 142:
"[The Palestinian tenant farmers] naturally resisted the eviction itself. Sometimes Turkish troops had to be brought in to enforce it; this happened in 1910 when, in another Sursock sale, the disposessed tenants from Lower Galilee were arrested and thrown into prison."
Page 143:
"Smilansky recalls '...The Bedoin neighbours, the Damireh and the Infiat tribes, rose up in protest... Where would they pasture their cattle and sheep? But the [Turkish] mudir came from Caesarea with a detachment of police and dispersed them.'"
"Characteristic, too, was the reliance of the settlers on the Turkish police for driving off neighbors whose livelihood they had put in jeopardy."
Page 149, quoting a Zionist settler:
"It was then that, for the first time, I came in contact with Arab nationalism. Rashid Bey the Vali [governor], who was a Turk, cared very little whether the Tiberias district was inhabited by Arabs or Jews, and was thus prepared to order the eviction of the tenants. But Emir Amin Arslan, the Kaimakan of Tiberias, who was an Arab Druze, not only insisted on the payment of compensation to the evicted Arabs, but also as I was later informed, resisted the de-Arabization of the district."
Hirst also notes that appeals by local Palestinian notables to Constantinople to restrict immigration were largely ignored (p.148-149). Without the active assistance of the Ottoman government and its governors in Palestine, there never would've been an Israel.
"So all Jews are nutjobs eh? Now we're getting somewhere. And how you comments reconcile with the fact that 20% of Israel is Arab, Arabs who have full citizenship, who vote and form political parties?"
I didn't say all Israelis are nutjobs and all Israelis=Jews. I said quite clearly that the nutjobs in question are those promoting the settlement and foreign policy of Israel.
"Jews have been completely driven out of their homes in all of the Arab countries. "
The circumstances of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries after the '48 War varied a great deal from country to country. In Egypt, widespread repression of Jews didn't begin until the '56 war and after Israel had been caught red-handed using Egyptian Jews to perpetrate false flag terrorist attacks in Egypt to drive a wedge through US-Egyptian relations (the Lavon Affair). Lebanon actually saw its Jewish population increase until the Lebanese civil war, and a synagogue in Beirut was recently rebuilt (with support from Hizbullah, among others) after the Israelis bombed it in the '06 War. In Iraq, less than 10% of Iraqi Jews expressed an interest in leaving the country in 1950; it wasn't until after a series of bombings of Jewish and American targets in Baghdad (As in Egypt, perpetrated by Israeli agents) that Iraqi Jews started to emigrate en masse. The Israeli government at every turn encouraged the 'driving out' of Jews from Arab countries - Israel needed warm bodies to farm those fields and do all the menial labor the Palestinians had been doing before being driven out.
Congrats IKE
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