The Palestinians, on the other hand, are Semitic people, who from antiquity were indigenous to the lands and homes from which they were driven.

I’m guessing you would refuse to live in peace as second-class citizens in your own ancestral home, under occupation by foreign usurpers.

if there is a right of return for one…then we have all have to recognize the right of return for all…equal justice to each and all…so send them back home to arabia….no need for a west bank/gaza solution…they lost thier right when they refused to live in peace…

>>>it all has to do with the absence of any real justice.>>>

The palis were nomads living in jordan.
They were kicked out by their fellow muslems.
They were offered their own country, as was Isreal.
Isreal accepted, the palis rejected theirs and wanted Isreals land instead.
There are 800 000 000 muslems that occupy half a continent, why dont they take in the “innocent” little palis?

NOOOO NOOO they HAVE to have Jerusalem.

This is a sore the arab world wants to remain open as to eventually drive Isreal into the sea.
YOU seem to forget Isreal has been directally attacked six times, and indirect ally attacked daily.

http://frontpagemag.com/media/pdf/BigLies.pdf

Yet to simply lay the responsibility entirely with the Arabs is naive, if not diabolically dishonest. The actual history is much more complex. As for killing the innocent, terror was introduced as a standard tactic to the region by Irgun, the Stern Gang and others to equalize the numerical disadvantage of the early Zionist utopians who intended to establish a state there. The bombing of the King David Hotel was just one incidence of this. The wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestine which preceded the official founding of Israel was the legacy that keeps on giving, to the present day.

That in no way excuses Palestinian terror, but in a universe of cause and effect these are factors that must be reckoned with in order to move beyond the present stalemate.

Love has little to do with it, Mark - it all has to do with the absence of any real justice.

You’re looking at it entirely the wrong way..and its a pity you can’t show a bit of love.

How else to explain the virtual silence concerning the many hundreds of innocent Palestinian civilians massacred at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, versus the hoopla surrounding the eleven Israeli athletes massacred in the 1972 Munich Olympic terror attack of a decade earlier? see http://www.counterpunch.org/gorman0921.html

The problem is not with violence or innocence violated, but with bigotry and prejudice, with disproportionate justice, which renders the very term “justice” oxymoronic.

Nobody I know thinks Israeli lives are worthless, but plenty think Palestinian lives are. Likewise plenty of people believe Arab lives are as disposable as yesterday’s trash. Only yesterday I sat at lunch with a GOP good old boy in Winston Salem, NC listening to a polemic about how the US should “kill ‘em all (Arabs) and let God sort ‘em out.” Mind you, the good old boy was of the ilk who believe abortion is murder - but somehow all those brown-skinned people just don’t rise to the status of real human beings.

As for Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, condolences are due their families. They should not have died. But since when were a handful of Jewish sodiers equal to the lives of over a thousand Lebanese civilians and a nation ravaged after decades of rebuilding?

Please don’t try to tell me it is the fault of Hezbollah. There has never been “tit for tat” over there. Israel always, ALWAYS kills multiples more innocent Palestinians than it loses to Palestinian terror attacks. They pride themselves on that.

Consequently there is a perverse symmetry in two Israeli carcases being exchanged for times more Palestinian prisoners. Unequal justice makes for unequal exchanges. Sometimes in spite of the diabolical nature of the situation, there seems to be a higher logic at work.