I also disagree with #5. I, however, see it as not so much ethnicity and hate, I see it as being rooted in religion, and therein lies the perpetual gap that will never be closed until their governments (this goes for us and the rest of the planet) are not affected by theocrats but use only reason and science as a measure of what is right and what is wrong. If you haven’t guessed by now, yes, I am an atheist. I look at history and almost every war has some religious basis for the perpetrator's lack of reasoning and not being able to see the others' point of view. Be secular. Be safe. No God, know peace.
Religion may have a use that I have no need for but I try not to condemn others if they are trying to do the right thing. At times I get off track, especially when I see the ignorance and hate that religions cannot seem to operate without. If they could there wouldn’t be 40,000 different sects just in Christianity. As for all the other 4000 or so religions, I digress.
Has it occurred to you that it is the hateful people who make the most noise no matter which group they are in? There is absolutely such a thing as bad religion (and plenty of it), and there is also such a thing as bad science— mistakes in science can be extremely costly.
Have you noticed all the attention given to flaws in scientific papers recently? The Christian perspective would be that religion and science are practiced by people, and people are fundamentally flawed by nature. The struggle against the flaws of human nature will go on as long as we inhabit this earth.
Also, only a few people are trying to do science whereas billions are trying to do religion. I regard both pursuits as equally difficult, and I am not surprised there are more screw ups in religion.
Here is some information on the retraction of scientific papers:
In 2023, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted, setting a new record¹. The number of retractions has been increasing as publishers work to remove flawed articles from the literature¹.
The majority of the retractions in 2023 were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley¹. Hindawi journals retracted more than 8,000 articles due to concerns about compromised peer review processes and systematic manipulation of the publication process¹.
Retraction is a mechanism used in academic publishing to flag papers that are seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon⁴⁶. Retracted articles remain visible and searchable but are marked as retracted⁴⁵.
Okay. Did I ever say that science is perfect? I know they make mistakes and some of them result in very bad outcomes, even death. But. At least Science doesn’t kill on purpose just because you say the earth is not flat sitting on pillars. IMO religion is stupid. The things they get people to believe in that are impossible and wrong like slavery or beating your children do no one any good. Those things and more have been in their dogma for thousands of years. I am quite sure the world will never see peace until religion is put away and not replaced with anything that resembles it.
Several months out of date, but I think you may have some of this backwards. Slavery occurs for purely secular reasons: hitting the other guy to make him do the work instead is easier (for certain kinds of work) than either doing it yourself or paying him, so it happened all the time in the ancient world, particularly to the losers of wars. Abolitionists showed up much later, and their motives were generally religious.
For that matter, science absolutely has killed on purpose; the restrictions on human experimentation are by definition restrictions on science. You might call them "ethical" restrictions rather than "religious" ones, but they are nonetheless there, and did not show up merely because the scientists had foresight.
This was almost a year ago, but I just discovered this sub so I am going to reply anyway.
Uses for religion that you have a need for and presumably use and benefit from every day are easy to find. Here are 2.
1. Ethics. Every ethical framework ever devised has its roots in religious faith. A simple example is honesty in business. Its a law in Leviticus that one cannot cheat in business. You can reject the Bible, but however you landed on the idea of not cheating your business partners or customers is ultimately from centuries of people following that religious rule.
2. Community. In our modern world community is hard to find and religion gives us a way to meet people and learn ideas we would never have met or learned otherwise. Religion gives us framework to participate in family and community events that nothing else can. We both know that you are doing something next Tuesday evening that is not part of the normal Tuesday evening routine.
Anyway, I'm not here to write a book; just make a quick point. Happy Holidays, whatever they may be.
I find that so much of this moral allocation and balancing completely misses the only important point: namely, that this is a war. There is no morality in war. War is the absence of morality. Starting a war is immoral. Ending it is moral. That is all. The narratives of the "sides" are irrelevant.
The moral focus needs to be on ending the war by helping the Palestinians surrender the idea that their national existence requires the elimination of Jews and the Jewish state from the land of Palestine. That war was lost decades ago, but in spite of their continuous suffering, most Palestinians are still full of fight and don't want to stop. They would rather bequeath this war to their children. Which means the war will go on, and they will - of necessity - continue to suffer.
The chain of consequences over the decades of conflict have narrowed the Palestinians' options down to this one narrow path. They cannot save their children and return to the land of Palestine unless the war ends, and it cannot end until they walk that path or are pushed through it. If they surrender they can be raised up and helped. If not, not.
Why shouldn't Israel end the war? Why is the entire burden on the Palestinians? Did they collectively start the war or was it a mafia style group called Hamas that started the war without their consent? Why isn't the burden on the Israelis to give back the land they have been slowly stealing from the Palestinians on the West Bank?
All information indicates that the great majority of Palestinians approve of what Hamas has done as part of their armed struggle. It is also clear that they have no capacity to restrain the terrorists in their midst, and this is part of the chain of consequences that has put them behind walls.
Israel can’t end the war without self-ethnic cleansing themselves. The Palestinians have put this stake in the ground. Their surrender would involve pulling it out.
I'd say Hamas put this stake in the ground. If Israel could figure out how to build a truly effective wall, I'd say problem solved. I think Israel has done many things since 1947 to earn the hatred of Palestinians. I am amazed that only a minority of them want to engage in terrorist acts.
I also hope that Israel can kill all of Hamas without killing so many women and children. Do you know that almost half of the bombs that Israel dropped on Gaza are unguided dumb bombs? Thus, almost half of Israeli bombing has been untargeted carpet bombing of civilian neighborhoods.
Everyone recognizes that Hamas is a terrorist organization. I hope the International Court of Justice Will thoroughly investigate Israel's behavior for possible war crimes at the request of South Africa.
I wonder what you think of what the Americans did to the Japanese in 1945. We did not exercise restraint as the Israelis are, we exerted maximum effort to end that war. The Israelis are hampering their mission and taking losses by restraining themselves. The toll would be much higher if they did not. Again, it’s a war. War kills. War is immoral. That’s why Hamas is immoral for having started it. You know how they conduct war. Anything that ends it faster is better.
It is very apparent that your assessment of Israeli behavior is very different from mine. They are bombing at a rate that has not been seen since World War II. I don't want to spend hours doing it but I do have some criticisms of the way that US handled the bombing of Japan.
I abhor our firebombing of Tokyo, and I wish we could have dropped the first atomic bomb either on Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Harbor to make the bomb's power apparent to all without killing so many civilians..
Maybe it’s generational. I remember the hijackings and Black September and the Lebanese Civil War on television and Munich and the oil crisis and the failure of Oslo and the First and Second intifadas. The Palestinian kids who indoctrinate their peers leave that stuff out of their little book. Similarly, my stepfather served in the Pacific in wwii so I grew up with the way people who experienced it thought about it and that was to be grateful that the war finally ended. The Japanese were like Hamas only much larger, incidentally. They too were in the grip of a genocidal ideology and they too committed horrendous atrocities. The two atom bombs killed 150,000 Japanese. The Japanese killed 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing alone, and this was repeated all across China and Southeast Asia. They too did not want to quit when they were defeated. Millions of Japanese are alive today in a peaceful and prosperous nation because the Americans did what we did.
You’re a historian. Refresh yourself on Hebron 1929. Precisely the same bestial atrocities a whole generation before 1948. The Jews did not cause the Arabs to be mad at them, they were already mad at them thanks to their nationalist leadership - again, look up Mufti of Jerusalem and the photographs of him with his good friend Adolf Hitler - and reflect that this very same man was the founder of the PFLP which created the Palestinian nation.
Guess what. I did a little historical research and I found that Palestine was the name used by Zionists for the land they wished to move to. So there was a Palestine even during Ottoman times, as least as far as the British, French, Germans, and Zionists were concerned. Palestine of course was the name that the Romans used for the Holy Land. The Europeans upper crusters were all trained in the Latin classics. Hertzl obviously got it from his educated milieu.
The following is a quote from "Der Judenstaat" by Theodor Herzl, published in 1896.
PALESTINE OR ARGENTINA?
Shall we choose Palestine or Argentina? We shall take what is given us, and what is selected by Jewish public opinion. The Society will determine both those points.
Argentina is one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has a spare population and a mild climate. The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us. The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some discontent, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement.
Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency.
The Zionists continued to use Palestine as the designation of the land they wanted to establish themselves in. The following book has chapters on various aspects of life in Palestine written by Zionists. It was published in 1911.
Zionist Work in Palestine by Various Authorities by Cohen, Israel 1879-1961
So the Zionists freely and constantly called the land Palestine even during the Ottoman hegemony. No one can say Palestine didn't exist in Ottoman times, because the Zionist insisted it did constantly.
The Jews moved into Palestine at the invitation of the Brits. If someone invited a family to move into my house, I'd be mad too.
In 1899 the Palestinian Mayor of Jerusalem wrote a letter to Herzl telling him it was a very bad idea for the Jews to come to Palestine: Khalidi suggested that, since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should find another place for the implementation of their political goals: "in the name of God," he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone."
I am a big fan of Israel Zangwill, who was originally a strong Zionist but changed his opinion because he realized the madness of trying to displace a large number of densely settled Palestinians.
Thus, I think Zionism was a bad idea, but because the UN assigned a certain part of British Palestine to the Jews in 1947, I believe they are entitled to that land and nothing more. Adding into any land to those borders, except by negotiation, puts them in the company of despicable aggressors.
Basically, because they stupidly accepted Britain's invitation to move into an already inhabited country without the consent of the local population, the ultimate aggressors are the Israelis.
It is astonishing to me that you have so much sympathy for Palestinian refugees and absolve them of all the consequences of their own agency and have none at all for the Jewish refugees who first settled in what became Palestine in flight from people who were literally trying to wipe them off the face of the earth. Also that you take no account of the humanity of 7 million Jews who are simply living in their home today. God did not commission you or me to judge who is “the ultimate aggressor” and this is irrelevant to the non theoretical war that is going on right now.
You should check your source. The term “Palestine” was first applied to the region by the British in 1918, so nobody in the Ottoman Empire was talking about it that way in 1898. There could be no “mayor” of Jerusalem (the Turks didn’t have mayors, each religious community had its own relationship with the Turkish officials whose jurisdictions did not match today’s borders or nations at all).
No. That is not correct. The Jews entered Palestine before the British Mandate when it wasn’t even called Palestine. They were refugees from pogroms who bought their land from absentee Arab landlords with the approval of the Turkish government which was the legal authority at that time. Nobody was displaced until 1948 which happened as the result of a war in which the Jews declined to be killed by the Arab League. The Ottoman Empire was multinational - all kinds of people lived in that house and many of them are Israeli Arabs or emigre Christians today. The Muslim Palestinians of today have no more right to exclude the Jews than they did the Druze or the Christians. And in any case it’s all moot because there are seven million Jews living there today and it is their home. The Palestinians can decide either to live with them or fight them. As we see they have chosen to fight them and the consequences are as we see.
It took 7 hours for people to agree essentially that two wrongs don't make a right 🙄. (Let's not get into who was originally wrong, there's a long vicious circle of mistakes where this part of the Middle East is concerned) . It might have been more interesting if they actually agreed on a solution even if it were the 50 YO the two state theory...
After Dresden (which by the way was a pretty clear cut war crime with no discernible contribution the final victory), the US policy has been to spend billions helping Germans rebuild their country, putting some constraints on the DFR (no commies in govt) but leaving Germans self determine for all the rest.
Israeli policy after 1967 has been apartheid, displacement and military rule in the West Bank, leaving its most zealotic citizens to carry out lynchings with impunity.
For Gaza, they were all too happy to let Hamas in place ("the PA is a liability, Hamas is an asset"). The rocket was apparently an acceptable price to pay for a disunited Palestine and a place to warehouse all those pesky refugees driven out in 1948.
Americans need to accept that Israelis simply are not like them, and any comparison with The Only War Everybody Knows About fall short for this very reason. To the extent something like the Japanese and German reconstruction can ever happen, it's despite the Israeli govt, not because of it
I also disagree with #5. I, however, see it as not so much ethnicity and hate, I see it as being rooted in religion, and therein lies the perpetual gap that will never be closed until their governments (this goes for us and the rest of the planet) are not affected by theocrats but use only reason and science as a measure of what is right and what is wrong. If you haven’t guessed by now, yes, I am an atheist. I look at history and almost every war has some religious basis for the perpetrator's lack of reasoning and not being able to see the others' point of view. Be secular. Be safe. No God, know peace.
I don't know if we will agree completely but I am completely convinced that religion is the hardest thing about human life to get right.
There are a lot of things that are impossibly difficult to do well and yet are still worth doing— Olympic sports, science of all kinds, and religion.
Religion may have a use that I have no need for but I try not to condemn others if they are trying to do the right thing. At times I get off track, especially when I see the ignorance and hate that religions cannot seem to operate without. If they could there wouldn’t be 40,000 different sects just in Christianity. As for all the other 4000 or so religions, I digress.
Has it occurred to you that it is the hateful people who make the most noise no matter which group they are in? There is absolutely such a thing as bad religion (and plenty of it), and there is also such a thing as bad science— mistakes in science can be extremely costly.
Have you noticed all the attention given to flaws in scientific papers recently? The Christian perspective would be that religion and science are practiced by people, and people are fundamentally flawed by nature. The struggle against the flaws of human nature will go on as long as we inhabit this earth.
Also, only a few people are trying to do science whereas billions are trying to do religion. I regard both pursuits as equally difficult, and I am not surprised there are more screw ups in religion.
Here is some information on the retraction of scientific papers:
In 2023, more than 10,000 research papers were retracted, setting a new record¹. The number of retractions has been increasing as publishers work to remove flawed articles from the literature¹.
The majority of the retractions in 2023 were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley¹. Hindawi journals retracted more than 8,000 articles due to concerns about compromised peer review processes and systematic manipulation of the publication process¹.
Retraction is a mechanism used in academic publishing to flag papers that are seriously flawed to the extent that their results and conclusions can no longer be relied upon⁴⁶. Retracted articles remain visible and searchable but are marked as retracted⁴⁵.
Source: Conversation with Bing, 2/1/2024
(1) More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 - Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8.
(2) Retraction in academic publishing - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retraction_in_academic_publishing.
(3) Retraction of Scientific Papers: Types of Retraction, Consequences, and .... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-99680-2_40.
(4) Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations .... https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-022-00125-x.
(5) The Top Retractions of 2021 | The Scientist Magazine®. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/the-top-retractions-of-2021-69533.
(6) Reducing the Inadvertent Spread of Retracted Science: recommendations .... https://bing.com/search?q=Retracted+scientific+papers.
Okay. Did I ever say that science is perfect? I know they make mistakes and some of them result in very bad outcomes, even death. But. At least Science doesn’t kill on purpose just because you say the earth is not flat sitting on pillars. IMO religion is stupid. The things they get people to believe in that are impossible and wrong like slavery or beating your children do no one any good. Those things and more have been in their dogma for thousands of years. I am quite sure the world will never see peace until religion is put away and not replaced with anything that resembles it.
Several months out of date, but I think you may have some of this backwards. Slavery occurs for purely secular reasons: hitting the other guy to make him do the work instead is easier (for certain kinds of work) than either doing it yourself or paying him, so it happened all the time in the ancient world, particularly to the losers of wars. Abolitionists showed up much later, and their motives were generally religious.
For that matter, science absolutely has killed on purpose; the restrictions on human experimentation are by definition restrictions on science. You might call them "ethical" restrictions rather than "religious" ones, but they are nonetheless there, and did not show up merely because the scientists had foresight.
This was almost a year ago, but I just discovered this sub so I am going to reply anyway.
Uses for religion that you have a need for and presumably use and benefit from every day are easy to find. Here are 2.
1. Ethics. Every ethical framework ever devised has its roots in religious faith. A simple example is honesty in business. Its a law in Leviticus that one cannot cheat in business. You can reject the Bible, but however you landed on the idea of not cheating your business partners or customers is ultimately from centuries of people following that religious rule.
2. Community. In our modern world community is hard to find and religion gives us a way to meet people and learn ideas we would never have met or learned otherwise. Religion gives us framework to participate in family and community events that nothing else can. We both know that you are doing something next Tuesday evening that is not part of the normal Tuesday evening routine.
Anyway, I'm not here to write a book; just make a quick point. Happy Holidays, whatever they may be.
I find that so much of this moral allocation and balancing completely misses the only important point: namely, that this is a war. There is no morality in war. War is the absence of morality. Starting a war is immoral. Ending it is moral. That is all. The narratives of the "sides" are irrelevant.
The moral focus needs to be on ending the war by helping the Palestinians surrender the idea that their national existence requires the elimination of Jews and the Jewish state from the land of Palestine. That war was lost decades ago, but in spite of their continuous suffering, most Palestinians are still full of fight and don't want to stop. They would rather bequeath this war to their children. Which means the war will go on, and they will - of necessity - continue to suffer.
The chain of consequences over the decades of conflict have narrowed the Palestinians' options down to this one narrow path. They cannot save their children and return to the land of Palestine unless the war ends, and it cannot end until they walk that path or are pushed through it. If they surrender they can be raised up and helped. If not, not.
Why shouldn't Israel end the war? Why is the entire burden on the Palestinians? Did they collectively start the war or was it a mafia style group called Hamas that started the war without their consent? Why isn't the burden on the Israelis to give back the land they have been slowly stealing from the Palestinians on the West Bank?
In any case a war typically ends when the weaker party surrenders, not the stronger.
All information indicates that the great majority of Palestinians approve of what Hamas has done as part of their armed struggle. It is also clear that they have no capacity to restrain the terrorists in their midst, and this is part of the chain of consequences that has put them behind walls.
Israel can’t end the war without self-ethnic cleansing themselves. The Palestinians have put this stake in the ground. Their surrender would involve pulling it out.
I'd say Hamas put this stake in the ground. If Israel could figure out how to build a truly effective wall, I'd say problem solved. I think Israel has done many things since 1947 to earn the hatred of Palestinians. I am amazed that only a minority of them want to engage in terrorist acts.
I also hope that Israel can kill all of Hamas without killing so many women and children. Do you know that almost half of the bombs that Israel dropped on Gaza are unguided dumb bombs? Thus, almost half of Israeli bombing has been untargeted carpet bombing of civilian neighborhoods.
Everyone recognizes that Hamas is a terrorist organization. I hope the International Court of Justice Will thoroughly investigate Israel's behavior for possible war crimes at the request of South Africa.
I wonder what you think of what the Americans did to the Japanese in 1945. We did not exercise restraint as the Israelis are, we exerted maximum effort to end that war. The Israelis are hampering their mission and taking losses by restraining themselves. The toll would be much higher if they did not. Again, it’s a war. War kills. War is immoral. That’s why Hamas is immoral for having started it. You know how they conduct war. Anything that ends it faster is better.
It is very apparent that your assessment of Israeli behavior is very different from mine. They are bombing at a rate that has not been seen since World War II. I don't want to spend hours doing it but I do have some criticisms of the way that US handled the bombing of Japan.
I abhor our firebombing of Tokyo, and I wish we could have dropped the first atomic bomb either on Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Harbor to make the bomb's power apparent to all without killing so many civilians..
Maybe it’s generational. I remember the hijackings and Black September and the Lebanese Civil War on television and Munich and the oil crisis and the failure of Oslo and the First and Second intifadas. The Palestinian kids who indoctrinate their peers leave that stuff out of their little book. Similarly, my stepfather served in the Pacific in wwii so I grew up with the way people who experienced it thought about it and that was to be grateful that the war finally ended. The Japanese were like Hamas only much larger, incidentally. They too were in the grip of a genocidal ideology and they too committed horrendous atrocities. The two atom bombs killed 150,000 Japanese. The Japanese killed 300,000 Chinese in Nanjing alone, and this was repeated all across China and Southeast Asia. They too did not want to quit when they were defeated. Millions of Japanese are alive today in a peaceful and prosperous nation because the Americans did what we did.
You’re a historian. Refresh yourself on Hebron 1929. Precisely the same bestial atrocities a whole generation before 1948. The Jews did not cause the Arabs to be mad at them, they were already mad at them thanks to their nationalist leadership - again, look up Mufti of Jerusalem and the photographs of him with his good friend Adolf Hitler - and reflect that this very same man was the founder of the PFLP which created the Palestinian nation.
Guess what. I did a little historical research and I found that Palestine was the name used by Zionists for the land they wished to move to. So there was a Palestine even during Ottoman times, as least as far as the British, French, Germans, and Zionists were concerned. Palestine of course was the name that the Romans used for the Holy Land. The Europeans upper crusters were all trained in the Latin classics. Hertzl obviously got it from his educated milieu.
The following is a quote from "Der Judenstaat" by Theodor Herzl, published in 1896.
PALESTINE OR ARGENTINA?
Shall we choose Palestine or Argentina? We shall take what is given us, and what is selected by Jewish public opinion. The Society will determine both those points.
Argentina is one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has a spare population and a mild climate. The Argentine Republic would derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us. The present infiltration of Jews has certainly produced some discontent, and it would be necessary to enlighten the Republic on the intrinsic difference of our new movement.
Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency.
https://archive.org/details/HerzlTheodorTheJewishStateEN194355S./page/n19/mode/1up
The Zionists continued to use Palestine as the designation of the land they wanted to establish themselves in. The following book has chapters on various aspects of life in Palestine written by Zionists. It was published in 1911.
Zionist Work in Palestine by Various Authorities by Cohen, Israel 1879-1961
Publication date 1911
https://archive.org/details/coheni1911zion/mode/1up
So the Zionists freely and constantly called the land Palestine even during the Ottoman hegemony. No one can say Palestine didn't exist in Ottoman times, because the Zionist insisted it did constantly.
The Jews moved into Palestine at the invitation of the Brits. If someone invited a family to move into my house, I'd be mad too.
In 1899 the Palestinian Mayor of Jerusalem wrote a letter to Herzl telling him it was a very bad idea for the Jews to come to Palestine: Khalidi suggested that, since Palestine was already inhabited, the Zionists should find another place for the implementation of their political goals: "in the name of God," he wrote, "let Palestine be left alone."
I am a big fan of Israel Zangwill, who was originally a strong Zionist but changed his opinion because he realized the madness of trying to displace a large number of densely settled Palestinians.
Thus, I think Zionism was a bad idea, but because the UN assigned a certain part of British Palestine to the Jews in 1947, I believe they are entitled to that land and nothing more. Adding into any land to those borders, except by negotiation, puts them in the company of despicable aggressors.
Basically, because they stupidly accepted Britain's invitation to move into an already inhabited country without the consent of the local population, the ultimate aggressors are the Israelis.
It is astonishing to me that you have so much sympathy for Palestinian refugees and absolve them of all the consequences of their own agency and have none at all for the Jewish refugees who first settled in what became Palestine in flight from people who were literally trying to wipe them off the face of the earth. Also that you take no account of the humanity of 7 million Jews who are simply living in their home today. God did not commission you or me to judge who is “the ultimate aggressor” and this is irrelevant to the non theoretical war that is going on right now.
You should check your source. The term “Palestine” was first applied to the region by the British in 1918, so nobody in the Ottoman Empire was talking about it that way in 1898. There could be no “mayor” of Jerusalem (the Turks didn’t have mayors, each religious community had its own relationship with the Turkish officials whose jurisdictions did not match today’s borders or nations at all).
No. That is not correct. The Jews entered Palestine before the British Mandate when it wasn’t even called Palestine. They were refugees from pogroms who bought their land from absentee Arab landlords with the approval of the Turkish government which was the legal authority at that time. Nobody was displaced until 1948 which happened as the result of a war in which the Jews declined to be killed by the Arab League. The Ottoman Empire was multinational - all kinds of people lived in that house and many of them are Israeli Arabs or emigre Christians today. The Muslim Palestinians of today have no more right to exclude the Jews than they did the Druze or the Christians. And in any case it’s all moot because there are seven million Jews living there today and it is their home. The Palestinians can decide either to live with them or fight them. As we see they have chosen to fight them and the consequences are as we see.
It took 7 hours for people to agree essentially that two wrongs don't make a right 🙄. (Let's not get into who was originally wrong, there's a long vicious circle of mistakes where this part of the Middle East is concerned) . It might have been more interesting if they actually agreed on a solution even if it were the 50 YO the two state theory...
After Dresden (which by the way was a pretty clear cut war crime with no discernible contribution the final victory), the US policy has been to spend billions helping Germans rebuild their country, putting some constraints on the DFR (no commies in govt) but leaving Germans self determine for all the rest.
Israeli policy after 1967 has been apartheid, displacement and military rule in the West Bank, leaving its most zealotic citizens to carry out lynchings with impunity.
For Gaza, they were all too happy to let Hamas in place ("the PA is a liability, Hamas is an asset"). The rocket was apparently an acceptable price to pay for a disunited Palestine and a place to warehouse all those pesky refugees driven out in 1948.
Americans need to accept that Israelis simply are not like them, and any comparison with The Only War Everybody Knows About fall short for this very reason. To the extent something like the Japanese and German reconstruction can ever happen, it's despite the Israeli govt, not because of it