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Cool. So why does an Islamic nation appeal to you? Or a Roman Catholic one? Are you just taking advantage of Israel being on the table for discussion or is there a double standard here?
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I wouldn't quite call it taking advantage of anything; I'm not finding the conversation any easier just because we're discussing jews. It just happens to be the topic of conversation, and if the carving of an Islamic, Roman Catholic, Italian, White, Black, Japanese, Jamaican, etc. nation inside an existing one was up for discussion I'd be all over that too, not to worry.
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Israel is a secular nation. It's tiring that I have to repeat that so often. There is freedom of religion, and speech there, which is more then I can say for the rest of the region. 30% of the country are non-Jews. The majority of the country is secular and non-practicing.
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I understand that, but the fact that it's well-known as
the jewish state is what creates the problem. If a secular state had been formed in the area without displacing a few hundred thousand Palestinians and giving a specific race decisive self-determination we might not have the same problem on our hands.
Before you say it, I'll go ahead and admit that I'm just playing a 'what-if' game here. Maybe it would have caused more problems, maybe it would have caused twice the racial tensions, maybe the whole nation would have collapsed and been under Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian or Jordanian control by now.
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Please stop. It's becoming less and less tolerable to hear people say Jews benefited from the genocide of the Holocaust, or that the idea of a Jewish Nation wouldn't have been legit without the guilt off WW2.
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The issue to me isn't whether the jews benefitted from it, it's everyone else in the region who was inconvenienced by it. The fact that there has been almost nothing but war and terrorism since then with little (and only recent) hope of peace is, to me, proof enough that splitting it into pieces and saying "this part is jordan, this part is israel, this tiny chunk in the middle is what's left of palestine" at the very least draws borders between opposing forces where there formerly were none. Why do you have to have two governments in an area less than half the size of MAINE? The problem wasn't necessarily created when Israel was created, it simply took tangible form in the shape of a nation's borders. This argument goes back to when the League of Nations mandated jewish autonomy in Palestine.
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It's a matter of allowing Jews to co-exist and live as citizens in the Mid-East. It's not a matter of owing anyone anything. What a juvenile interpretation of things.
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Abcdxxxx, that's exactly what it's
not. It's allowing them to
exist in the Middle East, sure, but it's not allowing or even asking them to
co-exist. You're drawing a neat little partition and saying 'this land is yours, and you don't necessarily have to get along with anyone in the area to call it that.' Granted that's how the vast majority of the Middle East is run, that doesn't mean it's the most (or even the second most) agreeable solution.