No argument. I do note however that Syria is doing the same thing as Israel, “protectingit’s people and sovereignty from terrorists”, yet the international community is on the side of the terrorists, according to Syria’sdefinition.

As per your comment about suggesting alterior motive being behind what Syria and Hamas are doing to Israel, and Israel’sengagement of it being some design to enter into wider conflict with Iran, it stands to reason that given the sensitivities in the region, at this time, that -ANY- escalation of regional conflict can -easily- lead to (perhaps undesired) engagement with Iran.

At this time, the leader of Israel only has a limited time in power remaining in which to do things he would -really- like to about Iran. Waiting for sanctions to work with Obama now that Obamawon, is not acceptable to the leader of Israel, who needs some new avenue to arrive at his strike on Iran, where a surgical strike is a pipe-dream givenhow Iran is ready to respond, and the whole region would burst into conflict.

The leader of Israel waited to see if George’s new guy would win and thenthey could all go after Iran if he did. That did not happen, and so both Syria and Hamas are poking the caged lion to give it a reason to unleashregional conflict, and to be provoked is to step into a trap.

We can only watch to see how much restraint the leader of Israel now exercises where we know howmuch he needs some war activity in the time he has remaining. It’s about the sensitivities there,where restraint is a greater show of force than retaliation, under the present conditions.

My problem with your line of argument is that it assumes some ulterior motive to Israel actions when there is much simpler and obvious motives to their actions (protecting their civilians and sovereignty).
It also neglects the possibility that a full scale war is not in Israel best interests, aka war = death. why would you assume that Israel wants full scale war when it can be avoided (achieving the goal of ending Iran nuclear program with precision attack which may not result in a war, as it did in the past with Iraq and Syria).
To sum it up, your line of argument assume that Israel seeks a full blown war by disregarding the price such war would entail. I would argue that Israel appreciate the lives of their people and solders much more then that.

I think that conceptually Israel should be regarded as just one of the many states established in the period stretching from WW1 to around 1950, divided on ethnic lines to prevent friction or protect a minority population. I can’t see any moral basis for distinguishing between Israel and Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, or wherever. Particularly Jordan – here’s a country carved out of the British Mandate to be a home for Arabs and not Jews!

Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is foolish and something which I find personally hurtful. It’s foolish because Israel in fact has a large Arab population, while its neighbours massacred or expelled literally hundreds of thousands of Jews, leaving themselves effectively Judenrein. . Israel is actually the Middle East’s shining beacon of coexistence; nowhere else in the region do you find even the somewhat-compromised intercourse and free association that exists in Israel.

I find the comparison personally hurtful because my family actually came from Hungary. In three months nearly two thirds of Hungarian Jews were killed by the Nazis – the numbers of course were higher in some countries, lower in others. Comparing this massacre of innocent civilians to anything Israel has ever done is … well, it’s just beyond the realm of reasonable discourse.

Israel’s response to Syria’s mortar’s is appropriate, and has been very restrained, and legitimate.  Syria’s reasons for firing the mortars at Israel has been invitational, where Syria knows Israel wants to arrive at active assault upon Syria’s friend, Iran, and may easily arrive at such a showdown by arriving at conflict with Syria, merely by Israel legitimately responding to Syria’s mortars to escalate conflict between them.

Whether Israel opportunes to arrive at legitimate conflict with Syria to leverage such to arrive at their desired strike on Iran, or whether Israel increases conflict on some other legitimate front to such end is left to be seen.

“When you get down to it, the only claim to Israel that Jews not actually born there before the ‘founding’/stealing of the nation have , is that sky god in the book said it was so”

Oh, so more then 120 years of nation building and 65 years of actually being a nation, doesn’t count? oh well… wait a second while I tell all the Israelis, most of them were already born there for 2 or 3 generations, to just pack and leave because they have no claim. what nonsense.

And to even larger extent, Gaza shots 100+ rockets on Israeli civilians for a week while Israel shows restraint (not to mention the 750 rockets already thrown since the beginning of 2012) and when Israel finally responds in order to stop the attacks, it again only doing so as a means of starting a much wider conflict with Iran…

What would convince you that Israel may have straight forward goals, as the politicians, media and its own civilians say (to stop attacks on civilians)? when 1500 will be shot from Gaza? 2500? 10,000? or maybe you would like Israel to wait to accumulate more civilian death until it responds… then, maybe, you would believe that it have a legitimate reason to respond. or maybe not..

But you said that Israel continues to engage in ethnic cleansing, that they bulldoze Palestinian buildings to make way for Jews to live.  They don’t.

I honestly don’t know what happens to homes that are demolished for so-called “punitive” reasons.  They probably just get rebuilt by the same people who lived there before.  But they aren’t given to Jews (it is, after all, a crime punishable by death under Palestinian Authority law to sell land to a Jew).  The ones demolished for “alleged military reasons” are generally not replaced.  The vast majority were demolished to clear the Philadelphi Route, which is clear.  Some were probably demolished to make way for the West Bank separation barrier.  But not because Jews wanted to live on that land.

I’m not blind to human misery.  The Palestinians have it bad.  Very bad.  And the Israelis shoulder much of the blame for it.  But take a step back and ask yourself what you would do if you were an Israeli.

Not a single one of those homes was demolished to make way for a Jew to live in its place.

No, they were just conveniently demolished for REALLY, REALLY GOOD REASONS, and then the land was turned over to regular folks.

Your disingenuousness in the face of human misery makes me want to scrub myself with iodine.

The “punishment” demolitions were the problematic demolition policy I was referring to, which I guess is still in full force.  The “alleged military purposes” part is mostly very real military purposes (the Rafah demolitions, for example, were done to clear the Philadelphi Route, and were considered necessary to prevent the free flow of weaponry into Gaza).

That’s not to say I think the demolitions are just or right.  B’tselem, AI and HRW all have very good reason to be keeping tabs on–and criticizing–these actions as they’re not without controversy.   And I applaud all three organizations for the good work they do.

Israel can be very heavy-handed (sometimes unacceptably so) in the methods they use to defend their country.  But this isn’t about ethnic cleansing.

So, something like 2600 years ago?

According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem: From October 2001 to December 2005, Israel has demolished 668 homes as punishment, leaving 4,182 people homeless. Israel has demolished 1,746 homes for alleged military purposes since B’Teselem started keeping statistics in this category in 2004. According to the United Nations, about 1,500 homes were demolished by the IDF in the Rafah area in the period 2000–2004….

A number of human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, oppose the practice. Human Rights Watch has argued that the practice violates international laws against collective punishment, the destruction of private property, and the use of force against civilians….

Amnesty International has criticised the lack of due process in the use of house demolitions by Israel. Many demolitions are carried out with no warning or opportunity for the householder to appeal….

However, Israel, which is a party to the Fourth Geneva Convention, asserts that the terms of the Convention are not applicable to the Palestinian territories on the grounds that the territories do not constitute a state which is a party to the Fourth Geneva Convention.[17][18][19] This position is rejected by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International, which notes that “it is a basic principle of human rights law that international human rights treaties are applicable in all areas in which states parties exercise effective control, regardless of whether or not they exercise sovereignty in that area.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_demolition_in_the_Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict

Here’s mine:
http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa60

The Palestinians are just as much carpet baggers as the Israelis.

Obviously there have been immigrants over the years, but the Palestinians are still largely descended from people who have lived there since remote antiquity.

Israel has had a (problematic) policy of bulldozing the homes of suicide bombers (I’m not sure of the current status of that policy), but they didn’t give the homes to Jews.  There were some cases where the building of the separation barrier divided villages from their farmland.  And in Hebron (home to a particularly obnoxious band of settlers, most of whom are American-born) there have been some Palestinian families effectively forced from their homes due to the settlers’ presence making them unlivable, and some of the settlers have tried to occupy those homes. But the IDF actually kicks those settlers out.

There have also been some eminent domain cases in Israel proper where Bedouin Israeli citizens were kicked out of illegal squatter villages to make way for highways.

But I can’t think of any remotely recent example where the Israeli government actually took land from the Palestinians, bulldozed the buildings, and gave it to Jews.

Israel’s problem is that a tiny and largely non-contributory portion of the population has vast and undue influence over how the country is run. Even more than in the US. Align Israel’s internal population with political influence and it would be a progressive, democratic, secular state within a year.

But consider the flip side:
1) There are no settlers in Gaza.  Israel forcibly removed every last settler.  And the blockade (as problematic as it is) only began after Hamas took over Gaza and started the rocket campaign post-withdrawal.  It’s a game of chicken and somebody needs to give, because innocents on both sides are suffering.  But if your next door neighbor has repeatedly tried to kill you in the past and continues to swear he’s going to kill you, wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop him from getting better weapons? 

2) Should Jews not be allowed to live in the West Bank?  I’m not a fan of Israeli settlement policy and in the interest of peace would go so far as to say that settlements shouldn’t exist in the West Bank (i.e., Jews shouldn’t live there) if they can only exist in the context of what’s effectively an apartheid system (yes, I’ll use that word for the West Bank).  But step back a second and consider who exactly is doing the ethnic cleansing if the international community effectively decrees that all Jews have to leave the West Bank.

If, on the other hand, you’re arguing that ethnic cleansing continues by the mere existence of a Jewish state on any of the land between the sea and the river, then I vehemently disagree.  Israel’s policies in the occupied territories (which were Egyptian and Jordanian prior to 1967, not Palestinian) are hugely problematic and need to change drastically if there is to be any hope of peace.  But Israel within the 1948-1967 borders (and many parts of Jerusalem where Jews were once again allowed to visit and live after 1967) are a very different story.  There are problems there, too, that need fixing.  But those problems are more akin to problems we have in the US with racism, sexism and political division.

It may also be informative to look up and read the Balfour Declaration of 1917…

Did Israel engage in some ethnic cleansing in connection with its founding? Yes, just like almost every other nation-state on earth that ever fought and won a war for territory.

They’re still doing it, Mister Selective Vision.

But it’s everyone else who unwilling to compromise that you’re fine with seeing eliminated from this planet?