Glocksman and Cordex
Ummm... They were captured during the 1967 war, when Israel attacked first. The 1973 war was when Israel got blindsided by the Arabs.
You should get your facts straight. Israel was about to be attacked by Egypt and Syria, and Jordan was gearing up. Nasser made repeated threats to "push the Jews into the sea" and to "annihilate the Jews," and had kicked the UN "peacekeepers" out of the Sinai desert in preparation for doing just that. The French, Israel's only arms supplier at the time, had cut off all deliveries of new equipment, spares and ammo when the crisis started in mid-May of '67, while the Soviets dramatically stepped-up deliveries to Egypt & Syria. Israel was the size of New Jersey, and a tank division could have cut Israel in half after about a 1/2 hour ride (it was 9, count'em 9, miles wide at its narrowest point). I'd say that the Israeli leaders not only did the only intelligent thing, but that they conducted the most moral of wars, one for survival. Ask yourself how long the US would have waited before launching a pre-emptive attack if at that time the Soviets had deployed 50 armored & mechanized divisions on the Canadian border and the Chinese a similar force on the Mexican border. Israel's '67 action was simply a pro-active defense. Kind of like us invading Iraq BEFORE it became too well armed with WMD's, since Hussein (like Nasser in '67) had proven himself to be a butcherous meglomaniac.
Besides, we captured Japan and Germany over 50 years ago. Did we annex them as US territories and 'settle' Americans in Bavaria or Honshu with the intention of keeping it?
First, there's a bit of difference between settling people several thousand miles away from your homeland on territory that has never been owned or claimed by your people (kind of like the Spanish and English colonized the Americas), vs. putting people on land conquered from an aggressive nation, land that used to belong to your people but was stolen by the Romans, Arabs, Turks and English over a 2,000 year period. Second and more recently, the Balfour Declaration gave all of the "West Bank" AND WHAT IS NOW JORDAN to the Jews in gratitude for Jewish help vs. the Turks in WW1, but the Brits did their usual thing and revoked a solemn promise when the big money (i.e. Arab oil) objected. The Israelis had every right to take that land PLUS all of Jordan even in the absence of the '67 threat to their survival, but they did the moral thing and only attacked when there was a choice between that and utter defeat, including a 2nd Holocaust (which Nasser promised to the glee of Egyptian audiences).
The West Bank isn't legally part of Israel. Those 'settlers' have no more legitimacy than the German 'settlers' did in 1942 Poland and are just as much a legitimate target as the Germans in Poland were to the Polish Resistance.
Again, you need to look a lot more deeply at your history, because you are just plain wrong. The Germans in Poland were naked aggressors, and no one but the most rabid racists ever believed otherwise. The Israelis are settling in territory conquered from an aggressor nation (Jordan, which attacked on the 3rd day of the war, despite Israel begging it not to), and for which they have a legitimate historical claim - one could easily argue that the Jews were "away from home" for a while (and on a non-voluntary trip, at that), and during the time they were away some squatters took over their home. They are now merely kicking out the squatters. Oh, and BTW, the squatters have NEVER recognized the right of the homeowners to live there, and despite being given generous terms have always refused to compromise in the slightest - to the point where they literally party in the streets when dozens of innocent Jewish children (hardly what you'd call aggressive imperialists at such a tender age) or old people (many concentration camp survivors) are ripped to shreds by some nut with a bomb. And you identify with them? You need your head, or at least your morals, examined.
Further, the so-called "Palestinians" are fairly recent immigrants to the area. Read Mark Twain - he visited what was then called Palestine in 1867, and wrote that the entire country was desolate, devoid of people. Jerusalem, BTW, was reported by Twain to have had about 40,000 people, mostly Jews. The "Palestinians" of today are simply Arabs whose grandparents and great grandparents came to this area in search of the prosperity that the farms and industry created by the western-educated Jews promised - much as many of the Blacks now in South Africa didn't originate there but are descended from recent natives of neighboring countries. There's a pattern here: the ill-educated neighboring people know a good thing (i.e. a western economy) when they see it, and since they can't create it themselves, they steal it (South Africa) or attempt to steal it (Israel) in the name of "national self-determination" or some such other PC nonsense concept used to justify a massive theft. Oh, and if you can kill a few dozen or hundred or thousand Whiteys or Jews in the process, that's just icing on the cake.
Cordex said:
Those settlers have no more legitimacy than the defenders at the Alamo. Israel has no more right to claim ownership of those conquered lands than the US has claim to a vast chunk of the southwestern states.
Cordex is mostly right: the Israelis have AT LEAST AS MUCH claim on the "West Bank" as the US does on the southwestern US. However, it is really MORE of a claim, since the southwestern US was never American territory before 1848 - whereas the "West Bank" IS ancient Israel and Judea. Hence, our self-righteous politicians should put a sock in it when they criticize Israel over its policies - unless, that is, they wish to simultaneously campaign on a platform of returning CA, AZ, NM, CO, NV & TX to Mexico (well, returning CA actually isn't that bad of an idea
). Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
Regarding Dean - let him get the Dem nomination. He'll be crushed like McGovern & Mondale. Heck, I take back what I said before - it isn't such a bad idea for the NRA to endorse him for the
Democratic nomination. The only negative is that such an endorsement might tick off enough Dems to lose him the primaries.
'em