Palestinian Leader: Romney’s Israel Comments Were 'Racist': Agree?

If a group of people can't call themselves Palestinians, then there are no Americans either. Or New Yorkers. Israel wasn't a state or country, it was a people. When they came to what they now call Israel, they named it. Palestine has been called that by it's people for a long time. Most were there before Israel came into being. I guess you think Israel can call aquired property whatever they want, but the owners of the property don't have that right.

You need to watch the news from some country besides the U.S. The Israeli army raids Gaza on a daily basis and kills the people they say are terrorists. There is no accountability. Israel didn't keep it's agreement to allow trucks in and out of Gaza. That is why the shelling starting again in 2007. All we heard in America was that the Palestinians were bombing Israel. We didn't hear about Israel not keeping their agreement and that's why the cease fire ended. Israel has kept the people at near starvation levels and allowed no material for rebuilding after they destroyed the schools and hospitals. Go to the World Health Organization to see what they said about the situation there. They shoot farmers for trying to harvest their crops. They are the terrorists. The army, not the people of Israel.

I have friends who moved from the U.S. to Israel and they talk about what is happening. Many of the people there hate what the army is doing. There are protests within Israel from it's own people who believe that Israel should release the lands it agreed to give back, rather than allowing building on it. Gaza wasn't 'just' Muslims. There were Muslims and Jews living peacefully side by side. The bombs didn't care. Israel is occupying land that was not given to them and they are supported no matter what they do. Check out the UN sanctions against them. They just ignore them.

I have absolutely nothing against Jews. As a whole, they are good people who don't like what their government is doing any more than Americans did when we attacked and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel (the government)will never try to have peace with the Palestinians because they would lose the billions of dollars in support they get. All over the world Muslims and Jews live side by side and do fine, but not there. Oddly enough the alleged rockets into Israel seldom seem to harm anyone. Those pesky hamas must have bad aim nearly every time.. Supposedly there have been 300 rockets fired this year, most into the desert. More people die daily in Gaza than in Israel. There is a cease fire right now, again. But if Israel doesn't keep it's agreements, the rockets will start again. It's all they can do since they are not given any rights as a country. It is ridiculous to expect an occupied people not to fight back. The cruel and inhumane living conditions breed hate. They are literally being held hostage, with no way to rebuild or support themselves. I would not make peace with my jailers.

I don't expect you to take my word for anything, but do some research through other countries news sources. Open your mind and look for the truth. Even the BBC has a very different version of what is happening in Israel and the West Bank. Look at some unbiased reports and see how different they are. I was really surprised at how different the perspectives are.

You're basically right: Viewed collectively, the Palestinians have never had a "country" or widely recognized state to speak of, and the boundaries of the territory have changed throughout history, depending on the whims of various imperial powers.

However, viewed individually, Palestinians do have land they've lived on their whole lives (individually) and many generations (including ancestors), and they own homes they've built on that land. When the state of Israel seizes land, they aren't just annexing territory against the will of the people who live on it; they're quite literally stealing people's homes and businesses out from under them and forcing them toward what amount to closed-off reservations. Almost everyone recognizes that theft is an unethical violation of someone else's rights, especially theft of something so precious, but we've been conditioned to see governments as an "exception," so the wrongness of it all just fails to register with too many people. Anyway, the reservations the Palestinians have been forced onto are cut off from trade in many ways, and everyone there knows that Israel will continue to expand onto them and steal everything in their path, so there's no incentive to build capital goods to sustain an economy.

As a result, they're boxed in and starving as the walls continue to close in on them. A lot of Americans wonder why some of them go totally nuts and panic and start killing innocent people, then assume "they're all just uncivilized savages like that," so even honest self-defense just "blends in" with terrorism against innocents. In the end, people use it to justify the Israeli government's systematic, methodical theft of land. It's eerily similar to what happened to the Native Americans: We're emotionally distant enough from that situation that most people can recognize that case as an injustice nowadays, but we still haven't learned enough from history to recognize injustice we have any current involvement with.

I hope I am remembering this correctly but I read (years ago) that the Jews were willing for the inhabitants to stay if they lived there peacefully. Many didn't agree to live peacefully, and had, in fact, been fighting with the British for freedom before the influx of displaced Jews. They begin fighting against the incoming Jews also. The ones who would not assimilate were said to be the ones that left, or perhaps were pushed out.

I ask you this. Where could those misplaced Jews have gone but to the lands of their ancestors? Since the British controlled the territory and invited them in, were they wrong to return to their ancient homeland? And when a different culture is introduced, the overtaken country changes. What do you think is happening gradually with the Hispanics? At the rate the legal and illegal Hispanics are coming in and producing offspring, don't you realize that in fifty to a hundred years this will be a different America? So would it be excusable for us to war with and try to exterminate them as the Palestinians wish to do to the Jews? I don't think so. I also ask you this. Where else can the Hispanics go? They are starving down in Mexico and have little chance to improve their lot. Now, I could wish they would stay in their own land and change their own land. But they won't. They haven't the will or resources. So do you think we should react as the Palestinians did and war against the Hispanics?

The Israeli and Palestinian situation is not quite the same as the early immigrants who came to America. Most came because they wanted a better life, not because their money and possessions had been taken, and in many countries suffered persecution as with the Jews. The new Americans handled the Indians badly, but since most Indians didn't practice land ownership on an individual basis, I am not sure how it could have been done more fairly. But the Indians were certainly treated unjustly.

I'm not sure if your analogy to immigration really fits: Immigration is a process that occurs on an individual level, where the immigrants come into a country and find room for themselves.

On the other hand, the state of Israel was created through very different and more forceful means. I'm not sure exactly how the land itself was initially claimed in 1948, and whether people were forcibly displaced from their homes or individual plots of land or not, so let's assume for the sake of argument that they weren't. Nevertheless, a state - a government - was erected in that land without the consent of the people who already lived there. If you believe in the words of the Declaration of Independence, that governments "[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed," then you would have to concede that this was an injustice.

To be clear though, I'm not concerning myself too much with what happened in 1948. The odds of that being undone are basically zero anyway, and there are Israelis who have built their entire lives on that land since, greatly complicating the matter. Instead, I'm more disturbed by the ongoing pattern and campaign of government expansion, annexation, and land theft, which is continually driving people from their homes and onto reservations. People are starving on these reservations, partially due to trade barriers and partially due to an inability to build an economy (who can afford to invest in making capital goods when Israel might come and steal them in a couple months?). In some cases it's true that the Israeli government is allowing some people to stay in their homes, but this depends on the government's whims, and it is not true in the general case: Bulldozers and usurpations/appropriations are common. This is in addition to the Israeli government expanding their jurisdictional borders without the consent of the people who already live there, of course.

I'm pretty sure if Mexico was doing THIS to Texas, we'd be calling it a lot more than illegal immigration.

Israel sacrifices land only temporarily and to keep up appearances for suckers, which should be painfully obvious to any objective observer who takes a single look at the Israeli/Palestinian map over the years. All you need is a quick Google image search:
http://www.google.com/imgres?...

The balance of land has continually shifted toward Israel over the past few generations, and the Palestinians now own just a fraction of what they used to. Bit by bit, it's being stolen from Palestinian individuals by Israeli "eminent domain," as Palestinians are gradually corralled onto what are turning into "reservations."

Yes, I know, you can show the entire map of the Middle East, which shows Israel as just a tiny sliver of the whole thing, but the actual proportions are not the point. It's the first derivative, the rate of change through abject theft from human beings and displacement of these people, which matters here.

You people, lol. Because I don't buy the propaganda? I could give you a huge list of civilians that the IDF assasinates every year. Farmers, civilians, children. Israel destroyed multiple wells in the West Bank and forbid the people access to others. There have been a couple of photo ops that Israel has shown to try and say they are 'helping' the Muslims. It is BS. Again, even the Jews in Israel are against the occupation and oppression. The Israeli government spends billions on their army and their people are living in the streets and protesting. There was a protest recently about Israel spending all that money on occupying land that wasn't theirs, that they said they were returning. Israel's economy is worse than Americas and they are no different than we are. They want the political games and wars to stop and they want their social problems addressed.

The Palestinians are not allowed to use many of the roads and even if they were there is almost no gasoline to run vehicles. Like I said, do some of your own research. We don't get the real story in America. Also look at how many UN sanctions there are against Israel and it's army for war crimes. If it were any other country, we would have invaded them for all the human rights violations.

About 3 years ago I started trying to find out what was really happening. I kept hearing that the Muslims were bombing Israel, but the Palestinians were the ones that had the major part of the casualties. It wasn't adding up. Anyway, I'm done. I've come to realize that people don't care what is true. They believe whatever fits with what they want to believe. And Romney is a fool for trying to stir up more contention.