I live in a Southern town of about 60,000, surrounded by Marine base and a Marine Air base.

Had an interesting I-P experience while out for lunch yesterday. A lady came into the resturant holding a copy of our local newspaper which had a front page picture of the dead children in Gaza. She held it over her head and started screaming...."why are these pictures allowed to be published, why aren't you talking about what Palestine does to Israel". Dead silence in the resturant. Then an older man stood up and said and I quote..."Lady, you and Israel and the US congress can all go to hell". Dead silence again.
Then a trickle of clapping began, then the dam broke and everyone started clapping.

Have no idea who the woman was,someone said she was the wife of a Rabbi at one of our local retirement communities.

Very unusual for my right wing newspaper to front page that picture and surprising response to the upset lady from our normally polite and laid back residents in this resort town.

But it made my day.

Here is an analogy you may find interesting... very real...and a little closer to home.

If during the second World War - all the Jews were evicted from Israel by the Germans - litteraly [sic] - their population decimated - their people scattered all over Americas and dingy corners of Europe.

As the Jews were away (the Wailing Wall still standing there attended by remaining Jews, and the main city is still called Jerusalem) the Americans, the French and the English then move in and create a country called "Palestine".

As the Jews find themselves without a home, always labeled the "The Ciscumcised people" around Europe and Americas forced to race in thestreets pants down - they are shunned, killed, and scapegoated - even after 18 years the German liquidation.

After @ 18 years, the Jews realise that the only way to survive, and thrive again, would be to return home to Jerusalem...as the Germans are no more in power.

So they begin to settle small tracks of land in "Palestine"..first by buying them from locals using the funds they made in Americas and Europe in spite of theirbeing badly labelled by them..their lands thrive, and they are happy - their goal is to restore Israel - all of it

The Palestinians are not very happy about seeing these new wave of fancy dressed Jews on top of existing traditional ones, they call them "Settlers" and "Occupiers" and begin to kill them...

The Jews begin to fight back, and repell attacks, and yes, begin to "reclaim" more Jewish land including from native Jews - always accused of stealing "Palestinian" land.

The UN decides to split the land between the Jews and the Palestinians - the new Jews jump on it with some reluctant support of the native Jews and accept the division for what would they lose - the Palestinians dont - and continue to attack all the Jews - native and settlers.

As the more land comes under Jewsish control, the Palestinians do everything they can to destroy this re-born Jewish sate..but to no avail..

As the Jews finally return to Jerusalem, reclaim it, rebuild it, makes it live and thrive again...as 18 years before the German desaster.

Would the Jews be "Occupiers" of Jerusalem?

Would the Jews be "Colonisers" of Jerusalem?

Would the Jews be "Usurpers" of Jerusalem?

Wouldn't the Jews simply reclaimer of their state as they were driven away from it by the Germans?

But you may wisely ask why in the first place the Americans, the British and the Europeans didn't restore Solomon's Kingdom and provide free ticket to all home-sick Jews to return their homes so that they don't keep interfering with their IP and FP, butd created a dummy state of Palestine and split it into a meaningless two states?

The answer might be "The Gods of the West shows their wisdom mysterious ways that we mortals of the Middle East and the Far East cannot fathom;->>

Stephen, what would I do without yourthought experiments even if they are not yours;->>

Grand Sen~or

"After @ 1800 years, the Germans realise that the only way to survive, and thrive again, would be to return home to Germany..."

Are the English really Germans? If English people settle in Angeln and Saxony, where their ancestors lived 1800 years ago, would they be in any sense "returning home"? Do they have a "historic right" to do so against the wishes of the Germans who live there?

What the second thought experiment shows is that "national legitimacy" is not something passed down from On High, but a condition in flux based on political, military, and social events. We in the West, for example, generally believe in at least some conception of Squatters' Rights - what does this mean for Israel's existence?

I suppose that would mean that nobody really has a right to tell the Palestinians that their attempts to either wipe Israel off the map or carve out a new state - Palestine - are somehow fundamentally illegitimate; they're just illegitimate right now because they haven't actually won either a state or recognition that represents true sovereignty.

As a by product of French Revolution the requirements for a modern state are:

1. They must have one low - the constitution
2. They must have one land
3. They must have one nation (however it might be a jumble of races/tribes/etc.
4. They must have one language
5. They must have one leadership
6. They must have one etc...

when you create a dummy state like that call it the USA/EU or the Palestine wouldn't matter much for the Jews/Arabs/Kurds/English/Germans for from the beginning they have different laws. Why would Jews leave their laws and accept the domination of the Constitution of the USA - the laws of Jumble Jacks? Or the Arabs leave aside their laws and accept the Constitution of Israel as their law?
In a mono-law structure of State, there is _no_ place for multiplicity of laws, so there is no end splitting such dummy states into ad..infinitum in the name of peace,
If Israel recognised the law making rights of Arabs, then perhaps they wouldn't face such stiff resistence. The same way if the USA had recognised the Jews to make their own laws and implement them to the Jews, they wouldn't interfere the IP and FP of the USA incognito;->> - mind you there are heaps other SPEEs out there in the queue waiting this recognition of their god given law making rights;->
What I am trying to point out is;-> There is something wrong with this French Revolution product of the concept "state".
It is useless in our modern environment. It caused two WWs and broungt us on the brink of the Third.

Grand Sen~or

Dear Writer and readers, all the above-mentioned ideas come from one presupposition, which is challenging.

if we consider Israel as a legal state, you are right. but its not that way. the invention of Israel accompanied many massacres with the help of UK and then US. still some countries in the world haven't recognized Israel as a legal state. UN has accepted it with the total support of US 60 years ago. the same UN is now unable to end any violence throughout the world, including the last one in Gaza.

the question is: Who has occupied Palestinian Land? -Palestinians?

who recognized the Palestine as a home to Jews?
-UK and US?

why Palestinian people are considered as not understanding anything.
Israel is based on the theory of owning the lands from Forat river in Iraq to the Nile in Egypt. the have chosen Palestine since they believe the prophet Solomon was from that special Land and it is their promised land.
they have ignored borders and gathered jews from all over the world to populate their unpopulated and occupied land.

therefore, in my opinion, there is one solution, and that is to remove sth as Israel from Middle East.

As president Ahmadinejad proposed, if Europeans and Americans, fill sympathy toward israel, they devote parts of their lands to settle israelis. Palestinian are Palestinians and they need all their homeland.

Your thought experiments leave out the fact that the Ashkenazi Jews who comprise 95% of the Jewish population of Israel, are not in fact descendants of the original Jews of Solomon's Temple. They are the descendants of Europeans who converted to Judaism, so when they immigrated to Israel, they were not "returning" anywhere. It just made for nice propaganda, same as "a land without a people for a people without a land." Read the article in Haaretz on Shlomo Sand's new book, "When and How the Jewish People Was Invented." A way forward to resolve this conflict would be for us to apply the law. After all, if we could invade Iraq to enforce Resolution 1451, why does Israel get to thumb its nose at hundreds of UN resolutions, the ruling of the International Court on the wall in the West Bank, the Geneva Conventions, etc.?

Through the eyes of much of the world, Israel is the last in a line of great european colonial movements cloaked as a mythical return to a former place in time.Is it a wonder the natives are upset? In America, we are good at shafting the natives,we have had a lot of practice. I do not see any change in U.S. policy of dealing with "natives" since they are considered by European minds as less culturally advanced and because "foreign agents" essentially control U.S. foreign policy.

1800 years is simply too far in the past. Every human on the planet would be eligible for displacement if there was no time limit on land claims. Global stability demands that we ALL have to renounce claims from 100's of years in the past.
61 years on the other hand? There are still Palestinians in Gaza who recall living in the present Israel. At what point do you tell a people they can no longer fight to regain their homeland?

I put together a thought experiment after working in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. I wrote it into a screenplay based on events that I had seen between 1993-2002.

The title is Two Weeks in September. Take a look at p. 41 by Adobe's counting or p 40 by the text and start just above the line:

EXT. OUTSIDE NEW KYOTO (FORMERLY HOUSTON) -- MORNING

Here is the backstory.

This scene takes place after the Japanese victorious in WW2 drove the vast majority of American citizens from the continental US. The former residents now languish in refugee camps along the Mexican and Canadian borders. (The Japanese colonial office frequently argues that Europe should take them back.) The Japanese government argues that genetic anthropological studies demonstrate that native Americans descend from ancient Japanese and that therefore Japan has rightful claim to the continental USA. Japan has dispatched colonists to replace ethnically cleansed American citizens.

Professor Walt's original thought experiment is more accurately viewed as comparative history.

He was describing common beliefs about ethnic Ashkenazim (Yiddish speaking Jewry) in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Czarist Empire.

[Note that I cleaned up the grammar and removed repetition in a version of the following that I posted as a blog entry entitled Backgrounder on Pale of Settlement.]

Even though the Pale is often identified as a (cramped or overpopulated) Russian getto, in reality it was vast and corresponded to Russian ruled portion of the historic homeland of ethnic Ashkenazim plus Chernigov and New Russia. Jewish income, education and life-span were significantly greater than those of the non-Jews among whom they lived.

Nevertheless ethnic Ashkenazim were on the whole extremely angry because they no longer had the elite status they had enjoyed in Commonwealth Poland and now lived in the imperial sticks and not the imperial center without actually ever having moved. Like all other populations in the Czarist Empire, ethnic Ashkenazim had no freedom to settle in the imperial center without an internal passport and official permission.

Ethnic Ashkenazi population was increasing while the traditional Jewish economic sector was vanishing.

Thus Ethnic Ashkenazim added rage at loss of income to anger at disenfranchisement.

Ethnic Ashkenazim were able in some ways to call upon the resources of extremely wealthy Western Jews dominating the media and banking industries in Central and Western Europe. German American Jews were in the process of developing similar power in the USA (often with the capital resources of relatives in Europe).

When the Czarist Empire started moving Jews away from the Western boarders because of Jewish smuggling, the outcry from the Central and Western European press forced the Czar to reverse his decision.

As ethnic Ashkenazim became more disaffected, a small segment of them undertook a campaign of revolutionary violence, sabotage, and targeted assassination.

Ethnic Ashkenazim planned and carried out the three defining assassinations of Russian history: Alexander II, Pyotr Stolypin, and Nicholas II.

In reaction to increasing Ashkenazi violence, other populations in the Czarist empire (including Jews of other ethnicities) develop increasing hostility toward ethnic Ashkenazim.

In 1881 pogroms break out that result in increased emigration of Jews from Czarist Russia to the USA and are usually identified as the inspiration of the Zionist movement. [Note that the collapsing Russian Empire was by 19th centuries a relatively violent place. Pogroms were not uniquely directed against Jews, and it is possible to identify Jewish rampages as well as Jewish incited pogroms.]

Eventually, the Czarist Empire reaches the breaking point, the Czarist government is overthrown, and then the Communists, whose senior leadership is predominantly ethnic Ashkenazi, steals the revolution and imposes a regime of hitherto incomparable violence with a tremendous level of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide often planned and executed by ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet leaders.

It is important to keep in mind that the Zionist violence we are seeing today either is a product of the increasing violence of ethnic Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe and in the Czarist or Soviet Empire or develops out of a common Jewish mentality of violence. See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.

True understanding of Zionism and the State of Israel is not possible without a thorough understanding of the history of ethnic Ashkenazim.

In general Jewish dominated media created at least as false a picture of Jews in the Czarist Empire and in the Soviet Union as it does of the conflict over Palestine.

In addition the Soviet Refusenik Movement was basically a fraud.

The techniques and practices of the Israel lobby predated Zionism, and we can be fairly certainly that it would have manufactured a heroic Zionist resistance if Zionist colonists at some point in time were defeated and confined to some sort of Jewish autonomous region under the control of a Palestinian state.

Ben-Gurion's advocacy of the Peel Plan (1937) supports this conclusion. He wanted the Zionist movement to accept it and then grab the rest of Palestine later. He could be certain that such dishonesty would be completely whitewashed by Jewish dominated media.

Note that Ben-Gurion lost that debate because the British and American Zionist political economic oligarchs of the time period after some internal debate came to oppose the Peel Plan. Then as now the leadership of the Zionist colony is subordinate to the political entity that I call the Zionist virtual colonial motherland (or Judonia) and that is roughly comparable to the Israel lobby in the formulation of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. (See also Another Perspective on the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland.)

34th US President IKE suspended AID TO ISRAEL
“Ike” = Dwight David Eisenhower American general & the 34th President of the United States (1953-1961). As far as WAR & PEACE issues; IKE had the richest experience of all US presidents!
In WWII he was the commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (1943-1945) he launched the invasion of Normandy (June 6, 1944) and oversaw the final defeat of Germany (1945).
Ike cared about the STRATEGIC WELL BEING of Israel because HE was aware that the creation of Israel was the ultimate answer to European anti-Anti-Semitism.
On October 31, 1956 Ike’s presidency was marked by SUSPENSION OF US AID to ISRAEL in protest at its invasion of Egypt in the Suez Crisis.
In an emergency session of the United Nations (UN) November 1-2 1956 General Assembly was called to consider the Suez Crisis. U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE John Foster DULLES, ATTACKED the British–French–Israeli ACTION, and the Assembly votes for a cease-fire!
Britain & France complied promptly, but ISRAEL did not; until January 22, 1957 when Israeli forces completed their withdrawal.