west bank

[Gamblor]

i dont know much about the history of Christianity past the part my people played in it [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

What I do know is that at the current moment, in Israel, the values and ethics of Christian Arabs are much closer to the Jews than the Muslims. Generally, the Muslim Arabs are much more crass, and hold the monopoly on violence against Jews (minus a few Bedouin and Druze incidents).

[Autocratic]

[ QUOTE ]
i dont know much about the history of Christianity past the part my people played in it [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

What I do know is that at the current moment, in Israel, the values and ethics of Christian Arabs are much closer to the Jews than the Muslims. Generally, the Muslim Arabs are much more crass, and hold the monopoly on violence against Jews (minus a few Bedouin and Druze incidents).

[/ QUOTE ]

Generally, Muslim Arabs are more crass? Instead of responding to every inane post of yours, maybe I'll just start asking for sources. Source, please. I'd really like to see when that study was done.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I appreciate that there are a dozen pundits that you can cite for your version of events, but it simply isn't true.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is great. A dozen people who follow and write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a living, but you ... know better than all of them.

[/ QUOTE ]

I see that it is necessary to complete Alger's warning, since you seem to misunderstand it :

"There are a dozen pundits that you can cite for your version of events, and there are a dozen more for my version of events".



Now, I have read those offering the version of events that claims, in a nutshell, that "Israel is and has always been right" and that "Islam is the Devil". (Books such as Horowitz's on Islam and the Left, for instance, or Dershowitz's The Case for Israel).

But have you read any of these books ? They too were written by "people who follow and write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". Who are, moreover, mostly Jewish scholars.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
A dozen people who follow and write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a living

[/ QUOTE ]
There's a simple test for this: find the offer that Barak supposedly made and that Arafat rejected. (At Camp DAvid, Arafat did reject Israel's insistence on sovereignty over the entire Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount area, but had no proposal dealing with the whole range of issues before him. The Israelis made no binding or written offer at Camp David at all). I haven't looked there recently, but the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website has exhaustive documentation on Israel's diplomatic history. Then try to figure out why, if Arafat walked away from an offer at Camp David, were the Palestinians and Israelis still negotiating at Taba six months later when the intifada was in full swing and there purportedly was nothing to negotiate. Moreover, this is a matter of public record and has been extensively documented (including on film, no less) by several key participants.

The pundits I referred to don't "follow and write about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a living," they broadcast the pro-Israel line for a living. They usually know a lot more about the issue than I do, but they don't report it honestly because the money and power are greater when you say things that money and power want to hear.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
Sharon refused negotiations altogether, well before the suicide bombings began, and continued to refuse them whenever they stopped

This is a lie. Arafat and Barghouti announced the intifada and suicide bombings became commonplace before the election that put Sharon in power. How do we know this? Because it was the bombings that put a right wing government in power.


[/ QUOTE ]
The first suicide bombing in Israel occurred in 1994, but it didn't become commonplace until the summer of 2001. The intifada began in September 2000. During it's first three weeks, the Israeli army fired a million rounds at Palestinians throughout the occupied territories (700,000 in the W. Bank; 300,000 in Gaza, according to Ma'ariv, citing official Israeli sources). By the end of the month, the death ratio of Palestinians to Israelis was ten to one.

Sharon was elected on February 6, 2001. The first fatal suicide bombing in Israel since the beginning of the intifada occurred on May 18, 2001, according to this BBC chronology.

The last-minute attempts to obtain a deal with Barak government and Sharon's outright refusal to negotiate or offer any plan for peace are matters of public record.

[ QUOTE ]
"concessions (however large or small) like Oslo . . . allowed Palestinian terrorist groups to arm themselves without Israeli supervision"

[/ QUOTE ]
Palestinian suicide bombers "armed themselves" with items found in any hardware store. You're probably referring to the excuses offered for Isreal's practice of gunning down PA policemen, like the five killed "by mistake" a few days before the first suicide bomb went off.