PS There was a region known as Palestine, not a state. It was violent and it was a conquest. The same as when we speak of Mesopotamia and the Levant. They’re not states but its not a misnomer to call a conquest of them as such.

Another PS: it may seem silly to you but the Palestinians have no army since they have no state, thanks to a certain few who prevent it so. Also, this type of guerrilla tactics has proven effective in every type of warfare against a more powerful enemy. The extinguished only gives further fuel to more who want to fight the occupier. That’s how we dance this death.

It’s cynical, yes. But just as cynical as Israel putting their army bases and missile launchers around a heavily populated area for “protection”.

You need to take this up with those “freedom fighters” in the Arab “resistance” who don’t wear uniforms and who deliberately place their bases, arms factories and rocket launchers on top of schools, inside mosques and in the middle of densely populated neighborhoods.

“…the violent conquest of Palestine ” is a misnomer: there was no Palestine; the UN Partition creating a state of Palestine was rejected by the Arab states and seemingly by the Palestinian Arab population; the alleged ‘violent conquest’ was the Israeli response to the Arab attempted violent extermination.

Apart from the fact of Gandhi’s success, he can speak for himself:
http://tinyurl.com/3l7afh
cont’d: http://tinyurl.com/4s32aq
(Jews and Palestine, by Mahatma Gandhi; The Harijan, 21Jul 1946)
http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-gandhi170903.htm
http://www.twf.org/News/Y2001/0815-GandhiZionism.html

To be honest, benefitting from hindsight I have my doubts whether Gandhi’s method would’ve worked in Nazi Germany. I also doubt that Gandhi knew the full viciousness of the persecution going on – in 1938 the worst was still to come, after all.
That doesn’t invalidate his criticism of the violent conquest of Palestine however.

Same with us…the Arabs threatened to annihilate us in 1948 and nice people like Fiddler and Gandhi said “it isn’t nice to fight back…just let yourselves go under so I can demonstrate how nice my philosophical system is”.
I will give your proposals all the consideration they are worth.

As for Jewish claims going back to Abraham, Erich Fromm answered that already: “If all nations would suddenly claim territory in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”
Self-determination in your own country may be what you want, but it’s also a red herring. The world, for better or worse, isn’t divided along ethnic/national lines. There are plenty of ethnic/national minorities almost everywhere, and ideally they have the self-determination with full civil rights they’re entitled to within their host countries. The notion is not one of domination but of cooperation. The world at large isn’t nearly there yet, but that doesn’t relieve us from trying. “The others are bad, too” ceases to be an excuse upon outgrowing kindergarten.
All that isn’t exactly new, it was proposed long ago by Zionists like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Judah Magnes (and also Mahatma Gandhi). We could idly speculate till the cows come home where we’d be today if they had won the argument over the Jabotinskys and Ben Gurions. We do know however that the “traditional” approach – if force doesn’t work, try more force – has failed. Those pesky Palestinians aren’t going away. Isn’t it high time to try something else?

I don’t know if Hamas would allow Jeff Halper to live in Gaza, should he wish to do so, and neither do you. So far the only entity to have made that illegal is the Israeli government. There are a number of non-Palestinian “internationals” at least temporarily living there, with no apparent objections by Hamas. The former settlements were a different matter, not because their inhabitants were Jewish, but because they were by design hermetic enclaves forced into a foreign population. The same is true for the WB settlements – even if not every settler is a gun-toting Kahanist lunatic, this is the very purpose of the whole settlements enterprise pursued by Israel – to create “facts on the ground”, that holy cow of Israeli politics.

I happen to be a German whose grandparents’ houses were bombed (they survived). While I do not feel terribly sorry for myself over that, I still regard the carpet bombing of civilians a first-rate war crime, no matter whether it’s the Germans bombing London and Coventry or the Brits and Americans bombing Hamburg and Dresden.
Many a village in Eastern Europe was destroyed by the Wehrmacht, its inhabitants shot or expelled, because they had allegedly housed partisans. Frequently that might have even been true. So they had it coming, too, to the last child, hadn’t they?

Y. Ben-David excoriates those documents which he does not care about and then thrusts up two documents which he provided no link or source to as barren for his (supercilious) opinion as dogma. Way to go; I wish I could be that duplicitous. If you don’t care about their illegality, then why do you invoke those two statutories to support your opinion of their legality?

Fine. Don’t pack up and leave because the law states so. Maybe more pain will be inflicted by both sides. Maybe that’s the price you’re willing to pay for this dream. Genocide? Ethnic cleansing? Denial of existence? What lengths will be appropriate for your goal of “peace”? Is it peace within yourself or peace with those who oppose you? Do you even care about those who oppose you? I don’t think you do.

And you think that you will reach peace that way?

Israel has all the right in the world to exist: It’s a member state of the United Nations. It doesn’t need to resort to the kind of arguments you put forward. If we’re going to use those as the basis for Israel’s existence, we might as well just save ourselves a lot of time and just say that it’s manifest destiny.