| The crux of my understanding is this. The Holocaust created the need for a Jewish as a final solution. It wouldn't have been possible without European's support and it's also obvious to me the geopolitical interest is what drove them—to establish a Western friendly state in the Middle East. Mandatory Palestine simply was not a country or recognized as such. PLO, Hamas, these guys aren't fighting for independence in my view, they are out to destroy, out of hatred and self-pity. I'm not going to side with a culture that teaches their kids to kill their enemies at an institution where academic learning should take place. I always side with a culture that teaches tolerance, peace and education. If the Palestinians truly wanted political independence, then they chose the worst way to do it, through violence. The IRA gave this up when they realized they could achieve independence politically and economically. My hope is that the Palestine side realizes this and overthrows Hamas and PLO with a rational minded leader. It's also not out of the ordinary to assume under the security threats that Israel faces not only from Palestine but also its neighbors, that their security apparatus is aimed at prioritizing the safety of its citizens and sovereignty which means a pro-longed war. It is similar in some ways to South Korea's situation but worse in many ways—you have a densely populated small mass land connected on all sides to hostile conventional forces as well as asymmetric threats from within. then I ask is the Korean peninsula an apartheid state? It's very clear to me as an outsider to see which one is the aggressor and poorer. South Africa is under a completely different premise—it's goal was colonialism and its aftermath was an ugly systematic racism. Israel was created for very different reasons, it was the systematic persecution based on theology and class envy based on stereotypes that formed out of long existing persecutions. So no, to me, the Palestine-Israel situation is completely different from South Africa's policy which was aimed at keeping the Dutch descendants colonial wealth. Is America an apartheid state? No but there are certain elements that remind us of it in parts of it. Having said that is there also part of Israel that is uncomfortable to North Americans and Western Europeans because we believe we live in an open society yet its ridiculous to me how we ignore our own problems and our own hypocrisy towards "outsiders". My message to people who support Palestine is this—you have change nothing you make it worse because you embolden these violent terrorist groups that run it which in turn creates overwhelming response from the people that get attacked. I will never understand people who get upset when a terrorist group launches rocket attacks on civilians and it is met with equal or greater force. Many conflate the pro-longed war as apartheid state, well in that logic, Korean peninsula is an apartheid state for making North Koreans poor. They did it to themselves after decades of asymmetric warfare and conventional attacks on the South. Terrorism and violence as a way to push political independence is counter-productive, it only removes credibility for your cause. If you support Palestine that means you also being okay with terror attacks or "freedom fighters". Let me remind you a group calling themselves The Base also sought to launch terrorist attacks to liberate their skin tone, ironically calling themselves after terrorists that attacked their country. Are neo-nazi white supremacist groups in America living in an apartheid state? In their head they are, at least according to the FBI |