Rhys: you obviously haven't been reading very widely. Try putting a viewpoint in favour of two states in New Matilda (better known as New Palestine), Overland Magazine or Crikey.Com, or in activities associated with the Sydney University Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies or the NSW Greens or various unions such as the NSW Teachers Federation - all journals and institutions captured by the pro-Palestinian lobby which exclude any view defending Israel's existence.

The outcomes in the Middle East reflect a range of factors on which the strength of lobbies in Australia rates very low.

Try considering the political culture of the region which rejects any compromise or win-win solutions. The Palestinians could have negotiated a state in 2000 or early 2001 without all the tragic deaths on both sides associated with the extremist second intifada, but chose instead to push for absolute rather than partial justice.

All part of ther sayanims game, Rhys.

Sadly, any point of view that contradicts the dictates of the Jews automatically means you are a supporter and spokesman for Palestine.
It is all part of the familiar guilt promotion by Jews who have dined out on Holocaust marketing, for 65 years, well funded, well orchestrated and their favourite being the anti-semitic accusation, both of which have passed their use-by-date. However, not before stifling honest comment and free speech such as the Anti -Discrimination League in the US, an ananachronism as are so many of the Zionist tenets.

From Robert Weltsch Correspondent for German Zionist Weekly in 1925 and later for Haaretz.......
"We may be a people without a home but alas this is not a country without a people as 700,000 Palestinians have lived for centuries in Palestine.
We can only prosper if the newcomers such we are, arrive with honest and sincere determination to live together on the basis of mutual respect.
The realisation of Zionism is unthinkable if we do not succeed in integrating our movement into the ever stronger nationalist awakening of the neighbouring people”

And by way of a distinct ontrast..... Ben Gurion

"The one great concern that should govern our thought and work is the conquest of the land and building it up through extensive immigration, our central problem. We are conquerors facing an iron wall and we have to break through it. Zionism is the most profound thing in Judaism and I think we should act according to Zionist considerations and not merely Jewish considerations.
This will be revenge for what they did to our forefathers during biblical times".

Makes it easy to see where the psychotic hatred comes from and the contrasts from a decent Jew to a rabid Zionist.
Sadly, it is passed on from one generation to the next.

They know no better

The BDS movement is a ploy by the far left and mohammedans to destroy Israel. The first because it is a democracy and the second because it is an insult to their religion for a Jew to better them and to control any part of "moslem" lands. The war is religious, not political or territorial. Jews are a people; history, archeology, genetics, language and religion define them. "Palestinians" were invented for political reasons to oppose Jews. A great many of the "ancient indigenous" Arabs migrated to the Palestinian mandate when Jewish enterprise pulled it from the Ottoman backwaters. And just as "Palestinian" peoplehood is an invention, so is the myth of occupation: there never was a "Palestine". The whole "Palestinian" narrative is an invention to counter and mirror Jewish history and rights. It is a political con job by the followers of Hitler's ally Haj al-Husseini. And to the eternal shame of the left, it supports the jihad against the Jewish state.

The local Arabs are more concerned to deny Jewish self-determination than for statehood; each Jewish concession has been met by aggression and deceit. Israel respects land title, but the Arabs claim that state land is their property. All of their baseless claims and myths, like Jordanian terms for lands illegally occupied - the Western part of Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria which they called the West Bank, are supported by the left and countries who want to benefit by trade and oil and neither Jewish deaths nor suffering matter. But Czechoslovakia didn't matter and the world got WW2 and 50m dead. Islamofacism which drives the war against the Jewish state, has designs on the "enlightened" West which its leaders ignore, as much as it has on its own people who want to depart from the savagery and backwardness of 7th century Arabia.

And what of the Jewish people worldwide and “all their descendents ad infinitum, who were born and have lived in other countries for their entire lives” who are granted instant Israeli citizenship?

Peter Wertheim fails to acknowledge that the Palestinian refugees and their descendents have suffered six decades of being STATELESS because the state that was created in what was THEIR HOMELAND denies them their right of return.

This is the single most relevant factor that calls into question the legitimacy of establishing an EXCLUSIVE Jewish state in Palestine - it was done at the expense of the indigenous Arab inhabitants, who were the majority population with a centuries long attachment to the land.

An exclusive “Jewish state” could not have been created in Palestine without the ethnic cleansing and the accompanying dispossession of three-quarters of the Palestinian Arab population. This was and continues to be the injustice that needs to be addressed.

Well said, Dora Q

For a state that started out as a collection of displaced peoples from all over the world, with the passionate support of the world, rightly so, it has now come to this; a pariah state, full of hatred and hated by that same world, a state that sees any action by anyone, anywhere, as trying to bring them down. The well-known persecution complex , now grown into a malignant psychosis.

What this embedded attitude has done over time is to degenerate to a stage that there is nothing endearing in the character any more where once I could say that the cultured, pleasant, worldly qualities that were resident in most Jews has now totally dissipated replaced by all the tried and true phrases from the 'Oh, woe is me' purveyors thick on the ground in Tel Aviv. The new dictates of Zionism.

A lack of empathy to suffering will blind a human being to justice, liberty, decency, and personal discernment, rendering them virtually soulless. Such is Zionism.

All we can do is hope that in the coming generation through better understanding, an element of decency is created that raises itself well above all that has now been developed by the hated militarists, cruel, inhumane police, the mass murderers of Shatila and Sabra and hopefully who can see that one life is just as important as another.

Every country in the world would support such a transition in every way possible

What if the diaspora, on which Zionism and the Jewish right of return depends, were a myth?
A different telling of the story has it that the Romans were not known to disperse or transport peoples. In the case of the Jews of Biblical times, after the Jewish revolt in the first century, the Romans destroyed their Temple in Jerusalem, reduced them to peasantry and forced them to remain on the land to grow grain for the conquering Roman Legions.
This state of affairs continued until Islam swept thru the Middle East in the seventh century. Then a slow conversion of Jews to Islam began and accelerated during and after the 200 year reign of the Crusading Christians beginning in the very late 11th century.
This narrative makes the present day Palestinians the rightful heirs of the land we call Palestine, and the Zionists merely the latest crusading colonists to descend on that land from Europe.
The European Zionists are themselves probably the rightful heirs not of Palestine but of Khazaria, a Kingdom which used to straddle the area between the Black and Caspian Seas.