Does Israel have a right to exist ? Of course, as much as a nation of Copts or Yazidis or Kurds or Druses or Turcomans or any of the other thousand small ethnic groups and sects.

And after all, strictly speaking, 'Arabs' have migrated from the lower-central Arabian Peninsula only over the last 1400 years, into the Fertile Crescent and across north Africa.

And even Mecca had a huge Jewish population back in 610 CE, before it was brutally expelled by Muhammad. Yes ? No ?

As Netanyahu indicated, Israel can't afford to let rockets fly into its territory, to show any weakness: to relent means to cease to exist.

Joe

Let’s parse Ali’s opening statement for a moment

“It is an irony of history that an entity, which claims to be innocent and the victim of the Holocaust ...”

Which “entity” is that, exactly? The entity attacking Gaza is the Israeli Defence Force at the direction of the Israeli government. The “entity” that endured the holocaust was European jury in the 1930s and 1940s. The state of Israel did not exist when the holocaust occurred. Only by the most coarse extension are these the same “entity”, Jews past and present, European and Israeli, pro- and anti-Zionist all participate in an undifferentiated lump sharing collective guilt. This is racism at its crudest

“… has been itself committing the most heinous crimes in contemporary history.”

Assuming that by “contemporary history” Ali means since 1948, when his list of crimes begins, this makes Israel’s crimes worse than the mass deaths and starvation of the Great Leap Forward, the genocides of Cambodia, Rwanda, the murderous oppression of Indonesia, Guatemala and Amin’s Uganda, and North Korea, the atrocities attending the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, the wars in Congo and Sudan, and Tibet.

or even the horrors today in Syria and Iraq.

The essay featured on the ABC Religion & Ethics website by Khaled Abou El Fadl titled The Tragedy of Great Power The Massacre of Gaza and The failure of the Arab Spring provides a very interesting nuanced perception and understanding of the behind the scenes dark machinations of all of the key players in the psychotic psycho-drama now being played out in the lunatic asylum called the Middle East.

A nuanced understanding which, if nothing else, shows how the stuff you read about this dreadful conflict in the main-stream media is little more than deliberate Orwellian propaganda (especially in the case of the Murdoch "news"-papers).

Meanwhile I have just finished reading a book titled The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand. He convincingly argues that there never was, and is not now, such a collective entity called the Jewish People.
Such a fictional entity is of course the principal justification for the Zionist colonial occupation of Palestine.

no doubt in your mind dd their was no holocaust.

Whatever people did or did not in the first half of the 20th century, there are now 7.9 million Israeli citizens living there, of which only a handful in their 90s were old enough to possibly influence the course of Israel's creation. The vast majority of these citizens were born in Israel or were still children at the time Israel was created.

Now who cares whether these people are Jews or Arabs or anything else? Also who cares WHY their neighbours want to kill them all? They live there, that's their home and they have every right to defend themselves!

Hi Duck,

Nor would Jewish people claim to have one single collective identity, there are pro- and anti-Zionists, socialists, conservatives, liberal, Orthodox and Reform Jews, Ashkenazi (East, South and West) and Sephardi Jews, even atheist Jews. But all would take for granted that yes, they are all Jews regardless.

After all, is there a collective entity of 'English', with which all 'English' can identify ? Londoners, Scousers, Geordies, Cornishmen, Cumbrians and of course Yorkeshiremen ? Not to mention differences in class, political stance, etc.

In Scotland, Highlanders and Lowlanders, people from Glasgow and Edinburgh ? Not much love lost there either :)

Any group you want to claim a seamless collectivity for ?

Joe