fungus

So you have done voluntary work for the Salvation Army. Yes I think that is good. But the alleged HR discrimination against gentiles in Israel is an exaggeration at best, trumped up at worst. As a Christian you ought to be aware of the true situation re Christians in Lebanon, a country which once had a Christian majority, but no longer. Talk to some Lebanese Christians, or Copts out of Egypt.

Stop believing the massive propaganda out of the Islamist world and from Saudi financed academics. Our journalists would rather criticise Israel than the Palestinian world, that is mush safer, Israel is not known for capturing or beheading journalists. TV material showed that when cameramen tried to show that most of Beirut was not damaged during the Israeli invasion, thugs with rifles stopped them from pointing the cameras anywhere where there was no damage. Hence the big lie that Israel had all but destroyed Beirut. We saw a succession of pictures showing the same buildings damaged again and again.

James Murdoch has publically stated that the European press is antisemitic and that is where our non Murdoch dailies get their reports. A Reuters cameraman was sacked for doctoring pictures, and that is the least of what happened.

The Salvation Army would have little chance of existing if the Islamists ever gained control of Christian nations.

Investigate the persecuted middle eastern minorities who found refuge in Israel, or the Darfurians who were accepted there. That doesn't sound like discrimination to me.

In the 1947-1948 Arab-Israeli war, approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees and were thus outside the soon-created nation of Israel. About 150,000 Palestinian Arabs remained inside Israel.

About 25% of these Palestinian Arab who remained inside Israel were displaced from their homes and villages, thus becoming Internally Displaced Persons and denied the right to return to their homes and villages. The Israeli army destroyed about 400 Palestinian Arab villages.

Israeli authorities have confiscated massive amounts of Palestinian Arab Israeli land, often to use it for building Jewish Israeli communities.

There are forty known Palestinian Arab Israeli villages which existed prior to Israel's creation and continue to exist today, yet are not recognised by the Israeli government. Thus, their residents do not get running water, sewage treatment, education services, health services, communication services or electricity, cannot get permits to build or expand houses or other buildings and are subjected to forced evacuations and house demolitions.

In 1948 the residents of the Palestinian Arab village of Kfar Bir'em were evicted from their village by Israeli authorites. They were told they could return in a fortnight. They are still waiting.

Numerous Israeli government services and benefits require citizens to have performed military service to receive them. However, Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims do not perform military service. Meanwhile, Jewish Yeshiva Israeli citizens do not perform military service either and yet receive the benefits.

Israeli government spending on education is less per Palestinian Arab Israeli child than it is per Jewish Israeli child.

The Israeli government has granted quasi-governmental status to the Jewish Agency, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish National Fund, often assigning them projects supposedly on behalf of Israeli citizens, yet these organisations are established to service Jews only.

Israel's Nationality & Entry Into Israel Law (Temporary Order) bars Palestinians married to Israelis from living with their spouses in Israel.

Israeli zoning and budgetary allocations are discriminatory towards Palestinian Arab Israelis.

All of the above are examples of systematic discrimination against Palestinian Arab Israelis. All are human rights violations. All are unjustifiable.

fungus

Perhaps a lot of the information you are quoting is just not true, or has been distorted beyond reality. The pro-Palestinian groups are masters of that. The Iman of the Al Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem even preaches to his flock that the ancient temple was not where the archaeologists say that it was, that the temple mount was not even built by Jews. He was interviewed on a film about Jerusalem making these ridiculous statements.

Ancient Jewish communities were forced out of their homes, when Israel reclaimed them the Palestinians regarded that as theft of their land. This includes Jerusalem, in which according to both British and Turkish records all through the 19th century a majority of the population were Jewish.

The numbers of Jews displaced from their ancestral homes in ME lands by almost any reckoning exceeds the numbers of displaced Palestinians. Iraq once had quarter of a million Jews, whose ancestors arrived long before the arrival of Arabs in the area - there are none there now. Lebanon has no Jews left. Mahomet cleaned out the Jews from Medina, apparently none of this counts with the anti-Israeli crowd.

Fictitious accounts of Israel blocking electricity supply to Gaza, which they had not done, were accompanied by crude photographs of people walking down shopping streets with the shop windows brightly lit and the neon signs blazing away. A picture of a conference lit by candle light lost its point when the intelligent viewer noticed the curtains drawn and sunlight trying to come through.

But some people will believe anything that supports their prejudices.

Fungus,

>>”If an Indonesian criticises another country's human rights record, would you say to that person, "What about what Indonesia is doing in West Papua and Aceh?!"

Yes I would.

What is hypocritical about your approach is that you pretend that Israel is somehow worse than the average liberal democracy in its treatment of its various citizens. You make absolutely no allowance for the fact that Israel is AT WAR, and has been for 60 years.

Israeli Arabs are, on average (it is pointless to talk about the issue any other way) better off than their relatives in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria or Egypt.

You say >>” In 1948 the residents of the Palestinian Arab village of Kfar Bir'em were evicted from their village by Israeli authorites”

And Israelis were evicted from the Old City, The West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the Jordanian and Egyptian armies captured them in 1948.

I would like to see your evidence for these 40 villages which do not receive Israeli recognition, as I would for your contention that more money is spent on Israeli children for education than Arab children.

>>”Numerous Israeli government services and benefits require citizens to have performed military service to receive them.”

This is a flat out lie. “At present, the only official advantage from military service is the attaining of security clearance and serving in some types of government positions (in most cases, security-related), as well as some indirect benefits” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Defense_Forces

Further, It is only COMPULSORY military service which these groups are excused from. There is nothing to stop them enlisting and some do. Most do not because they don’t want to join the Israeli Army.

In recent years, there have been several initiatives to enable Israeli Arabs to volunteer for civilian National Service instead of to the IDF, completion of which would grant the same privileges as those granted to IDF veterans. However, this plan has gained strong resistance from Arab members of the parliament, and as a result, has not been implemented yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_Defense_Forces

logic, do you always answer allegations of Israeli wrongs by dismissing the allegations as "Arab propaganda"? Because if you do, then I guess it would be futile to try to reason, debate or argue with you. Also, I recommend that you source your statements. You haven't sourced any of them so far.

Paul.L, you say that I am hypocritical and make out that Israel is worse than "other liberal democracies". This is the second false claim you've made about me in this thread. I haven't compared Israel's treatment of its Palestinian Arab citizens to anything. I haven't said it's better or worse than any other situation.

In regards to the forty unrecognised Palestinian Arab Israeli villages and Israel's budgetary and zoning discriminations, you can find all of those claims in sources I cited earlier. Same with the issue of the treatment of Palestinian Arab Israelis who don't serve the Israeli military.

In regards to the Wikipedia entries you cited about the same issue, I went onto them with interest. The problem with them is that they don't cite the sources about this issue. So it's impossible to verify the claims

The land was promised to both sides in return for support against the Turks in WWI. This led to the partition plan for the land, so as to give a portion to both sides (after the British having given King Abdullah some 60% of the land originally promised).

Only one side chose to hazard their ownership of half of the remainder on a gamble which would have seen them achieve ownership of the whole of the remainder through conquest (seen by them at that time as a legitimate way of transfering ownership of that particular land).

Here is the oft-cited and generally taken out of context Report of the Peel Royal Commission:

http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.nsf/561c6ee353d740fb8525607d00581829/08e38a718201458b052565700072b358!OpenDocument

Here is a transcript of a radio broadcast which sheds some light on the 1948 conflict:

http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.nsf/9a798adbf322aff38525617b006d88d7/04d23e80853f829985256a71006de4b7!OpenDocument

The question of the Palestinian refugees arose primarily because of the deliberate move by the villager's in the area to vacate the area so as to allow freedom of access to the Glorious Armies of Arab Liberation, who were to drive the Jews into the sea and thus provide them with access to the vastly improved farmland at zero cost.

There was to be NO question of Jewish return to the land that they legally owned (as opposed to merely occupied as tennants which was the position of most Arabs in the area).

All the hand-wringing and revisionism fails to address the fact that the aim of the Arabs in the wars from 1948 to 1973 was conquest. That was the name of the game and to the victor the spoils.