I have no problem criticising the current Israeli administration's members for committing war crimes; likewise, I have no problem criticising Hamas for committing war crimes.

Australian government relationship with Aboriginal Australians is worth a short digression. Australian indigenous people were recognised by the Australian constitution in 1967, as a result of a national referendum. Overseas readers may be interested.

A reasonable history can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_referendum,_1967_(Aboriginals)

The article goes into considerable detail. One paragraph gives good sense of the outcomes of the referendum:

"The overwhelming support [90%] for the ‘Yes’ vote gave the Federal Government a clear mandate to implement policies to benefit Aborigines. ... [F]ederal legislation has since been enacted covering land rights, discriminatory practices, financial assistance and preservation of cultural heritage. The other aspect of the constitutional change, enabling of Aborigines to be counted in population statistics, has led to clearer comparisons of the desperate state of Aboriginal health."

Discrimination still occurs in Australia, against Aboriginals, against other people of colour, against other people.

In late June of 2007, the government of the day sent federal troops into aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory to extirpate all the sly grog merchants, welfare cheats and paedophiles. There was broad public support for this incursion, possibly because soldiers stopped short of burning and bulldozing any substandard housing and shooting and shelling in the general direction of suspected miscreants. Despite the arguable gains made, the government of the day lost the subsequent federal election.

The episode gets a brief mention by Mick Dodson:

"Professor Dodson has been a trenchant critic of government policy towards indigenous Australians.
In 2007, he described the Northern Territory intervention as "storm-trooper tent diplomacy of health providers dressed in battle fatigues"."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24962558-601,00.html

I am waiting for the day when Israeli government policy shows an similar degree of social progress toward the Palestinians it has dispossessed, and a popular move toward reconciliation with other rightful occupants of the Holy Land.

mac,
I believe we should understand egalitarianism and how the secular west cannot come to grips with it. A secular Israel, based purely on current western values, is not likely to be egalitarian, neither is the interplay of a faction ridden Hamas, favouring the rise of armed militias with party control over Gaza’s illegal economy. I would also add, if the whole world is to sing the song of a "peace process", where a Jewish young couple from Melbourne, who has never set their foot in Palestine, has a right to settle in the Galilee, there will always be resentment. If Jews and their descendants are to regard this as their inalienable right in perpetuity, there will never be lasting peace.

Uncannily, secularism nurtures an ultraconservatism within Western state machinery, screeching madly onward towards what has been described by Huntington as the 'Clash of Civilizations.' The Islamic Ummah describes religious morality and universal ethics as absent from the Western consciousness - I tend to agree. According to Mitt Romney, "Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality..." On the social level, Secularism generates a culture of degeneracy, a society of minimal selves, ephemeral lives. Socially, secular societies have abandoned the cultural cohesion based on transcendental human values religion creates. This is what makes secular society fragmented, excluding those it defines as the 'other'. The values of a secular west, as now adopted by Israel, have created this ‘other’ – so tell me, where does any blame truly lie?

Our innate tendency is to differentiate and to discriminate. Peaceful coexistence is hardly a part of our history. It was advocated by Islam as one of its tenets in the name of symmetrical recognition, as stated in the Qur’an. The second tenet is social justice, the third principle or tenet in Islam is egalitarianism. The West, in losing track of its religious base, appears unable to stomach the principle of egalitarianism, neither before God or the law, national or international.

"Our innate tendency is to differentiate and to discriminate. Peaceful coexistence is hardly a part of our history."

This hasn't always been true. In the Middle Ages (circa 800-1400AD) Arabs that settled in Spain were the global centre of academic achievement and intellectual development. Their society had Christians, Muslims and Jews that, although culturally very different, learned to live together in harmony.

Maybe the fact they were intellectually developed/superior was the glue to their racial harmony. The problem in the Gazan conflict is that the ordinary people do not have a positive outlet, cannot smooth over their differences and hence emotions start to fray. Surely, part of the solution to this problem is to get people doing something constructive with their lives in a way where they do not feel oppressed.

Quranic Guidance on Muslim non Muslim relations. (from Chapter 9)

29. Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allâh, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allâh and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islâm) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah[] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

30. And the Jews say: 'Uzair (Ezra) is the son of Allâh, and the Christians say: Messiah is the son of Allâh. That is a saying from their mouths. They imitate the saying of the disbelievers of old. Allâh's Curse be on them, how they are deluded away from the truth!

How did this 'guidance' translate into real world behavior in Muslim Spain, that bastion of tolerance, harmony and utopian blessing?
Well..for the Franks..here's how it all panned out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours

<<While Abd ar-Rahman was pursuing Eudes, he decided to despoil Tours by destroying its palaces and burning its churches.>>

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/732tours.html

Isadore of Beja:

Then Abderrahman, [the Muslim emir] seeing the land filled with the multitude of his army, crossed the Pyrenees, and traversed the defiles [in the mountains] and the plains, so that he penetrated ravaging and slaying clear into the lands of the Franks. He gave battle to Duke Eudes (of Aquitaine) beyond the Garonne and the Dordogne, and put him to flight---so utterly [was he beaten] that God alone knew the number of the slain and wounded.

Hmmmm...nope... still looking for that tolerance and utopian spirit :)
cayyyynt find it.

RobP,
I think there is a partial truth in the 'golden age myth', where there were perhaps glimpses of tolerating foreign belief and culture, but any cursory referencing (as indicated by our friend Poly-Boaz), will suggest this as largely illusory. As far as the relationship between Jews and Muslims go, there is no clear scholarly consensus over whether there was truly a paragon of interfaith relations, or whether it was simply similar to the treatment they received elsewhere at the same time. In the latter 6th Cent, the Christian Visigoths of Hispania persecuted the Jews severely; therefore, the Jews welcomed the Muslim Arab and mainly Berber conquerors in the 8th century. The Muslim 'tolerance', however, is unlikely to rank anywhere near along side our idea of 'moderm equality'. After all, as with traditional Christianity or Judaism of that time, how could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.

As "dhimmis", or "protected non-Muslims", Jews and Christians etc. in the Islamic world paid the jizya (a material proof of the non-Muslims' acceptance of subjection to the state and its laws), which was administered separately from the zakat paid by Muslims. Perhaps illuminating was the Qur'an's insistence on observation, reason and contemplation ("see", "think" and "contemplate") which led Muslims to develop an early scientific method based on these principles - particularly empirical observation. The 1066 Granada massacre of 4,000 Jews by Muslim's, however, tends to tarnish the illusion of a 'golden' age with its promise of a real and lasting tolerance. This is despite any intellectual prowess that might seem so evident in the greatest of any medieval mind. Ironically, and at a certain point in history, Judaism was the dominant religious force in Jerusalem; Christianity was embryonic and Jews were the persecutors. Christians hoped that Jews would join their new, universalistic faith – but they didn’t.

relda,

I think you have the wind under your wings and have soared too far,
you seem to be arguing against the modern liberal democratic secular state- because it doesn't support an egalitarian society? Does this imply a "Jewish" Israel as the only solution to the problem? I would never support a theocratic or ethnically based state anywhere on this planet. Of course Jews born outside Israel had, and have, no right of "return" or to settle the West Bank, this doctrine was chauvinistic nonsense from the start, however it was sustained by European guilt. By any humanitarian standards Israel should (like Australia) never have been founded, but the damage has been done.

Your argument that religious belief is essential for a moral foundation for humanity has been refuted by philosophers since Classical times. Religious "morality" is in fact a system of (1) dubious rewards and punishments in the next life and (2) barbarous sanctions in this life.

The most pernicious doctrine that threatens the Western secular state is not loss of faith, but cultural relativism.
This is an interesting subject, however it's probably OT.