I hope you are going to discuss now and not just preach.
I have been discussing, you're just throwing disingenuous arguments.
Indeed but does not change anything in the discussion. It is still evidence and need to be considered.
It is an anecdote by a writer, who spent time in the Holy Land and wrote it from his perspective. It is clearly neither impartial nor attempting to be, as witness his dismissive, practically contemptuous description of several Islamic landmarks and Ottoman rule and cities. It's clear this was written in the days of the weakening Ottoman Empire, gradually breaking down from overextension and crippling debt. It's to be expected the Ottoman lands would be backwards and poorer than Europe; this is not a sign of desolation, merely of a third world country in the making.
Irrelevant we are facts, not views.
Which I've been doing for the past several posts. You've tried to dismiss a Palestinian website for dismissing your almost religious attachment to Mark Twain's writing, and my response was that many websites discussing the Palestinian-Israeli issue tend to be one or the other, and have a tendency to show their allegiance. There are certainly neutral websites, but the sides most passionately arguing for one side or another are the ones who try to present the most facts, thus inevitably tainting their facts in someone's eyes.
Also, all Twain's writing proves was that Palestine was small and underdeveloped as a region. The use of "Devastation" is theatrics.
The first point you are confusing is Arab, most Israeli Jews are Arabs and Muslim and Christain Arabs who are citizens of Israel are about 3 million. The major dividing line is not between Jews and Arabs in this conflict but Jews and Arabs against intransigent Arabs. A large percentage of the Arabs despite what you say early did make a choice and that is not to go to war and compromise.
Might need to work on your nouns there, buddy.
Yes, the IDF recruits Arab auxiliaries, and has a few Arab units in it. Problem is, these people are not viewed very kindly by the rest of the Palestinian Arabs. To give a comparison, the French have words to say about the SS-Charlemagne division, and the Algerian
harkis are now all exiles in France. Hell, the SLA officers had to learn to live in Israel because France wouldn't accept them after Lebanon made loud protests. They live in a moral and legal grey area, very much disliked by others of their former group, and have to rely on continued Israeli goodwill. And for the most part, it's recognized they're not doing this on their own but at the orders of IDF command.
People make choices, the future is not fixed.
And yet the options one has are often limited by the aftereffects of the past and the limitations of the present.
The next is that if you check the foreign aid Israel gets it is mainly for defence, not agriculture as you say etc.
And every penny Israel doesn't have to pay for its defense is a penny going towards agriculture, development, and industry.
Finally, you are wrong about the money, the Palestinians have received extremely large of sums of money from Arab states, from the USSR, the West and other sources. Much more foreign aid than almost any people in the world. What happens to the money read on.
https://www.algemeiner.com/2014/07/...llionaires-how-hamass-leaders-got-rich-quick/
Which still pale against the amounts paid not only by the USA, but channeled through organizations such as the B'nai Brith Intl. and other Jewish charities, which have considerable influence in the West. The USSR has never given money as generously as the USA has, and while the USA has made generous aid to Arab countries, it all comes with strings attached, unlike what is paid to Israel, and the average paid to the Middle East per country is way below what Israel receives per annum.
https://explorer.usaid.gov/cd/ISR
While I concede the fact that the Palestinian leadership is rather kleptocratic, the argument in this thread is that the Palestinian territory was underdeveloped not because of wanton malice, but of the natural geopolitical situation of the times. Also, people tend to notice less the politician sucking dollars out of their wallet and more the people in F-16s blowing up everything they've lived in and worked hard to earn.
And your repeated arguments that the Palestinians should have just "gotten over it" are ludicrous. While the 1992 Oslo talks were the beginning of the Palestinians "getting over it", it was soon realized that they were getting a deal that would favor Israel, as Israel sped up procedures that would dump Palestinians from Israel into Gaza and the West Bank, and Israel has been repeatedly taking slices and chunks out of it, building settlements and favoring settlers over its citizens in more traditional places like the Tel Aviv metropolitan area who just want the peace treaty over and done with so they can turn to more peaceful ventures. The settlers, by contrast, are voting for people like Tsibi Levni, who
advocated moving Arab towns over to the Palestinian side and Bib Netanyahu, who constantly bellows about security and defense, repeatedly souring US-Arab and US-Iranian relations just to gain more votes with the average Israeli. Tsibi Livni has since retired, but she is just one of many right-wing politicians with agendas that encourage building more settlements and trying to squeeze more out of the peace deal, or overturning the peace negotiations entirely. When the other guy votes loud, angry people into office, you're more likely to drop the moderates and try calling for the violent radicals yourself to balance them out.
Also, you used the example of the German loss of Kaliningrad and that they've gotten over it, and that the Palestinians should too. By that logic, one would say the Irish Catholics should have gotten over it - but then the Good Friday Agreements finally came out with a solution that the Catholics can accept, after decades if not centuries of a Protestant boot on Catholic neck.
http://education.niassembly.gov.uk/post_16/snapshots_of_devolution/gfa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Agreement
Basically, in 1930 the Irish got most of their island back except Ulster, where British rule continued and the Protestant militias tended to have run of the place. By your argument, the Irish Catholics should have been glad they got 80% of their land back. But instead, the PIRA persisted, kept up its pressure on the British government, and through its efforts exasperated the British into finally giving up and giving them what they wanted. Not "getting over it", I'd say, worked very well for them.
Coincidentally, the IRA and the Palestinian guerrilla groups tended to be close buddies during the 1970s and 1980s, often sharing intel and resources. And when one team holds out until they get a good deal while the other tries peace negotiations only to get repeatedly snubbed or make repeated concessions, which side do you think people will remember won?
The above could only be written by someone who knows almost nothing about Twain.
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, but he left home at age 18 to work as a printer in several cities, including New York. He also worked as a Mississippi steamboat pilot for several years, until the Civil War began. He then went out west - to Nevada, where his brother was secretary to the new Territorial Governor.
Twain spent the next few years in the West - trying his hand at mining, then as a reporter. He wrote an entire volume of memoirs about this period, called Roughing It. He also had success as a humor writer. In 1867, the San Francisco newspaper Alta California paid for Twain to join a group tour of Europe and the Near East, and send back letters about his experiences.
The letters were a great success. They were collected and published as The Innocents Abroad, a best-seller which made Twain rich. He married the sister of a fellow tourist and settled in upstate New York, then in Connecticut. He never lived in Missouri again.
The Innocents Abroad covers France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria, the "Holy Land", and Egypt. There are eleven chapters on the "Holy Land", because it was particularly interesting to the Bible-reading American public. But that is less than a fifth of the whole book. It isn't "about" Palestine.
And I concede the point. The problem is, this particular entry has become a contested point in this thread because bernardz is holding on to it tightly as proof that the Palestinians basically fucked up their land and that they deserved to have it given to someone more worthy. Or something like that.
Thing is, it's clear Twain wasn't trying to give a fair shake to the Arabs or Ottomans here, and we're talking about a man who reacted to an Englishman poking fun at Americans as louts and ignorant yokels by tearing into the Arthurian mythos so fiercely that the English literary scene reacted as though he had marched into Buckingham Palace and took a giant steaming shit on Queen Victoria herself. So naturally, Twain used overly dramatic language about those silly foreigners and their backwards ways.