Netanyahu calls on Israel’s Arabs to ‘thrive in droves’

[Ken Burch]

21. I don't pretend that Israel faces NO security threats...nor that all Palestinians are saints.

There are bad actors on the Palestinian side(as there are on the Israeli side).

I simply reject the idea that all Palestinians should be treated as terrorists or should have to suffer collectively for the actions of thre violent.

And I think at least some of the security threats are Netanyahu's own doing.

Palestinians are brutally repressed by the Occupation...anyone in that situation is likely to support resistance against their oppressors, and as the repression and injustice(all settlement expansion is an inherent injustice)continue, resistance methods are likely to become, in any situation among any oppressed people, more desperate and violent. What else would you expect?

The hostility Palestinians feel towards Israelis is the hostility of the oppressed towards oppressors. It has little if anything to do with the religion/ethnicity/culture of the oppressors. If it were other Arabs(Palestinian resistance against the Jordanian government bears this out, as does at least some of the Arab Spring-a lot of people supporting that DID want secular democracy and progressive change)or European Christians and the Ottomans during the imperial era, or Americans during the U.S. occupation regime in Iraq, there was, and there would be, just as much violent resistance as there is now in the West Bank and Gaza(there are also plenty of people resisting in those places by nonviolent means, but I never see you acknowledge any of that).

Yes, there are some Palestinian bigots(as there are lots of Israeli bigots-you'd have to put every party in the current governing coalition in the bigot category if you're going to be honest about it)but it is inaccurate and frankly pointless to claim that none of this is about anything but Arabs hating Jews(Israel is not synonymous with Judaism or with the world's Jewish communities). And
justified anger at the actions of a state is not hatred of people.

The Palestinians have bad leaders and have used bad tactics. There is no way that continuing the Occupation and further expanding the settlements can ever cause either the leaders or the tactics to change...other than to change them for the worse(as was the case when Hamas rose, with partial Israeli support initially, to challenge the position of the PLO). Why stay with what everything that has happened since 1973 proves can never, ever work?

And why look for alternative leaders to negotiate agreements with, since that still leaves those not in the negotiations out there with all the weaponry they possess? No Palestinian leader can be expected to launch a civil war against Hamas or Fatah, and none would ever sign off on letting the IDF roam the territory of a new Palestinian state trying to liquidate those groups. Therefore, trying to replace Fatah and Hamas as the Palestinian leadership is a waste of time.

You're defending(and demanding unquestioning international support for) a status quo in this situation that cannot ever lead to the end of the conflict or to peace and justice for anyone.

Why do that?