Muslims will never accept Jews on perceived Muslim land. Muhammad tried to exterminate them in his time and for Muslims, to have Jews in the Middle East is an insult to his legacy.
There will never be peace until the Islamic death cult is defeated.

It is not the Isreali-Arab dispute that motivates Islamic terrorism but the jihad sanctioned by their holy book the Quran. In it one finds that the war on Jews must be pursued till Judgement day. In addition the war on all infidels till their lands have been seized and the infidel subjugated.

We are seriously deluding ourselves that what is happening in Isreal, will not happen here in the West.

This new reader says, lovely blog and please continue.

Israel will build over 600 new homes in Jewish settlements. The announcement came a day after the Jewish state approved an expansion of a fence in the West Bank.

The government published tenders for a series of building projects planned for three West Bank settlements on occupied land in defiance of the US-backed road map that calls for a halt to construction at settlements.

The plan calls for 604 new units — 50 in Maale Adumim, 530 in Beitar Illit and 24 in Ariel, a sprawling enclave of 18,000 near the West Bank city of Nablus.

Presumably, another 10,000 IDF troops and associated military hardware will be deployed to 'protect' these illegal settlers - and the cost of this will come as usual from the generous US taxpayer (whats another couple of billion dollars between friends ?).

Housing Ministry spokesman Koby Bleich said the plan was part of “a government policy by which we are to advance and develop communities in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) in accordance with needs and natural growth.”

OF COURSE, THIS IS JUST ANOTHER LIE - WE ALL KNOW THAT THESE ILLEGAL OUTPOSTS ARE JUST ZIONISTS TOOLS TO FURTHER DEMORALISE AND PROVOKE THE PALESTINIANS.

The international community views all Jewish settlements on occupied territory as illegal.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States has “concerns” about Israeli settlement activities.

“The president continues to believe that the fence presents a problem,” Powell told reporters in Washington. “We also have concerns about continuing settlement activity on the part of the Israelis.”

France said it would “without delay” hold talks with its EU partners, Russia, the United Nations and the United States on the consequences of Israel’s decision to build new fences.

“France will coordinate without delay with its European partners and the members of the Quartet to examine the consequences that can be surmised from the decisions announced yesterday about the dividing wall,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Herve Ladsous told reporters in Paris.

He noted that “the inadmissible character of acquiring land by force is a fundamental principle in Resolution 242 of the Security Council upon which the peace process is based.”

“This is evidence that the road map has been fully assassinated by an Israeli policy of settlement expansion, to which the United States is a witness,” Palestinian Cabinet member Yasser Abed Rabbo said

Palestinian anger had already been stoked by the Israeli plans for the next phase in a 350-km (210-mile) network of electric fences and concrete walls that cuts deep into the West Bank.

“Israel is pursuing its crimes by expanding this racist and Nazi wall that expropriates our land,” Palestinian President Yasser Arafat told reporters in Ramallah.

He accused Israel of “sabotaging and destroying the peace process” and appealed to the Quartet to stop Israel from going ahead with the project. Palestinians were alarmed at Israel’s estimate that new sections of the barrier would leave towns and villages with 60,000 inhabitants on the Israeli side, making it difficult for them to reach other parts of the West Bank.

The illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories continue to expand.
The most outrageous expansion is slated to occur in the Gaza Strip, and offends both the letter and the spirit of the 'road map'.
Although Sharon has staged a few violent removals of some uninhabited trailers which were there specifically so their removal could be shown on
American television, the process of increasing the size of the settlements so that peace will always be impossible continues.
Since they are supposed to be turning over the land to the Palestinians, why would they expand any settlement?
They continue to play this bad faith game of playing lip service to the concept that the
Palestinians are entitled to the land at some point in the future when there is no more terrorism, while simultaneously creating the 'facts on the ground' which make peace impossible. In fact, the recent Palestinian ceasefire, like the Oslo Accords before it, has just been used as a method of obtaining relative
quiet to continue the rather obvious plan to slowly ethnically cleanse the Occupied Territories of Palestinians.
Squeezed out by increasing numbers of settlements of increasing size, with crazed settler violence making Palestinian life impossible, the plan is to force the Palestinians to decide to leave (remarkably following the Zionist myth that the Palestinians voluntarily left in 1947).

Insufficiently Sensitive;
We can all agree that Jews have as much as a right to live in mecca or hebron, as muslims have to live in London. So assuming you don't support deporting the muslim population of Britain or limiting where muslims can live in New York; you have to agree that no matter what Nazi or Kuranic or Marxist philosophy underlines Palestinian behavior it is illegitimate.
No "stoking of anger" can justify Dawa;
No "provokation" gives legitimacy to Nazism;
No "tribal belief" permits Jihad.
By not protesting the Nazi/kuranic of the Palestinians you have a hand in the dawa/nazi/jihadic behavior of the savages.

Very impressive start Melanie, please keep it up. We need more like you.

The Law Student - you need to go back to school - to study common sense, as you are deficient in this valuable commodity.

This is a good read but I'm afriad the problem goes much deeper then a few nations sponsering terrorism!
Islam itself is the cause of all this hatred.......and its not just in Israel........look a dozen other places where Muslims in the name of Islam are murdering innocent civilians!

I'm afriad unless the Quran and Hadiths are edited, many Muslims will go on happily killing in the deluded belief they are going to gain paradise for such wanton evil!!

Folks, the brainwashing is terribly deep.......it has been going on for 1400 years.....our greatest weapon is the Pen and through the Interenet we can help destroy Islam as we are seeing droves of Muslims leaving this horrific 1400 blitzkrieg movement!!

Yes I know it sounds harsh.......but it is reality! Until Islam is destroyed or secularized, these evil acts will continue from Southern Phillipines to Algeria....

Horrible stuff indeed!!

Devon Hill

I would just like to add my thoughts and prayers go out to the families that have lost loved ones today in Israel......exempting this murderous little witch whose family was having a party for her 'martydom' today........May she rot.....

Devon Hill

If you wish to see a good example of Israel’s state-sponsored terrorism and ethnic cleansing at work, Hebron is a good instance :

http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/h021903.html

Good, for you, Melanie. And a real WRITER on the web. Very nice to see!

To the seething, whining Jew-haters, I have a simple comment: don't like losing your territories to Jews? Then DON'T START WARS WITH THEM THAT YOU CONTINUALLY LOSE. The West Bank and Gaza ("Yesha") are essentially territories abandoned by their former governments and are administered by Israel who WON THEM IN 67 after another war that the Arabs started and lost to the Jews (can't help rubbing that in!). Nothing that I know of says that Jews can't live there. Too bad for you, boo-hoo and all that.

Came upon your diary; thank you. You bring a voice of clarity to the fray.

One quibble however. It concerns your statement that Israel's settlement policy is "wrong and morally corrupting." The difficulty is faced especially by Jewish or Christian believers in Scripture. Those who are strongest for the settlements are those who believe the promises God made to Israel in the Torah.

To such believers, not only are the settlements "moral", they are a duty unto the Lord to fulfill promises made. I would respectfully ask you to consider this point of view when thinking and writing of the settlements.

I personally do not believe in the literal nature of scripture. I do believe, however, that simple justice should not restrict Israel to its indefensible 1967 borders. To the extent that settlements facilitate more defensible borders, they are a good thing.

As for injustice done to the Arabs, perhaps they are simply paying the piper for their continual denial of the rights of Jews to live in the Middle East.

As a man who cherishes freedom of conscience and religion above all, I am offended by those who posit that a Jew may not live in the West Bank. Just as Arabs and Christians (not mutually exclusive, I recognize) may live, with full rights, in Israel, so should Arab states welcome Christians and Jews.

Should. But don't.

Unless and until they do, Israel is fully justified in extending her settlements.

Unless I'm mistaken, there was nothing signed at Oslo that prevented ANYONE from building in the WB and Gaza.

If Arabs can live in Israel, why can't Jews live in the WB and Gaza, anyway?

And if the Palestinians don't like it, why don't they move to the 75% of the original Palestine which was already given to them.

sadly the West--especially Europe--will not realize that the suicide bombing method in Israel is part and parcel of Al Queda's work--mainly indirectly--until it is too late...that is when AQ causes mass casulties in Eurpoe somewhere using a better weapon but the same method...they will nt realize in time that you can't ask the Jewish nation to just make peace in the face of such blind hatred...unfortunately reality has way of intruding and it will mean the death of many Westerners and Israelis

A good essay, Melanie, but you have been hoodwinked by the Arab propagandists regarding the settlements.

For example, the Jewish "settlement" in Hebron simply reestablished the Jewish community that existed in Hebron for ages and was massacred and driven out by an Arab mob in 1929.

If there is ever going to be peace between Israel and her neighbors, it certainly won't be in the context of Arab countries that are carefully kept Jew-free while there are one million Israeli Arabs and calls for Israel to let in hundreds of thousands more. The sad truth is that the Arabs are the most racist people on earth. The highway sign in Saudi Arabia with one lane marked "Muslims" and another marked "Non-Muslims" is just one of many examples. Arab slave traders in North Africa is another, as were leaflets distributed by Arabs at the UN's infamous "Conference Against Racism" in Durban, SA.

Finally, remember that most of the Arabs don't recognize Israel. For them, Tel Aviv is a "settlement." But the fact is that no Arab government seriously entertained making peace with Israel until Israel began building settlements.

To wit, the Arabs need to be reminded that their aggression has its costs. If they lose land in the process of jihad, they just might never get it back.

The people who have died in these bombings were killed not just by those who carried the bombs, but also by "intellectuals" in the U.S. and in Europe.

If the civilized world had united in condemnation of terrorist behavior, it would have been substantially suppressed by now. Instead, terrorism has been excused and even encouraged by people in faculty lounges and newsrooms. Their motivations? Careerism, peer approval...and the desire of people who lead soft, almost risk-free lives to feel that they are doing something "courageous".

Good work. The settlements are a tough issue, I can't really make up my mind on whether or not they are justified. But I do think that they are politically stupid. However, keep up the good work, and try to keep Britain sane!

Your diary is is welcome in the world of plain-speak. Maybe you and others are the forerunners of objective opinion which will eventually see the demise of "big media" for honest reporting.

If one has seen this link from LGF

http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2003/09/18/news/local/dadeli0919.txt

then one must not wonder why. The plain hypocrisy that allows this and permits discussing a situation without context, journalistic fraud and media agenda is at the root of it all.

6 million places have been vacated by the Jews in Europe (more, actually, considering those who managed to get out alive). Each and every European country that had Jews and/or collaborated in the slightest way with their expulsion through the chimney (that is, all of continental Europe and any other country that didn't actively fight against the nazis) could easily solve the Middle Eastern problem simply by relocating the so beloved Palestinians in their own (I mean European) lands. France and Austria and Belgium and Norway and Switzerland and Italy and Germany and Spain and Croatia and Hungary and Poland and Romania and Lithuania and Greece and Ireland and Slovakia etc. would, I'm sure, be quite happy to grant the Palestinians this kind of "right of return", wouldn't they? They were all part of the problem. Now they have a golden chance to be also part of the solution.

Well, are the settlements moral or not?

They were originally bargained with 35 years ago to secure peace for the state of Israel, but since then the Arab world have made it unequivocally clear (at a number of occasions) that they're not interested in the territories, not interested in a Palestinian state, and not interested in peace...
Only in the utter defeat and annihilation of Israel.

The settlements are moral as soon as Israel stops the charade - they just need to say "Ok, no more bargaining. This is ours now, and any attacks against us will be met with a force ten fold."

That would be the proper thing.

It is as moral for a Jew to settle in Hebron or Jenin or Mecca as it is for a muslim to settle in Dearborn, MI or in London.
If you want to say that it is "illegal"; so compare it to Mexicans settling in Los Angeles. Muslims may not like it. You may not like it. But unless you advocate the genocide of Latino-Americans or of Asian in Britain you have to agree that it is moral for jews to "occupy" hebron, Mecca or Jenin.
Nazi beliefs of Arabs do not make their lunacies okay.

the problem with settlements is not that the settlers will not leave, it is that they are not being offered financial compensation and therefore cannot leave. this is PEACE NOW's settlers survey, it's an interesting read. http://www.peacenow.org/nia/pr/07232003.html

lovely blog by the way!

Take a look at the question from the following angle. The Native Americans, whom we could consider the only true owners of the continent, were not, in the least, responsible for the crimes perpetrated by European whites against African blacks. From their point of view, the African-Americans are intruders that should be immediately sent back to Africa, after all, the American continent doesn't belong to them, does it?
Or we could consider this: Texas, New Mexico etc. should be given back to the Mexicans, who descend from Spaniards; but then these should give the lands back to their earlier owners, the Aztecs or their descendants; the problem is that the Aztecs themselves conquered the region in th 13th/14th century only, stealing lands that belonged, I think, to the Toltecs, who stole them from the Olmecs, who stole them from the Chichimecs etc. European homo sapiens sapiens hegemony was built on the extermination of the legitimate owners of the land, the Neanderthals. On the other hand, the "pieds noirs", who had been living in Algeria for far longer than the Muslims have been living in England were ethnically cleansed. But, of course, the "pieds noirs" were European invaders, right, while the Algerian Arabs were the native population, right? Wrong. Before the Arabs arrived, only a thousand years earlier, most of the land was owned in part by the Roman Empire and in part by the Berbers. These are right now an oppressed minority in Algeria, having been forcefully converted to Islam. But it seems that the only land claims that are ever taken seriously are those made by Arabs and/or Muslims.

It is essential that people in the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the infidels, understand that according to central tenets of Islam, the dar al-Islam, or Domain of Islam, MUST expand until it has subjugated the entire dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, where the Infidels still rule. This is not outdated; it is not tangential; it is central to Islam, which is a geopolitical ideology formed in the seventh-eighth centuries to explain, justify, and promote the Arab conquest of far more populous lands -- Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, etc. -- by imposing an ideology that required the Christians, Jews, and latterly the Zoroastrians and Hindus who were conaquered -- to submit to their conquerors, who brought with them a "religion" that, a mishmash of pre-Islamic Arab lore, Christianity, and Judaism, was designed to make conversion of some of the Infidels easier, and to establish the system of dhimimtude -- permanent humiliation, degradation, and insecurity -- that those non-Muslims who did not convert, and were not killed -- suffered under (over time, of course, many did convert, which is why the "Arabs" of today are almost all non-Arabs, given the scant population in Arabia at the time).

Israel is part of dar al-Harb; it is intolerable that Infidels, especially the hated and despised Yahudim, should have a state of their own. They must be reduced to dhimmitude. The P. A. Constitution is explicit: there must be the imposition of the shari'a over all of "Palestine" -- i.e. a re-subjugation of the Jews, who will either be 1) killed 2) converted or 3) have to live in the state of degradation and humiliation that they did, for 1300 years, in the MIddle East (with occasional intervals of semi-decency, dependent on a ruler's whim).

Israel's size is irrelevant; its existence as an Infidel state is the problem. It does not matter if it is 10 times as large, or 10 times as small. From the viewpoint of Islam, it can not exist as a non-Muslim sovereignty.

Compromise, further concessions, which make sense among Westerners, make no sense to the Muslim triumphalism that takes every concession as a sign of weakness, to be further exploited. Nothing will so guarantee a future war as will any further territorial or other concessions by Israel. The foolishness of its leaders, in not deeply studying, and thoroughly assimilating, the nature of Islamic doctrine, has had terrible consequences for Israel. It has also had terrible consequences for the entire West, which -- had it understood the problem, had it been properly educated by the Israelis in the first place -- would have come to understand the nature of JIhad, and above all the role of demography as a weapon of Jihad. Unless something is done, very dramatically and soon, Italy, France, and Holland will in two generations have a 50% Muslim population. The West will cease to exist. And it will not only be certain statues in Florence and Rome that will suffer from a Muslim population.

Forget about the perceived gaucheries or trivial miscalculations of the U.S. Wake up.

It is a truism of life that nations or people who lose a war, particularly ones they started, cannot ask for any loss incurred as a consequence of defeat. The Arabs dont seem to realise that judgement of history. Their attitude is similar to that of a gambler demanding his wager back, if the horse he backed lost the race. I dread to think the bookies response in such a situation.

The Arabs lost the war they started and that Judea and Samaria are in Isreali hands not just because the Arabs lost but it is best for all concerned. It makes sense in all ways, economically, strategically and common, that Palestinian arabs should settle in the Palestinian state of Jordan.

The Arabs once they have given up on the delusion of destroying Israel, can then get back to making something of their lives. The present impasse is destroying lives, both Jewish and Arab, not just literally but metaphorically, now and into to the foreseeable future.

A division by a geographic barrier is the only real choice, given the viseceral hatred of Muslim Arabs to Jews.

My first visit here.....great site! There is most certainly a moral inversion now operating in the West.
The lastest and most outrageous example in my neck of the woods was the Montréal Gazette's Saturday
review of Irshad Manjii's book 'The Trouble With Islam' The reviewer trashed the book; indeed how could he have done otherwise
he was one of CAIR's Canadian executive directors. Ah, the Montréal Gazette so liberal,
so hip, so cool.........makes great cat litter too !

I got your link from http://imshin.blogspot.com, Melanie, you're brilliant - keep writing!

Every country gets the government it deserves
is a cliche banded about a lot lately.
Israel is faced with a cabinet & Prime Minister
who it elected but does not deserve.
The problems in the middle east need to be sorted by serious negotiations & active partnership.
By going further to the extreme right & rolling up
ones sleeves to "put up a fight" will not help the
situation. Bombers still explode themselves into
kingdom come & the Israeli Government still does nothing constructive.
The majority of those "glory seekers" who sit in the Israeli parliament (Knesset) on all sides of the house are pig-headed, arrogant, selfish, low lifes who are looking after their cosy seats at all costs. They care little of the population of Israel & are happy to step on anyone who gets in their way. They get elected by an ignorant public who vote the same way their grandfathers voted, they get voted because "honest" people don't run
for Knesset. Israel ie Arabs, Christians, Druze, & Jews deserve better.
Arafat is playing his dirty game much better than Arik Sharon, who is living out his dreams at the expense of the people who elected him. When the "real" people stand up for themselves & the "unreal" Knesset changes its dirty laundry we may make some steps toward a "real" peace.

I agree b'lev - the fact that israel is run by a hideous bunch of war criminals, control freaks and pathological liars is quite unbelievable.
Sharon and his zio-nazi believers have only one interest - to remove the Palestinian people and steal their land.
Israel is an embarrassment to the civilised world.