David Walters,

I fail to see how what you have written exposes my comments as “silly.” Just because one, or even seven, generations of Gazans lived in the same place as they do now, or if they moved there in 1994, it makes absolutely no difference to my analogy. It is what they have been doing for the last 40 years or so, especially the last 5 or 10, that was the focus of my comments. It is about their behavior, not their residential history. So, if a Muslim in England did as I suggested in my analogy, but had only moved to England in 1994, would it have mattered one small bit? Obviously not. And if he had lived there since 1944 or 1804, would it have mattered? Not at all. It is really about the behavior of Gazans, under the leadership of the openly eliminationist Hamas, and what any sane government charged with the protection of its citizens would do in response to it. If Gazans merely wanted a state of their own, a Palestinian state, they would clearly not be doing what they are, and would have had it long ago. If you can’t yet “get it,” I’ll spell it out for you; however the conflict between the Jews of Israel and anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli Palestinians started, whatever the rational for the Gazans once was, and as shocking as it may seem to you in your parlor, it now only resembles a one-sided crusade, a Jihadi crusade, to wipe the Jews from the face of the Middle East. Anything less does not resemble their behavior at all. And, Israel is just now doing her best to remain humane, but survive nonetheless.

Furthermore, are you aware that the vast majority of the people now living in the Palestinian territories are recently descended from the same people, families and tribes who now refer to themselves as Jordanians, as well as those found in all the other Arab states surrounding Israel, and who had never had any kind of “Palestinian” identity until after the 1960′s, when encouraged by the Arab nation states and the Soviet Union to couch their desire for Israel’s destruction in terms of a new and never-before-heard-of nationalist movement, the most popular and successful form of revolutionary agitation at the time? Before there was Palestinian nationalism, there were only people who, if they thought of themselves as having any identity at all beyond their family or tribe, thought of themselves as part of the greater Arab Muslim Ummah, not separate from Syrians or Egyptians or Iraqis or Jordanians, but nonetheless anxious, just as now, to eliminate, despite the continuous presence of Jews in the area since records have been kept, as much of the Jewish presence that they could in what is now the State of Israel.

And, in the precise areas now occupied by Arabs now calling themselves Palestinians, a huge number of their forebears, perhaps half or more, moved there from other nearby Arab states and territories only in the late interwar and immediate post WWII years, due to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the relative prosperity of the nearby British Mandate where Jews, both native to the land and more recent early European Zionists, along with Christians and their accommodating Arab neighbors, had long been developing a much more modern and attractive economy. So, does residence since 1936 trump all other considerations, even the readily and proudly admitted attempt to exterminate a whole nation and its Jewish citizens? Well, then what about residence since 1947(Israel). What about international law (not just later UN proposals sponsored by the third world dictators and the Islamic coalition)and what it says about territories acquired and held by a nation as a consequence of defending itself from an attempted war of annihilation, in the event of the aggressor/loser refusing to agree to an actual treaty of peace, rather than a temporary cease fire? Please read a little about these matters before concluding that the latest story on PBS or in the Guardian is remotely relevant to the realities on the ground.