LadyEllen
Posts: 10931
Joined: 6/30/2006
From: Stourport-England
Status: offline
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Hi ddm
Please excuse me for writing and running, (I have to leave in an hour for a few days), but I had to respond to some of the points raised in your posts.
Judaism is an old religion - no argument there, however neither it nor the religion of Canaanites is the oldest in the world. There are many tribal religions which can trace themselves back many tens of thousands of years. Judaism is also a tribal religion in many senses but varies from others in that it was written down, rather than being an oral tradition. But just because it was written down, it does not make it more valid as a religion than any other, including those that came after it.
The right to retake lands which your ancestors formerly occupied is non existent - otherwise I would have claim over some Danish land and could evict a Danish family quite legitimately since my ancestors once dwelt there. The might (your own or your allies') to retake lands which your ancestors formerly occupied is something different. It is ridiculous to depend on rights asserted in a book written by your own side, to justify the taking of lands - I seem to remember similar claims over Alsace Lorraine et al being made by both France and Germany for nearly a hundred years - neither claim was legitimate just because it was written down. (I realise this isnt your argument).
Israel has a right to exist, but so do the Palestinians have a right to live in their ancestral lands. Siting Israel where it is now may have seemed sensible at the time, but was bound to cause problems. Given that land was expropriated from Germany after the war, it would have made far more sense to locate Israel in say, the Saarland, where antipathy could have been easier dealt with.
The so-called holy land is claimed by all who follow the Hebrew God. Until Israel was formed, such peoples lived peaceably with one another within it, as they did across the Middle East. It is the deeds of Israel as a state which have caused conflict - its tit for tat sure enough, but the first wrong was committed on the Israeli side by eviction of families from their ancestral land.
Jerusalem is held sacred by all who follow the Hebrew God and all have a legitimate claim to it. The choice seems to be whether it should be allocated to one or the other - why not all, as it was in the time before Israel? - or are the people of this God determined to violate his principle commandments in order to gain a superiority over his other followers which is anathema to his way?
The God of the Christian Bible is two Gods - students of the Bible have long since acknowledged this. The OT is basically Judaic and the NT is Christian. Its a difficult task to reconcile into one being the two attitudes in the OT and NT. As a specially collected library of writings, gathered to prove the legitimacy of a single form of Christianity amongst many extant at the time it is wrong to rely on the Bible for anything, unless one chooses to.
In the end, the religious element in the present conflict is not helpful (unless each side practices their true religion fully), and only a sideshow to what is essentially a territorial and human rights dispute - were the two sides not of different religions, then the dispute would still have occurred. That they are of different religions only causes the conflict to be abused by the hotheads on each side and so escalated from a simple matter of righting a wrong to proving who is closer to God, by breaking his commandments paradoxically.
This conflict comes down in the end to one question - does might make right? Sadly to date, both sides seem to think it does.
E
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RE: Does Israel have the RIGHT to deploy over this? - 
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