I have several Palestinian and Lebanese friends. There is a large refugee presence in Australia, as there's been 1.4 million displaced Palestinians pushed out alone.
First off, it's a basic error to refer to these people as 'The Palestinians'. They were a thriving region of multiple ethnicities and religions.
Second off, the concept of 'wipe Israel off the map' is a nuanced statement. What it means in English is essentially that they deny the original UN mandate recognising the de facto conquering their land of Palestine (then southern Syria) and handing it to a largely foreign people for things they had no part in. They claim, and I think with a good reason, that it was the last and worst action of colonialism.
They say that the foreigners inflicted well armed, foreign and alien people on them who, when they fought back, pushed them off the map and into camps - and then never let them out again.
This is all strictly true.
The deny the concept of 'Israel' as 'our land promised by foreigners in their religion which they keep us in servitude, slavery and misery'. This is what 'wipe Israel off the map' means, and it similar to wanting 'Rhodesia' gone meant - the natives want their own region back. Yes, Zimbabwe sucks, but it's a lesson for what we have to deal with if an occupier brutalises the indigenous population living there.
As you guys probably know, since I stopped surveying I've been studying to become a historian. In Israel something is happening that is shocking historians; they are rewriting the local history to edit out the Palestinians. Villages that were extant when Australian troops rode through in World War One are now claimed to never have existed. This is something that must not be permitted to happen, if you rewrite history you are engaging in George Orwell's 1984 tactics. Alan Dershowitz has successfully stopped a historian getting tenure at his university due to 'anti-Semitism', which is odd because the guy was Jewish. All he was doing was documenting Palestinian village history. This is not normal Israeli behaviour, it is the behaviour of a conquering elite and a chilling insight into what may come.
I'm fairly pragmatic, I think Israel is there now but I still know that Palestine is there as well. If Israel wants to continue its Spartan/Helot relationship with the Palestinians it should encounter the same attitude that the Spartans got in the ancient world; resistance from democracies.
As for Hamas, Fatah and the PLO.
Well, when the PLO came back and Rabin was murdered, everything fell to pieces. The West Bank and Gaza are captive communities (and some of the densest population areas on earth, which means bombing should never be allowed). the PLO was called 'The Libyans' by the Palestinians because there weren't considered to have Palestine interests at heart, and Fatah is just as corrupted by the Israeli commercial interests they are the conduit for.
That leaves Hamas, which is by any definition extremist. But, they are also the Gaza infrastructure. The men of Hamas are not 'fighters', they are also police officers, firemen, ambulance drivers, postmen and so on. When these men are targeted they are gutting Gaza of its infrastructure. When 'Hamas targets' are struck they are hitting police stations and disaster relief.
This not war. This is not insurgency. You know what it is.
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