A wonderful discussion among all parties. A few quick comments/responses; it's too late at night to do much.

Bel: Follow your heart, my dear. Your bringing-up, your standards are leading you the right way.

InselP and Mav: I am not a Jew, but I support the Israelis on the Israeli/Arab situation. You are both sadly ignorant of a number of basic facts which can be found in a non-partisan history and in many documents. Such as: 1. The British acquired Palestine after WWI as a mandate from the League of Nations. The mandate was "to provide a permanent home for the Jewish people". Palestine at that time was a neglected and impoverished vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, which had just gone down to defeat. The native Arab population lived under Turkish law, had done for centuries, and had no say. The vast majority of the Arab population were living in poverty, working for a handful of wealthy landowners who spent their time in Damascus, Beirut, Cannes, etc. The Brits, needing to get some kind of administration in place, turned the territory over to the Colonial Office, who proceeded to attempt to run it like another colony, on the model of Egypt, also a British colony at the time. It is believed by most experts that the Brits' motivation was that they wanted to protect the other flank of the Suez Canal so as to eliminate any threat of disruption of their line to India, their chief colony. 2. When the Brits took over, Palestine consisted of what is now both Israel and Jordan. As soon as they started the mandate, Jews started coming in. They cleared out the malarial swamps (at great mortality from disease), planted trees, irrigated fields, and started reclaiming the land which had been neglected and run down for centuries. The rich landowners were glad to sell these worthless (to them) plots of land to Jews, and did so. ALL THE LAND SETTLED BY JEWS BEFORE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL WAS PURCHASED FROM ITS PREVIOUS OWNERS. Of course, the landowners cared nothing for their tenants, but the Jewish buyers did what they could to help the displaced Arabs.
3. After a while, say around 1922 or so, the Jews were doing so well that some Arabs got jealous that the Jews had prosperous kibbutzim and other communities while they still had these worthless lands and wanted to be cut in (without doing anything for them, of course). This was the start of the "Palestinian" movement (a name not applied to the Arab population of the area until then). It was headed by a Hussein who called himself the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was in with the rich landowners, and who later became an ally of Hitler during WWII. They started the campaign of violence against Jews which has gone on ever since, hoping to discourage them so they would leave and abandon their farms and factories. 4. The Brits, not wanting a lot of strife, coddled these Arab thugs and ended up, after some years of continued violence, by sawing off the eastern part of their Mandate (in contravention of the terms of it) as a "home for Palestinians", naming one of their stooges whom they owed a favor as king, and named it Trans-Jordan, later shortened to Jordan. So there really is, and has been for 70 or so years, a Palestinian state -- it's called Jordan. 5. When WWII broke out, the Jews, although greatly dissatisfied with the British administration which allowed them to be massacred by Arabs with impunity, supported the Brits against the Axis; the rich Arabs did all they could to help Hitler, the peasants, as always, were at the mercy of prevailing forces. It was during the war that the Jews set up their own organizations, like the Irgun Zvi Leumi, the Stern Gang, etc. which became the basis of the Israeli army and political parties. 6. When the war was over, the Brits figured on going back to the status quo ante, but the Jews were having none of it. The Holocaust had changed all that. The Brits, as is well known, tried to cut off immigration into the territory, even of Holocoast survivors. The Jews, having adopted the principle: NEVER AGAIN, took on the Brits and the outcome was that the Brits had to get out. 7. The Arabs, having forewarning that the Brits were leaving and not giving the Jews any help in taking over (the same thing they did in India, setting the stage for the Hindu/Moslem strife), figured the Jews would be easy pickings. They advised the native Arab population to get out of the country for the time being so their armies would have a clear field in driving the Jews into the sea. Thousands of Arabs took this advice, some selling their land cheap, others abandoning it. Unfortunately for them, the Arabs failed to defeat the Jews and the Jews, very naturally, declined to readmit those who gave up their property and they became refugees, whom the Arab states have kept in that status ever since. 8. From 1946 until the later war when Israel defeated the combined Arab armies once again and recaptured much territory, East Jerusalem was part of Jordan. The Jordanians desecrated Jewish cemeteries, denied all access to holy places to Jews, cut them off from Mt. Scopus where the institutions of learning and healing were. When Israel took back Jerusalem and the West Bank, they decided that this would not be allowed again; hence their determination that Jerusalem shall be their eternal and undevided capitol, although they allow Moslems access to the Temple Mount, even when the Friday sermons egg on the believers to new hatred and violence against Israel. 9. The claims of the Palestinians that they are a poor persecuted lot of people whose land was stolen from them are mostly rot, although there have been some cases of dubious landtaking. As I noted above, up to the war, all land was purchased by the Jews, and most of it after the war as well. But the Palestinians and their Arab brothers in other nations in the area learned one of Hitler's techniques: If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it consistently and constantly, it will eventually be accepted by most people as truth, no matter that evidence exists to refute it, because most people can't be bothered with evidence. That's what you, IP and Mav, have been bamboozled by. Check the history and evidence.

Horrors -- that last turned into a thesis. I'll have to get in some other points, in which I agree with IP and Mav, tomorrow.