Report: PA President Mahmoud Abbas worked as KGB agent in Damascus during 80's

[Ken Burch]

29. I don't personally know all the history there, and wasn't one of those who did the rejecting.

Although, prior to the 1960s, Palestinians themselves had little power to reject OR accept anything, since before that time they were either a conquered people under the Ottoman or powerless subjects of the British Empire as part of the League of Nations Mandate. So most of the proposals you speak of were rejected by the regional Arab leadership, not the Palestinian people, a people who were not represented in any of those talks.

I do know that it's silly to keep trying to reduce the entire Palestinian side of the argument to antisemitism, because Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and non-Zionist indigenous Jewish people had generally co-existed much more amicably than Jews and Christians in Europe. There was never an Arab equivalent to the Caesars, the Inquisitors, the tsars or Hitler. And in the history of Spain, Jews were generally treated much better by the Moorish rulers than bu the Christians. It wasn't the Moors who expelled them from Spain. nor did Arabs or Muslims ever conceive of anything remotely comparable to the Inquisition, the "blood libel", or Auschwitz. And that is one of the reasons, I think that Palestinians and other Arabs(remember, Palestinians are not "generic Arabs" and can't be assumed to be part of some sort of toxic regional hivemind) have had the feelings they have had about Zionism in practice.

It's entirely reasonable for a Palestinian to ask "why should my family have been uprooted from their homes to create this state? They had nothing to do with what Hitler and his minions did. We couldn't have stopped him and it's not OUR fault that the U.S. and Canada barred the door to those refugees. Why should WE have been punished for what other people did somewhere else?"

And even if you were right...even if it WAS nothing but bigotry, how could any of the tactics and any of acts the of oppression cause that to change? It's not possible to crush people into tolerance. Calling it nothing but bigotry is just an excuse to keep anything from changing.

You're just going to have to accept the reality here...yes, there are some purely hateful Palestinians(as there are an equal quantity of purely hateful Israelis, as you'd have to acknowledge)but this is about legitimate grievances over how people have been treated and how their land has been taken from them. Anyone else, anywhere in the world, who was treated like this would be just as angry at whoever it was that was subjecting them to that treatment. It's not bigotry to resent foreign troops swaggering through your streets like conquerors, or about water shortages, or about the theft of the olive and lemon trees your family raised for centuries, or about being unable to hold a job because you are kept waiting at checkpoints for hours, or about your grandmother dying of a heart attack at a checkpoint because somebody won't let the WRONG ambulance take her to the hospital. No one has to be a bigot to be angry about that.