"Why do Palestinians hate us?"

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

They can not do anything about it, that is the problem.

They refuse to do anything about it.

They do not have the room to be self supportive because of the walls Israel is building.

What a load of crap. "We are unsuccessful because we can't easily enter our worst enemy's territory." Can't you look at this one at face value and see how ridiculous it is?

If they do get land (the worse land in the area BTW), Israeli troops will sometimes destroy them.

Bulldoze, but not indiscriminately. If they are the family of a suicide bomber, or the entrance to an arms-smuggling tunnel, the dozers move in.

Boo fuckin' hoo.

For being self-supportive, they have the worst land in the area because Israel has claimed the best,

That's bullshit, but you can imagine how such a notion got started. After all, it's pretty much all bad land... but somehow the Joos made their parts green. Everywhere they worked the land, they turned it green.

When you said "claimed", by the way, I'm sure you meant "taken over as a defensive measure during a defensive war." And really, now that Israel does not occupy southern Lebanon, and has given back Gaza, and kicked Israeli settlers out of their houses and off what they considered to be their land, some of the old talking points are starting to look a little kooky.

...lost about 75% of their former land, and now the territories have the 7th highest population density in the world. They have very bad health care and education and it isn't improving along with an extreme poverty rate of over 50%. It is extremely hard, if not impossible to start up a stable economy under those conditions, even without outside pressure from Israel.

Do you want to talk about a people that faced a rough start? How about the Jews? Their starting point was the Holocaust. And after that, most incoming Israelis were unceremoniously kicked out of their previous residence in neighboring Arab countries.

Did they blame the other? They had every right to, didn't they? Practically no people in modern history has had a bigger right to blame the other. And for a while, many of them were steaming mad and pursued outrageous, even terroristic acts and policies.

But, for the most part, they spent more time building a productive culture, improving themselves and their society, until voila -- they are now so powerful that one can't even remember when they were not the powerful ones. So powerful, that we now hear arguments about how the Jews got a better start, a big advantage.

Six million dead, and the rest in ghettos or kicked out of their countries...

Israel has had an enormous amount of financial and military support from the US and other countries, something you can not ignore when comparing them to Palestine.

US support for Israel did not really start in meaningful quantity until 1973 and didn't really grow large until 1979. Seriously. You could look it up.

But even then, as with the Arafat example, support is one thing... having a culture that will do something productive with it, is another. They were given a University! They use it to teach bomb-making methods. They were given television stations! They use them to indoctrinate the kids in hate. They were given loads and loads of money! They used it to buy munitions. They were given the vote! They voted for Hamas.

Helpless? Not hardly; when they ask for food aid instead of monetary aid, get back to me.