Israel/Palestine

but I admire that in your posts you think for yourself and look at things from multiple perspectives.

so for your post above, here is my reaction (which I think is a belief held by a lot of pro-Israel people) and I would like to know what you think of this view. the full democracy call seems beautiful in theory, if there is a secular country where Jews and Arabs and people of whatever ethinicity feel allegiance to that country and feel that they are all citizens in it together. although not perfect, that is a pretty good approximation to the US. In Germany, there is one dominant ethnicity and various minorities, so I don't think it has been put to the test that a one-state Israel would be. in particular, the fear of many on the Israeli side (presumably Jews) is that Muslims would become the majority, and that as a majority, they would vote in leaders who do not want to continue the democracy and who would instead be very unfavorable to the Jews. For example, Hamas could win an election (noting that there are also voices on the Israeli far right who call for expulsion of Arabs). What make this a serious fear is that there is already such a level of animosity and such a tradition of conflict, along with many outsiders (and all sorts of crazy conflict in the mideast in general) who currently like to stir up conflict between the two sides and who I am pretty sure would try to continue this. I see a lot of endpoints to such a democracy that devolve into an all out civil war, a la the breakup of Yugoslavia or Lebanon or Syria or even worse. I see few endpoints that involve a functioning democracy. To get to a point of co-existence would in my view generations of education to undo demonization that people have learned, and something far beyond something like truth and reconciliation committees because this is really part of a larger Arab-Jewish conflict or Muslim-Jewish conflict -- it has been made essential to a lot of discourse in the Islamic world. The downside is so bad, and so hard to work around, that it seems like a poor risk - especially from the Israeli Jewish perspective, even if the alternatives are bad. So, either that risk is much lower than it seems, or there is some way to lower the risk to an acceptable level. I haven't seen compelling arguments on either of these, only the easier argument that the alternatives are bad.