Israel/Palestine

It would have been the exact same reaction if any OTHER group had come in and started acting as if the land was theirs and no one else's, and as if the people who were being dispossessed had no connection to the land of their own.

Ben-Gurion spent his last years opposing the idea of settling the West Bank(the government waited until AFTER he died to start).

Look, I agree that the original pre-1948 Jewish inhabitants of the area, the people who were driven out by Jordan, not the Palestinians(a group that had no real say over the matter and who themselves had never wanted those folks driven out)should be allowed right of return(and should get the "acknowledgment, apologies, compensation" package that I've called for for Palestinian exiles), but why bring in people from other countries on other continents who themselves had no direct connection to what the right wing calls "Judea and Samaria" to treat the place as if it should be their personal and exclusive domain? Why bring in religious and political extremists, some of whom wanted nothing BUT conflict? Why not just send in the pre-1948'ers and leave it at that?

Can you not see how sending in over 250,000 people, letting those people divert much of the available water supply, take the best land, uproot the ancient olive trees Palestinians had tended for centuries to be replanted ON the setlements, and lay out their settlements in such a way as to make it impossible for Palestinians to get from one part of their homeland to another without having to go through checkpoint after checkpoint after checkpoint just MIGHT make the situation worse?

Could you at least concede, if nothing else, that the whole settlement project was carried out in a far more heavy-handed and insensitive manner than it needed to be?

We're coming very close to the situation in which the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank will be impossible, due to all the land the settlements hold. If the creation of a Palestinian state is made impossible, any possibility of peace forever vanishes. Are you ok with that?