Poll: Israel or Palestine?

[Mr Khan]

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:

"Death to Israel" is boilerplate. A rallying cry that, while it has its share of true believers who do want nothing more or less than the destruction of Israel, is more taken up by people with a grievance against the current Middle Eastern power structure that they feel is intolerable and that they feel they are powerless to resolve.

You're talking as if these people are rational about this issue when they quite obviously are not. It's a sickness, and what happened to David Gerbi yesterday (do these look like Islamic radicals?) only serves to highlight the pathological paranoia against non-Muslims - but especially the Jews - that afflicts so much of the Muslim world.

Given that fact, any land for peace concessions Israel might make will pacify their enemies as much as the Munich Agreement pacified Hitler. The land Israel gives up today will be used to attack them tomorrow.

Vastly different. Hitler's Germany was strong enough to conquer Czechoslovakia, so he did. Really, he was strong enough to beat everyone but Britain and the Soviet Union, and he wanted to beat them, so he did it. The critical difference is that no matter how many land concessions they make, Israel could still turn all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into a smudge on the pavement in a week.

What you have cited as well is an instance of short-term racism and xenophobia in a country currently running on mob mentality and lacking a rational state actor visage, as well as acting against an individual, which afflicts many countries that, as states, are still rational actors.

The only danger to rational acting is when people get it into their head that they have powers that they do not, or when the state has made promises to the people in such a way that it has to try to fulfill them, no matter how irrational they are on an international level (thinking here of Georgia's idiotic provocation of Russia in 2008, which i theorize was based upon Saakashvili basing his career on making Georgia strong against Russia and spending quite a lot of their GDP on military buildup, which he had to justify no matter how stupid it was as a rational action)