Quote Originally Posted by A Quiet Monkfish View Post
About 35yrs ago I was talking to a daughter of a well-known local person at the time. She was about 22 and had converted to Judaism. She was with her Jewish friend and they'd just returned from the West Bank where they had recently settled. They had taken over the home of a Palestinian family, as was allowed then, and is now. Effectively ethnic cleansing. They must have spent an hour telling me how run-down and shabby the home was and how they would have to make 'improvements'. The fact that they were evicting a family who probably had to scrape together every penny just to survive and make their home habitable for their children didn't cross their mind. Their sense of right and entitlement was in every comment, and has stuck with me all the years that followed as I've seen the tragedies in Palestine unfold.
The Jewish lobby throughout the West is all-pervading, and influences every single political decision. The Palestinians are not 100% victims, that is true, but the reality is that Israel, with their fundamentalists pulling the strings to no less a degree as the Arab world, can do - and do do - pretty much what they like.
When I was in Israel the guy showing me some of the religious sites was basically telling me the same thing... his family have now 'returned home' and occupy a former Palestinians house and then ranted about the Arabs. We argued and he ended up walking off. It was awful. Nearly as bad as the evangelical US Christians next to me who had an impromptu prayer meeting while laying their hands on the temple stones praying for them to collapse, as per the biblical prophecy, so the Christ could return. I interrupted his prayer and asked him to wait until I had left before the temple comes crumbling down.