Israel

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Originally Posted by Spudulika

When the headers back in the 1890's when the British Israelites were over ripping up the Hill of Tara to find the Ark of the Covenant, one of their claims was that the Irish gypsy/traveller was actually a pureblood jew who had wandered from the "homeland" to the westernmost shores of Europe. They provided acres of evidence of this from fairs, rites, festivals etc. So it's not too great a leap :-)

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Thats actually fascinating, never even heard of that before.
You wouldnt have any links on that?

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Both sides makes claims that have little basis, and both claim racism when you question their standpoints.

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Totally different contexts, I think bringing the traveller question into the Israel/Palestine discussion only contributes to muddying the water even further.

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Originally Posted by Docboy

Amazing how these hardliners can never see the error of their ways.

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Thats taking the Israelis at face value when they claim their actions are in self defence etc.
But what we must look at is the full context of the Israel/Palestine question since the 1920's/1930's.
What is happening is a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.
These plans were drafted in plan "Dalet" and have continued to this day.
For anyone under any doubt read Ilan Pappe's great work, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine".
And before someone chimes in with the crys of Anti-Semitism and all that nonsense, Ilan Pappe is actually Jewish and a quite principled critic of Israeli policy.

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Originally Posted by Rasputin

Thats actually fascinating, never even heard of that before.
You wouldnt have any links on that?
Totally different contexts, I think bringing the traveller question into the Israel/Palestine discussion only contributes to muddying the water even further.

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Fair point on muddying the waters, I was drawing parallels on the matters of freedom of speech - when freedom of speech comes with caveats attached - ie Thou shalt not slag off Mohammed, Thou shalt not question Israeli government policy - they're the only democracy in town don't you know, Thou shalt not question why Irish Travellers can be termed a separate ethnic group etc.

The best I can do, on short notice, in relation to the Hill of Tara is this weak effort from Wikipedia. With an addition that in the majority of ancient sites Irish travellers had a tradition of staging fairs (the locals too), hence the rather spurious link the British Israelites made between Travellers and Wandering Jews - this all goes back to the age of romance when whole nonense and lie about Celts in Ireland came into vogue. It was no leap of the imagination that it again came into vogue in the early 1990's and "I Keltoi" when the EEC/EC then EU were trying to push a lovely hippy version of European unity - Napoleon, Hitler or the Romans wouldn't make a good template - so better to use the first, and this is true, "proto-Europeans" as the original EU. Anyway, the theory about the Ark of the Covenant, the lost tribe of Israel etc all came to a crashing end when, by local history, the Irish travellers borrowed some items from the tourists and failed to return them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_of...ient_monuments - point at the bottom of this section

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

I think a two state solution is the only fair model. The 1947 boundaries, with Jerusalem a special, secular, UN-controlled zone. Any military action to change the borders, from either side, will result in military force being used to restore the borders.