Sorry I did take you up wrong.

Mystic7, thank you for that powerful testimony. I have a neighbor who grew up as a Catholic in Northern Ireland. He says that in just a decade of peace the hatred and bigotry between the communities has already begun to melt away. He says most people there wonder now what it was all about and can't even imagine going back to those days. If Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland can find a way to peace I am certain that the Jews and Palastinians can do the same.

Yeah I've heard that before "Those people breed like goddamn rabbits!" Well consider this then. On THE DAY the Palestinians finally create, wrest, erect their own country, on that VERY DAY, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians all over the Arab world will be kicked out to 'return to their homeland'. It's happening in Iraq today. It happened in Kuwait in 1991 (a quarter million Palestinians evicted). See for all their posturing, Arab states give not a goat fart for the Palestinians. About 300,000 'refugees' in Lebanon who are not citizens and are not allowed to vote or get normal jobs. Similarly the Syrians forbid any of their 180,000 Palestinian 'refugees' from attaining citizenship or moving out of their camps. Even Jordan which is 75% Palestinian they don't give Jordanian passports to any but a tiny handful of elites who live in the west bank and there's about a million more Palestinians living in Jordan for more than a half century who are labeled 'foreign refugees. So - Palestine's population will swell greatly in the early months of statehood

So here is how it lays out. Israel gets about 9% of the West Bank mostly suburbs of Jerusalem and areas that abut and/or are contiguous with the rest of Israel, typically areas that are within a few km of the 'green line'. That accounts for about 300,000 of the 400,000 Jews today living among what the left calls "Palestinian homeland" qnd the approx 1.2 million Palestinians living there. (or about 33% of the total population of "Palestine". The remaining 100,000 people, will be relocated back to Israel. Palestine will then become the Jew-Free Paradise the liberals and the Hamas wish it to be.

Since most Israeli Arabs, when asked, have zero desire in becoming Palestinian they will stay wherever they like, as Israeli nationals. Today that's about 20% of the population of the State of Israel. Given that Israel is a parliamentary democracy and Arabs have ample opportunity to participate now, their representation in the Knesset will stay more or less the same as it is now, about 13% of the total seats.

In the meantime Gaza and the West Bank will slowly separate into the 23rd and 24th Arab middle eastern states, respectively. 2 different countries. Exclaves rarely work as a permanent stable form of governance. It didn't work with Pakistan, it's failing in the Naxcivan exclave province of Azerbijan and it won't work with the Gazans either. The people who live there will have some window of opportunity to emigrate to the 'other' Palestine in the west bank for a few years following independence. After that the West Bank nation will have its own problems to manage.

Gaza will persist in theocratic radical failure and the West Bank being somewhat more secular modern and educated will maintain somewhat better. It's doubtful they'll return to having the highest standard of living among non-oil state Arabs as they did in the period of 1974-94 but they'll be better off than the Gazans. Not because Gaza is small, because Hong Kong, Singapore, Macau, Monaco. Lichtenstein are all smaller and very wealthy, but because of Hamas which is little more than a violent religiously inspired criminal gang. But they'll have portage to the Mediterranean so perhaps they can be the New Barbary Pirates or something. In either case, that's their problem to solve just like every other country that went independent. The Palestinians problems will be no different than anyone else's. We wish them good luck with that.

But all of this is largely out of the Palestinians own hands. It relies on Israel simply actin unilaterally and hoping for the best. The Palestinians have proven themselves to be utterly unreliable bargaining partners. Israel will just have to act on its own, let Palestine declare itself and simply accept whatever level of cross border violence ensues. Seemingly 8300 rocket attacks is the new watermark. If the Palestinians persist in lobbing 5 or 6 thousand rockets a year into Jewish cities, no one outside of Israel will care or worry about that.

In the interim, Hezbollah will still be there in the north. My only recommendation would be to deter them to the extent that they eventually limit their attacks to a very low level. This way they can simply take over Southern Lebanon and declare it the 25th Arab state, this one a Shiite fundamentalist state that like Gaza employs terrorism as a legitimate tool of foreign policy. A confederacy of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, southern Syria, Syria proper under the aegis of Iran is probably unavoidable with the only thing standing between one continuous Iranian federation from the Mediterranean is Afghanistan is Kurdistan (which Iran is clearly working on right now). Again though, a few thousand rockets lobbed into northern Israel won't worry anyone outside of Israel whether they give up the Golan or not is of no importance either way except domestically in Israel.

You took me the wrong way entirely, Pancho.

Truthfully, I always assumed the DNA would be indistiguishable between the two.

My interest lies in the idea that Judiasm is a religion, not a race. I have jewish relatives that are always pushing the idea that we come from some noble race, when the reality, I would suspect, is that jews were just one of many tribes wandering around in the fertile cresent, and while there may be some genetic markers that identify people from a particular area (I don't know enough about it to even know what this might mean), it would seem to me that Jews and Palastinians have been boinking around enough to make them hard, if not impossible, to tell apart.

Mostly I was thinking about the whole ambiguous concept of race, and how it seems confused with "Nationality". Are the Irish a "Race"? Are the Catholics a "Race"? The Jews seems to claim both.

Thanks for the link - I'll check it out.