Edit: I got a bit pissed off after you concluded with the "enlightened you" bit, and having gone away I feel I may have been too sharpe and more vicious to you than I should have been. I stand by all the points I have said though, and will not edit my post to soften some of the things which I feel are a bit harsh in your general direction (as opposed to the bits which are harsh towards Israel: I stopped trying to make excuses for them finally in the Summer of 2006) because I feel that to do so now would be cowardly and unhonest of me.
"
Enlightened" me? Don't be so patronising, and
don't make laugh.
Nazi Germany also gave the world some fabulous leap forwards in things like woman's breast cancer and rocketery. If Nazi Germany still existed, chances are Humankind would have gone to Mars by now. So?
Most of those things aren't really what you can claim to be "Israel-exclusive". Who honestly gives a damn that Jews invented something on stolen land that they would no doubt be invented elsewhere? Who cares that Israel has so many museums? I've seen this list before along with a point by point rebuttal: I'm trying to find it, but one of the things I distinctly remember is the response to the musuem question, which broke down figures and showed how many of the museums are built on utter ridiculous premises - like the number of museums dedicated to the story of Samson, the Exodus, and other such nonsense pedalled as historical fact. The same with the number of books: I'm sure the fact that Israel has an abnormally high amount of religious books coming off it's presses doesn't influence the figures at all. The absurd list of things like having Golda Meir as a leader doesn't make up for many of it's... "negatives" (not a strong enough word).
Citing things such as the number of Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel sounds good and fancy and wellmeaning - but what did Menachem Begin immediately demand the right to do to house them? Exactly. And come to think for it, which nation picked up the bill for it all? Thought so.
All the above while engaged in regular wars with an implacable enemy that seeks its destruction, and an economy continuously under strain by having to spend more per capita on its own protection than any other country on earth.
That's just bullshit.
Most of the wars, Israel has chosen to start, right down to the original war in which the Arab League agreed to a last minute ceasefire sponsored by the UN and the newly formed Zionist Commitee rejected it by about 6 to 4 and began "Premptive Defensive" moves against their allies. I think Count Bernadotte would be able to tell you in no uncertain terms who was the first to reject international law in the war.
I'm sure no doubt from the above you have been indoctrinated with the "The Jews are heavily outnumbered" crap: They have over 90,000 fighting men and machinary brought or borrowed from Europe compared with the Arab League's 30,000. Check the US archives. Check Israel's. There was never any doubt about who would win.
Israel created the largest refugee problem since the 1930s, and, like Germany in the summit held by Roosevelt around 36-37 (can never remember it's name), claims that this is all the fault of other nations who refuse to do something about it. Even more maliciously than Germany at that summit, denying that Jewish Identify was something worth doing anything about, Israel just denies the existence of a people: One with their own ideas of a national identity which has been as strong as there has there has been historically in Switzerland that they are Swiss, and not French, Prussian or Italian even before there was a recognised name or legal entity put to that.
This pattern continues through to the 1957 expansion (We find out later that Ben-Gurion had been hoping for a conflict even going as far as joking that they could pay the Arabs to attack again. Magically, a couple of months later, Israel begins "defensive moves" against the Arabs) and into the Six-Day War. Here we find "Lavon Affair" style tactical releasing of information to Egypt suggesting that Israel was planning to militarise near the Sinai... We both know what Egypt (quite rationally under the circumstances) did next and SURPRISE! what Israel did - for what they had been drilling beforehand.
We find this behaviour carried through right the way through to the 2006 Lebannon War - the US and Israel were drawing up plans beforehand and then, once completed, miraculously found a reason to enact them.
The only time Israel has ever been outnumbered and outgunned was in the Yom Kipper War.
Israel brought inadvertantly brought communism into a region which hadn't shown any inclination towards it beforehand, kicked off an arms race, and a nuclear arms race in historically one of the most volatile regions of the planet, and has alienated so many millions of people from ideas which we hold to be sacred here in the West by showing them to be nothing more than rhetorical farces. It has lead to the rise of religious extremism, er... EVERYWHERE which is tearing the planet apart.
Yeah. You may have noticed I don't like Israel, but I'll admit that I may have an emotive bias. One of my friend's grandmother and grandfather were executed in front of his mother whilst she was a young girl by the kind and benevolent IDF for the crime of "Pretending to be Jewish". This is by no means an isolated incident - if you care to look. If you want to know the punchline to this sick little joke, it is quite simply as a Mizrahi Jew able to connect their family to the region for at least seven hundred years, they had far more right to grow their oranges in Palestine than the IDF had to evict them... or execute Jews for "pretending to be Jewish".
Their centuries old family home and orange groves belong to someone else now, because someone who did not have the authority to evict them did. So yes, having been surrounded by anti-Zionist Jews, Christians and Muslims, and being involved in the political situation from a young age, I guess I do have a hard time seeing the logic of ethnic cleansing and Palestine-denial (semantic quibbling) to replace it with a peace-loving, "democratic" state that can create a special kind of microchip and print a lot of books.
The only thing I will thank Israel for is giving me some of the best friends I could have hoped for and might never have met otherwise.
I have no doubt you or someone else will come up with the usually "Arab Propaganda" crap, or KKK/Nazi/Hamas (delete as appropriate) comparisons and then begin to cite "From Time Immemorial" or figures from the Departments of "Explanation". Go ahead. I've been picking apart those arguments since I was twelve. I could fill a book with points, rebuttals, and moronic pro-Israeli propaganda, so we can easily carry this further, although we'd be going massively off-topic.
I began by mentioning that, had Nazi Germany been around today, we'd have probably gone to Mars. In the above, it is mentioned that Israel economically fights it's enemies by itself: America has given Israel five times what America spent to go to the Moon and, more importantly, destroyed itself as America, the Shining City on the Hill.
My point is that the Israeli conflicts did not invent modern Wahhabist terrorism. The Palestinians merely chose to adapt it.