The Oslo accords contain an explicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist. I want to know when Israel has made any statement comparably official to Palestinians recognizing their right to a state as sovereign as Israel on territory currently controlled by Israel. No such statement exists. Israel does not officially recognize any national rights to exist for Palestinians.

However, according to wikipedia:

Since beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada much blame has been placed on former President Yasser Arafat for the ending of the peace talks in 2000 at Camp David. What most Western commentators fail to add is that talks continued at the Taba Summit in Egypt in January 2001. At these talks both sides came the nearest to agreement than at any time in the entire history of the occupation. However the Israeli Prime Minister Barak pulled out of the peace talks to begin campaigning for the Israeli elections. Yasser Arafat sensing that Taba may have been his last chance to negotioate a peace deal, called for Barak to come back to the table. This was unheeded and Barak went on to lose the Israeli election to the Likud leader Ariel Sharon.

The Palestinians were offered a set of disconnected bantustans at Camp David and a non-militarized, IDF-occupied state afterwards at Taba. The degree to which either proposal constituted a genuine version of the two-state solution is questionable at best.

I don’t know what you mean by “official pronouncements” (statements by Israeli PM’s are not official? weird) so I’ll pass on that one. I’ll note though that the two-state solution was offered to the Palestinians at Camp David 2000 and afterwards at Taba.

Indeed in Europe many people have hated the Jews and there are various explanations for that, but not the Arabs. Not until recently, anyway. You have no idea, then – just irrational hatred for no reason whatsoever, mass-insanity, is that it?

Aah, the not-so-age-old sophistry… if there’s a component of anti-Semitism in the reactions of people who have been evicted, persecuted, shot at, bombed, tortured, imprisoned etc by the Israeli state, all their reactions must be mere and irrational anti-Semitism. (By which entertaining logic, since some of Louis Farrakhan’s critics are plainly Negrophobic racists, Farrakhan himself and his Nation of Islam must be quite blameless and totally non-crazy.)

And I love the way you slide in a nice insinuation about abb1’s supposed anti-Semitism for good measure. Vintage IKDF, Dan. Nice work.

Aah, the age-old question…surely, if so many people have hated the Jews so much, for so long, then they must deserve it—no?

Is this some kind of mass-insanity there or what?

I dunno, Abb1, I dunno…hey, maybe you have some insight—you’re obviously, shall we say, much closer to the problem than I am….

Hmmm. AFAICT, according to the data provided here, the Israeli settler population in the West Bank grew, on average, about 5 or 6% per year between 1999-2004, and at a slightly slower rate in Gaza over the same period. By 2004, Gaza accounted for maybe 3-4% of the total settler population. I can’t find any stats later than that at the moment, but unless Gaza’s share of the population base jumped very dramatically in the interim (unlikely), Sharon’s evacuation of the settlements there (and a small fraction of the West Bank settlements as well) wouldn’t have been enough to obviate a net growth of the settlements.

Olmert has publicly talked about committing to evacuate the West Bank settlements east of the “separation barrier,” but hasn’t exactly moved decisively toward that goal.

So I think it’s probably fair to say that the settlements remain a major issue, that no preference is substantively correct on the facts and that you are, at the moment, not.

Wake up and pay attention, for pity’s sake.

You should probably take your own advice.

So, Dan, out of curiosity: if what you’re saying is true, why do you think they hate the Jews so much that all they want is to kill as many of them as possible? Instead of welcoming their new Jewish neighbors/liberators with flowers and so on? Is this some kind of mass-insanity there or what?

This is curious. I think a blogroll is an explicit endorsement of someone else’s wrtk. Not that one agrees with the content 100%, but that there’s effectively a thumbs-up regard for the site. So to say that you don’t like it and you don’t read it makes the list into something of a paradox, or less than one might expect it to be. It raises some interesting questions about blogs not on the list, and about whether we are to take any measure of significance at all from those who are on the list. Curious.

Really? How far back before the evacuation of Gaza do you have to go, to get a net growth in number of Israelis living in the occupied territories since then?

You seem to be living in the past. Recent events have overtaken you.

That main point is whether Israel has a right to seize Palestinian land and plant its own settlers on it.

Why on earth is that, of all things, the main point? Because you’re still obsessed with it, despite its relative unimportance and hopeless anachronism?

Wake up and pay attention, for pity’s sake. The current Israeli government has already purged Gaza of Jews, and has officially announced its intention of doing the same to large parts of the West Bank. These days, not even the duly elected ruling party in the occupied territories thinks that the “main point” is that Israelis are living there—they’ve long since moved on to their longstanding main mission: killing as many Jews as possible in Israel proper. Sheesh….