Had a billion American Indians inhabited the million square miles of America's Midwest...

Had a billion American Indians inhabited the million square miles of America's Midwest, our settlers would faced the same population density -- one thousand per square mile -- encountered in the West Bank by Israeli settlers -- that is, before Israeli first worlders battered West Bank third worlders back into half the space (affluent moderns needing more room to breath -- and swim).

To fill out the billion Indian comparison: 150 million American settlers would have to have carved out -- extra -- room for themselves. What today's 300 million Americans face are the least rational responses of the Palestinian people's billion-plus co-religionists for what they deem our role in the "dozerkrieging" of Islamic land.

The accidents of history make it easier for America to take the rap for Israel's mis-doings: Israelis speak the same language, live the same lifestyle, the other half of their ethnic group lives by and large in the United States, their people even gave rise to our Christian-Judaic culture.
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An Israeli defense analyst recently worried that, for all Israel's local conventional and nuclear preponderance, her continued existence could be called into question by a single nuclear strike on Tel Aviv. Enough Israelis might, then, take flight for safer climes to insure others followed and so on.

Country emptying could be just as likely to play out with nuclear material-free bomb works* (no plutonium core) -- snuck into Tel Aviv and left to be discovered -- with no one to blame and no reason to fully retaliate: the perfect nuclear blackmail?

Could the shadow of nuclear blackmail drive Israel to the ultimate mad option?: go Stanley Kubrick and deploy a doom's-day device -- that does its dirty work without the possibility of human intervention? (Witness Israel's recent nation blasting over a couple of POWs.)

In real life Israel hasn't the thermonuclear technology to build a full-fledged, civilization ending weapon (see Herman Kahn). Possibly Israel could improvise a poor man's version -- arraying half (100?) her Hiroshima type bombs widely and deeply enough underground to blow millions of tons of matter into the upper atmosphere, triggering nuclear winter.

-- or -- alternately --

Israel could adopt the ultimate sane option (practiced by successful first-worlders everywhere): no more "dozerkrieging" next-door neighbors, no-choice returning misappropriated land and homes and no fair waiting until resistance ends before doing both (it works the other way around). A growing Arab consensus can assure Israel that withdrawing the unbearable occupation would do more for her genuine security than embarking on mutually assured destruction.

In the twentieth century, a smart Jew gave the world E = MC squared.

Twenty centuries earlier, a Smarter Jew (by me) gave the world: "Love thy neighbor as thyself, already" [A certain amount of "lingo" was culled from the New Testament for wider distribution -- always going to be more Gentiles, right?]
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It does not take a Solomon to calculate that a nation of 5 million who occupies a neighbor of 4 million -- to park a few hundred thousand of her own on half their ancestral land -- will be condemned to exist always half-concentration camp and half-free. Oy!

Denis Drew
Chicago
ddrew2u@sbcglobal.net
www.onsamepage.blogspot.com
[*Anyone could sneak nuclear-free bomb works into any city in the world in the hope someone else catches the blame. Anyone includes Mossad. Red Star Rogue recounts a credible tale of old Soviet hard-liners attempting to provoke a war between the US and China -- leaving the USSR the winner -- by staging what was to look like a Chinese sub nuking Honolulu, only to have the sub blow a hole in itself upon the attempt (and be later recovered by the Glomar Explorer). Any such event should be investigated as painstakingly as any airline crash in the expectation that the explanation may take the same kind of time to work its way out.]