[Chris Alger]

"So what, most ethnically monotone countries are like that. Try not being Japanese in Japan and see how far you get. Arabs with Isreal citizenship can own businesses, run for office, vote, and generally not be stoned in the street just for being a different race."

Israel is not "ethnically monotone" but 20% non-Jewish. (This is just within the Green Line; about 40% of all people living under Israeli rule aren't Jewish). After living under martial law for 20 years after independence, Israeli-Arabs continue to face a host of debilitating discriminatory practices, particularly relating to housing, education, public services, land ownership, employment and marriage. Israel is the only nation state in the world that doesn't purport to belong to its citizens, but to an ethnic group that includes both non-citizens and excludes its own residents. Ethnic supremacism in other countries is considered regretable, backward, a sound basis for criticism or an embarrassment. In Israel it is not only a symbol of national pride by a vital element, often put forth as the most vital element, of national identity and culture. A couple of weeks ago Congress passed another of its pro-Israel resolutions demanding that the PA recognize Israel's right to exist "as a Jewish state." Try to imagine Congress acknowledging the right of Japan, Canada or Mexico to exist as states belonging exclusively to their dominant ethnic groups to the exclusion of their minority citizens. Canada as a state for "true" Canadians, Rwanda for the Hutus, or something similar. Everyone in the world would denounce it as racist.

"Isreal was born of a 1947 partition by the UN. Isreal accepted it, and Arabs didn't. There was a war where lots of people died and were misplaced. If the Arabs hadn't invaded there would be no war and no one would have died."

Israel was not created by any UN resolution and Palestinian Arabs and Israelis were fighting and dying for six months before the armies of the Arab states invaded.

Israel didn't "misplace" its Arab population, it turned some 80-90% of them into permanent refugees, in defiance of international law and simple morality. It drove them out and mined the borders and enforced shoot-to-kill orders to prevent them from returning, killing thousands of civilians who tried to return (Morris estimates 2,700 to 5,000, based on Israeli documents) while seizing their land and property in their absence. Your passively voiced "lots of people . . . were misplaced" is like the Serbs pointing to Bosnia and saying "mistakes were made."

Since 1948 it has been Israel, not any Arab entity, that has unilaterally refused to declare its borders (even to this day) or resolve its border disputes other than by unilateral force. The non-binding resolution was in Nov. 1947; Israel declared independence without declaring bound by the borders proposed by the UN in May 1948, by which time it had already grabbed some of the land designated for the independent Arab state and was negotiating for a Jordanian Hashemite takeover of the remainder. Israeli military forces would grab even more land, including West Jerusalem, during the 1948 war. At the Lausanne peace conference, Israel refused the Arab request to negotiate on the basis of the UN partition resolution. Israel subsequently tried to grab even more land: unsuccessfully in 1956, sucessfully in 1967 and with mixed success in 1982. As the uproar over the Gaza pullout revealed, a sizeable political force that believes that all occupied territories are part of Israel and the whole spectrum of Israeli and U.S. opinion acknowledges Israel's "right" to retain its settlement colonies come what may.

In the U.S. and Israel, maps often show a unified "Israel" including the occupied territories. Palestinian maps showing Israel and the territories as "Palestine" are constantly denounced as proof of Palestinian genocidal intent, one of the many contradictions that make it hard to take Israel's legendary "acceptance" of partition seriously.

"There is a difference between targeting civilians and civilians getting caught in the cross fire."

I know, that's why I said "deliberately." I'm referring to cases where Israel pointed its guns at civilians and shot them. Shelling, bombing or strafing an apartment building or refugee camp hoping to pick off a terrorist (or "militant" or other troublemaker) is no better than blowing up a bus hoping to kill an off-duty corporal. Your argument for slaughtering civilians is very similar to that made by apologists for Palestinian terror, that since nearly all Israeli adults are reservists, Israeli civilians are equally fair game.

"Since then [1947] Isreal has made numerous attempts to have a Palestinian state . . . ."

Name one.