Let me play Devil’s Advocate: “nzuckerman” is a troll. He did not respond to my response to his first challenge. Now he’s trolling here. I have no desire to keep him around. I’m deleting his posting access. As I’ve said before, I’ve read arguments like his in every other Israel discussion, everywhere I’ve seen it. He uses a fake email address, thus proving he isn’t looking to take part in this blog. So goodbye, troll.

Why do you invent a situation when the facts show that there was no land grab but that Israel implored the little king of Jordan not to enter the war, which he did not heed and so lost that land in the fighting?
The land that Jordan had grabbed in 1948, with British military help, when they invaded the territory the UN had granted the Jews in partitioning what remained from the Ottoman Empire. That was a land grab.
Why is it that successive American administrations, we won’t consider the Europeans for obvious reasons, but American, have consistently reneged on International agreements from the League of Nations, San Remo, Sevrès, UNSC resolutions?
Why didn’t the UN force Jordan and Egypt to devolve the land they had grabbed to the local Arabs who only became Palestinians after 1967?
Why does your President now discard the Quartet’s “Road Map”, accepted by all parties at the time, to invoke his latest dream, Redistributing the Wealth?

The ONLY legitimate place to begin negotiations on any topic is with the status quo. To have negotiations begin with the false assumption that there WAS a Palestinian state and that the Palestinians have the ability to negotiate AS IF that land belonged to a Palestinian state is ludicrous. The negotiations are truly between Israel and the Arab League for the creation of something that has never previously existed, well two things, a Palestinian state and peace between the Arab nations and a Jewish state. THAT is what negotiations should be about and the only assumption should be the status quo because everything else is but vanity.

Meanwhile, the REALITY is that there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis on the other side of those lines. We can argue about the sanity of the decision to build isolated settlements, but some of the areas settled are legitimate suburbs of major population centers and other areas are legitimately security concerns. Negotiations have to deal with that reality.

Bibi came to the US, delivered a speech in which he said we will not negotiate on Jerusalem etc etc. and now let us negotiate all things that are no longer off the negotiating table. So negotiations!

Israel is willing to let the Palis have most of Judea and Samaria, under certain security safeguards, which is more than the Palis deserve, especially after decades of terrorism. Let them be content with that, or let Jordan take those areas over again. Yah Falastini, if you cannot live at peace with Jewish neighbors go find neighbors with whom you can live at peace. That might be difficult for you, since your “Arab Brothers” treat you like dirt, worse than the Israelis do.