re: #75 CuriousLurker

I will be happy to share my thoughts once I have read the original source documents.

Kudos to you for the attempt to understand this incredibly complex area of the world and issue. The thoughts you describe in your last paragraph are a large part of why I have found this to be a fascinating area of academic interest. As for the politics and obfuscation, I agree it is often difficult to discern truth from spin. That is one of the reasons why, although I am clearly pro-Israel, I also regularly read newspapers from around the Arab and Muslim world in addition to Israeli and other Western news sources (h/t to Bob Levin, by the way, for getting me to read the Turkish Hurriyet Daily News on a regular basis).
For what it’s worth (and with the caution that this betrays my view on the subject), I have found two quotes about the Arab-Israel conflict to be pretty accurate. The first poses the dichotomy that if the Arabs were to lay down their arms, there would be peace, but if Israel was to lay down arms they would be annihilated. As yesterday’s atrocity in Bulgaria shows, there remain far too many in this world who would kill Jews and Jewish Israelis for no other reason than that they dare to live.
The second is the famous statement attributed to the late Golda Meir (ironic that for all the accusations of Israel being a racits, bigoted state, it had a female head of state within two decades of independence; the U.S. has yet to match that feat after well over two centuries), who said there will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate [the Jews]. Obviously, in its stereotype and generalization that Arabs do not love their children her statement is tremendously overbroad and inaccurate. However, there was and still is a too strong cultural and religious current in the Arab and Islamic world that believes death in violent jihad against the non-believer (and particularly against Jewish Israelis) is a positive thing. Suicide bombers who manage to kill Israeli Jews are still celebrated as shahid (as, for example, by naming public squares after them). For there to be a true peace, those forces within the Arab and Muslim worlds that embrace life and the right to live as an unassailable right of every person (recall, it is the first of the three inalienable rights referred to in the U.S. Constitution) will have to defeat those who continue to promote the glory of death for Allah’s sake as a greater value.
For the sake of us all, I hope and pray they succeed.
And, on that note, as I have to turn my attention elsewhere, my best to you for a meaningful and blessed Ramadan.