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Comment by knz42 | Hacker News Reader

"“If you have everything but land – if you have a population that is displaced – whether that allows you to be a state is a novel question,”"

Jews would have disagreed that this is a novel question -- for them the question has been about for around 2000 years if not more.

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I would disagree that this was ever a question. The assumption of the Zionist movement was that a Jewish state was not possible without land and a concentration of population. Jews hadn't been displaced because their land disappeared, they were displaced because they'd been conquered and divided and driven out by empire after empire over a period of thousands of years. I don't think any Jews would have disagreed that without the land, with the population displaced, that they did not represent a state.

No, it IS a novel question, and it has yet to be answered. You talk as though Israel is a done deal, when the ongoing situation suggests anything but.

Why do you need to do political astro-turfing for Israel on a totally unrelated thread?

I wouldn't call it astro-turfing. For a long time, Israel was a race/people without a homeland. You could maybe say the Palestinians are in that state now as well.

I sure as shit would call it that.

Just because it doesn't have a definite answer doesn't mean it's a novel question. Otherwise P ?= NP would still be a "novel question".

2600 years, according to wikipedia the Diaspora started with the conquest of the Kingdom of Judah by Babylone (started in 597BCE and ended with the destruction of the first temple in 586BCE), although a numbers of jews were already in exile since the conquest of the Kingdom of Israel in 722BCE by Assyria.

...and more recently Palestine?

State and Nation are not the same.

You just had to say something didn't you :D :D :D Now look at the responses at what you have done. (Very tongue in cheek)

I wonder if the fine folks of Kiribati will go about slaughtering civilians as well.

I should imagine they would if Fiji started launching rockets at them and had a stated aim of wiping them out.

Yes, some religious nutjobs start lobbing missiles at you. So go kill the innocent civilians. Seems reasonable to me.

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