Poltical correctness is an Anglophone invention, and neither Arabs or Israelis do it . For Israelis, Americans and Brits who do it to Israelis are admonished with sometimes red faces to speak "tachlis," basically to give it them straight, say what you mean and not beat around the bush. A borrow word from Yiddish and probably my favorite word in Hebrew. As for your metaphor, I don't know what to do with it. Palestinians have no life boat or shore to go to. Even if we ignore that we're casually talking about displacing an entire people from their homes, it's not as though there is a state that is willing to take them. Even in the cases of Arab states that have already taken the refugees of 1948, which I explained in my post inthe other thread, their descendants are still forced to live in refugee camps without the benefit of citizenship in their host countries. This is pretty much the base justification of any conflict. As long as there are tribes, there will be tribalism. Unless you subscribe to a humanistic world view that supports an idea that all humans have an equal right to resources and self-determination (though it exists in nearly every world religion), there will always be a "them" competing with an "us" over something worth killing for. Otherwise, the future of the human race ultimately boils down to a competition between interpretations of Leviathan. Groups like this exist because they fulfill a role in what is otherwise a vaccuum for the disenfranchised. Hizbollah are essentially a private army that claims to "protect" Lebanon's south. Considering their success against the Israeli army in the Lebanon War, it's not a claim without merit, and it it's easy to understand why many Lebanese civilians may not hate them even if they think they are all whacko and are afraid of them. Hamas presented themselves as an alternative to the corrupt and spirtually vaccuous PLO, and started off feeding starving kids and teaching people how to read (the Koran, mostly, but literacy nonetheless). They are also sane enough to understand the dilemma they are in, which is if they fail to restrain their own extremists from violence, they will be held accountable and their population will be collectively punished, but if once that happens, if they don't retaliate, they will find themselves with an weaker claim to remain in power. Even in faraway Afghanistan, the Taliban would have happily retired to their madrassas after the Soviets left, but tribal leaders nearby decided to pillage, rob, and rape (and in many cases, boys who were Taliban students). The result was a brutal attack with vintage Enfield rifles to restore order and protect the civillian population with the purest intrepretation of old time religion taken to the extreme. And the revolution was born: No more boy rape, but no more clapping, or television or womens' rights...and I think you know the rest. These extreme groups wouldn't exist if they didn't provide something of value to a population that needed them, with a brutal counter-offensive against outside powers the easiest of all to sell. If they fail to do it, new extreme groups will continue to pop up to replace them. They exist because their populations have no viable alternative unless you count occupying armies (British, Soviet, American) or nationalistic, despotic strongmen (Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Gaddafi, Hafaz/Bashar Al-Assad, the Pahlavi Dynasty...). I'm under no delusion that the UN, IMF, World Bank, Médecins Sans Frontières, or the Red Cross is going to fix these third world problems, much less the good will of the US State Department building hospitals with taxpayer money. Nor do I expect the developing world to react with a clamoring for democratic reform, education or a demand for better rights for women and their own minorities, or any other wishful thinking, But the advocates of redrawing borders, forcible relocation of populations and bombing the **** out of everyone that doesn't play nice are playing their own role in "been there, done that, and NOW look what we have to deal with." If you truly "take a step back" then you should see things as they actually are: layers of overlapping irrational intrests that formed like painful blisters from needs that once began from a perfectly rational self-interest. If you permit yourself to be intellectually lazy enough to react with an emotional game of whack-a-mole, which is tempting, if not far more gratifying than having to deal with the headache of the world as it is, you are still just as much a part of the problem as the cliched wild-eyed tribesman of Western collective fears.
