View original postthe same comments remain as relevant (or not) days, weeks or even a year later.

Am I underestimating anti-semitism among the non-Muslim, non-far right European population - probably. My personal experience can't necessarily be generalized - and my city did witness some cases lately that aren't all attributable to the usual suspects. Americans talking on the subject of anti-Semitism in Europe have a funny tendency of trying to pretend that they themselves somehow aren't Europeans, though. Hint: you are. Most of you can disavow anything that happened after the turn of the twentieth century; some anything after the turn of the nineteenth, or even eighteenth. The rest of our history is shared. With all your talk of "two thousand" years, you've failed to explain how, somehow, the US is so different despite having shared 90% or more of that history. Could it be that things really do change a lot faster than that and parallels to events of two millennia ago are coincidences rather than proof of eternally enduring phenomena?

Your view on history remains seriously distorted and obsessed with seeing parallels or continuations of Biblical "History", though, and hyperbole like "two thousand years of genocide" doesn't help. I had readily admitted in my post that the Palestine nation, as it exists now, was born largely from its shared experience under the Mandate and especially in 1948, which makes several paragraphs of your reply utterly pointless - you are the one obsessed with the Romans and the name they gave to that land, not me. And the Ishmael comment was intended to illustrate the absurdity of your reasoning, it wasn't something to be commented on seriously. Though I guess that was pretty naive of me, in hindsight.

And then for the "the Palestinians have 22 other countries to live in" - that just misses the point. What Europe owed to the Jews back in the day was not to give them a state in a part of their colonial possessions at the expense of the people already living there; it was to give them a state by making them full and equal citizens of their own European states and guaranteeing their security. I'm glad to see you find the attitude of certain Evangelical American supporters of Israel as disturbing as I do, but your own views seem just as eschatologically and Biblically based. There are plenty of peoples living in a very different place from their homeland two thousand years ago, and there's really no good reason for any of them to go back. Instead, they should be respected and accepted wherever they've ended up - politics should be based on the people who live here and now, not on ancient history. Doing otherwise just opens the door to irredentism (where should one draw the borders of this newly restored state of Israel, at its widest historical extent or its narrowest?) and gives majorities an excuse to suppress minorities who may originally have come from abroad but really have nowhere else to go (like, say, the Rohingya in Bangladesh, or the Roma in Hungary).

It seems, somewhat surprisingly, that I'm not only more positive about Palestinians than you are, but also more positive about Israel which, after all, is a pretty impressive country in my book, even if I don't think its original foundation was very fair to the local population.

And finally, I'm sorry, but Haman was not an "Arab" from what I can tell, he was an Amalekite. Though, amusingly, looking that up on Wikipedia will tell you that the word "Amalekite" has been used to refer to people as varied as the Armenians, Hitler, the Israeli far right, the Israeli secular left, Zionists in general, and finally, yes, also Palestinians. I think at this point it's fairly safe to say it's become rather meaningless...