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Do you have a problem with Jews' exercising their rights?

I don't think Phil V has a problem with Israelis exercising their rights anywhere and anyhow they wish on Israeli territory.

He does seem to feel that Israelis celebrating exclusivist rituals on illegally occupied territory is an arrogant and imprudent course of action likely to lead to further bloodshed. In which, of course, he is right.

To say that Israel occupies the Temple Mount "illegally" is quite ridiculous. Israel occupies the territories by right of conquest in war. War by definition begins where legality ends. Israel was attacked by the surrounding Arab countries in 1967. Was that "illegal" too? Israel repulsed its attackers and took certain territories from them to make its borders more defensible, and to recover ancient holy sites of the Jewish people, from which Jews had been barred by the previous Arab occupiers.

Furthermore, Israel did not take any land from the Palestinians. The Palestinians had no land and have never had any. Israel took land from Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, which had occupied them for nearly twenty years. Was it also "illegal" for Jordan and Egypt to control the territories? Why do you suppose there was no international or Palestinian outcry about that "illegality"?

Before that, these lands were under primarily British control; the British took them from the Turks; the Turks took them from the old Arab Caliphate, which took them from the Byzantines. You can take it back further if you want, but then there will be no Arabs in the picture at all. Were all those siezures of the land "illegal"? How far back shall we go to set it straight? What you will not find in this history, by the way, is any point at which the land was held "legally" by "Palestinians."

By every traditional understanding of the law of war, territory acquired in the prosecution of a just defensive war against an aggressor is rightly acquired. What is remarkable is not that Israel still holds the territories, but that it has not simply annexed them, as Jordan annexed the West Bank in - what was it? - 1952 or there abouts.

First of all, there is NO illegal occupied territory. Read 242 and the comments of the authors. Israel has done nothing illegal and occupied nothing. If Israel had the will it could cede a square millimeter and fulfil 242.

The Temple Mount is the Temple mount no game playing allowed. It has been a sacred Jewish site for about 4000 years. If anyone is illegally occupying the site, it would be the Muslim entity.

But why not be honest. You think Jews have no claim on any territory. Have you insisted that France and Germany return land that was German in history and culture for a thousand years? Why is it only Israel that must pay the price of United Nations Neo-Morality?

Your handle is a disgrace to objectivists everywhere.