You’re right again; some people are more human than others, apparently. White Christians qualify before brown Muslims, and the rich before the poor. It is so easy for Americans to put the people who have funny-sounding names and funny-sounding languages and who wear funny-looking clothes further down on the humanity scale.

Human rights laws seem to have become optional; the circumstances where they are applied appear to be chosen from out of thin air, to fit the needs of an agenda and not to fulfill a moral imperative. The true test of humanity is to apply the laws equally to all people, not only those whom we “like”; we must treat the murderer, the rapist, the terrorist with as much compassion and humanity as the innocent child. This is the test of our humanity.

Unfortunately, Obama is giving legitimacy to so-called “preventive detention” by advocating and adopting it himself in the case of Guantanamo detainees, and no doubt others – additional evidence that as low as my expectations of him were, they were not low enough.

And you are so right that Ohad and others are setting Israeli Jews above Palestinians on the humanity scale. This goes directly against the most fundamental and essential principle of human rights concepts and laws, which is and must be absolute, that all human beings are equal and are entitled to the same rights on the same basis regardless of race, nationality, ethnicity, age, gender, education, socio-economic status, or even other legal status. That includes the worst of the worst, the best of the best, and everyone in between. Unfortunately, in the thinking of some people, including our friend Ohad, all human beings are equal, but some are more human than others.

You have also correctly identified the core issue here, that being the human rights of all persons. Human rights laws cannot be cherrypicked for any reason, not least of which is an imagined scenario of future recidivism. This is precisely the kind of evil that keeps innocent people locked up in Israeli prisons and in places such as Bagram and Guantanamo. It is not acceptable to keep people incarcerated because of what you think they might do in the future. And for heaven’s sake, one country’s citizens’ rights should not be preferred over another’s, which is what Ohad clearly advocates in his comments. He is implying that a Palestinian is a lesser human than an Israeli, and that seems to be a significantly common attitude among some Israelis I know.

You reap what you sow – I say that again and again, because it is a fact. Israel’s policies and actions breed terrorism, and the answer to that is not to continue to flout the law and act as a rogue, a middle eastern banana republic hiding its dirty deeds behind a phony excuse of needing to “defend ourselves.” You just don’t see the blowback, do you? Palestinian violence does not come out of a vacuum; there is a cause for which it is the effect.

I will say it again – get back behind the green line and stay there. Stop acting like hysterical children, wantonly killing and destroying in outrageously disproportionate ways. In other words, stop acting like the terrorists you fear so much.

I would love to respond fully to this and what follows it, but no time now. I just have to say that I am shocked and disappointed that you are trying to equate the Zionists’ blatant and generally cynical use of the Holocaust as a marketing tool, and my reference to it as the trigger event that brought the world community together around the need for universal laws governing human rights. It is the one positive thing to have come out of the Holocaust in fact.

I will try to say more later.

I acknowledged my error in that one case. On the other hand, there have been multiple other cases in which you have seriously misrepresented what I and others said in order to give yourself a better argument. I am not suggesting you did it consciously, but you most certainly did it on more than one occasion.

“and no, im sorry, palestinian nationallity has been virtually null before Zionism”

That simply contradicts historical fact. I would refer you to the study by the late Baruch Kimmerling, among others. I can cite chapter and verse for you if you like, but I do not have time to look up the references at the moment. I appreciate your acknowledgment that Palestinian nationalism is legitimate, but I simply cannot let you get away with the fiction that it began with and consequently as a result of Zionism.

“i really cant understand why pro-palestinians try to fight this so fiercely”

That is not difficult. We fight it because it is false, and not coincidentally because it is, for Zionists, completely self-serving.

“it really doesnt matter who has deeper roots”

Yeah, it kind of does, although it is not something I generally make an issue of.

“both us and them are both stuck in this land and have to find a solution together, it doesnt MATTER who came first”

What matters is that Palestine had a settled population when the Zionists decided to turn it into a state for European Jews. What matters is that the mainstream view of those European Zionists was that the existing population – or at least the non-Jewish majority – had to be removed from the land to accommodate their ambitions of creating a European Jewish state. And what matters is that they accomplished that, ultimately “by blood and fire”, and that the project of removing the non-Jewish indigenous population continues to this day by a variety of means, including but not limited to “blood and fire”. So yes, it matters.

And yes, ultimately the two parties must find a way to live in the land together, which would never have been a problem had the Zionists accepted the rights of the Palestinians to begin with. And it is absolutely clear which party is putting insurmountable obstacles in the way of the coexistence that you appear to accept.

“David ben-gurion actually encouraged settlement in the negev to reduce friction with the arabs, he made it a public statement, and tried to make an example by moving into the negev himself”

David ben-Gurion made a lot of public statements that were contradicted by his private statements and his actions. I don’t believe for a moment that he promoted the colonization of the negev OR moved there in order to improve relations with the “Arabs”.

And finally, at least for now, when Israel prosecutes (not persecutes) murderers of Palestinians (and gays, and other marginal persons) then you will have the right to demand that Palestinian authorities prosecute murderers also. Until then, I suggest you clean up your own house before you criticize others’ housekeeping.

- I, for one, did not label you as anything, nor did I assume you were either a hasbarist, or a troll.

- No one here said “it must be assumed that those prisoners were tortured” or anything like that, so again you are making up something in order to create for yourself an easy argument. I said that “it is a fair bet that at least some of them have been tortured”, which is very, very different from “it must be assumed that those prisoners were tortured”. Unlike what you claim I said my statement was very reasonable and realistic based on Israel’s record of routinely torturing Palestinians whom they detain and imprison for any reason or for no stated reason. How many other countries in this world have been so brazen as to openly make torture legal for heaven’s sake?! Israel has even been known to torture children, for god’s sake, some of them quite young. So I stand by my statement that it is a fair bet that at least some of the prisoners who are to be released were tortured.

- I answered your question, as Richard pointed out. I would further point out to you that you have some serious misconceptions about matters involving human rights, and should learn a bit more about the principles involved. No, either way human rights will not be violated. It cannot in any way or under any condition be a violation of Israeli human rights to honour the human rights of others. It is not a question of what “human right activists like us” can comprehend, it is a matter of understanding the universal stature of human rights, and the fact that you cannot deny human rights to anyone for any reason. Along those lines I would suggest that had Israel and its Zionist founders cared more for human rights all along things would be very, very different both historically and in the present day.

Sorry you are disappointed, and sorry, really, that you don’t want to stick around.