Should Israel have the right to exist?

Of course.

Yes, so does Palestine.

ummm. jewish folks pretty unequivocally state "yes". islamic folks pretty unequivocally state "no". i've asked maybe 100 christians, they seem about evenly divided, but, when i follow up with, "how come", they seem to have a difficult time articulating why.

ought the jewish people have a home land because somebody in the old testament said that God said it should happen about 3,000 years ago? i don't know.

God told some muslim guy that that land belonged to them.

the muslim people lived there for 1,100 years.

ought the jewish right supercede the muslim right?

well, in 1948, the usa and un recognized israel as a nation. since then, the impoverished palestinians have been engaged in acts of violence to bring attention and justice to their cause.

the jewish people are scared. they've been the targets of random acts of violence for 60 years now.

i'm glad that i'm not one of the smart people who will resolve this issue anytime soon. i can see arguments on both sides, i feel horrible for the palestinian people living much like the jewish people lived in concentration camps. and, i feel horrible for the jewish people, living in an extremely small block of real estate, with all the eyes of the world honed in on you, with threats of terrorism and nuclear exchange any day. i pray for peace, that's all i can do, today.

Bob, thanks for the avatar. I strongly oppose the Zionist Movement because of their evil agendas. The best place for them to reside is central Antartica.
Facts:
1. not all jews are zionist.
2. the creation of Zionist Israel also created the largest concentration camp in the planet: Palestinian Territories.
3. Hitler was a blind puppet for the Zionist Movement during WW2. The Zionist Movement masterminded the Holocaust to use it as a prime reason for the creation of Istael.
BTW, the worse enemies of Israel are the ones in the shadows, Holocaust deniers, the ones that hate jews/judaism in general. Not my case.

Yes. In central Antartica.

My 2 cents.

Absolutely.

Yes they should, people have been trying to destroy Israel for years and have all failed.

EVERY country has the right to exist, some may need to do more to earn that right :-)

EDIT... +6 for the question, people may not like it, but its just a question, fair enough.

Yes, and so does Palestine.

But try telling that to a Muslim and they just start screaming at you.

I'm fully gentile. And happily so. But I'm also an infidel, and gratefully so.

As far as I'm concerned, the Palestinians can get all of their lands back if they stopped persecuting the Israelis.

Look at Egypt and the Sinai.

Of course ! Know something I don't ? Please share .

1) Yes. Palestine too.


2) "Since 1967, the phrase "right to exist" has most commonly referred to Israel. The Israeli Knesset past a resolution passed immediately after the Six-Day War of June 1967 in which Jerusalem offered to return the recently conquered territory in exchange for "peace and recognition of its right to exist." This resolution was past unanimously and even Menachem Begin, who would later criticize this formulation, voted for it.
Egyptian spokesman Mohammed H. el-Zayyat responded that Cairo had accepted Israel's right to exist since the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli armistice in 1949. He added that this did not imply recognition of Israel. In November, Egypt accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which implied acceptance of Israel's right to exist. At the same time, President Nasser urged Arafat and other Palestinian leaders to reject the resolution. "You must be our irresponsible arm," he said.

Upon assuming the premiership in 1977, Begin spoke as follows:
“Our right to exist--have you ever heard of such a thing? Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist? Mr. Speaker: We were granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago. Hence, the Jewish people have an historic, eternal and inalienable right to exist in this land, Eretz Israel, the land of our forefathers. We need nobody's recognition in asserting this inalienable right. And for this inalienable right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of nations. Mr. Speaker: From the Knesset of Israel, I say to the world, our very existence per se is our right to exist!”
In 2009 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert demanded the Palestinian Authority's acceptance of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. The Knesset plenum gave initial approval in May 2009 to a bill criminalising the public denial of Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, with a penalty of up to a year in prison.

- Criticism:
According to Noam Chomsky, the term "right to exist" is unique to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "No state has a right to exist, and no one demands such a right....In an effort to prevent negotiations and a diplomatic settlement, the U.S. and Israel insisted on raising the barrier to something that nobody’s going to accept....[ Palestinians are] not going to accept...the legitimacy of their dispossession." John V. Whitbeck argued that Israel's insistence on a right to exist forces Palestinians to provide a moral justification for their own suffering."

"In a speech in June 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama said "Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's.""
Source and further information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_exist

yes ofcause they do and we in the west should support them in any way we can because there the only democracy in the middle east.

According to true Jews (not the Zionists SOBs who are screwing up the world today), the establishment of the State of Israel is against their religion, their holy book (the Torah) and the wishes/commands of their god:

"It was through reading Rabbi Teitelbaum’s books that I became aware of the true contradiction between Zionism and Judaism. The Talmud says that ever since the beginning of exile, Jews are forbidden to conquer the Holy Land, or to fight wars against the non-Jewish nations. They are also forbidden to take physical action toward their redemption. Thus, according to Jewish law a Jewish state is forbidden to exist. It must be dismantled and the land must be ruled by a non-Jewish government."

"It is my sincere hope that they change their approach of deliberately ignoring this subject, and begin to see what I have learned: that Zionism is fundamentally against the principles of Judaism, that it must be clearly and publicly denounced, and that religious Zionism must be declared an heretical movement. My organization, True Torah Jews Against Zionism, is doing a lot of work in this area by spreading books and other reading material against Zionism throughout the Orthodox world. We already have seen some success.
Sadly, however, many non-Zionist Jews have been brainwashed by the incessant Zionist rhetoric of the Jewish newspapers to believe that all Arabs and Muslims are murderers and the only way to protect Jews is to support the Zionist state. Every time the Zionists launch an attack on Palestinians, such as in the Gaza operation this year, they build even more support for themselves, because their actions cause a backlash of Jew hatred in the Arab world, which in turn causes Jews to support the Zionists. It is a never-ending cycle."

"The way to end this is to do what we are doing: show Jews that the Zionists are the ones who stirred up this whole fight to begin with, and that their actions have only brought trouble upon Jews; and to show Jews that Jews and Arabs have always and can still live side by side in peace."

"We must also remember that as all of these trends are occurring within the Jewish world, Divine Providence is preparing the demographic solution as an end to the tragedy of the Zionist state. In a special report on the 61st anniversary of the Nakba, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics surveyed the demographic situation in the Holy Land. According to the report, the worldwide Palestinian population was 10.6 million at the end of 2008, compared to 1.4 million in 1948 – a sevenfold increase. Moreover, the report stated that the total number of Palestinians living in historic Palestine (between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea), by the end of 2008 totaled 5.1 million compared to 5.6 Jews. The report predicted that the Palestinian and Jewish populations in historic Palestine will be equal by 2016. This is all without counting the millions of refugees who long to return to their land."

"Thus there is hope on the horizon. A time will soon come when Jews will be faced with the additional ethical dilemma of a minority ruling over a majority. Most secular Jews will surely be uninterested in such a prospect, which goes against the principles of humanism. The religious Zionist and settler communities will continue the fight, but they cannot win it on their own. Their numbers are too small. It will be the larger community of non-Zionist Orthodox Jews who make the difference. Our job, as Jews who know the truth of the Torah, is to bring those Jews to the truth as well. They are ready to hear it."

Yirmiyahu Cohen is an American rabbi and spokesman for the group Jews Against Zionism. He is the author of several books on Orthodox Jewish thought and history.
His articles have appeared at www.truetorahjews.com.

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=214393

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Now, before y'all brainwashed ignoramuses go on downrating me, calling me anti-Semitic and reminding me of the Holocaust, I urge you to have the balls to look at the website posted above, research Zionism and maybe y'all see the threat it is to world peace. And how, you idiots, criticizing the actions of Israel & its Zionist is none of the above and something every one should be doing if we hope to achieve world peace one day for us and our children.

Israel has been the homeland of the Jews for 3,600 years. It's the Arab who call themselves Palestinians who have no rightful claim to the land of Israel. These Arabs who now claim their land were natives of other Arab countries. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were practically no Muslim Arabs in the Holyland. When the British conquered Palestine in 1917, there were only a few thousand Arab Muslims.Most of the Arabs were Christian and most of the Muslims either had come from Turkey or were descandents of Jews and Christians forced to convert to Islam . For example in 1695, a Dutch scholar Adriann Reland found the holyland inhabited by Jews who were the majority and the rest were Christians or non Arab Muslim. There were no Arab Muslims. Because the British were non Muslim, Muslim Arabs immigrated to the Holyland beginning in the 1920s.They took land which was rightfully Jewish land. Now they falsely claim the Jews took their land. They have only called themselves Palestianians for 30 years . They have no connection to the holyland except as invaders and should leave. Israel has more right to exist than 99% of world's nations.

yes

Palestine? Yes! Its occupants? No!

believer and strongest will be win

Same as any other,why wouldn't they,,there are humans there,they contribute to the betterment of human kind,heck,they even have enemy's,,imagine that...

why not?most of them so smart!Ask Americans!And Jewish culture~~~WOW!