Yiddish and Ladino are obviously strongly influenced by Hebrew. I never claimed otherwise. There is, however, the unfortunate fact that hardline Zionist ideologues were excessively obsessed with discouraging the use of Ladino or Yiddish, especially Yiddish, which they unjustly equated with weakness and subservience towards Gentiles. The great Martin Buber was heckled and shouted down by some thugs planted in an audience at a lecture he gave in Jerusalem, solely because he didn't give the talk in Hebrew(a language he wasn't fluent in at the time).
And I totally agree that the Christian political establishment treated the Jews of Europe horribly and that those who did all that- all of whom are long dead now- should be held to account for all that they did- the situation was far more ambiguous in the Arab/Muslim world, where there were long periods of co-existence and amity between Arabs and the indigenous Jewish community, where the dynamic was never unrelenting hostility. There is the fact, for example, that one of the safest places a person who was Jewish could be in the 1933-45 period was in an Arab or Muslim country: that Albanian Muslims helped Jews get out of Europe to safety; that the Chief Imam of Paris sheltered Jews in his mosque. It's not as simple as "they're just like the Nazis".
And I'm not asking for anybody to "give in"- just to let go of the useless objective of "peace through victory", when "victory" in the military sense, isn't possible in this conflict, and the only way to peace is a real face-saving compromise in which nobody is forced to play the role of the "vanquished side", be seen as surrendering, and therefore immediately be overthrown and replaced by somebody else vowing to "avenge the shame".
I want Israeli Jews and Palestinians to be able to live in peace, safety and security. It's impossible to get to that objective through Netanyahu's bloodyminded and pointless obsession with being able to claim victory, while dragging any Palestinian leadership throught the dirt.
As to what happened in the second intifada, Palestinians have as many wounds and have suffered as many, if not more injustices. No one side is the only victim in this. Nor does it do any good to refuse to accept that Palestinians are Palestinians, or that they are driven by bigotry and nothing else. Their are equal degrees of bigotry on both sides and there are equal degrees of legitimate grievance on both.
