You seem to think you can bulldoze over reason and fact with your pious poses, for our own good. “If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, and the world would drown in an ocean of pride.”

I don’t mind arguing with anybody, as long as minimal standards of civility are respected. These cannot be switched on and off at will. Prove over a period of time that you’ve shed your boorishness and we will be able to talk.

Israel did it’s part, it left, it’s up to the people on the other side to take responsibility once she left.

So your claim is that if an Israeli premier shook a few hands before leaving then peace would be magically possible? Well if thats true, then you have the secret to the universe and should be telling every Isaeli not us…

As for Jimmy’s “charming racism”, I think he was making an observation about the lack of civil responsibility common in third world countries, he said “Egyptian” not “Arab” though since there are no first world Arab countries that might not be a problem either.

Israelinurse was making the perfectly valid point that when southern Lebanon was handed back it became a launching pad for rockets. Ditto Gaza.

No, Jimmy, this point is not valid.

Neither South Lebanon nor Gaza were “handed back”, this is a convenient legend.

In the case of South Lebanon, and as a consequence of the idiotic Lebanon War in the early 80ties (which, more than anything else, eroded Israeli deterrence, created Hizbullah and served, in the long term, the most extreme Iranian interests: it was just about the worst strategic disaster!) and the “asymmetric warfare” that followed, IDF retreated, leaving the ground to Hizbullah.

In the case of Gaza, Sharon steadfastly refused to “hand it over” under any sort of agreement or negotiations with the PLO (something that might have proved that “there is a partner”). Instead, Gaza was left in a vacuum, effectively given away to local clan thugs and, in the long run, to Hamas and its goons.

The art of politics, Jimmy, is not to make grand (and ultimately idiotic) gestures that look good as newspaper headlines but, in the long run (and even before newsprint turns into mulch), help nobody but your worst enemies.

Equally, Northern Sinai became a conduit for smuggling rocket parts and explosives into Gaza; the Egyptian who’ll refuse a bribe has yet to be born.

Leaving aside your charming racism… The reason Israel marched into Sinai in 1967 was the presence along Israeli borders (and in defiance of written agreements) of Egyptian army, poised to invade Israel. Since peace with Egypt, Sinai is demilitarized and nobody claims that Egypt is not keeping to this. (Indeed, one reason why Egyptian army and police are fairly powerless in face of massive smuggling is that there are so few of them. I seem to recall that Israel proposed increasing their numbers above those prescribed in the Peace Agreement.)

It is easy to rewrite history. Indeed, rewriting history is a popular sport of those keen that we repeat time and again the same blunders.

Israelinurse was making the perfectly valid point that when southern Lebanon was handed back it became a launching pad for rockets. Ditto Gaza.

It took some sharp smacks to compel Hizbollah and Hamas to cease and desist, as we all know.

Equally, Northern Sinai became a conduit for smuggling rocket parts and explosives into Gaza; the Egyptian who’ll refuse a bribe has yet to be born.

Of course, in both cases power should have been handed over to well-armed unscrupulous local clans who would have run both places like personal fiefdoms, but the opportunity was missed and probably won’t come again.

Israelinurse simply does not want the Golan to become a rocket-launching pad or a terrorist base, as it was before 1967.

The fact that she chooses to spend some of her time in chilly Blighty is neither here nor there!

True, Muffin, but it would be unwise to ingnore the wording of the original PLO charter, created in 1964

Not just in 1964 but much later the Herut Party, and its successor Likud, were formally in favour of not just “Greater Israel” extending from the sea all the way to Jordan, but also of annexing the Hashemite Kingdom to Israel: as Beitar youth sang, “Jordan has two shores: one is ours and so is the other one!”.

Does it mean that this is the official policy of the Israeli government and that we should disregard (or consider as sheer hypocrisy) Bibi Netanyahu’s agreement to a two-state solution?

So many people died so that Israel could push back the threats from Syria, Jordan and Egypt to a manageable distance.

Those people – many of them my friends, many of them who died at my side – did so to safeguard the existence and well-being of the State of Israel, not to allow your settler friends the opportunity to evict Palestinian villagers in the West Bank, behaving like Cossacks on rampage and establishing an empire of their own.

That tiny minority of us who live on the front line…

Now Manchester is the front line? Even Begin in his madder moments didn’t claim it.