Anyone who thinks the Israel-Palestine crisis is about land and tries to imply is not about religion is kidding themselves. You only have to look at a map of Israel and the West Bank and see that nice smooth "border" (not sure if that's the right word, perhaps demarcation line?) between Israel and the West Bank. It is a pretty smooth line apart from one area where the Israelis made a determined effort to surge inwards with a much more aggressive military push in one particular area. Remove religion (including all the Jerusalem holy sites) from the Israel/Palestine equation and this would never have happened. Jerusalem would be well within the West Bank.
In fact, I read that in the zionist conferences around the turn of the century (around 1900 very roughly) where they considered alternative homes for the future state of Israel others favoured a location within Uganda and, were it not for the religious connection to Palestine Uganda might have prevailed (this is debatable and somewhat speculative) and what is today Israel would simply be the peaceful state of Palestine. It was the religious Israelis that really fought for the establishment of a state in that area, according to at least one book I read a couple of years ago.
Israel/Palestine ought to be taught to school children in schools in the future as a case study in why religion sucks.
Netanyahu today said that Jerusalem has been the "capital of Israel for 3,000 years". How long was is though that Israelis/Jews had basically no or negligible connection to the region and their people in the region were a tiny minority? Was it 1000 years or 2000? I can't remember right now. But the Israelis war to reclaim Jerusalem in I think the 1940s and/or the 1960s maybe (I forget the exact details) makes no more sense (less, in fact) than if a band of well-funded red Indians decided to take over the US on the grounds that their ancestors used to own the land and worship the sun god or whatever was their religion. Netanyahu's comment is blatantly unfair. I can't believe he is a complete moron, so I think he is deliberately manipulating the truth.
I've hated Netanyahu ever since he proposed that Elor Azaria be pardoned (i.e. given no punishment at all). He was the Israeli soldier who was caught on video shooting and murdering a wounded Palestinian who was lying on the ground not moving. Netanyahu is not committed to the peace process, and has openly acknowledged that there will be no two state agreement on this watch, while continuing to build settlements where there is not justification.
Israel has had the same policy for decades. It steals as much land as it can get away with, shrugs off the international condemnation, and it knows that once a generation or two has passed and Israelis have been born on the stolen land, and the dispossed have died or gone away or been forgotten, there is no case to give it back. Then it steals more which is what it is basically doing now again by trying to take the whole of Jerusalem and surrounding areas by building settlements, a position that would have been totally unacceptable to everyone some years ago.
At the moment, it's hard to be pro-Israel and it's tempting to be pro-Palestine.
The Palestinians didn't help their cause over the years by carrying out attacks on civilians, by the great support their community has given to suicide bombers that attacks random civilians, by the airplane hijacks of decades ago, and other things. But if our country, if your country had been occupied by another power, had suffered the same atrocities and humiliations and wars, all while living in poverty and having much less opportunity to educate ourselves about the world, can you honestly say that some citizens of your country might not have done similar crazy things? The US nuked the Japanese even though the Japs had no chance of invading the homeland, and the Brits in WW2 constantly bombed civilians even while there was not a single German soldier in the UK.
The other thing that pisses me off is the Israeli argument that there was no nation state there before they came. As it that makes it OK to steal someone's land and then burn down their villages just because they haven't organized themselves into a nation state. When you hear that utterly rubbish argument being wheeled out time and again, you know they have a weak argument.
Sorry about that, but when I click on the news and hear the name "Netanyahu" and remind myself of his sorry existence it's either rant on veggie views or bang my head against a wall....