The Joys of Victimhood (1989)

Oh yes, corporations typically just hang onto it and use it to enrich executives, or they funnel it out of the country. But it should be well-known by this point that corporations get way too many tax breaks.

> It seems like these types of problems can only exist when there are too many people living in close-proximity.

Let me guess: you avoid cities because the black people scare you?

What's the "compromise" for the Jews exactly here? They had nothing, they got half of the country.

> This is the whole story in a nutshell.

Really, no. It forgets the illegal occupation of the West Bank, the ever expanding settlements, the unilateral and unrecognized annexation of Jerusalem, the de facto apartheid system in the Occupied Territories, the daily violence against Palestinians.

It does mention Israeli disengagement from Gaza though. Maybe other readers would be interested in knowing how many settlers were actually affected by the famous disengagement from Gaza: eight thousand. Increase in the settlers population in the West Bank since then: more than 150 thousand. Nice trick, huh?

Btw, for some reason on Quora I've found the most blatant and shameless pro-Israel propaganda, often presented with long historical perspectives that are strangely blind on some crucial details, like the one you pasted here. I wouldn't take my information from there on this subject (or actually, most subjects) to be fair.

I'm aware that the conflict is old and complicated and there are good and bad people on both sides, but by your own account, the basis of it is that Brits decided that a group of people scattered across the world all had a natural right to live in roughly the same place their ancestors came from 2000 years previous, regardless of the feelings of the people who were already living there.

And, granted, their neighbors could have reacted less violently. But it still doesn't make much sense to begin with. I can trace my ancestry to medieval Britain, and I might be able to figure out exactly where some of my ancestors lived, but that doesn't give me or anyone the right to evict the people living there now.

> Such a situation could never have come about without certain fundamental confusions having been firmly established, and these begin with language itself. Victims have traditionally been minority groups, but in fact women, who in the United States are a slight majority, have been deemed victims, whereas the Jews and the Chinese in America, though clearly minorities (and vastly less numerous than blacks or Hispanic people), are not usually counted as victims and thus rarely get included in affirmative action or other quota favoritism programs. A victim, then, is someone who insistently declares himself a victim.

There have been times and places in the history of the world where the majority of the people in certain places were outright slaves, including in the United States and especially in the Caribbean. And yet are we to believe that these powerless, enslaved people weren't victims simply because slavery was such a vast institution that there were more people suffering under if than committing it?