S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Israel on Friday for meetings with senior government leaders and to see firsthand some of the U.S. weapons and security assistance that Washington rapidly delivered to Israel in the first week of its war with the militant Hamas group.

Austin is the second high-level U.S. official sent by President Joe Biden to visit Israel in two days. His quick trip from Brussels, where he was attending a NATO defense ministers meeting, came a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the region. Blinken is continuing the frantic Mideast diplomacy, seeking to avert an expanded regional conflict.

  • @Sanctus
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    11 year ago

    My statement was meant to point out the ridiculousness of the comment I was replying to. If you go far back enough every bit of land has been fought over. Original ownership of the land is a phallacy that seems to make sense if you pick a specific time period and ignore all that happened before. At this point, the wars over the holy land are all finger pointing and dubious claims at best.

    • R0cket_M00se
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      11 year ago

      So what do we do? Nuke the dome of the rock and tell both groups they can have their God’s holy land when they’re ready to join the rest of human civilization? Split it 50/50 and DMZ the two sides somehow?

      If land claims are that dubious (which I agree with) then who can say it wasn’t the right of the British to give it to the Jewish people in the 40’s? Multiple generations of each have lived on this land, though. It may have been a mistake to give it to them but that was a couple generations ago and what’s done is done.

      The best case scenario is that Palestinians get assimilated into surrounding Muslim countries, anything else and the loss of culture will be surpassed by a loss of life instead.