Reply #17: I think that's a bit simplistic

[HamdenRice]

"Is this really different from Ireland, Yugoslavia, South Africa"

Actually it is. Those struggles were not, initially, two or more groups fighting over land they way Israel/Palestine is.

South Africa in particular is very misunderstood in the west. White South Africans rarely even contemplated a South African without black South Africans. That was pretty unthinkable.

It was always about maintaining a social structure with whites and blacks in which the latter worked for the former in a white dominated South Africa.

Even going back to the frontier days of the Great Trek, one of the surprising aspects is that whites always looked for black communities to settle near. A frontier homestead without a black village was useless because there would be no one to do the work.

Only very late in the apartheid scheme did the government come up with a bizarre plan to "denationalize" black South Africans into homelands, but even then the idea was that most "citizens" of homelands would spend most of their time working in "white South Africa."

Black and white South Africans were always inextricably bound together, and despite their posturing at times, this was always an underlying assumption of the political conflict.

Northern Ireland as well was more like South Africa than like I/P. Protestants rarely talked about driving Catholics out, only about keeping them down.