That was that my assertion was untrue in that there is fairly high Arab vote for labor, and that there are Arab labor ministers in the knesset, and I believe now an Arab cabinet member.

And, that the two Arab parties are anti-Zionist.

If dual loyalty is a concern, then they would not be able to take the Israeli oath of office honestly.

Phil's invocation is an irony for him, in that he urges unification, assimilation of Jews and Arabs, but then where it happens, he condemns it.

You'll always be able to find figureheads. Israel is engaged in a public relations war, after all.

I'm trying to figure out how long West Bank Jews lasted in 1948. I think the last prisoners were expelled to Israel one year after the war. After a year's captivity.

Even in the UK, the Meretz supporters are pretty strange. During one of my forays into finding ways to become a Jew of some stream or other, more or less any stream that is recognised by the Israel govt (some chance) I found myself at one point at a ceremony held by a Meretz-oriented yeshiva drop-out, who wanted everyone to practice a version of the Jewish prayers that he had re-written entirely in Heraclitean or possibly Democritean terms, since these philosophers were Marx's early love.

It reminds me of the strange ideologies developed by the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim, in which they replaced the traditional Jewish seasonal festivals with marxo-zionist ones, glorifying labor and the building of the state.