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From 1947-1949, approximately 700,000 Arabs became refugees, leaving the land defined as Israel by the 1948 U.N. Palestine Partition Plan. The exact underlying reasons for why the Arabs left their land is a source of painful political and cultural dispute and serious historical debate.
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Israel's demolition policy is to bulldoze the family house of a Palestinian suicide bomber, as a deterrent. There is debate as to whether in fact the policy is a deterrent, and also as to whether it is ethically justifiable.
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During the presidential debates, John McCain and Barack Obama argued vigorously over whether the US president should talk face to face with Iran's president. The conservative's position is that until preconditions are met, such as acknowledging the state of Israel, any such meeting would be pointless, and do nothing but to legitimatize a corrupt regime in the eyes of the world. The liberal position is that negotiation may bear fruit, and will actually help the US gain international credibility.
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Iran has expressed their intent to create a civilian nuclear energy program, but many international leaders believe this is a smoke-screen for a nuclear weapons program.
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The Holocaust was the extermination of European Jews in World War II by Nazi Germany, under the plan named 'The Final Solution of the Jewish Question' by Adolf Hitler. An estimated 5-6 million Jews were killed, mostly in concentration camps. Antisemites such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have claimed that the Holocaust is myth, claiming that the authenticity of the event is at best a wild exaggeration of the truth.
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Some Arab states believe that Israel and Palestine should be unified to form a single state. Israel thinks the suggestion is untenable for several reasons.
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The primary reason the US Government stated for going to war with Iraq in 2003 was to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). This includes nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. These weapons were never found, and many questions were raised regarding the failure of US intelligence.
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The justification for the Iraq war partly predicated on the assumption that the war would be swift and easy. In 2007, 4 years after the war started, the U.S. Government authorized the “Surge” – an additional 20,000 troops - to quell ethnic violence in the region.
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The primary reason the US Government gives for maintaining a military presence in Iraq is to give the Iraqi people a chance at democracy. However, a common skeptical theory is that the US is significantly motivated by a need to secure a cheap supply of oil.
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The primary reasons the US Government gave for invading Iraq in 2003 was to rid the country of Weapons of Mass Destruction and to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. However, many critics of the US believe its government was significantly motivated by a need to secure a cheap supply of oil.
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Conservapedia
The holocaust denial view point has no support amongst any significant number of scholars. ... As denial of the holocaust is nonfactual, another common strategy of history revisionism is to use relativism by comparing it to other genocides, the death toll of Germans in WWII, persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany, or the number of abortions.
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Michael Neumann
...big oil and big business have never been supporters of the war. Bush I, who was much closer to big oil than Bush II, never wanted to invade Iraq. ... Why then did the US go into Iraq? To my mind it was because the US had to show the world that it was powerful after the humiliation of 9-11, and especially after the equally great humiliation of failing to capture or kill Bin Laden and the Mullah Omar.
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Ali Khamenei
US politicians [...] accuse Iran of trying to make nuclear warheads... We do not act like this toward our enemies [and in fact] the US is the only country that has up to now committed such a big crime. The Westerners are the ones that have made chemical weapons and used them, and during the 8-year war they imposed on us through Iraq, they put these lethal internationally banned weapons at the disposal of Saddam and his tyrannical Ba’th minority regime.
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Barack Obama
To this day, there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened -- a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful.
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Baker Institute
Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to U.S. allies in the Middle East, as well as to regional and global order, and to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. ... The United States should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments.
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Tony Blair
Let me first deal with the conspiracy theory that this is somehow to do with oil. There is no way whatever, if oil were the issue, that it would not be infinitely simpler to cut a deal with Saddam, who, I am sure, would be delighted to give us access to as much oil as we wanted if he could carry on building weapons of mass destruction. The very reason why we are taking the action that we are taking is nothing to do with oil or any of the other conspiracy theories put forward.
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Sarah Palin
We are a nation at war and in many [ways] the reasons for war are fights over energy sources, which is nonsensical when you consider that domestically we have the supplies ready to go.
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The Economist
But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land.
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Ehud Barak
[The single state solution doesn't work because] demography and attrition will lead to a state with a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority. This would not necessarily involve kicking out all the Jews. But it would mean the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. This, I believe, is [Arafat and his colleagues'] vision.
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Ehud Olmert
I will not agree to accept any kind of Israel responsibility for the refugees. Full stop. It's a moral issue of the highest level. I don't think that we should accept any kind of responsibility for the creation of this problem.
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