Perhaps, though if that is true then at least someone is doing something without thinking about "political significance." A strange breath of sanity.

Seeing as you have defined "religion" as something close to "any ideology besides your own", by definition you disapprove. But are you being logical?

If religion "beats logic day and night with both hands tied", it therefore "logically" follows that your trolling is vain and you have no reason to insult ninety percent of the world  at once . So would  you please go away and leave the rest of us poor souls in the vale of ignorance without making a fuss over it? Because otherwise you are being illogical which is unworthy of such a great mind as yourself.

Battar is actually making a useful point.

The religion-vs-reason argument is, by this point, a deflated balloon. It was always senseless, as it's a false dichotomy.

A more useful dichotomy is sociology v. history. Do we take a sociological or a historical look at the situation? Trying to understand the disaster of Palestinian living and governance is thinking sociologically-- it looks at other societies, their resources and their accomplishments and makes a comparison. It thereby seeks to put the society in a petri dish, in a lab-controlled environment, for inspection.

Thinking historically, this cannot be done. And that is the point Battar is touching on. The Palestinians have a history, not just a present situation. They are Muslims, and they are Muslims for a reason. Part of that reason is Islam's history of conquest, from its earliest days (its days when Muhhamad was more a conqueror, a warlord, than a religious figure). This gave rise to certain Islamic doctrines which absolutely forbid Muslims to live under non-Muslim authority, at least without fighting it.

In a sense Battar is right-- most Muslims will never accept this situation, as they never have in the past. (They've only barely accepted other versions of Islam, even during years of the Caliphate.)

The problem in the argument is that he conflates the historical with the sociological. He look around at religion and makes a statement about how humans, when together in society, behave under religious systems, without considering the history-- the unique characters-- of each of those systems.

Still the article has value. It should be read. People need to accept that the Palestinians are people too-- in the sense that they have responsibility for their behavior and their destiny. The West-- and the Left in particular-- tends to treat them like retarded children-- if he fired that missile it's because he "doesn't know any better;" if he commits honor killings on a daily basis it's because he can't help it, he's been kicked around all his life.

This idea needs to stop. The Palestinians aren't children wounded by assault weapon fire, or unborn fetuses, or any of the other helpless victims that the Left loves to champion. They are smart, and strong, and shrewd (and backed by some of the largest power structures in the world) and when they f**k up it is their own doing, since they also have two hands and a brain.

It is time to call for their responsibility. And we can begin by asking, viz-a-vis the Palestinians, "What ever happened to non-violent resistance? Why were the Palestinians able to kill Gandhi?" Mulling those questions will lead to the more essential ones.

I don't like this article much.
While it states the undeniable progress of the Judea, Samaria, and Gaza Arab under Israeli rule, it conveniently omits to mention the fact that it was an occupation, and a colonial one at that.
The opening stages of this occupation, from the battle of 1967 onwards to the inception of the so-called "Civil Administration" in 1981, were indeed characterized by a lack of policy, or a lack of willingness of the Israeli political establishment to devise one, which inevitably led to "the forces of the market" taking over.
Once Sharon established the Civil administration, which goal was to relieve the IDF of its necessarily corrupting duty of administering the populations under occupation, the corruption was handed over, in effect, to the local residents "loyal" to Israel, namely, the "settlers". This led to more, not less, injustice and brutality, and set the scene for the first intifada, as well as convinced a plurality of the Israelis that the occupation could not be sustained as it was an endless source of corruption, an injustice in the broad sense, and a source of backwardness since the increased dependence on a large pool of cheap, skilled labor precluded the need for technological advancement of many sectors of the Israeli economy, chiefly in construction and in agriculture, which are still suffering from it these days. Since Israel's interest was the core preoccupation of this civil administration, they did a really good job as colonial administrators, while ordering the army units at their disposal around, collecting taxes, and actively preventing any Arab initiative in industry and manufacturing, that could have competed on the Israeli consumer market with more attractive prices and acceptable quality.
I personally endured reserve duty doing the CA's bidding at the beginning of the 1^st intifada, so I know what I'm talking about. Even before that, and while the Arabs were in their groveling-subdued phase instead of their present menacing-murdering one, and the situation in the Territories was calm and rather profitable to Israel, a lot of Israelis objected to the occupation since, apart from being contradictory with human rights and the principles of democracy, they were the ones actually required to do it for about a month every year, and of course at no personal profit to themselves or their families.
Most of us understand the need to don the uniform every once in a while in order to defend our country, but we were increasingly opposed to being the suckers who serve the interests of a few fat-cat settlers, especially as we were seeing them living in luxurious villas and driving expensive vehicles while we were left with less than 11 months of the year that we could dedicate to our struggle to make ends meet, and pay the mortgage of our shoebox apartments and the installments on our Subarus.

What Israel did with the Palestinians from 1967 to 1994 was a colonial occupation. I should know: I did it.
We weren't very good at it, and we were a far cry from the murderousness of the Belgians in Congo, or from the exploitativeness of the French in N. Africa. In hindsight, it would have been better if the Palestinians had walked in 1967, rather than allowing us to undergo the shameful experience of being occupiers, as well as the corrupting influence of their pathological society. With some luck, they'll be walking out of Eastern-central Eretz Israel anytime soon to allow the Jihad a better selectivity in the use of WMDs, we'll manage to survive and to prevail, and they'll be a real border between us and the Arabs, one that everybody can live with. The Jordan River.

"I personally endured reserve duty doing the CA's bidding at the beginning of the 1^st intifada, so I know what I'm talking about."

Right. So every Motie, Dudu, and Yair who served with you knows just as well as you, because they served in the territories? Wouldn't that mean that every one of the plurality of opinions held by reserve soldiers in the territories is correct, regardless of their inevitable contradictions? So, either you are saying that the right-winger who was in your or a similar unit and denies that it's an occupation is absolutely correct (at least as correct as you are), or your statement that, "I'm right because I was there" is false and sophistic.

As for the occupation being an occupation-- yes, it was/is-- de jure. We all know that, nobody, least of all Israel is hiding it. The article may not have mentioned it because it might not be de facto an occupation. That's more a question of, first, how ownership/sovereignty is determined in general and, second, who that land belongs to according to the answers of our first question.

Even if, it's hard to make a case that Israel is occupying "Palestine," since there was no Palestine. If were are to say that people lived and owned land there before the state and 67, then we need to do some revamping of the Middle East in total, considering that the earliest, evidenced ownership of the land in the region is that of the Jews; and that land owned throughout the rest of the region around '47 (and later) is also now occupied by others.

We might start with Jordan. If you want to talk about an occupation, especially an occupation of "Palestinian" land, that is the closest and most egregious place to look.

Actually from what I have read the Palestinians have always been like that. The Israeli occupation didn't change anything as they were like that as far back as the Mandate, and perhaps even the Turks. To be fair they aren't really out of the Levantine tradition-Sicilians and Corsicans were like that too. They are more extreme perhaps.
A lot of the fault stems from the form of nationalism that defines power as a measure of national worth rather then as a tool. However that weakness is timeless among men.
As for religion vs reason, that may not be the problem. It actually seems more like pride then religion. And of course pride trumps reason whether or not religion trumps reason. It is for instance interesting that Israel if it doesn't exactly "get along" with Egyptians and Jordanians is at least able to inhabit the same world in a reasonably civilized manner. The reason why may be that they have already managed to attain the minamal military performance to satisfy their pride.
Also it is, besides being an ethnic, and to some degree a religious problem, it is a quarrel between two mutually incomprehensible mindsets about war. To a Westerner war is a political tool to be used in emergencies, a soldier shoots at uniforms not men and when it is over it is over, more or less. And the chief target is organizations rather then ethnic groups in most circumstances. The Palestinians are really thinking in terms of what a Westerner would consider a feud rather then a war. Which of course means that they often feel they have a duty to have personal rather then theoretical enmity and to carry it from generation to generation.
As for non-violent resistance, well the premise of that idea is essentially to compromise a foe by surrendering oneself to his mercy. Which in turn implies that the Palestinians are such bad fighters that they need to do so. It is not suprising that they are reluctant to remind themselves of their own lack of prowess.
As for Palestine being a colonial occupation that isn't quite accurate. It was more like a military frontier zone that some people happend to colonize.