Edit: On a completely unrelated note and just out of curiosity, are you back in the US? Or just insomniac, to be posting posts that long at those hours?

It also seems to be the only state besides maybe Hawaii whose flag isn't utterly hilarious (don't mind me, I just read a Washington Post blog post making fun of all American state flags).

No one I know, no, but indeed, Belgium's had rather its share of terrorist scares these past few years... and the highest per capita number of people who ran off to join ISIS, which doesn't exactly bode well for the future either. Sorry to hear Breivik hit so close to home - certainly in a league of its own, that.

That wasn't precisely what I meant actually - despite the Klan and neo-Nazis, I won't dispute that anti-Semitism has been a much smaller issue in the history of the USA than in Europe over the same period. What I was getting at, is that if you're looking at two thousand years of history, as you insist on doing, the two hundred odd years that the USA is a separate place from Europe are pretty meaningless - and if you go back further, things like medieval pogroms are as much a part of most Americans' history as a European's.

Agreed.

Well, I agree in the sense that I don't think the Palestinians should necessarily have a separate state - I have no objection in principle to a binational state, if that turns out to be more practical than the alternative. I disagree in the sense that I am indeed convinced the Palestinians are a separate Arab nation now, regardless of what they were four generations ago, and that "solving" the problem by e.g. just giving the West Bank to Jordan and the Gaza Strip to Egypt wouldn't work (even if either country was at all interested). The other Arab nations are also quite separate, by the way, even if they all do their best to keep writing the same language (speaking, not so much). Some of them are very nearly as hostile to each other as they are to Israel (I do a fair bit of business with Algeria - if you're smart you'll never mention either Morocco or Egypt to an Algerian, though in fairness that was nothing compared to the spectacle that we were treated to when accidentally delivering goods in a container displaying a David's star). Pan-Arabism used to be a big thing for a while, and it still has its adherents, but a clear minority. A place like Morocco has been politically and culturally separate from most of the rest of the Arab world for most of the last millennium - much longer than the USA has been separate from Europe.

Not much of that is really wrong, it's just over-generalized. Examples like the Khazar empire, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Caliphate of al-Andalus and, more debatably, the Osman Empire all show that Jews could thrive in Europe under the right circumstances - and if the states in question had survived, their thriving Jewish communities would have too.

I'm actually reminded of your earlier comment - that Europeans historically have pretty much sucked at dealing with any kind of minority that wouldn't or couldn't blend in, it just so happens that for most of that history there weren't that many of those except Jews. And then of course the Christian anti-semitism on top of that.

Yes, "a precise but indefinite amount of time" sounds about right. How long that should be depends on many things, but mostly just on the attitude of the refugees and their new host countries. I was thinking about it this morning and struck by the fact that besides the Palestinians, there are at least two other cases of much larger populations being permanently displaced, all in a period of less than three years in 1945-1948: the Germans of Silesia, the Baltics, the Sudetenland etc., and the Indian Muslims displaced to Pakistan (as well as Hindus displaced to India). In both cases, it became obvious in a matter of a few decades at most that there was no question of going back, and nobody is seriously saying otherwise now. Not that that justifies the initial expulsions in any way (both of which involved death tolls that were many times higher than the entire Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict, while we're at it - see, your tendency of rambling is contagious!).

As you can tell, I'm really a pragmatist at heart about this. It may not seem that way now, but there were times back in 1949 after the armistice when real peace between Israel and its neighbours didn't seem that far off - and if Israel had taken back a small portion of the refugees then as part of comprehensive peace, with the rest resettled for good in their new homes, nobody would be talking about the whole thing anymore now. You could argue that Israel's victory at the time was either too complete, or insufficiently so; too easy in the end to make them willing to make big territorial concessions for peace, but not overwhelming enough to make the Arab "brother" nations accept the Palestinian refugees as permanently adopted citizens rather than annoying temporary houseguests. Same with all other conflicts after that.