If you don't think contributions matter to DC politicians, then you don't know how the cake is made.
I didn't say anything about people changing party affiliation. You can shift in your beliefs without changing parties.
Jews were not gone from Israel for 2000 years. There have been Jews living there for millenia. Here's a little refresher course for you:
en.m.wikipedia.org
Sorry, I miswrote. There were Jewish people all over the Middle East up until the 20th century. I have written about this before.
Between Muslim laws about non-Muslims not being allowed to hold any government post in Mulsim kingdoms and other regions and Jewish people being a fairly small minority. There were Jewish people in Palestine, but they were powerless. That began to change when more Jewish people started moving in during the early 20th century and then they took power over what is now the state of Israel in 1947.
The Palestine area hasn't had control over their own territory for a long time. The Ottomans took over in the 1500s, but the rulers were other Muslims. The British became the rulers after WW I, but they weren't there that long (compared to everyone else over the centuries). The Jewish people went from a powerless minority to the dominant group running the place over the course of a few decades.
When the Jews were a powerless minority, they were pretty much left alone to do their thing. As they began to become a larger portion of the population, tensions began to rise between the two populations. A lot of Jewish settlers were content to buy their land from the Arabs living there, but as the Jewish population grew, there were also those who just took land they wanted.
Some of the settlers were treated non-Jews around them badly, inflaming tensions that were growing because the Arabs felt like they were becoming a minority in their own homeland.
Even when there isn't violence tensions can come about due to a new population moving into an area. I went through it once when I was a kid. I grew up in a part of Los Angeles that already had a minority majority population. My town had a large east Asian population with a very large concentration of Hispanics starting only a few blocks from where I lived.
But starting around 1977 Chinese began to flee Taiwan and my town was the most desirable destination. These were wealthy immigrants. Some were the descendants of Chaing Kai Chek's lieutenants who had escaped to Taiwan with their wealth and others were neuvo riche who suddenly got rich when their farms were bought up to build factories. All of them brought wealth with them.
I think it was mostly the old money who brought the attitude, but some of the immigrants liked to look down on the rest of the population as untermenchen. They even did this to people already living there who were ethnically Chinese.
Initially the first people to move in were immigrants in a community where everyone was from somewhere different and it was no big deal, but as they grew in number and some of the immigrants took the superior attitude, tensions grew. There was an increase in gang activity, but they mostly just messed with one another. There wasn't any other violence, but our sleepy suburb got a lot more tense. There were a lot of ethnic jokes told about the immigrants and non-immigrants found they weren't allowed to shop in the stores owned by the immigrants. A friend of my mother's was told "we don't sell to your kind" and kicked out of a store.
Add in a bit of violence to this mix and you have the kind of situation that was happening in Palestine by the end of WW II.
As far as the Muslims are concerned, the Israelis are colonists. What the Israelis have done has some echoes of what the Christian Crusaders did 1000 years ago. Stories that are still told in the west, but from a western perspective. But they are widely taught in the Muslim world these last 1000 years with a different perspective. And the state of Israel is taught as a new Crusade.
www.vaticannews.va
