As I said on another TB, I recognize you now. You're the American who works in Israel and badmouths Israelis to his friends and family back home while sharing sympathetic vignettes about the Pals. True, Meretz has your same view. It, too, has contempt for the overwhelming Jewish majority. But Meretz consists of citizens; you are a foreigner--an ugly American given what you do in Israel. Anyway, since you call me "slime king," I'll refer to you in the future as mike/UA. Because I didn't recognize you, I was more polite than I should have been in #54. I should have started out by asking what on earth you could have in mind when asking someone to "refute" the statement: "Israel's web of physical and administrative barriers to movement goes at times beyond Israeli security needs and is aimed at boosting Jewish settlements, at the expense of the Palestinian population, the bank said" " There are various claims being made made there. Where would one begin? I tried, in good faith, to disentangle them, and answer the claims separately. Your response #60 ignores my (1-4) in #54 and focuses only on my (5). But you can't even get (5) right. In (5) I was making a "normative" argument that Israel political elites SHOULD do certain things. I was not making a "positive" argument that they in fact DID DO these things. In fact, if you could have troubled yourself to read my TB, you would have known that I couldn't have begun to assess the positive argument that barriers were excessive and motivated by an intention to encourage Jewish settlements. This is because I didn't know that barriers were excessive or that they could easily be increased and decreased in small, tailored steps; nor did I know if the "settlements" had much to do with this. While I suppose one can sometimes "refute" a normative argument, this is certainly not the place to try. Really, though, I took you too seriously. All you really wanted was to encourage a TB featuring an Israeli response that you could send to your American leftist buddies. The World Bank presupposes that Israeli settlements are a bad thing and should be discouraged. I think they are a great thing and should be encouraged. I do not know that the Israeli government is encouraging them with closures, and suspect they are not, but I hope they are indeed encouraging them. At minimum, a government should be protecting its citizens wherever they live (including disputed territory). Why don't you ask your American buddies if they disagree.

quite the verbose "refutation" which boils down a wimpy, "im not sure if the statement is true, but it should be"

My TB covered what I wanted it to cover without too many excess words. You need to learn the difference between "long" and "verbose." Precise use of words seems to be difficult for you. But someone who sympathizes with anti-Semitic totalitarians (i.e., the "Palestinians") will not be concerned with such matters. I guess your little gambit here didn't turn out the way you had hoped, as it only revealed your own moral hideousness. Enough! I feel soiled even responding to you.

ahh the last refuge of someone who has been revealed as a fraud...slinging anti-semitism charges.