I won\'t pretend to know much about the Native Americans, but I can and will say that the Palestinian/Israeli parallels were essentially introduced only because of misinformation and false assumptions.
I mentioned Israeli PM Barak because he held the office at that time, but since then Ariel Sharon has taken over that office. Arafat, whether or not he can actually control the terrorist regime he helped create and continues to support, has been taken out of all political equations as far as the Israeli gov\'t is concerned, that\'s the one thing I do agree with, at least. Sharon is actually an Israeli general, and if ANYONE in Israel\'s government would have had the guts (and stupidity) to kill Arafat, it would have been him. And we ALL know that he had plenty of opportunities to do so, but the fact is, and Israel recognizes this, that a live Arafat with little actual power is much less of a problem than a dead and martyred one. That is the only reason Arafat still lives today.
Yes, politics and religion are deeply intertwined in the Middle East, sadly, in Israel as well. It may be a democracy, but it is one that granted a (now very influential) political party to the Orthodox religious Jews living there. Sadly.
The whole Israeli Manifest Destiny thing also doesn\'t apply, since Israel is in no way seeking expansion of her borders. We have been more than willing to negotiate down to fairer borders, but we will NOT return to the ridiculous Oslo accord borders, which would spark a situation much like happened in the 1950s and 1960s. Had Israel been seeking genocide, they could have accomplished it long ago, multiple times. To think that Israel seeks to wipe out Palestine is ludicrous. One of the original contributing factors to the ongoing Palestinian/Israeli conflict is the Arab World\'s unanimous rejection of the UN\'s original plans for a United State of Palestine (and Israel) after WWII, and the horrible way which the other countries, such as Jordan, treated the Palestinian "refugees."
The issue of religion and brainwashing is not one I\'m going to visit here, but I can assure you that nowhere in the Koran does it say that all good Muslim boys (and now women too) are supposed to go and self-detonate themselves, taking out as many Israeli\'s as possible. Anyone who has been led to that belief or conclusion under religious or political guidance has been brainwashed. And this type of mentality is the norm in Palestine and many other Arab nations, where the government overtly controls the media.
I don\'t have any maps readily available to show the current border disputes between Palestine and Israel, but I can say one thing. Should Israel and Palestine ever come into a mutual agreement concerning borders, Israel would be the one that would actually do their best to maintain the status quo. It\'s the Arab world that can\'t be trusted in that regard, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past 50 years.