@ Warren McIntosh
it remains an arguable position that Isreal's policy has long been and remains the destruction of historical Palestine...
Anything is arguable. Which "historical Palestine" would this be: the Roman province of Palestine or the British Mandate of Palestine? Both of these would include the destruction of the land on which Israel stands. As for pre-1967, 47 years is an odd definition of "historical" and there's is no stomach for anything of the kind. Israeli people, just like their governments and just like Palestinians, do not have a hive mind.
...and the societies who lived there, and their replacement with an ethnicly pure Jewish state. I say arguably because thats one end of the spectrum, and given the hostility in the region against the Jews it is also arguably a defendable position.
But given the experience of the Bedouin (did you know they form a large part of Israel's border guard?), and the Druze (did you know one was Israel's president?), and the Arabs of Nazareth, Haifa and many other villages who unaccountably remain Israeli citizens living peaceably in Israel, loyal to Israel...and the Greeks, and the Armenians, and the Ghanaians, and the Samaritans, and the Christian Russians and Germans etc. etc., non-Jewish societies are not in any peril of extinction from the majority.
As for an ethnically-pure Jewish state:
1) any Jewish state would, ipso facto, be made of many ethnicities;
2) the non-Jewish proportion of the population has been rising appreciably, particularly over the last ten years.
Not many results for a "long-term policy." And while you can find any number of Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian and Egyptian presidents and prime ministers calling for the extinction of Israel and the odd Palestinian leader calling for the Israelis' total extinction, so far no Israeli prime minister or president has reciprocated. 66 years and counting... any day now...
its a pretty poor argument to say that just because the methedology, detail and time frame over which it is done is different, and the process is at an earlier stage than the Jewish holocaust ended up reaching (deportation and confinement into ghettos? remind you of anything?) that the comparison cannot be made.
Any two things - a beach ball and a subway train - can be compared. But if scale, methodology, causes, ideology, time frame, threat of extinction and detail are but trifling matters, you would do as well to compare the police evicting squatters from a farm (deportation) and holding them in jail overnight (internment) to the Holocaust. And it's still very, very cheap.
And Germany wasn't acting out of the public eye: the Allied governments condemned the mass murder of the Jews on December 17 1942. If you can understand German, there is a recording of a BBC German service program on the subject dated December 31 1942.
As to whether Israel would do it if there were no publicity, if we are to go by the views of politicians, perhaps we can go by the British example. Had it been up to a considerable number of British politicians, including a government minister - and that trumps a deputy speaker every time - in the past twenty years, when discussing means of 'solving the Irish problem' and on 'deportations,' then the Catholic Irish of the Six Counties/Northern Ireland would long ago have joined the long list of peoples who vanished courtesy of the British state.