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In your mind the land belongs to the Palestinians because some of them lived there for some time. If time is all it takes to acquire legitimacy, be patient. Before you know it Israel will be a legitimate country in your eyes too.
Their problem is that they can't see that Jews lived there many thousand of years before Mohammed came on the scene. Those Muslims, the Palestinians who became Muslims after Mohammed have only been there for about 1300 years by my math. I do wonder when the left will understand that time in grade isn't much of an argument for the Palestinians.
The OP's basic premise is false.
The root cause for the absence of peace is not the issue of Jerusalem, or borders, or "settlements".
It is, and always has been, the Arab rejection of the right of Israel to exist. Some of the Palestinian Arabs, like Abbas, do want a two-state solution. The problem is that they want one state, called "Palestine", which is totally Arab and Jew-free, and a second state, called Israel, which will eventually become majority Arab.
That's why they refuse to recognize a Jewish state and insist on maintaining the "right of return". The "right of return" is the right to flood Israel with millions of third, fourth, and fifth generation "refugees".
We consent to everything that Turkey, China, Pakistan, India and Iraq do by doing nothing. We politely don't bring it up. We don't officially recognize the Armenian Holocaust as a genocide 100% for diplomatic reasons. Especially during the Cold War we felt we needed them to stay in NATO no matter what the cost and no matter what misdeeds had to be overlooked. We diligently remain silent and don't bring up any of Turkey's crimes. Israel isn't part of NATO. Turkey is. I think we should have a right to expect better from them than what we're seeing.
No argument there.
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Palestine has never really been an independent nation. It went from outside occupation and rule by Rome, then Arabs, then Turks, then the British. The British handed them the only sovereignty they've ever known by giving them only part of Palestine and giving the other part to the Jews -- the Brits had lied and promised the whole thing to both groups, so I suppose in their minds it was a fair compromise to half keep both promises.
The British didn't give anything to anyone. The UN General Assembly proposed a partition that was dead on arrival and never took legal effect. When the British left, the Israelis hoisted their flag and took whatever they could grab.
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Rather than accepting this first-ever independence for even a second, they immediately attacked Israel ... and lost ... badly.
They were a 70% majority being given 45% of their own country. Are you suggesting that anyone else would've taken a deal like that?
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The Palestinian question has far more to do with the fact that the current rulers of the land are not Muslim than it has to do with anything else. Re-establishment of the "Independent Nation of Palestine" is just a red herring since no such nation ever really existed.
To answer the second sentence first: no, it's a red herring to pretend the pro-Palestinian side makes any such claims or would use quotation marks around "Independent Nation of Palestine."
As for the first sentence: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The PLO fought a bloody war against King Hussein. It has historically called the Hashemite monarchy illegitimate and the PLO Charter says the entire British Mandate (both banks of the Jordan) belong to the Palestinian people.
I don't know how many times I have to repeat this, but almost all Palestinians, whether Muslim, Christian or secularist, despise Israel with equal fervor.
The Arabs of Palestine and Arabia fought with the (non-Muslim) British against the (Muslim) Ottomans. They did not care for the British, but they did not engage in routine terrorism against them (as the Jews did.)
Your attempt to explain everything in religious terms is as contrived as the attempt of Marxists of old to explain everything in class terms.
Their problem is that they can't see that Jews lived there many thousand of years before Mohammed came on the scene. Those Muslims, the Palestinians who became Muslims after Mohammed have only been there for about 1300 years by my math. I do wonder when the left will understand that time in grade isn't much of an argument for the Palestinians.
Would you apply this same argument to the USA returning all its terratory to Native Americans?
The PLO fought a bloody war against King Hussein. It has historically called the Hashemite monarchy illegitimate and the PLO Charter says the entire British Mandate (both banks of the Jordan) belong to the Palestinian people.
According to the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is 97% Muslim and 3% Christian. "Palestinian Jews" almost universally abandoned the "Palestinian" tag given them and joined with Israel. Of the estimated 6% of Palestinian Christians, over half have abandonned ship on the matter and left Palestine. Sure those 3% of the Palestinians that are Christians might hate Israel. Sure the 0.0001% that are Jews might also hate Israel. But people arguing for the Palestinian cause LOVE to overstate how diverse a group Palestinians truly are. They'll say things like "there were 84,000 Palestinian Jews before 1945" without bothering to say that -- almost to a man -- these Jews joined with Israel and welcomed the Zionist migrations. These Jews never identified themselves as Palestinians anyways -- that tag was given them by the UN and others denoting "people who were already living there" before the Jews from Europe started settling there. End of the day, Palestinians still living in Palestine are so overwhelmingly Muslim that there's really no point drawing any distinctions. 3% of the Palestinians -- that minority of Palestinian Christians that actually cared enough to stick around -- are more of a statistical anomoly than anything else.
What I do see in war between King Hussein and the PLO is a power struggle to determine who was really in control of the Kingdom of Jordan. Hussein won. Before that, the Palestinians used Jordan as their base of terrorist opperations to strike out at Israel and generally acted like they owned the place. Hussein had had enough of it. The PLO viewed Hussein as "not anti-Israel enough" so the PLO tried to kill him and take control of the whole of Jordan -- but they ultimately failed. Sounds a lot like what they're still doing in Lebanon and Israel -- wreaking havoc and making a mess.
From 1949 till 1970 -- a 21 year stretch of time -- what we DON'T SEE is the Palestinians attacking Egypt and Jordan for also illegally annexing occupying their lands. If there was any resistence to Egyptian and Jordanian occupation, it was pretty insignificant. Jordan and the PLO never actually fought until AFTER the all the rest of the UN chartered lands for Palestinians fell into Israel's hands. From '49 to '70, all the focus was on attacking Israel. So laugh it up, but the facts tell a different story: The Palestinians in Palestine are overwhelmingly Muslim and overwhelmingly focused on attacking Israel as a non-Muslim invader. They might prefer to not be occupied and ruled by anyone at all, but they're a lot more willing to let other Muslims rule them. The Palestinian cause -- though you'll never admit it -- is a Muslim cause. You'll almost never hear ANY Muslim ANYWHERE say anything positive about Israel. Virtually ALL OF THEM are vehemently opposed to the establishment of Israel. It leads back to Palestine being a Muslim cause more than it is anything else.
I'm happy to admit that the Palestinians are mistreated because that's just a fact. But they are nowhere near to being the most persecuted group of people in the world today. Not even close.
Last edited by godofthunder9010; 09-01-2011 at 08:08 PM..
Regardless of who is right or wrong, the greatest Arab success (and they had many) was to "convince" the world that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the most important and nothing can be fixed before it is solved. That of course is pure c**p. It is no more significant then 100 other ethnic conflicts all over the world (the Tamil problem was solved already?). Just two desperate ethnic groups fighting over a minuscule strip of land, the size of an American county.
By maintaining this line (which some Israelis adopted as well) the Arab states were able to draw attention away from their deeply rooted problems and keep Israel under constant fire. However, with the current unrest in the middle east, they were left naked. Assad and Gaddafi are butchering their people not because of Israel. Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Lebanon, not to speak of Iraq and Afghanistan all have grave social conflicts that need solution perhaps before Israel-Palestine. For example, Hisbullah, a parasitic entity that hijacked Lebanon, is sweating over the possibility that Assad (an Alawi) will be kicked out, and the bloodline to Teheran cut off. (Alawis are a minority in Suni Syria). Even Turkey, the newest "Islam protector" condemned Assad. And what was Assad's answer? "Turkey is working for American imperialistic interests". Poor Assad, in his despair, still holds on to the old rhetoric.
As for Israel-Palestine, if an independent Palestinian state (on the west bank, next to Israel) was the issue, it would had been solved decades ago. Unfortunetely, this conflict will not end even with Israel's withdrawl to pre 67 borders.
Last edited by oberon_1; 09-02-2011 at 12:34 AM..
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I voted for no palestinian state, 95% of the arabs that live in Israel and call themselves palestinian are offspring of immigrants that moved to Israel at some point because the jews made it into a place worth moving to. There was only a couple hundred thousand people there before 1900. Jews created jobs and made something out of nothing. Israel was formed in the late stages of the "might makes right" era. They took this small section of land by force to make a homeland for themselves, it belongs to them and would be a good place to live if the arabs were gone.
Israel should deport their arab population to whatever arab country they want to go, and those arab countries should gladly accept them, as they have for decades been forcing out christians and jews from their lands.
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