Nation in the sense of people, not country.
The link you provided gave a population in 1920. Israel was founded in 1949. That was also the population of all of Mandate Palestine, not just the parts that became Israel. In 1950, which is, of course, after the population migrations that made up the founding of the state, 85% of the population of Israel was Jewish.
As per the 1947 UN report on the situation in Palestine, Jews made up about a third of the total population the entire mandate. As per the UN partition recommendations in 1947, about 55% of the Jewish state would be Jewish.
And the partition ultimately didn’t come about. The borders of Israel are where they are, not because of the partition plan, but because the Green Line is where the front lines were when the Independence War ended and the cease fire was declared.
Thank you, my mistake it was supposed to say at the beginning of the century. It is possible my recollection is for the entire mandate of Palestine and not just for modern day Israel.
That sounds about right. I believe the arab side of the partition was almost entirely arab (reminds me of gerrymandering). IIRC, some of the areas in the new Jewish state were majority non-Jewish.
I understand that and I don’t think I have ever suggested that we revert to the UN partition plan (which I also understand would give the Palestinians more land then they currently occupy). But the assumption seems to be that they were obligated to accept some sort of partition of land that would give Jews a Jewish state in their midst. I can’t think of any other time the UN has forced something like this on a people. They created the partition without any participation from the arab side and while this is largely because the arabs refused to participate, i can’t think of any time we partitioned a land without the participation of all major parties. Can you?
Well, fine… But you can’t cross from one definition to the other.
No one can be in a state of war against the Jewish people, even if they are at war against the nation of Israel. War simply isn’t defined that way.
(The definition of war, of course, already is under significant revision because of the modern practice of soldiers not wearing uniforms and not fighting in formations. Still, I am uncomfortable with those who said, for instance, that the attacks on the World Trade Center were engaging in an “act of war.” I would still refer to it as a “criminal act.”)
If some loopy extremist came and shot my nice Jewish neighbor, and tried to declare it to be an “act of war,” nobody is going to be convinced. She just isn’t part of a “nation” in that sense. Her “nationality” is U.S.
War still has some rules left!
How, exactly, did the Germans “participate” in the partition into East and West Germany?
When an area is under military occupation, the power that is in possession has pretty much all the power it needs. Britain, as the last nation in power to be in possession in Palestine, withdrew from the area and largely ceded what control they could have exercised. The U.N. was the only power that had any remaining authority.
I cannot name another situation where all the people in power simply walked away from the matter. The matter fell into the hands of the God of War…and Israel won.
Can you propose a way forward from here? Even if I agreed with every single word you have written about the past…it’s the past. What do we do with the situation now? How do we make the region happier, safer, wealthier, and more peaceful?
Thats a good point. The same thing happened to Korea. Japan lost the war and they split Korea in half. I guess the thing that bothers me is that they created a partition plan with the full participation of zionists but none from the arabs.
I don’t know if anything would work but I think the arab peace initiative might do the trick.
Israel will never agree to any “solution” that doesn’t allow for the continued existence of a Jewish state within the original Palestinian mandate so any proposed such solution is simply a waste of time and energy.
It’s as utterly pointless and stupid as suggesting that the solution to the Kashmir crisis is a union between India and Pakistan.
They weren’t obligated to accept anything, and they didn’t, hence the War for Independence. But something had to happen, either partition or war.
So?
By that wonderful analogy, I guess I can go and murder my next-door neighbour, who is an immigrant. After all, his presumption in moving to “my” country is exactly the same as if he had moved into my living room!
Really, do you actually believe that? Do YOU hate immigrants in YOUR country, and think they have no right to be there?
No, its only “claim to existence” is exactly the same as that of every other country in the world - that it exists now.
What does this even mean?
No, as I said the “justification” for the existence of Israel is that it exists.
Point out these facts is simply pointing out that the actual problem in this case is not the existence of a state, but the refusal of certain people to deal with it. That refusal to deal was directly encouraged by Israel’s neighbours who offered to rid Palestine of its inconvenient Jewish immigration problem, failed, and thereafter offered … nothing … to the Palestinians displaced by this failed program of ethnic cleansing.
Part of the blame for their plight surely belongs to those Zionists who took an active hand in driving out the Palestinians, during the war; but not all of the blame. That was many decades ago, and other victims of wars have got on with their lives.
One could only imagine how messed up Europe would be right now if Europeans in general took the same attitude - to name just one example, after the end of WW2 Poland moved about 100 miles to the West at the expense of Germany, and millions of ethnic Germans were killed or displaced. Would it not be wonderful if there were refugee camps for all of those Germans, waiting for Poland to dissapear?
Hamas is not the product of an environment of any kind. It is the product of the Israeli government.
The airstrikes started before the rocket attacks and have taken more lives. Seems like the title is fine.
This strikes me as total exaggeration. Hamas has deep roots going back to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is active in Egypt and Syria as well as Gaza. The notion that Israel “created” them is silly. Certainly, as with many Palestinian groups, the Israelis were willing to tolerate them when they thought Hamas was simply a religious alternative to the secular PLO. This was mainly out of a desire not to appear as being “anti-Islamic”.
What is often forgotten is that Hamas gained popularity, not as vicious fighters, but as a religious institution establishing charities and the like - a stark contrast to the corrupt kleptocracy of the PLO. I can only imagine how Israel’s critics would react to Israel harshly cracking down on a Palestinian religious charity - including its blind, elderly founder. Yet fail to do so, and Israel is judged as having “created” Hamas.
*In November, 1947 we began to execute our Plan Dalet to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the non-Jewish majority. We took, by force of arms, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa, creating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the process. Having seen the devastation and injustice caused by Plan Dalet, five Arab countries decided on military intervention, but the 60,000 poorly armed and trained Arab soldiers were no match for the 90,000 heavily armed and well trained Zionist soldiers. When we won the war and took even more Palestinian land than the UN gave us, we told the world that David beat Goliath and the west was happy to believe it.
But we need to be honest. The Palestinians have paid the price for the Holocaust. We ethnically cleansed as many as we could, which is well-documented by Israeli historians, including from the left Ilan Pappe to the right Benny Morris. We kicked them out and refused to let them back in. We looted their houses, we took the beautiful ones for ourselves and then we razed 500 of their villages so they wouldn’t have a place to come home to. We were once made refugees in Europe and now we have immigrated to Palestine and made the Palestinians refugees. When we wouldn’t let them return, they resorted to violence, so we called them terrorists and made it stick.*
– Michelle Cohen Corasanti
Er… Everything you’re quoting from, though not linking to, took place after the start of the war when the Arab armies invaded and they also engaged in ethnic cleansing.
As for your source, if he classified Benny Morris as “right-wing” he’s a fool or trying to fool you. Also, Ilan Pappe is hardly a reliable source since he freely admits to being a liar.
I know its not a simply solution (if there were any simple solution we would be talking about the Israeli Palestinian peace treaty of 1978 or something like that.
The only part where I see that might threaten the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state (other than the tide of demography) is the part in UN resolution 194 (which is incorporated by reference) that says:
So the Palestinians yould get the right of return OR restitution. IIRC there was a poll that said that most Palestinians did not want to move to Israel, it wasn’t enough to immediately tip the balance and I think the ratio would be better than what the Jews would have had under the UN partition plan. So the plan may accelerate the demographic time bomb but it would not detonate it.
And why was something inevitable? What was pushing the change? Was it the Palestinian people staying exactly had been for centuries or was it a zionist movement peopled largely by immigrants?
Whoever this person is, he or she is no historian. Pretty well every historical fact cited above is wrong. To give examples of some of the whoppers:
- “Plan Dalet” was part of the Israeli defence plans. It was enacted after the war began - it did not, in and of itself, provoke the war. The notion that the war was “provoked” by an Israeli self-defence plan is laughable to any historian of the time.
http://www.ijs.org.au/Extracts-from-the-Text-of-Plan-Dalet-Plan-D-10-March-1948/default.aspx
- The “professionalism” of the two forces - this is simply silly. The prifessionalism on both sides varied widely - on the Israeli side, elements of the Palmach could be considered “professional”, but numerous fighters were nearly untrained - some right off the refugee boats from Europe. On the Arab side, no-one (in their right mind) ever described Jordan’s Arab Legion as “poorly armed and trained”.
Comparable numbers are impossible to assess, as both sides employed formed units and irregular forces. In any event, the main element leading to Arab defeat was an almost total lack of co-ordination between different Arab armies.
- Anyone citing Pappe instantly loses credibility - Pappe simply makes stuff up, and has been repeatedly hammered for it.
- Morris is not “right wing”.
Immigrants again. What do you have against immigrants? Does that hatred extend to the children of immigrants?
Global research and informationclearinghouse.:dubious: All we need now is whale.to or 911truth.org for the trifecta.
So, if Israel “has no right to exist,” what should it do? Disband? Send all 7+ million Israelis packing?