Because we took it, kept it, and killed the people who got in our way. You guys just have to keep holding on, and eventually people will stop carping.
CA: You guys just have to keep holding on, and eventually people will stop carping.
Maybe. Certainly we’d stop carping a lot faster if you would just stick to the territory that almost the whole world agrees is legitimately yours and stop “holding on” to the rest of it.
Let’s recall there was no nation of Palestine, it was a area in the deceased Ottoman Empire, which was then recarved into political states by Allied governments with indigenous tribal leaders/royal families.
I agree with Vanilla that God created the people Israel. and has promised a restoration of them to their ancient land, and that the present state of Israel may indeed be part of the fulfillment of that restoration, HOWEVER, God has allowed Israeli states to collapse before & might decide to do so again (tho woe to those who delight in it’s downfall. Assyria, Babylon & Rome were God’s agents of punishment upon Israel, but their brutality in doing so brought them also under judgement.)
Not really. If Israel pulls unilaterally out of the West Bank and Gaza, the rest of the world will still complain about it, and all it will do is give the world another state intent on destroying Israel. This isn’t to say that Israel shouldn’t pull out of the West Bank and Gaza, just that it in itself isn’t going to solve anything.
Well, we’re getting a little far afield here from the OP question about whether the modern nation-state of Israel should ever have been created at all, but since it came up…
CA: If Israel pulls unilaterally out of the West Bank and Gaza, the rest of the world will still complain about it, and all it will do is give the world another state intent on destroying Israel.
I doubt it. After all, the PA has officially recognized Israel, and the restructuring plan proposed in the Geneva accord has won broad support (as well as support from slim majorities even in the Israeli and Palestinian populations themselves). Seems to me that what the vast majority of Israel’s critics are bitching about is not its mere existence, but its resistance to allowing the existence of Palestine. Once Israel acknowledges the demands of justice and world opinion in that regard, I think we’ll see a lot more solidarity with it from other nations, and a lot less apologistic excuses for suicide bombers, anti-semites, and Israel-bashers.
This isn’t to say that Israel shouldn’t pull out of the West Bank and Gaza, just that it in itself isn’t going to solve anything.
I completely agree that it wouldn’t solve everything; there would still be lots of political, economic, social, and security problems to work out, and there would still be a lot of people making unreasonable demands and criticisms of Israel, as well as a much smaller number of people who would still be absolutely implacably opposed to Israel’s existence under any circumstances whatsoever. But I think it would go a long way towards solving the most fundamental problem, because it’s what Israel should do.
Too bad that God isn’t on the UN Security Council, then.
The fact that a religious group says their god promised a land to them is not, rather fortunately, real cause for a nation to lay claim to an area.
As for the statement: “Where else would the Jews go,” well, considering that there are 13 million Jews in the world, about half of which live in America and about a third of which live in Israel, saying that Israel is the only place for Jews to go is bordering on absurd. While the climate in Europe post-holocaust was hardly friendly, saying that the Jews needed to leave Europe altogether is an unfair assessment to make. As mentioned, they would have been be better off in West Germany than in Israel. The various diaspora could have been to any number of places, and lacking Israel, they would have been to them.
Yeah, but Hamas hasn’t, and if they get in power there, who knows what’s going to happen. Besides, Israel is getting ready to pull out. That’s why they’re building the security fence, that’s why they’re doing their best to kill off the Hamas leadership, and that’s why they’re evacuating the settlements in Gaza. By this time next year, assuming there’s no major terrorist attack, I predict that Israel is going to start talking about dismantling some of the outlying West Bank settlements. Barring catastrophy, in a few years you can expect to see Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank along the Green Line and a working Palestinian state in the rest.
Because the Holocaust was not an isolated incident, and there’s no reason to assume that it won’t be repeated, anywhere in the world… except in a Jewish state. Israel was founded on a basis of deep cynicism about human nature.
I’m reminded of the simple statement by Primo Levi, the author and Holocaust survivor:
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.”
Ed
Thanks for the response guys. I feel like someone who when expecting a pamphlet, recieved instead a set of encyclopedias. Now I’m off to Pit my ba**ard roommate for something he did yesterday.
Carry on.
Yea, I can see what you mean. Moving into the middle of a few million people who want to absolutely kill them was a much safer call than hanging out in Europe. You know what a hellhole that has turned into.
Considering that most of them came from Eastern Europe, which was indeed a “hellhole” until the fall of the Soviet Empire relatively recently (and in some places still is, as in Belarus and to a lesser extent Ukraine), their decision to live in a democracy for the last fifty years rather than trusting to the tender mercies of the Soviet government and its east European puppets was actually totally justified … right?
Where would you rather have lived?
Note that hundreds of thousands of people (Jews and many claiming to be Jews just to get this privilege) poured out of the ex-Soviet Union just as soon as they were able. Voting with their feet, you might say.
Correction to this canard: There were active democracies in the ME before the modern state of Israel was founded.
Don’t use that claim any more. Rebut people who assert; “Israel: the only democracy in the ME”
Do you mean Turkey and Lebanon?
I’m scratching my head over this. Turkey is a democracy, but it is more a part of Europe than the ME. Lebanon is right now a vassal state of Syria. What other democracies are you thinking of?
Well, Egypt is sort of democratic now, but it wasn’t when Israel was founded. If he’s not thinking of Turkey or Lebanon, you have to go back to either the early days of Islam or maybe some of the Levantine Greek city states, as far as I can tell. (and I will point out that Israel’s democracy has been a lot healthier than either Turkey’s or Lebanon’s)
I dunno about Egypt. Haven’t they been a one-party state for a long time?
I found this quote on the US Department of State site for what it’s worth. It seems they have an elected legislatiure, but having the head of state “elected unopposed” in a referendum strikes me as more of a Soviet-style democracy in practice :
Well, if someone can find that original map of Israel/Palestine, you look at it and realize that neither of the two countries were set up to survive to start with. Palestine’s divided in half, and Israel blocks it from any port. Considering the known issues…
I blame the British for being entirely too clever for their own good. This is entirely their fault.
So. Creation of Israel good. Creation of Israel in a half-assed way that pretty much assured conflict eternal… bad.
That’s why it’s only sort of a democracy. It’s sort of dodgy.
And E-Sabbath, here’s a map of the original proposed partition.
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/history/map3.html
It doesn’t totally cut the Arab region off from the sea. They get Acre and Gaza. But it’s still a mess. In addition to both states being enclave states, there was large Arab settlement in the Jewish areas, and large Jewish settlement in the Arab areas. (For all of that, the Palestinians would have been in a better position than they are now if they had accepted the UN partition, but hindsight is 20/20, I guess)
The Middle East is a region. Europe is a continent. Being part of one does not preclude being part of the other, any more than Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and the Sahel are not part of Africa because they are part of the Middle East.
I believe what sevastopol is referring to are small-scale democratic developments taking place in Palestine as the influence of the Ottomans waned. Since the Ottomans had eviscerated the traditional leaders of the assorted tribes clustered in the area, what amounts to local democracy began to appear once it became clear that the Ottoman governors had neither the ability nor the desire to run the territory.
Suggesting that a (or several) functioning democratic state existed there is a bit of a stretch, though.