Exactly. They need to have an autonomous state, with all the rights and privileges of any other sovereign nation. This includes control over their own air space, the right to control their borders from the earth to the heavens and exclude anyone they want to from crossing them. They weren’t offered that, and so were right to refuse and continue their fight for freedom.
The question is not if december claimed he put this thread here by mistake, the question is whether he was sincere when he made that claim.
The fact that you consider the differences between the Pit and GD “not important enough” tells us all about you, december.
Re-read yojimbo’s post about the Irish situation, and how they include the 6 occupied counties in their flags and logos. It’s the same thing.
Other than that, you’re boring, and trolling for responses once again, or -as you will no doubt claim- trying to debate this horribly, horribly difficult issue.
No, your thread doesn’t belong in GD. My colleagues will have a fit when I move a thread which cites as evidence a “photo essay” made by some hyperpro-Israel idiot with too much time on his hands. So, I won’t. You obviously want to bitch about the Palestinian Authority some more, so you chose the right forum.
A few thoughts:
(a) not all Israelis are Jews, and not all Jews are Israelis. In fairness, cites from Palestinians and Israelis should be looked at with equal suspicion, but cites from, say, Jewish-Americans are in a different category entirely. Which isn’t to say that they are guaranteed to be objective, of course.
(b) I’m treading on thin ice here, but… It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the general objectives and desires of Palestinians are far more unreasonable than those of Israelis. Ie, I expect that a much higher proportion of Palestinians than Israelis are more or less fixated on Ultimate Victory Over The Evil Opponents. Which is not because Palestinians are evil or dumb or inferior. But the fact is that as of right now, Isreal is rich and basically democratic. Isreal can afford the luxury of providing its citizens with good, consistent education. Israelis, being currently on the top of the heap, can afford the moral magnanimity of sympathizing with their enemies.
To put it another way, someone who grows up in a suburb and has free time to read and think and go to school and so forth has more opportunity to develop a somewhat impartial viewpoint than someone who grows up in a refugee camp.
I’ve also heard repeatedly that the level of bias and propoganda which Palestinians are exposed to in education and media is vastly higher than in Israel, although I don’t know that for a fact… can anyone confirm/deny that claim?
“Over half the indigenous Palestinian population fled or were expelled.” From the UN site
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ngo/history.html
“creating about 780,000 Arab refugees, Palestinian Arabs who fled or were forced out of their homes during the fighting”
http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees1.htm
http://www.ajds.org.au/1948.htm
These are several more impartial organisations.
No. But it did put significant areas under Israeli control–i.e, the bulk of the territory that Israel had already taken to establish Israeli settlements on captured territory. The Israelis didn’t exactly settle on random chunks of desert, you know. Many of those settlements lie on land that is of disproportionate economic, cultural, and strategic importance to the Palestinian people. Moreover, the idea of maintaining Israeli sovereignty and security over a large number of disconnected, dinky settlements smack dab in the middle of a Palestinian state is basically a recipe for guaranteeing future violence from both sides.
There has been dozens, and even probably hundreds of thread where this issue has been argued about.
You should search for a detailled map of the Israeli offer (they’re quite easy to find on the web, and you should understand the problem at first glance.
Perhaps the Israelis offered 95% of the West Bank, but were to remain undr Israeli control : the settlements (and there are really many of them), the roads connecting them, various strategical spots, several major roads crossing the west bank, several towns, an area along the boundary with Jordan, etc…If you look at a map, it looks like a patchwork of territories under Palestinian control, separated from each other by Israeli-controlled areas. Once again, just look at a map. Honestly, I can’t see how the Palestinians could have agreed to such a “deal”
Concerning Jerusalem, it wasn’t a part of Jerusalem, proper wich was offered, but a remote part of the subburbs of the town which has been included in the administrative limits of the city (Oh! and by the way : the area around Jerusalem which was part of the occupied territories and which has been annexed to Israel wasn’t included in the basis on which the “95%” has been calculated).
To sum up : the “we offered them almost all the west bank(and anyway, why should the Palestinian settle for “almost” all the occupied territories as opposed to the whole thing?) and they declined because actually they didn’t want to make a deal” is a Israeli propaganda ploy which is intended to make the Palestinians appear fully responsible for the failure of the Camp David talks. But this ploy doesn’t stand after even a very quick check.
With all due respect, I some times wonder if you might be retarded. Here’s a paper from Israeli political scientist and Oslo accord co-author, Ron Pudak: www.gush-shalom.org/archives/pundak.doc . The Palestinians agreed to the UN mandated split of Palestine. It was in April of '48 that the fighting started when the soon-to-be Israelis occupied cities outside of their UN mandated area. So take your racist crap and shove it up your fucking ass.
Funniest insult at december ever. And that’s saying alot, since he’s pitted about twice a month. What exactly is the respect due to someone who you accuse of being retarded? Just wondering 
Not so. From mideastweb.org:
“The Jews accepted the UN decision, but the Arabs rejected it. The resolution divided the land into two approximately equal portions in a complicated scheme with zig-zag borders (see Partition Map). The intention was an economic union between the two states with open borders. At the time of partition, slightly less than half the land in all of Palestine was owned by Arabs, slightly less than half was “crown lands” belonging to the state, and about 8% was owned by Jews or the Jewish Agency. There were about 600,000 Jews in Palestine, almost all living in the areas allotted to the Jewish state or in the internationalized zone of Jerusalem, and about 1.2 million Arabs. The allocation of land by Resolution 181 was intended to produce two areas with Jewish and Arab majorities respectively. Jerusalem and environs were to be internationalized. The relatively large Jewish population of Jerusalem and the surroundings, about 100,000, were geographically cut off from the rest of the Jewish state, separated by a relatively large area, the “corridor,” allotted to the Palestinian state. The corridor included the populous towns of Lod and Ramla and the smaller towns of Qoloniyeh, Emaus, Qastel and others which guarded the road to Jerusalem…
It soon became evident that the scheme could not work. Mutual antagonism would make it impossible for either community to tolerate the other. The Arab League, at the instigation of Haj Amin Al-Husseini, declared a war to rid Palestine of the Jews.”
Ah, but you are assuming here that december will agree that the U.N. is an impartial organization when it comes to Mideast affairs.
(BTW, I took the tour of U.N. HQ for the first time a few weeks ago, and brought back a souvenir for a friend: a bilingual Spanish/English coloring book on U.N. operations. Did you know that the Spanish acronym for UNRWA, the agency that provides services to Palestinian refugees, is OOPS? I busted out laughing in the middle of the basement bookstore.)
I think it was Amos Oz who pointed out that a real tragedy is when both antagonists are in the right.
A Palestinian state carved out of whatever shithole the Isrealis are willing to give up won’t work. Not without massive economic assistance, and I do mean massive.
Only the impossible will work. The State of Isreal, as it stands now, becomes home and soveriegn homeland to both Palestinians and Israelis, with equal rights and opportunities extended to all.
I did say “impossible”, didn’t I. But its the only thing.
Are you saying that someone faked the photographs? If you accept that the photos are valid, what difference does it make who pulled them together? The intended question for debate is what their significance is.
BTW FrontPage Magazine is not an Israeli nor a Jewish site (although its editor is Jewish). It is a conservative American site. Methinks you’re shooting the messenger of news you don’t care for.
Thanks for the cites, MC Master of Cermonies. According to your cites, 780,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled. I was discussing how many were expelled. Presumably the number expelled would be some portion of the 780,000. According to something I saw recently, their estimate of the number expelled was around half. A great many Jews were also expelled from Arab countries.
Depends on what you mean by “biased toward Israel.” If you mean, they typically want Israel to not be destroyed, then I agree. If you mean, they lie on behalf of Israel, then I don’t agree. The belief that Jewish media is more apt to be dishonest about Israel than gentile media strikes me as a prejudice, unless you have evidence that it’s actually the case.
Frankly, a more clear-cut dichotomy is that conservative media tend to take Israel’s side more than liberal media do. E.g., the Washington Times, owned by Reverend Sun Myung Moon, is much more pro-Israel than is the New York Times, owned by a Jewish family.
** js_africanus**, it’s not racist to criticize Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. I think they deserve it. Nor do I consider your criticism of me to be antisemitic; you think I deserve it. I’m not criticizing all Palestinians and you’re not criticizing all Jews.
december, would you kindly knock it off as far as calling everyone who doesn’t believe in Israel Right or Wrong anti-semitic?
Not believing in Israel isn’t what I was talking about.
Saying, “this cite is unreliable because it’s Jewish,” or “this cite is unreliable because it’s black,” or “because it’s gay,” or “because it’s Arab,” or “because it’s female” is pre-judging the cite merely on account of its group membership. That’s the exact definition of* prejudice.*
DNFTd, people. Learn it, use it, become amazed at how much less fuckwittedness you have to endure in your life.
DNFTd.
Isn’t stripping of citizenship/right of abode pretty much the definition of deprivation of membership in Israel?
Anyone who leaves and isn’t allowed to come back is in the same situation as someone who was handcuffed, put on a truck, and forcibly removed.
What, and break a lifelong habit?
BTT, I say. BTT.
Yeah, rjung, but I bet I get fewer headaches than you do:D
clair, I am aware of the history behind this debate and to be honest I’m not interested in rehashing it. I was just pointing out the fault in minty’s Texas analogy.
No.
Unless you failed to notice, the photo essay was accompanied by text. Yes, words. The words clearly revealed the bias.
The significance of the photos? Nill. The logos used by the Palestinian Authority have been the same for years. Does that mean that the P.A. won’t be satisfied until all of Israel is theirs? No. Re-read yojimbo’s post about the Irish situation regarding the 6 counties. The flag used in that instance has the same symbolic meaning as the flag used in the P.A. example.
Good for you. I never said it was Israeli or Jewish, of course. I alleged that it was obviously created by a “hyperpro-Israel idiot”. They come in all shapes and forms, you know.
Fuck you. If anything, I care about the Israel/Palestine situation more than you do, in that I am prepared to look at both sides of the equation. You’re the one who doesn’t care about what happens to one of the two peoples involved in this horrible mess, not I. So don’t ever tell me that this is news I “don’t care about”, just because I happen to fucking disagree with you.
You got that?
Thanks. Now go play in traffic, or something.