I had a chance to watch the Mike Wallace interview with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He posed an interesting question that begs to be answered: Why should the Palestinian peoples suffer if they had no hand in the atrocities of World War II? I am not entirely divorced from reality that (1) the West has interests in the Middle East and (2) the West must be active in molding the global arena. But we aren’t talking about land, we’re talking about the continued occupation of an entire peoples.
We (The United States) march into the heart of the Middle East waving the banner of democracy. We criticize leaders like Putin and Chavez for abrogating the democratic process. I agree, to some degree, with this logic. Nations that want to be recognized should by the international community have some type of representative government even if it “representation” is one-party system like China. I find it odd that when the Palestinian peoples take it upon themselves to democratically elect Hamas, the world punishes Palestinians by hurling the country into economic collapse.
What I find most deplorable about the elections is the international community’s lack of openness and frankness to the actual people of Palestine. Why didn’t Israel or the USA warn the Palestinian citizens about the penalties for electing Hamas before hand? The Hamas platform did not materialize out of thin air, suddenly and swiftly. When the Hamas entered the race to be elected, the international community should have immediately detailed the dire consequences if Hamas were to be elected. Why weren’t they? And if they were, what is the impetus to participate in a supposedly free election? Indeed, if Palestine is supposed to be an example of “democracy” in the Middle East, no wonder they seem so resistant to the idea.
It seems to me that Israel should formally occupy Palestine and enact a series of decrees that forbid a party to espouse views that conflict with Israel’s. In 2004, the world groaned as the United States re-elected George Bush. I would not, however, think it’s particularly amenable to democracy if the world punished American citizens by shutting off trade with us.
If the Belgians freely elected a government that called for the destruction of Luxembourg, and worked toward that goal, surely the rest of the world wouldn’t be expected to say “Well they’re a democratically elected government, so whatever they do is cool.”
Just because a government is democratically elected doesn’t mean it can do no wrong.
Indeed, a U.N. mandate in 1948 provided for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. For more on what happened after that (and a brief modern history of the region), take a look at this site.
The Iranian President might have something to learn there, as his knowledge of history has seemed a bit wanting.
Your analogy would only work if the Luxembourgeois had occupied Belgium for nearly 40 years, hiving off parts of their land and ruthlessly suppressing Belgian aspirations to statehood.
Now That’s a straw man argument if I ever saw one. When will people understand that Israel wasn’t founded because of WW2? At most, the war acted as a catalyst for a process that began half a century earlier with the foundation of the Zionist movement by Theodor Herzl. The Jews who founded Israel weren’t refugees, they were people who had lived there for decades; many of whom had been born there.
Let me stress that again, so we could rid ourselves of this stupid, stupid meme: ISRAEL WASN’T FOUNDED AS A RESULT OF THE HOLOCAUST.
Now, about the Palestinians: I don’t think anyone *should * suffer, not even them, but I believe that they *are * suffreing for a myriad of reasons. Some of those reasons have to do with Israeli callusness and obtuseness, but the largest reason is, to me, their refusal to accept the permanant existance of a state which has already exsited for nearly 60 years.
One more thing: when the OP and others refer to the word “Palestine”, I’d like you to please define what exactly you mean by the term: the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, or the entire country between the Jordan and the sea (“Mandatory Palestine”). That’ll make things much easier to understand.
I only wish assholes like Ahmadinajad would follow this simple rule, too.
The analogy was simply intended to show that a Democratically elected government =/ a good government. It wasn’t intended to be an analogy to the Isreal-Palestine mess. A lot of people dislike George Bush and he was democratically elected (more or less.)
You’re missing the point a little. It’s often contended in support of Israel that the Jews are owed something because of the Holocaust, or that the Holocaust is the reason the Jews need their own state. Those things may both be true, but the question is: why are the Palestinians the ones who are asked to pay?
Israel has a right to exist because it exists, just like any other country. What right do the French have to a state? What about the Chinese? Like them, we don’t have to give excuses for our existance.
We Israelis don’y “need” a state - we already have one.
Michael Moore used to have a bit where he’d argue that we should’ve given the Jews Barvaria after WWII instead of part of Palestine. It would punish the Germans, had a low population density to get pissed of and was full of rolling green hills and meadows instead of sand, dirt and angry musliums.
The Holocaust is one example of the overall reason why Jews need their own state. It’s just the largest and most recent (prior to the establishment of Israel) act in a grotesque play that includes pogroms, expulsions, Crusades, blood libels and myriad incidents of persecution which don’t necessarily fit into those categories.
Why must the Palestinians “pay”? The land had to come from somewhere. The Jews had a history there. And, most importantly, Great Britain was in charge of the place and was in a legitimate position to give it to them. That’s right, Great Britain. The Arabs currently referring to themselves as Palestinians may have lived there, but the land can’t honestly be said to have “belonged” to them for eight hundred years. That’s the annoying little fact that they need drilled into their collective heads before any rational discussion can begin. SOMEONE ELSE WAS REALLY IN CHARGE, AND THEY DISPOSED OF THE LAND AS THEY, WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS, DESIRED.
If the Palestinians agreed to recognize Israel and refrain from attacking it, they’d have a state and Israel would retreat from the settlements. Palestinians are suffering because of the acts of Syria, Jordan, and other countries that want an issue to deflect their own populace from thinking about what their government is doing. Palestinian leaders are exploiting the situation for personal gain and glory and consistently act in ways that are against the interests of the Palestinian people.
I personally think the whole concept of Zionism is stupid: how do people born in Europe have more right to land than people born in the mid-east? But, it’s hard to be on the Palestinians side when they consistently target civilians in bombings.
Now, Palestinian apologists will point to civilian deaths from Israeli military actions, but that’s what happens when you launch rockets from civilian areas or base your actions in refugee camps. People that apologize for those who are so callous as to plant bombs in buses, cafes, and tourist hotels make me sick.
Which proves that Michael Moore A) has no clue about the founding of Israel, given that the land “given” to them was established in 1919; and B) thinks that setting a bunch of Jews down in the middle of Germany would mean they’d be safe as milk.
If you were Palestinian, how would you feel about this outrageous argument?
And the land can’t honestly have said to have “belonged” to the Jews for 2,000 years.
Are you really going to justify the state of Israel by saying the British had a “legitimate” hold of Palestine (as if the British had a legitimate hold on any of their colonies), and had the right to give it away (ignoring the fact that the British didn’t give it away at all)?
The fact is, the question of why there’s an Israel and not a Palestine is a valid question, even if it is Ahmadinejad doing the asking. And the answer, as anyone knows, is “might makes right,” and not anything more highfaluting. However, if the question becomes, who should have a state, then it becomes very awkward indeed for the Zionists, because most of the arguments they advance could be cited with equal aptness by the Palestinians.
If the land was taken from elsewhere, how would whoever it was taken from feel? And why is this relevant, when my point has been that the land didn’t belong to them anyway?
Very true. And that’s why my point wasn’t based on any ancient Jewish claim to the land. My point was based on recognizing who the land really DID belong to at the time (the British). The Israelis are not the ones claiming “their” land was stolen from them. They are living on land that was given to them by the land’s owners at the time.
What made the British hold on Palestine illegitimate? It was spoils of war, Britain and France having divided up the defeated Ottoman Empire. It can’t even really be said to have been colonized the way, say, India was.
The right to give it away is a property of legitimate ownership, which my prior paragraph already argues for. And if they didn’t have the right to give it away, what’s the legitimacy of numerous other states that are formerly British-run, including (Trans)Jordan, which was blatantly a gift of rulership to a non-native?
Why do you say that, because partition was a UN plan? It was the British who left the decision up to the UN.