Free Palestine?

[Honesty]

@Alessan

Whether or not the governments of these countries were directly involved in the fighting is immaterial.

That is absolutely ridiculous. You cannot reasonably expect any government to babysit each and every one its populace. And I pose the question again since you cleverly sidestepped it: the Mexico government has failed, despite decades of U.S protest, to successfully stop the flow of illegal drugs across the border. These drugs not only add more drug-related violence but has probably cost our economy billions of dollars. Should we invade Mexico City? If not, what should we do? Your argument is that it doesn’t matter whether the government is involved, right? So I am curious to hear your answer.

Lebanon and Palestine, especially the latter, have been bloodied by Israel so much that they have no efficient means to stop the flow of terrorist into Israel. I put the following in italics because I think its important: The people of Palestine have no voice and no money, Israel has made sure of that. So please, please, please explain me how you expect Palestine to do anything meaningful against the terrorists?

Seems like its just scapegoating these infant governments.

Besides, what should we have done? Just sat back and let them bomb us? A government’s first responsibility is for the welfare of its own citizens. Everything elase is a distant second.

Absolutely.

Israel should have waged war on the terrorists not the countries themselves and joined other Arab countries in rooting them out. The antagonistic nature that Israel goes to defend itself often comes off as a knee-jerk reaction. If Israel, in just the last six years, Israel focused more on the terrorists than by capturing elected officials and bulldozing homes, the world, including myself, would be standing behind Israel. Right now, whether its right or wrong, Israel isn’t protrayed as an aggressor but as a merciless monster.

You know what? No, I don’t care about them at all . . . If displacing a million people makes my family safe, then I say: displace *two *million and make them safer.

Wow, just wow. Sounds like something Andrew Jackson would say. In any case, I’m curious: How does the displacement of innocent civilians make your family safe?

• Honesty

[cmkeller]

Sal Ammoniac:

cmkeller, remind me not to appoint you as a trustee of my estate. God only knows what you would do with the money.

Consider yourself so reminded (not that there was any danger of it anyway). That said, I’d split the money the way I would have thought most equitable - and if one heir insisted that the entire estate belonged to him in the first place and neither you nor I had the right to distribute it amongst himself and his fellow heirs, tough on him, it happens to not be true.

Sophistry and Illusion:

First: BS. How can you possibly ascribe this motive to all Palestinians who fled the fighting? Maybe some of them fled so as not to get caught up in the bloodshed? Maybe?

Maybe. So naturally, the Israeli government should have gone around to all departed Arabs and asked, on an individual basis, “Did you leave because you were scared, or because you wanted to make it easier for the Arab armies to destroy us? Because you know, if you’re just one of the scared ones, we’d let you have your land back.” Yeah, that would be an effective way to weed out the dangerous element from the simple war refugees. :rolleyes:

Second: So what if they did have the goal of Israel’s defeat? I still have yet to see a single argument for the claim that the Jews had a right to Palestine

Then maybe you should bother reading this thread, which is full of them.

and the Palestinians were wrong for resisting this, and therefore deserved forfeiture of their property.

From an Israeli perspective, hell yes. Action taken against a state is of course wrong in the eyes of that state, and certainly forfeiture of property is a possible consequence.

If your claim is ‘might makes right’, then you are claiming that the Palestinians have the right to kill Israeli civilians, so long as they are able–a claim which is obviously absurd.

Which is why I did not say that. I said that by and large, the Arab abandonment of property in Palestine was done at the urging of Arab armies who wished a clear path to overrun the Jewish state. Not returning abandoned property to people whom you have to, for your own safety, assume are hostile to you is not “might makes right.”

[Sal_Ammoniac]

@cmkeller

I said that by and large, the Arab abandonment of property in Palestine was done at the urging of Arab armies who wished a clear path to overrun the Jewish state.

Do you have a cite for this, from a nonpartisan source?

[clairobscur]

@cmkeller

Which is why I did not say that. I said that by and large, the Arab abandonment of property in Palestine was done at the urging of Arab armies who wished a clear path to overrun the Jewish state.

That’s the official Israeli line. But if you look at almost every conflict, you’ll notice that civilians have a tendency to flee war zones in droves, without needing anybody else to tell them to do so. You would need extremely convincing argument to make me believe that in this particular case, they actually felt perfectly safe where they were, but choose to abandon their houses and properties just to oblige arab armies. The wishes of military headquarters are generally the least of the concerns of fleeing civilians. Of course, maybe the palestinians farmers were an incredibly dedicaced and disciplined lot, but somehow I doubt it.
And of course, you forget to mention the opposite theory : that Israeli militias deliberatly scared off palestinian civilians so that they would abandon their villages and properties. Isn’t it the most commonly advanced reason for the massacre of Deir Yassin? What about the “D plan”?

[Sal_Ammoniac]

/hijack

Ah, clairobscur, you’ve been more obscur than clair recently. Where have you been? There’s been many a French-language thread that has missed you.

[cmkeller]

Sal Ammoniac:

Do you have a cite for this, from a nonpartisan source?

I have a web site that you would no doubt consider partisan, but it quotes plenty of sources that you should agree are not partisan on the Israeli side. Of course, I am not exactly equipped to check that their references are quoted accurately and in context, but unless you can tell me why I should think their sources are misrepresented, I think they should qualify as a non-partisan source.

Clairobscur:

But if you look at almost every conflict, you’ll notice that civilians have a tendency to flee war zones in droves, without needing anybody else to tell them to do so. You would need extremely convincing argument to make me believe that in this particular case, they actually felt perfectly safe where they were, but choose to abandon their houses and properties just to oblige arab armies.

I wouldn’t have BEEN a war zone if not for the Arab armies ostensibly acting on their behalf.

And of course, you forget to mention the opposite theory : that Israeli militias deliberatly scared off palestinian civilians so that they would abandon their villages and properties. Isn’t it the most commonly advanced reason for the massacre of Deir Yassin?

No, the reason for the so-called “massacre” (“battle” would be a better word - there were Arab combatants in that town) at Deir Yassein was to establish supply lines to Jewish Jerusalem, which was suffering food shortages due to an Arab blockade.

[Shodan]

@Honesty

And I pose the question again since you cleverly sidestepped it: the Mexico government has failed, despite decades of U.S protest, to successfully stop the flow of illegal drugs across the border. These drugs not only add more drug-related violence but has probably cost our economy billions of dollars. Should we invade Mexico City?

Do you consider that there is any difference between transporting illegal drugs, and firing rockets, invasion, and kidnappings, suicide bombings, and attacks on civilian women and children?

I put the following in italics because I think its important: The people of Palestine have no voice and no money, Israel has made sure of that.

You were aware that the flow of money into Lebanon ended specifically because they elected Hizbollah and Hamas, were you not?

I can’t remember who said it, but the phrase was “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. It seems a little one-sided to blame Israel for the plight of the Palestinians. They were offered 95% of what they said they wanted, and Arafat rejected it out of hand.

Israel should have waged war on the terrorists not the countries themselves and joined other Arab countries in rooting them out.

As has been pointed out a few times, the terrorists deliberately stage their attacks on Israel in heavily populated areas especially so that they can blame Israel for incurring civilian casualties.

And could you provide a list of those Arab countries who have made rooting out anti-Israeli terrorists a priority? Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Shodan

[clairobscur]

@Sal Ammoniac

/hijack

Ah, clairobscur, you’ve been more obscur than clair recently. Where have you been? There’s been many a French-language thread that has missed you.

Thanks for the welcome back. I’ve been away for some months indeed. I’m unwilling to comment on my absence, so let’s say I’ve been on vacations.

[Jackmannii]

@Sal Ammoniac

Do you have a cite for this, from a nonpartisan source?

Here in part is what one balanced source has to say about the creation of refugees and arguments over right of return:

*"Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews tell two very different stories about the events of 1948. The Israeli version is that the Palestinians attacked the Jews and then fled voluntarily because they believed Arab armies would soon liberate Palestine. The Palestinian version is that they were innocently minding their own business, when suddenly the Zionists attacked them and evicted them by force, as part of a preconceived plan of ethnic cleansing…Right of Return for refugees is guaranteed in International law under certain conditions, but these statutes were approved in 1966, many years after the flight of the 1948 refugees. Moreover, the right to self-determination is also guaranteed in international law, and is recognized as jus cogens, which would override other considerations. Return of refugees to Israel would negate the Jewish right to self-determination. If a Palestinian state were created that would allow expression of Palestinian rights, it would seem that symmetrical justice could not abrogate the same rights from Jews. If the Jewish state absorbed Jewish refugees from Arab countries, the Palestinian state could absorb Palestinian refugees…Israelis point out that in consequence of the conflict and the creation of Israel, about 900,000 Jews fled Arab and Muslim countries and many their property. (see Jewish refugees of the Arab-Israel conflict). Thousands of Jewish refugees were created in Palestine as well, as every single Jew living in areas conquered by the Arab armies either fled or was expelled by force, except for those who were massacred in Gush Etzion. Moreover, there is probably no precedent in international law for forcing a country to repatriate hostile belligerents, and there doesn’t seem to be any applicable provision in any UN or Hague statute…The Arab states do not want the refugees. With the exception of Jordan, they are unwilling to give them citizenship. The territory that might be allocated to the Palestinian state, about two thousand, two hundred square miles, is probably too small to house all of them adequately. Israel and the Palestinian areas both have extremely high population densities - over 300 persons per square kilometer in Israel and over 500 per square kilometer in the occupied territories, including over a million refugees.

The refugees have a sincere tie to their land and homes. Many have kept the keys to their houses, houses that no longer exist. Many certainly were evicted unjustly, or left in innocence to protect their families from war and from subjection to unknown alien rule…Returning the refugees to Israel would put an end to Jewish self-determination, as noted by Palestinian as well as Israeli sources. The large numbers of refugees, together with the much higher birth-rate of the Arab population as opposed to Jews, would soon create an Arab majority…Not only the Fatah, but Arab leaders and media have unabashedly admitted that the refugee issue and right of return are being used as a means to destroy Israel. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser told an interviewer on September 1, 1961: “If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.”

With the exception of Jordan, no country has allowed permanent resettlement of Palestinian refugees. Israel tried to do so in Gaza, but was forbidden to interfere with the camps by the UN."*

[clairobscur]

@cmkeller

Clairobscur:

I wouldn’t have BEEN a war zone if not for the Arab armies ostensibly acting on their behalf.

Even if you’re right, it doesn’t change my reasonning that you failed to adress. Again : War zone. Civilians flee. Your conclusion : these evil arabs farmers did that jut in order to be a pain for the israelis hence richly deserved to be punished.

(“battle” would be a better word - there were Arab combatants in that town).

Point taken. From now on, I will also refer to the battle of My Lai and the battle of Oradour, and will avoid giving bad names to the heroic combattants involved. I mean, would you be able to burn houses and kill children in order to achieve a higher goal? I’m not sure I could. It surely takes some guts and praises must be given accordingly.

[Sal_Ammoniac]

@cmkeller

I have a web site that you would no doubt consider partisan, but it quotes plenty of sources that you should agree are not partisan on the Israeli side.

The entire purpose of that site is partisan. I have no doubt that the sources quoted are accurate, but of course they have been cherry-picked to present the Zionists in the best possible light, and the Arabs in the worst. This is specifically not what I was looking for.

Besides, I think far too much stress is placed, by both sides, on why the Palestinians left. It seems to me that getting out of the way of the fighting is a natural instinct, and I have a hard time seeing fleeing as an act of hostility. But in the Zionist narrative, the act of fleeing made the Palestinians enemies of Israel, who should not under any circumstances be allowed to return. The strange thing about this is that the Zionists have always claimed – even in the matter of Deir Yassin – that they treated the Palestinian civilians with kid gloves. Well, if you’re going to argue that, then you have to acknowledge that the Palestinians’ flight actually made things easier for the Zionist forces. In fact, if the Palestinians hadn’t left, where would Israel be now?

In other words, Israel owes the Palestinians an enormous debt of gratitude for fleeing in the first place. So where are the thanks?

[lunarnoodle]

@Sevastopol

thoughts of obliteration, the erasure of Judaism from the face of the earth, the demolition of its temples and incineration of the last Torah, while entirely natural and to be expected, these are marks of extremism and do not much assist.

What!?
It’s natural and expected to want to annihilate an entire religion?
And what of the people who practice this religion?
Is it perfectly natural and expected, in your estimation that they too be erased from the face of the Earth? Is it perfectly natural and expected then that every practicing Jew be incinerated as well along with the Teples and every last Torah?
Or would you expect that through this supposed obliteration that none would be harmed and after, they would simply cease being Jews?

Entirely natural and expected, indeed.

[Sophistry_and_Illusion]

@Sal Ammoniac

Do you have a cite for this, from a nonpartisan source?

Does it matter? He thinks that b/c some Palestinians left in order to insure Israel’s defeat, Israel shouldn’t bother to try to compensate **any ** Palestinians b/c it would be too much trouble to find out who is innocent. And then he inserts question begging stuff about how aggressive Palestinians deserved in 1948 to forfeit their property to the Israeli state–a state whose entity still hasn’t been justified in this thread (contrary to his assertions).

This thread is a waste of time. Bye.

[MEBuckner]

@Sevastopol

Moderate that rage please, thoughts of obliteration, the erasure of Judaism from the face of the earth, the demolition of its temples and incineration of the last Torah, while entirely natural and to be expected, these are marks of extremism and do not much assist.

Moderator’s Warning: Sevastopol, you may criticize the policies of the Israeli, U.S., or any other governments as strongly as you wish, but loose talk (however coyly phrased) about the extermination of entire ethnic or religious groups crosses the line. Don’t do this again, on any forum of this message board.

[RedRosesForMe]

I apologize for jumping in here without reading all the previous posts, but it’s late and my eyes hurt and I want to throw this out here.

I’m taking an awesome class this semester called Crusades and Jihad, and I’ve learned some very interesting things so far. Especially since the OP mentioned the sanctions incurred after Hamas won the election.

This is from one of my required texts:

Another terrorist organization was Lehi, led by Avrahim Stern and called the “Stern Gang” by the British. Stern had been killed in 1942 but Yitzhak Shamir, who would go on to become Prime Minister of Israel in 1986, continued the work of the organization. Begin (leader of Irgun) despised the Stern Gang for its crude methods: he would have nothing to do with such Lehi operations as the killing of 6 British paratroopers in their beds.

My point being, there’s such a fuss over Hamas being a terrorist organization, yet no one seemed to care that the Prime Minister had a hand in the murder of 6 British citizens, as well as countless other acts of terrorism?!

I’d also like to add here, my SIL’s mother is a Palestinian refugee who lost her home back in 67, and until a couple of months ago I worked at the 4th largest Holocaust museum in America, so I’d have to say that I feel both well-informed and unbiased as I possibly can be, and I still can’t wrap my head around this idea.

So, terrorism from the people attempting to create their own state is ok, but it’s not acceptable on the part of the people trying to get said state back? (And at this point someone will be quick to point out that the Palestinians never had a state in the first place. Perfectly true, but the British had made conflicting promises in support of a Jewish state and an Arab one, so I do feel that the Palestinians were justified in feeling like they got a bum deal)

I’m surprised that more people don’t feel like Israel’s Acting Foreign Minister in 2000, Shlomo Ben Ami, in response to a document prepared by the Prime Minister’s office purporting to list Palestinian transgressions.

Ben Ami opposed the distribution of the document on the grounds that no one in the West would be surprised that a people under occupation fails to honor agreements with its occupier: “Accusations made by a well established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking rules to attain its rights do not have much credence.”

So if you’ll forgive me for jumping in at this stage of the debate, I’ll go back and read ALL of the posts (and feel mightily embarassed if anyone else should have already brought up the point I was trying to make).

[RedRosesForMe]

It took me nearly an hour to go back and read the posts I skipped, and I fully expected in that time to have several people jump in and point out half a dozen problems with my post. Apparently I am the only insomniac paying attention to this thread right now.

Now then. Since I see several people have stated (quite rightly) that it’s pointless to get in some pissing contest about who has more right to the land, and we really need to focus on what can be done at this point to stop the violence, here’s my (totally unsolicited) 2 cents:

Both sides have made major mistakes in the way they’ve conducted themselves. Both sides have committed atrocities which they continue to try to justify. While I would consider myself more pro-Palestinian (no human can ever be truly unbiased), my stint at the Holocaust museum certainly made me more sympathetic to the Israelis. However, I don’t see how the situation will ever be resolved with the way things are going.

Thus, I propose, (not entirely in jest, though I do understand it will never happen) a solution not unlike the one agreed upon in regards to the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

(I totally thought my History of Christianity teacher made this up until I read it in one of the books for my C&J class) Apparently, the different Christian denominations fought so viciously over control of the Holy Sepulchre, locking each other out, etc, allegedly even getting so bad that Dominican friars were getting in fistfights with Orthodox priests, that the Ottomans solved the problem by taking the keys away and giving them to a neutral Muslim.

Why can’t a similar deal be reached in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian problem? Why does Israel have to be a Jewish state? Why should the Palestinians, if given anything at all, get only a portion of Greater Israel? Why can’t it be a secular state with rights for both Israelis and Palestinians? Jews, Christians, and Muslims seem to get along just fine in places like Morrocco, why should it be such a problem here?

I am sure quite a few of you will think I am nuts for suggesting something so idiotic and tell me that the Palestinians won’t give up until they have driven the Jews into the sea, but with the copious amounts of reading I am required to do this semester, I will agree with the authors of my textbooks that the hatred between Jews and Muslims today is NOT an age-old problem that will never go away. Yes, there were tensions between the religions, just as there are always tensions between different religious groups. I think that most of the current hatred and violence is a result of the struggle for Israel, not due to some centuries-old grudge or inherent incompatibility between the 2 religions.

But I don’t see anyone claiming that, given the history of pogroms-not to mention the Holocaust-in Europe that Christianity is essentially antisemitic. Yet I do hear a lot of people (particularly when I worked at the Holocaust museum) claim that Muslims are all a bunch of Jew-haters that want to burn Israel.

So, at the risk of being pitted mercilessly for saying so, it seems to me that Palestinians and Israelis are acting like a couple of spoiled toddlers playing tug of war over their favorite toy, when they really just need to learn to share.

[FRDE]

You were shocked by the killing of 6 British paratroopers in their beds.

That is a new one to me, but the bombing of the King David Hotel was pretty nasty and they hung about six British troopers in retalliation for the British hanging convicted assassins (bad idea, I would have deported them). According to my Israeli friends one of the soldiers was Jewish.

I’ve a relative who was a British Officer, he got stoned to death in Palestine by an angry Jewish crowd that he was trying to talk sense into.

These things are in the past and best left alone, although there is a small museum on the beach in Tel Aviv, dedicated to Haganah and Irgun - I would quite like to bulldoze it.

Begin was no angel, the stuff you quoted above looked like whitewash to me

Menachem Begin

However the past is past, I cannot hold German friends responsible for WWII and would be surprized if they held me responsible for the many atrocities we committed.

As I mentioned earlier, 20% of Israelis are not Jewish, they are Arabs, some Druze, some Bedouin, some Christian - and many Moslem. Probably a lot belong to that religion called ‘Don’t give a toss’.

Apart from a few nutters, the Israelis don’t want to occupy the West Bank or the Ghaza strip, but they really object to people bombing them and chucking rockets at them.

Would you believe it, but the Israelis actually armed Yasir Arafat’s forces, and were dismayed to have those weopons turned on them.

From your perspective the thing looks daft, from my perspective (I’ve been going to Israel on business for 16 years) the thing looks like a minority stirring up trouble.
Both Hamas and Hezzbollah remind me of the IRA, those noble freedom fighters who were financially supported by naive Americans until 9/11.

I am pretty sure that most Palestinians and Israelis are totally fed up and would prefer to get on with their lives without reprisals for reprisals.

Also the Holocaust was not ‘Christian’ - it was not openly condemned by the Catholic church - but I put that down to fear rather than approval.

[RedRosesForMe]

@FRDE

Begin was no angel, the stuff you quoted above looked like whitewash to me
Menachem Begin - Wikipedia

I certainly wasn’t suggesting he was, the pages preceding that quote attested that he was quite the opposite, I just wanted that whole quote without editing and being accused of taking it out of context.

@FRDE

Also the Holocaust was not ‘Christian’ - it was not openly condemned by the Catholic church - but I put that down to fear rather than approval.

I was merely pointing out even though Europe was mostly Christian during the pogroms of the Middle Ages and the Holocaust, no one would suggest that Christians are antisemitic; quite a few (IME) people seem to think that Muslims are antisemitic as a rule.

@FRDE

I am pretty sure that most Palestinians and Israelis are totally fed up and would prefer to get on with their lives without reprisals for reprisals.

Which is a statement I agree with wholeheartedly. It just drives me nuts when people make blanket statements about another group. Like the Holocaust survivor who yelled at me (ok, scolded would be better, she didn’t really raise her voice) when I ordered “Peace, Salaam, Shalom” t-shirts to be sold in our gift shop. She referred to Muslims as “the enemy” which really made me mad. I had to bite my tongue a lot when I worked there actually.

[RedRosesForMe]

Oh, and what shocked me about the murder of those 6 troopers was that the future Prime Minister had a hand in it. Not to make light of their deaths, but I know there were a lot of much more heinous acts (on both sides, to be fair).

It’s just that, how can anyone be so hypocritical as to make such a big deal about Hamas when Yitzhak Shamir had an equally sordid past?

[Noone_Special]

@RedRosesForMe

Oh, and what shocked me about the murder of those 6 troopers was that the future Prime Minister had a hand in it. Not to make light of their deaths, but I know there were a lot of much more heinous acts (on both sides, to be fair).

It’s just that, how can anyone be so hypocritical as to make such a big deal about Hamas when Yitzhak Shamir had an equally sordid past?

The initial leadership of the state of Israel was not Yitzhak Shamir, or Menachem Begin, or *any *of the Irgun/Lehi people. They were marginalized for many years, until 1977 when Likud first won the national elections. This also means that Begin and Shamir had 30 years of political activity, and political activity only, behind them at that point - they had time to washthe blood off their hands, figuratively speaking.

The initial leadership was David Ben-Gurion, and Yigal Alon (and, yes, Shimon Peres…) and others, mostly from Hagana background. Not yesterday’s terrorists immediately turned national leaders.

I, personally, will not have too much of a problem if 30-35 years down the road, following the establishment of a Palestinian state (which likely will eventually happen even if I’m not thrilled with the idea), one of today’s Hamas leaders will become Palestinian PM or President. I do see a problem with master terrorists immediately assuming the role of National Leader, based on their resume as terrorists.