You mean the “offer them full Israeli citizenship or allow them to move to Jordan” plan.
I sure you won’t understand what I’m referring to here, either.
While the rocket attacks, periodic ambushes of IDF soldiers, suicide bombings, etc etc continue? No…I don’t see any need. As you say, Jordan RELINQUISHED it’s sovereignty to that area. Israel is and has been the occupying authority. Their only screw up, again, was in not simply annexing the entire thing (and thus putting it forever beyond the reach of any future Palestinian state). That’s what most other countries would have done…it’s what most countries DID do, historically.
Ah…sophistry is it? It’s funny, but I thought this would have better defined your own arguments on this subject. I suppose it’s a matter of perspective…
You want to dispel reality? How is that working out so far?
To paraphrase Innigo Montoya…I dinna thin’ that word means what you thin’ it means…
(Actually, I’m sure you know what it means…you just seem to be applying it to the wrong side of this argument. Natural, I suppose.)
Sure, we can do that. In that case, there was never a Palestine BEFORE 1947, and they would never, EVER, have had even a chance at their own state prior to that. Do you want to discuss the history of the region prior to 1947? I don’t really think it will help your case any, but if you’d like to I’m willing.
No…I’m pointing out the irony that the Palestinian’s, assuming they are ever able to get over their violence and stupidity, will gain lands given to them from Israel (the much hated foe). They are HIGHLY unlikely to be granted bits and pieces of, say, Jordan, Syria or Egypt (their supposed allies) however…this despite the fact that those countries could slice off parts of their borders to give the Palestinian’s some land.
-XT
There’s a lot to get across to you , and frankly, xtisme, I’m not sure there’s a way to do it.
But just consider: You can’t start even a business negotiation, much less a peace agreement, with somebody else by simply telling *them *what you think they *should *think or feel. Assuming the role of arbiter as well as negotiator, for instance by declaring and imposing “just penalties” for the other guys’ failures, is a nonstarting tactic as well.
By going further and calling their inexplicable failure to see things your way anad act accordingly “stupidity”, or saying they have less than the “intelligence of rocks”, or lamenting their failure “to get over their violence and stupidity”, you make it worse than if you had never started. Placing all responsibility on “the other guy” to change *his *behavior and thinking to suit *you *is worse than useless. That’s true no matter who you’re talking about, and no matter what the situation. It’s just how human nature works. The Golden Rule works between peoples as well as people.
I’d say they help prove my point. In all three cases, we had borders that had been established by existing treaties. Then we went to war (or in the case of the Gadsen Purchase threatened to do so) and redrew the border line. And then we wrote a new treaty.
Wrong. We had *never *firmly established the Canadian border, until the Aroostook War made it necessary. There have been several more-recent treaties about the border’s location, but they’ve all been treaties, as I said.
The Mexican War I’ll grant you was to “move the border”, so to speak, but Guadalupe Hidalgo was a treaty nonetheless. The Gadsden Purchase, as you appear not to know, was in large part a ruse to reach a fairer deal with our neighbor, and thereby help establish a durable peace with them, by vastly overpaying for that land.
That is a *very *unusual interpretation of the Revolution and the War of 1812, to say the least.
Mandela and the ANC blew shit up and killed civilians to further their cause. Hamas blows shit up and kills civilians to further their cause. You can debate the relative worthiness of the causes all you want, it doesn’t change the body count. And I’ll point out that Mandela himself was a vocal opponent of the people who tried later to whitewash or sugarcoat what he and MK did, even from within his own party.
Yeah, the last point is a particularly good one. The formation of a Palestinian state, in the first place, was blocked largely by Egypt and Jordan seizing the rest of the Mandate territory and blocking self determination of the people they claimed their war was on behalf of. And that was after Jordan (then, Transjordan) took possession of the majority of Mandate territory i nany case.
The (somewhat twisted) humor inherent in Elvis’ claims that the Jordanians relinquished their claims to sovereignty in order to help the Palestinians is that if that had been their goal at any point during their administration of the West Bank, we would’ve had a Palestinian state long before 1967. After 1967, they could have agreed to peace with Israel and granted the lands to the Palestinians.
Instead, after 1967 Jordan blocked the Palestinians from seizing power over Jordan (and the West Bank), fighting against the Fedayeen was long and drawn out. And then, of course, Palestinian militants did indeed want Jordan to be their country. In short, Jordan fought a civil war to prevent Palestinians from gaining political power, and ended up killing/expelling thousands, setting in motion events that led to Black September’s massacre of Olympic athletes. At the time, in point of fact, the idea that “Jordan is Palestine” was the idea of not just some Israelis, but some Palestinians as well.
In '88, Jordan renounced its claims to the West Bank (claims it had, effectively, already renounced in 1967). Its '88 declaration has to be taken in context with the fact that the Intifada had started in '87, and Jordan wasn’t in the mood for a reprisal of its battles with the Fedayeen. We should keep in mind, as well, that as of the framework of a proposed treaty in 1987 between Israel and Jordan, the West Bank would have become Jordanian property, not Palestinian. The 1988 Jordanian declaration was in the service of avoiding a second civil war, not out of any principled support of Palestinian statehood (which they could have created at any point during roughly four decades)
Now, seeing as how Jordan absorbed the majority of the Mandate and was one of the main reasons why a Palestinian state was not formed in 1967, it would make sense for Jordan to provide some sort of concessions in order to aid any developing Palestinian nation. Whether or not that’ll happen, of course, is roughly equivalent to the chance of Jewish refugees of the 1948 war being compensated for their losses.
Of course getting Elvis to acknowledge any of this will be semi-miraculous. He’s already spewing rhetoric about how asking the Palestinians to stop bombing is asking only them to change… especially since those requests have been made in the context of things like Israeli offers of Palestinian sovereignty and the concession of more than 90% of West Bank land. Evidently that’s not a big enough chance. :rolleyes:
And, of course, instead of “I disagree with your interpretation and this is why”, we can be treated to more faux shock and surprise with “Gee, I can haz idea of what you responding to?”
Wikipedia may not be a credible cite by itself but their report on the negotiations seems in line with what I’ve read elsewhere:
This hardly sounds like an act of generous reconciliation.
Why? It seems your argument is that until the Israeli electorate is made to feel completely comfortable, it will never agree to peace. Palestinians ask, “Why, if it’s comfortable, would Israel agree to anything?” For instance, one of Israel’s senior ministers just said that until “final negotiations,” life in the settlements should be normal. If it’s normal, why change things?
Given human history, which argument do you think is right? My argument is that it is only when people are uncomfortable that they are willing to make great changes. Most Israeli governments seem to have believed the same, as they seem to want to put as much pressure as possible on the Palestinians.
As I’ve said in other threads, I support Israel in it’s attempts to protect it’s citizens. You won’t get any argument from me about getting those guys who launch missiles from Gaza, for instance.
But I think that an Israeli government in 2005, or earlier, certainly could have made the deal.
I really don’t want to get involved in yet another Israel/Mid-East thread/discussion/fight but as a historical correction the Sinai was captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. Retaking the Sinai was pretty much the entirety of Egypt’s goal in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. There was no unrealistic expectation of destroying Israel. After the assault crossing of the Suez, they established small bridgeheads and probably wisely stopped and dug-in, assuming a defensive posture for over a week in the realization that they were simply outclassed by Israel if they tried to fight a fluid, mobile war. In the end you could say Egypt succeeded; though they lost the '73 war, they had forced the issue. Sadat wasn’t Nasser and actually did want to come to an agreement with Israel, even at the cost of losing the backing of the USSR and losing face in the Arab world by breaking away and coming to a separate peace with Israel. Well, more than just losing face, being expelled from the Arab League, and eventually being a root cause in his assassination.
As you said, there were no real hostilities between Egypt and Israel from the end of the war to the '79 Camp David Accords and since then. Quite a huge change from overtly supporting terrorism against Israel, being a constant and immediate menace by having the largest of it’s neighbor’s armies sitting right at the border and from '67-'70 conducting constant low-level warfare in the War of Attrition.
For all of his faults, were that more of Israel’s neighbors had leaders like Sadat. Or Israel would be more accommodating about Palestine, or Hamas et al weren’t constantly firing rockets into Israel, or Israel settlements weren’t put there, or there were never suicide bombers, or whatever your flavor is on the issues. Shit, 60 years on and its still trying to kill each other with no end in sight…
Because in 2005 Abbas’ power was weak, his opposition from Hamas was strong, Hamas was about to win both major electorial and military victories and Abbas wouldn’t have had the power to enforce any agreements. To say nothing of the fact that any agreements would have simply further radicalized Hamas/Islamic Jihad/etc…
No, I’ve never said anything of the sort. The point is that when the most likely result of any changes is not rockets falling on every single Israeli city and suicide bombers on as many buses/in as many restaurants/clubs/whatever as they want, then they’ll be much more receptive to renewing negotiations.
“Let’s reach a compromise so we can both live in peace” is much more likely to get results than “Let’s reach a temporary truce so we can rearm and then have freedom of movement to hit every single city of yours with advanced rockets.”
- You are operating from a flawed premise. Israel already has agreed to negotiations and to sufficiently expanded PA powers when they believed it had a chance of working out, not when they were “completely comfortable” (which is of course a strawman anyways).
- Final Status negotiations have long been agreed upon as the point in which actual territorial shifts will be agreed upon.
- You’ve offed up a non-sequitor by asking if things are normal, why change them. Things were ‘normal’ in Gaza before Israel decided to remove the Israelis who lived there, too. The issue isn’t normality, but security.
Somethign really strange is going on with your argument. As I’ve already posted the timeline, prior to 2005 Abbas wasn’t in power. Arafat didn’t even die until the end of 2004. To allege that Arafat would have allowed the same sort of deal he had already scuttled once is a very, very strange suggestion that’s not carried by the facts.