Up until a couple weeks ago, my understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had been that the Palestinians were trying to oust Israelis from the land known as Israel.
However, my political science professor (who is a native of Iran, but whose views are pretty liberal)stated that Palestinians are merely trying to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Is this true? If so, I’m supportive of the Palestinians in this.
I have a feeling there’s more to it than that, though. Are Israelis afraid that if they withdraw from those two territories, they will also be forced to give up the rest of Israel? What’s the Israeli rationale for invading these lands?
Okay, maybe not such basic questions, but I’d love to hear answers on this.
This is the least basic Israel/Palestine question there is.
Some people say “occupied territories” and mean Gaza and the West Bank. Others say it and mean the whole of Israel.
To sum it up Israel is afraid of further attack from Gaza and the West Bank which is why they do not leave it. There is a section of Israel that would be reduced to 9 miles in width should they give up the occupied territories. With the occupied territories included israel is about the size of New Jersey.
The Palestinians have in the past used concessions to strategically leverage further concessions and many times ask for land that is strategically important back first. When Israel allowed the Arabs to have rule over Jerusalem they tried to destroy jewish holy sites.
One possible idea that has been toyed with is building a wall around Israel and then giving the land back and not allowing the Palestinians to move within Israel at all.
This is a fairly oversimplified explanation, but as I said, it wasn’t a basic question. I confess that I might have even missed the mark.
It’s hard to qualify all the “Palestinians” as wanting one particular thing, particularly in light of the fact that the many different Palestinian terrorist groups have differing agendas. However, general sentiment seems to indicate that many Palestinians want (and have always wanted) the destruction of Israel; opinion polls show strong support for groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which want a Palestine from the “[Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea”, i.e. no Israel. Here in the West, particularly on university campuses, it is something of a cause celebre to say that the Palestinians/PLO are only fighting against the illegal occupation of their lands, and Arafat plays to this when talking to Western leaders. In any case, talk among many Palestinians of a return “home” is indicative of a desire to “return” (I put that in quotes because many of these militant young Palestinians have never lived in Israel proper) to what is now called Israel.
**
Even if this is their true cause, does your support extend to attacks on Israeli civilians within the 1967 borders?
In general, most Israelis and the Israeli gov’t (with the exception of the most extreme fundamentalist elements, e.g. Shas) do not want to be in the West Bank or Gaza. Very few Jews live in that region (excepting a few major areas, such as Jerusalem), there is little to be gained economically from it, and Israel really gains no particular benefit from its occupation. The occupation began after the 1967 war, when Israel found out that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were planning to attack it and preemptively attacked them, winning after 6 days. Israel held on to the land as a buffer zone against further attacks, particularly from Jordan. N.B. there never was a Palestinian state even before 1967, as Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan held the WB - conditions then were even more miserable than now.
Now Israel has peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, and its control of the Golan prevents a Syrian attack. However, the Israeli perspective is that a Palestinian state in that area would become a base for terror attacks against the Israeli state, since there is such strong support for the entire destruction of Israel, not only from the Palestinians, but among other Arabs, and many Arab/Muslim governments (e.g. Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Syrian puppet gov’t in Lebanon). Arafat has shown that he cannot be trusted to keep his people from attacking Israel, with his revolving door jails and inability to even keep members of his own organization from committing terror attacks - the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a group which has made a name for itself through suicide bombings in recent month, is a component of the Fatah movement, founded and headed by Arafat himself. In short, Israel doesn’t really want most of the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, but from its point of view, has to be there to protect its own citizens in its own (recognized) borders.
If one listens to what the Palestinian leaders say to their own people, the goal is to destroy all of Israel. However, reasonable people can disagree.
Israel has already given up land to the Palestinians. In exchange the Palestinian Authority was supposed to help keep the peace. Instead, the PA is actually conducting some of the terrorism. A years and a half ago, under pressure from President Clinton, Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a very generous offer to Arafat – giving the Palestinians perhaps 90% of what they had asked for. Arafat refused to even negotiate from that offer. Instead, he called for the start of the current conflict. It seems obvious to me that Arafat cannot or will not make peace.
Some of the land was captured in earlier wars made against Israel.
This whole thing about arab leaders saying one thing in English and another in Arabic has been something I’ve been hearing for a long time. My wife speaks English/Hebrew/Arabic and has translated a little bit for me so I don’t doubt that it occurs. However i was wondering if someone has a definitive cite that I can go peruse with a documented case of this happening, with what they said to the west in English, and then a translation of what they said to Arabs in Arabic.
It would be nice to have some examples of such, mswas, but I suspect they may be harder to compare than just a translation. Some of it is the use of “coded” or “loaded” words: that is, does the term “occupied territory” mean lands occupied since the 1967 war, or lands occupied following the 1948 U.N. creation of Israel?
Similarly, political factors in the U.S. may use the term “support life choices” – one audience reads that as meaning pro-life/anti-abortion, while another audience hears the phrase as meaning “allowing women to choose.” Even more so is there obfuscation in the use of terms in the Middle East, regardless of which language you’re using.
Factual clarification. “By the end of 1998, some 350,000 Israelis resided in areas that had been taken in the June War: 180,000 in annexed East Jerusalem, 164,000 in the West Bank, and 5,500 in the Gaza Strip”. (Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East).
Let’s not downplay Israel’s expansionary (and, let’s face it, provocative) policies. Following Oslo I, Israel confiscated some 20,000 acres of Palestinian owned land in the West Bank between 1993 and 1995. Even in 1997, some 5000 housing units were under construction in the West Bank, many (most?) of them government-subsidized.
A long, long time ago (I’m talking about 10 years or more), I participated in the FidoNet POLITICS discussion (hell, I moderated it). A Palestinian expatriate (going by the name of Ghazy Kader, for the record) participated and obviously discussed the Israel situation.
At the time, after going back and forth on a number of occasions, I asked him straight out: Would you be satisfied with the Israelis turning over the Gaza Strip and West Bank to the Palestinians, or do you want the state of Israel erased from the map? (Or words to that effect.) He replied, “Yes.” I responded and explained this was an either/or question, not a yes/no question. His only response was “Yes.”
Why was that? Well, I suspect he didn’t want to lie and say that he wanted the latter, but he didn’t want to say it outright either and look like an extremist. So he took the middle path. But it also exemplifies the difference in opinion amongst different Palestinians. Some would be happy with Israel turning over the “occupied territories” to them. Others want Israel to be erased completely. Remember, the PLO charter still says Israel shouldn’t exist, so we’re not just talking a few extremists here.
You don’t anymore (at least I don’t think they exist in any real sense these days). This was all pre-web stuff.
Nowadays if you want to get into discussions like that you either go to Usenet (which is generally unmoderated) or you find websites that host message boards, like this one!
Something I am sad about is that this board doesn’t have more Palestinians on it. I hear the Israeli side on this subject and I hear non-Palestinian Arabs or Arab sympathizers or people like Collounsbury who associates with both sides, but I never hear it straight from a Palestinian. I guess I’m gonna have to walk over to Columbia and stalk Edward Said.
It’s hard to keep all these Palestine/Israel threads straight, but this one looks like the place place to post a question that’s been bugging me for a while.
Leaving aside for the moment that it would set a precedent for the appeasment of terrorists, why couldn’t Israel and Palestinine revert to their original boundaries set by the 1948 UN resolution? Concerning the Palestinian demand for return, why not simply allow the number of Palestinians who were expelled (or lack of a better term) have the right to return to their original holdings, provided they accept Israeli citizenship? Dismantle or (better yet) turn over all settlements on the west bank to Palestine. In return, the Palestinian’s recognize the right of Israel to exist and pledge not to against jews and/or Israel. The Palestinians get what they claim to want, Israel gets secure borders, and any future acts of terrorism cannot be explained away as arising from Israeli aggression.
And by the way, what were the original boundaries? Was the proposed Palestinian state supposed to be what is now the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip? If so, it looks awfully small to me.
What you’ve proposed is what’s being offered by the Arab League at the moment. Neighbouring countries have not accepted Israel’s existence until now (with the possible exception of Egypt, following the Camp David accords in the 70s). The lands that are, in name at least, the Palestinian Authority, were captured in 1967 (and during other wars) from neighbouring countries, none of which are Palestine, because Palestine as an independent state never existed (though it did exist in name under the British).
There are several problems with that from the Israeli perspective. The first is that the old borders are not defensible. Second, Israel has learned that assurances from Arab countries are worthless, since Israel has been attacked many times, and Arafat himself has unilaterally broken something like 64 different cease-fires. In fact, they are supposed to be in negotiations right now under the Oslo agreement, but Arafat chose to violate that. So from the Israeli standpoint, giving up a significant amount of security for assurances from the Arab world that they won’ t be attacked is not that great a deal.
Another problem is that Israel would have to give control of some holy sites back to Arabs, and the last time they had control of those sites they destroyed or severely damaged them.
And another problem is the Golan Heights. The Golan now provides about 1/3 of Israel’s water, and I don’t think they can easily turn that off. Plus, the Golan heights are a strategic nightmare for Israel, because it gives the Syrians high ground from which to snipe and shell Israelis (which they did when they had it), and because the ridge line allows Syria to amass troops and armor without the Israelis being able to see it, giving them the advantage of surprise (which they’ve used before).
Then there’s the little problem that the Palestinians show no sign of being willing to accept that deal anyway. After all, they didn’t accept it in 1948, and Arafat walked out of an offer in 2000 that gave him about 95% of that. He didn’t even try to negotiate from that starting point - he just called off the talks and launched the intifada.
You mean the borders that Israel accepted with a smile. Until the next morning when every Arab Nation within reach attacked her?
**
bizz, you’ve never visited the Middle East, have you? The reason I ask is because I don’t think you know what it’s like there. Ever see The Mummy? That’s what it’s like… desert. Sand, rocks… not much else.
That is, until Zionist settlers moved there and built the land up - literally - out of nothing.
You know why the Green Line is called that? Because it marked the border between the arid desert (where Arabs lived) and green, lush farmland (where Israelis lived). To ask the Israeli people to simply give their land to the “Palestinians” is to ask them to sacrifice all of that progress.
Plus, what are you proposing they get in return? “…the Palestinian’s recognize the right of Israel to exist and pledge not to against jews and/or Israel.”
You know, “right to exist” is not a phrase you hear very often. That is, unless you’re talking about Israel. You never hear anyone discuss France’s “right to exist,” or Germany’s.
That’s a scary phrase… it presupposes that granting Israel the “right to exist” is in some way a concession. Bzzzt! Wrong. Israel exists. Joseph Aron wrote an excellent column about this in last week’s Chicago Jewish News. The article is here, but here’s an excerpt:
bizz, you go on to propose (I think) that the “Palestinians” would also pledge not to attack Israel anymore. You remember a certain handshake on the lawn of a certain White House? :rolleyes: What were the Oslo Accords about?
**
Pardon my frankness, but anyone who honestly believes that current acts of Arab terrorism can be reasonable blamed on “Israeli agression” is a boob. There are people here, in America, that plot to blow up Federal Buildings because of some grievance they have with the US Government. Does their say-so make their complaint true? Even if it were true, does it justify the act?
No and no.
Time and time and time again, Yassar Arafat has said one thing to the Western Press and another to the Arab world. He has repeatedly asked for things then slapped away the hand that offered them. He has broken his word more times than anyone can count.
How soon we forget. Arafat is not a “partner for peace.” The people sending their children out to blow themselves up are not interested in just a little more land. This is a terrible, ugly situation… but the “land for peace” model does not work.
Thank you for your replies. sdimbert’s point about Israel’s ‘right to exist’ was a point well made.
No, I have never been to that area of the world, but I am not unaware of recent events. I guess the idea is to call Arafat’s bluff. What if the Palestinians got what they claim to want? If they shit the bed, then who’s to blame? America? Israel? Any future acts of terrorism cannot be portrayed as an oppressed people fighting against an expansionist invader, but will be seen for what they are, craven acts of murder. Arafat can no longer play the victim.
I am aware of the past events in this area, but the two countries will someday have to live next door to each other. They might as well start down that path sooner, rather than later.
OK, but Arafat’s bluff actually was more-or-less called 18 months ago. Under pressure from Clinton, Barak made an offer that gave the Palestinians almost all they claim to want. Arafat refused the offer, refused to negotiate using that offer as a basis, ended the negotiations, and began the current intifada.
Too late for “sooner”. They’ve been fighting ever since the Arabs attacked Israel in 1948. Intelligent, committed, knowledgable people have worked on this problem for 53 years without finding a good solution.
However, one must give credit to Jimmy Carter (and to Sadat and Begin) for getting a settlement between Israel and Egypt – countries that had been at each others’ throats for a long time. So, there’s always hope…
Before the 1967 war, the Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and West Bank belonged to Syria, Egypt and Jordan, right? If a deal for a Palestinian State is ever reached, it would be on these lands (plus or minus), right? Have Syria, Egypt and Jordan renounced their rights to these lands in favor of the Palestinian Authority?
