You sort of missed the point of my post, which was the fact that the same questions keep getting raised and debated ad nauseam. And whether they matter or not is very much a question of debate…is there any way to find a compromise of compensation and blame putting that both sides will accept, and if not, who the fuck has anything to gain by beating that dead horse?
No, but if someone’s claiming that they have a right to land because their grandfather lived on it, then it seems that the same logic would say that somebody who was born on that land and is living on it now has a stronger claim. And if the argument is the Palestinian’s ancestors were living on the land before the Israeli who’s living there now arrived, then the counterargument is that the Israeli’s ancestors were living on that land before the Palestinian’s ancestors arrived. The Israelis were living there first and they’re living there now - so the only way the Palestinians can claim priority is by picking some arbitrary date in the middle.
…After which you would be invalidating the argument that the ancient Israelis were the ones who personally worked and owned the land. And, as Alessan has pointed out, about 40% of the population at the time were Jews, so its really not one-sided. As I had said, the only way to go about fixing the problem in the best possible way is to get the two peoples to strike some sort of compromise.
Yes. Like many wars, if you delve into it, you may end up perceiving shades of gray. I perceive one shade of gray, but can understand that someone with a different set of starting biases would see a different shade of gray. What matters is the future, not the past, *** and for that, good-spirited people should be able to find common ground***.
Modern Israel arose in the aftermath of mankind’s most horrendous war; other boundary lines also changed as a result of that war. Poles now live on and govern German land … but Germans don’t strap bombs to their teenage children and send them to die. The Poles in turn have been kicked off their land, but they don’t mutilate Russian babies and then cackle in glee.
One side wants to live in Peace. The other has, as its sole goal, to push the Jews into the sea.
It is not hard to decide which side is on the righteous side now. (To focus on which shepherd stole how many sheep from whom in 1946 is not a path to enligtenment.)
A piece of history that doesn’t seem to get mentioned frequently is that the Palestine of the British mandate included what is now Jordan, as well as what is now Israel.
The idea of partition, initiated by the UN, was to give separate states to the Jewish and to the Arab populations.
The West Bank was to be part of Israel under partition. It was seized by Jordan during the 1948 war, but not described as “occupied” until the Israelis took it back in 1967.
Sort of. As of 1922, the area was divided into two distinct areas - Palestine under direct British rule and Transjordan under increasingly ( over the years ) indirect rule through the Hashemites until full independence in 1946.
This is incorrect. It certainly was not supposed to become part of Jordan, but it was to have been the largest chunk of what would have been the new Arab state if the partition had proceeded peacefully.
That is incorrect, as this shows.
Jordan formally annexed the West Bank after seizing it. Israel controls the West Bank but has not annexed it, hence, “occupies” it. Compare that to the Golan, which Israel did annex.