They aren’t part of the Middle East
Middle east consists of…
Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran (Persia), Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Palestine.
Egypt lies in Africa and Asia
So the middle east is the middle of what? Asia ? Seems to me it’s more like western Asia.
So Where do you put Turkey and Afghanistan ?
An Israeli friend of mine came up with a surprizing saying:
‘The Middle East is a British invention’
Actually, I think it might be right, it would be hard to call it ‘The Cradle of Civilization’ nowadays.
Turkey is a bit in Europe - Afghanistan is a Jungle.
As Dave Barry once put it, (paraphrasing):
There has always been fighting in the Middle East. There always will be fighting in the Middle East. If all life on Earth were wiped out, except for two amoeba, if those two amoeba are in the Middle East, they will be fighting.
Let’s review a little modern history. If the arab brothers care SO much for their Palestinian brothers, then why the hell won’t THEY give up some of their mucho land?
Don’t you see? It’s just a smokescreen. It’s so easy to pick on Israel, but in reality, peace is not in the Arabs’ blood. Which nation would you propose should take Israel? Ok, let’s say it should be annexed by Egypt. Is Syria going to peacefully agree? Lebanon? Don’t you see they cannot even trust each other?
Also, please consider how their filthy rich, Draconian leaders treat their own people.
The only thing that unites them is their common hate for Israel and the Western world. What a great day it was when, in the 1980’s, Iran and Iraq were beating up each other. (That’s the true, Islamic brotherly love in action.)
If you think deeply, far beyond the superficial oil issues and such, you will see how Israel is to the Middle East what the neutron is to the atom. And, if you want to see it only in today’s terms, you should love Israel for being a thorn in the Arab’s side…each time they gouge you at the pumps. If there were no Israel, would gas prices improve? Would they suddenly be friends with the Western world? I think not.
Don’t ever forget there is a manifesto for Islam to own the world. Israel is just the tip of the iceberg. If you think about it, their treatment of Israel should reveal to you their true motives.
I don’t ask you to agree with all of this; I merely ask you to think about it.
IMHO, Jinx 
The Middle East term was first used on Afghanistan
Middle East is more of an political and cultural definition than a georgaphical one. I think Europeans called it “Near east” before ww2
Even if you want to be generous, the only part of Egypt that lies in Asia is the Sinai, which is hardly a fundamental part of the country. And, like someone said, what about Turkey, which is mostly in Asia with only a little bit in Europe.
And what about Azerbaijan? Is the Iranian part part of the Middle East and the independent part not? Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti? Most of their ties have been with the Arabian penninsula, and Ethiopia even ruled Yemen for a a while, as well as being a home for those early Muslims who fled Mecca.
I suspect that Israel provides a focus for the resentment most other middle eastern nations have toward the US for the manipulations we made in the area during the Cold War. Israel was the largest recipient of our foreign aid because we had a major guilt trip going on (deservedly, IMO, although the nations of western Europe should have shared at least equally in that) and because many of its citizens were former citizens of the US whom we felt we could trust. Had Israel not been formed, we would have more heavily supported other regimes. The resentment probably wouldn’t be as tightly focused, because our foreign aid wouldn’t have been as tightly focused, but it would still be there. IMHO. We interfered, rather heavy-handedly in many cases, such as supporting the Shah in Iran.
Hatred of Jews by Muslims is, I believe, a fairly recent thing. Islam had a very long track record of treating its Jewish populations well compared to the way Christian Europe did. I think Israel is not the cause of hatred of the US by Middle Easterners. I think the US is largely the cause of hatred for Israel. This was enormously bolstered by the fact that this tiny strip of land in the desert, with no oil resources at all, was prosperous beyond compare in the region, and because when this tiny nation was attacked, it promptly beat the crap out of all its much larger attackers. These two things are both due to two factors; one is that many of the initial citizens of Israel were highly educated people from the west who promptly went about doing their best to recreate the technological environments from which they had come, and the other is that Israel got enormous aid from the west, particularly the US. Since human nature doesn’t allow most people to acknowledge things like “Oh, they’re better educated and going about things better than we are,” that kind-of allowed most people to blame US funding entirely for Israel’s rather one-sided victories over them.
As for a Palestinian state? I’m sorry. There was a very large land region called Palestine. It was split into a tiny little region, subsequently called Israel, and a great big Palestinian state. We call it Jordan. There’s your Palestinian state. That being said, the Palestinians in Israel have won the PR war, and it no longer matters who is right and who is wrong. There will be a Palestinian state peeled off of Israel, because the world demands it.
Which rather wanders from my original point. My original point was that the real hatred in the region is primarily of the US, and it is due mostly to our activities during the Cold War. This is inextricably linked to Israel because our primary recipient of foreign aid during the Cold War was in fact Israel.
A new definition (The Greater Middle east) was used by G8 2-3 years ago and that definition also included North-Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan and lower Caucasus
Uh, wow. What is now Jordan was previously Transjordan, and Palestine, the part that *was * split, was the area *west * of the river. The acreage of the current “great big” Jordan (which had NOT been “split”) is irrelevant since it’s mostly empty desert - the water, arable land, other resources, and general habitability of the region was and is mostly in the valley and west of it.
It would instead be factual to say that Israel will be required to withdraw from its occupation of a foreign country, wouldn’t it? Just when do you think the West Bank became *part * of Israel? Yes, the world demands that, not because of any “PR war” but out of a recognition that the Palestinians are fully human, with all of the rights that that entails.
Do Israel’s actions toward its neighbors really have so little to do with it? Is *any * resentment unjustified by fact?
That was a remarkable post - the extent of your rewrite of history required to hold Israel unaccountable for its actions, fully entitled to do and take whatever it has done and taken, goes well beyond what anyone else in the area could reasonably be expected to agree with, isn’t it? From what you say, it inevitably follows that all those pesky Arabs should just move to Jordan, make do somehow in the middle of the desert, and quit whining is not something I think you’d wish to assert publicly - yet that seems inescapable. You’re willing to accept the two-country formulation that has been the framework defined for the area since 1947, but only because of a “PR war”, not out of any judgment of fairness or any recognition of any need or desirability to live in peace with one’s neighbors.
Isn’t the widespread nature of the attitude you hold at the heart of the problem?
OK, I’m not going to go into this with any depth, because this is not a thread that is supposed to be debating the Israel/Palestinian issue. I’ll just say this: your viewpoint is heavily biased against Israel, even though it may truly be based on the facts as you understand them. I will admit that mine is biased toward Israel, based on the facts as *I * understand them. I’m not denying that Israel has done some things that I think were wrong. But your portrayal of them as treating Palestinians as sub-human is ridiculous, and indicative of your willingness to throw reality aside in a pursuit of ideological holiness. I’m a hardcore left-winger myself, Elvis, but this is one area in which I think the left-wing has lost sight of some facts in its desire to protect the weak against the strong. The fact that Israel has rather one-sidedly won the military conflicts it has been in does not automatically make it the bad guy.
Oh, and btw? Trans-Jordan was a very recent name denoting a portion of what had been known as Palestine for quite a long time.
Of course not. But occupying the West Bank since 1967, and planting settlements there, and maintaining an Apartheid rule over the Palestinians, does.
Cite?
Really? I thought it was about Israel and peace in the Middle East. *That’ll * teach me to take thread titles and OP’s seriously. But your reluctance to get into the subject in any more depth is perfectly understandable.
Facts are not a matter of opinion. They are facts. What you cite as “facts” are nothing of the sort.
Your claim that it does not include what is now Israel or the West Bank is what I pointed out as wrong, not to mention absurdly so. If you can tell us why you chose to make that claim, it would help this discussion quite a bit more than projecting “ideological holiness” on those with the temerity to point that little problem out. Stick to the facts, please.
And what BG said, too.
Dammit, I knew I should never have posted in Great Debates! It makes me work, something I try to avoid at all costs.
First of all, you may be right, and I may be mistaken. I had seen a single source claiming that Trans-Jordan was but a portion of what had long been known as Palestine, and I accepted it, despite the fact that it was clearly Israeli right-wing propaganda (I assumed that since it was comparatively easily verifiable, they would be telling the truth - that may have been incorrect). The Mandate of Palestine, established by the Brits in 1922, included the area we now know as Israel (including the West Bank and Gaza), then known as Cis-Jordan, and the now nation of Jordan, then known as Trans-Jordan, but I’m still running down what region was actually considered Palestine in the years prior to World War I. I need to do more research there, and I want to respond first, because I was away from the SDMB for some hours, and I don’t want to look as if I’m just abandoning the thread.
Second, the thread was clearly titled “If state of Israel had never been created, would we have peace in the Middle East?” It was not asking who was right - the Palestinians or the Israelis. I never should have mentioned the issue in the first place, and I’m sorry for having raised it in this thread. It didn’t belong here.
I disagree with BrainGlutton and Elvis for the simple reason that Israel captured those territories in brief wars that were caused by coalitions of Arab nations mobilizing on the Israeli borders, clearly in preparation for an attack. I may be old-fashioned here, but it seems to me that if one guy starts a fight, and the other guy wins it, the winner has no obligation to return the territory he seized in the course of that fight. If, for example, we attacked Canada, and Canada beat the crap out of us, taking Montana in the course of the war, we might want Montana back, but I don’t think they’d be under any moral imperative to return it. That being said, it probably would have been both better in a moral sense and smarter in the long run for Israel to do just that (return Montana 
). But I can understand the decision at the time. Israel was a tiny nation surrounded by a whole lot of bigger countries who made it clear they didn’t like them and were willing to express that dislike in quite physical terms. Israel felt threatened, and with quite good reason. I can certainly understand their desire to add some territory to provide a further geographic buffer between themselves and their enemies.
Again, I really don’t want to sidetrack this thread. If you want to start a debate on the Palestinians vs. Israel, by all means do so and either mention it in this thread or email me to let me know, and I’ll participate to the best of my ability, even though it does make me work <shudder!>. But in the meantime, in *this * thread, could you just take the point that the US’s actions during the Cold War did a lot to foment resentment against us in that region, and that Israel, supported as it was by the US, probably became the target of a lot more resentment because of that? As I said, I shouldn’t have raised the topic of the Palestinians here, because that situation is only one of many problematic areas in the Middle East.
I’m off for the night, but will try to respond in the morning to anyone else who wants to inform me that I’m a complete idiot (as if I didn’t already know this).
That is exactly the reason I posted it here in GD, because I hear so many conflicting “facts” from both camps that my opinion changes based on the “facts” I believe. There must be one objective set of facts regardless of how one side or the other interprets those facts.
Actually, they would, if the people of Montana had a problem with living under Canadian rule.
I doubt you can get a factual answer to a “what if” question.
I agree with much of what you said, but it is a bit more complicated.
We need to remember the Suez fiasco, which was sorted out in no uncertain terms by the USA - and very much in Egypt’s favour.
In the later 1970’s the USA brokered a deal between Israel and Egypt, in which Egypt got a chunk of the Sinai back, Israel had a new airport (built by Portuguese workers with a penchant for sunglasses) to replace the one they lost, and Egypt got a lot of financial support from the USA.
At that time Egypt was skint because it had spent a fortune on weapons from the USSR - the USSR was, one could say ‘meddling’.
The USA has never had a problem with the Saudi ruling class, and it got on Ok with Iraq in the 1980’s.
Prior to 1979, Iran was motoring along very nicely, and despite the meddling to get the Shah on the peacock throne, it looked as if Iran and the USA were on pretty good terms.
I don’t think that Arab antipathy towards the USA is really based on Cold War antics. I reckon that it is something along the lines of Islamic Fundamentalists detesting the West, and the USA is the best example of the West.
I also reckon that we might as well accept that Islamic Fundamentalists detest us ( I am British ), for the simple reason that we stand for everything that they loathe, and that there is not much we can do about it. They regard us as decadent, and realize that everything we believe in is the antithesis of their rather peculiar beliefs.
In time, I am sure that the Arab population will turn away from Islamic Fundamentalism, but in the meanwhile we might as well accept that while we are not ‘at war’ with Islam, a good chunk of Islam reckons that it is ‘at war’ with us.
It’s been more than 10 years since I read Charles Glass’ “Tribes With Flags,” and much of my impression of the area has been shaped by events since then. But Glass did a good job of protraying the various Middle East mindsets, almost all of which are tribal in nature. Even if Israel didn’t exist, America would be despised by the Islamic zealots. There would be bloodshed because secular Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian governments would be under attack from Islamic zealots for allowing the Great Satan to “westernize” the area, selling Coca Cola, western fashions, technology and even pornography. American investment means the expectation of American profit, and there is a widely accepted belief in Third World countries that prosperity is a zero-sum game – the affluent gain by taking away from others. The inability of Middle East governments to nurture stable, prosperous economies would be blamed on American prosperity robbing the natives of their birthright; anybody who allied with the U.S. would be attacked. And, of course, none of this excuses the fact that we and the Soviets used proxies in the Middle East in our struggle for supremacy in the region.
The Arab, Persian, Palestinian and even Muslim obsession with honor, combined with the American obsession with profit pretty much guarantees conflict in the region.
Can you provide a cite for the idea that they hate us for who we are and not for what we did? We did some pretty nasty stuff to them during the cold war and much of the region is still pretty ticked off about the creation of the state of Israel.
Other people seem to think that there would be war in the Middle East even without Israel but noone seems to be able to cite anything more than the argument that these people just like killing each other or something along those lines.