It sounds like youa re saying that the aprtition plan was more damage control than the manifestation of global (non-arab) concensus)
I can appreciate how dire the need for a jewish state may have seemed in the late 1940’s but I wonder how important it is in today’s modern world. It seems like a lot of the problems in the Middle East derive from the desire to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel combined with the fear that a muslim majority would impose sharia law in israel as soon as they achieved the majority.
60 years is a lot of death and suffering to endure for offended sensibilities. It seems unreasonable. If there was ever any shame in “losing” to Jews, it certainly doesn’t exist anymore so why is it still an issue?
I can’t defend how the other arab states have treated Palestinians. While it doesn’t excuse Israel’s role in Palestinian suffering, it seems to me that a lot of that suffering could have been avoided at very little cost or trouble to the arab states but wasn’t because of political reasons.
Oh, I see what you are saying. OK so the arab peace plan would be OK with you if the withdrawal was done more incrementally to ensure that giving up an acre of land didn’t mean another acre from which terrorists could shoot rockets but a set time table would not be acceptable?
How would you determine if standards had been met? Would Israel trust a third party to make that determiniation or would that be the subjective decision of Israel?
How would you treat terrorism? If you give up some land and terrorist start getting nervous about reconciliation and start bombing cafe’s. If the Palestinian Authority condemns those bombings, what then? Would you hold the Palestinian population hostage to the actions of desperate terrorists who were intent on derailing the peace process? Would it be enought aht the Palestinian Authority was respecting the demilitarized zone or would you demand that the Palestinian authority enforce peace in the demilitarized zone without weapons?
That is not the way the peace plan is worded.
“Attain a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees to be agreed upon in accordance with the UN General Assembly Resolution No 194.”
This seems to leave quite a bit of room for negotiating how you determine that a refugee wishes to live at peace with its neighbors and when the earliest practicable date for that return would be. Do you think this is what Hamas and Lebanon think of as the right of return?
So the fact that I think that there is a right fo return makes me unobjective while your rejection of this right makes you objective? PUHLEEZE! If you are going to say that I lack objectivity merely because I disagree with you I am going to question your objectivity. Like I have said in the past, I have no personal connection to this issue. Do you?
Would it take more than the desperate act of terrorists intent on derailing the peace process to break security?
Do you mean '67 borders are indefensible in a military sense or indefensible in a moral sense? Because the demilitarization zone would probably let you create borders for military purposes almost anywhere you want (within reason).
Would it matter to you that in exchange for abandoning the right of return, Israel would have to agree to give up land beyond the 1967 borders?
So the Balfour declaration was nothing? Or are we just ignoring that for now?
The right of return is not contingent on land ownership. Poor Palestinians have the same right of return as the rich ones. The right of return has NOTHING to do with land ownership as far as i can tell.
Why is the time period surrounding the war of 1948 the only relevant period for determining the history of the creation of Israel?
Balfour declaration.
The UN’s actions might have been damage control but it gave israel’s actions legitimacy that it would not have had without the UN resolution.
It wasn’t just the “historical” connection with the land was it?
Balfour declaration was an attempt to keep out Jews?
You have your version of reality and the rest of the world has another. The UN resolution reiterated a right of return that had been part of the dialogue since the late 1800’s.
So you can’t live on land you don’t own? Are the Bedouins trespassers? Are all the residents of an apartment building trespassing? What the heck are you talking about? If they used to live in Israel then they and all their kids have a right of return regardless of whether they owned rented or squatted on the land they were living. Not that this has anything to do with the right of return but I’ve also noted before that it appears taht there was more arab ownership of land in israel than Jewish ownership of land in Israel.
Calling me disingenuous might be the strongest argument you have but you can only use it so many times before you sound ridiculous.
If you think I am misreading what you are saying then say so but you seem to assume that anyone that disagrees with you is being “disingenuous” that there is no way someone could reasonably take a position contrary to yours. That is a hard way to debate.
I had been reading your rejection of the right of return based on the forced population transfer of Jews. Are you asking why Palestinian refugees have the right of return but the people subject to population transfers in the USSR under Stalin do not have such a right? Is that your analogy or do you mean something else?
BTW, didn’t the Nuremburg trials make forced population transfers war crimes (not really been enforced i guess but I think they made forced population transfers war crimes).
The US might consider hamas a terrorist group but I wonder if the Palestinians who voted consider thema terrorist group? If not then why not? They certainly engage in terrorist activity. What would make the Palestinian majority think that Hamas deserved their vote (and noone seems to think the vote was rigged)?
Marmite Lover, please don’t change the text inside quote tags. If you’re responding to multiple quotes from the same post, use extra [noparse]
[/noparse] tags. I edited your post to make it clearer which parts were yours and which were FinnAgain’s, although bolding your own text helped. Thank you.
Was Martin Mc Guinness a terrorist?
Was Nelson Mandela a terrorist?
These two guys don’t seem to me to be terrorists. Just men who were fighting against injustice.
Sometimes you need to step back and look from another angle.
Khaled Meshaal might just become another Mandela.
But to be honest I doubt it. The way things are going Israel is not going to survive anyway. They clearly do not want peace on a fair and just basis. They want all of Palestine and that is not going to happen.
Rather obviously it’s not changing the subject to ask you to substantiate your Conspiracy Theory, nor is it changing the subject go get you to provide a citation for your claim that most if not all Arab men are sexist pigs. None of the Arab men I know are chauvinist pigs, so put your cite up.
Along with your Conspiracy Theory about Israel making the United States go to war, this too shows that your argument simply is not factual. If Israel wanted all of the West Bank and Gaza, it would have had it in '67.
It would be subject to agreed upon metrics, just like it was during the peace process before it collapsed. It would be proven by the PA not using genocidal incitement, not engaging in terrorism, and cracking down on terrorists rather than letting them go free. Rather obviously a sovereign government has to do more than “condemn” military attacks being launched from their territory. A PA that cannot deliver on peace is not a partner for peace, it’s only able to offer lip service.
Yes, it is. The demand that all “refugees” (actual refugees, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, etc…) can move back to the land even if they didn’t own it is the “right” of return.
Lebanon doesn’t have one unified ideology, and Hamas/Hezbollah don’t support any right of return, they support the destruction of Israel by military force.
Yep, since there is no such “right” and you are privileging Palestinian demands as an objective fact. Rather obviously, it’s not because you “disagree with me” but because you have certified that a “right” exists even though it does not, and you have certified that such a “right” exists because one side demands it and you credit their demands as having the force of gospel truth (objectively, of course). People who didn’t own land don’t have the right to live on it just because they demand it, not even if you really, really want them to. There’s a difference between saying “people who didn’t own land, and their children, and their grandchildren, and their great grandchildren, and so on in perpetuity, want the ability to move to land that they never had ownership rights for. I support that.” is quite different from “they have a Right of Return.”
And I suspect that suddenly it wouldn’t be a question of “you’re just saying that because you disagree with me!” if someone told you that Israel has the Right of Unlimited Annexation. You’d ask what binding document or valid legal principle granted them such a right.
The '67 borders are militarily indefensible, which is why UNSC 242 called for a negotiated compromise for some but not all of the captured territories rather than a unilateral withdrawal.
I’ve already pointed out, to you, many times, that the British reneged on the Balfour Declaration, it was never implemented, the British actually acted to keep Jews out of the region, and it was completely abandoned once it was expedient for the British. For some reason you refuse to address the facts about the BD.
People who had no legal right to live on a plot of land, in your reasoning, have a “right” to live on it… because it’s a demand that they make, or because non-binding UN resolutions said so, or what have you.
It’s been pointed out to you, several times now, that the UK actively frustrated the creation of the state of Israel, reneged on their promises in Balfour and that the time period around 1948 is at issue because that’s when Israel was created and the manner it was created in was exclusively through armed conflict, despite your claims that words on a piece of paper that nobody observed had some sort of effect.
Yes… we’ve been over this and you have yet to address the facts. The British quickly violated their promises in the Balfour Declaration and acted, at the request of the Arab powers, to prevent the formation of a Jewish national home on all of the Mandate territory.
There is no evidence that the nations that accepted Israel’s existence would not have done so if other nations didn’t as well at the same time. In fact, many of their acceptances of the state of Israel were not based on the UN resolution, their acceptance of the UN resolution was based on Israel’s ability to defend itself through force of arms without their aid.
If the Israelis claimed that their justification for self determination was God-given, I seriously doubt you’d be arguing that God created Israel. And when asked to show anything, at all, that the UN resolution did, you are still unable to.
Yes, it was.
Malthus and I have both pointed out how the British reneged on Balfour and tried to keep Jews out, up to the point of imprisoning them without charges. This is why I have pointed out that your argument is disingenuous. After the facts have been cleared up for you again and again and again, you are still claiming that an agreement that the British quickly violated formed the basis of something and glibly asking if the agreement that they violated by trying to keep Jews out was, itself, an attempt to keep Jews out.
Please quote where in 181 any “right of return” was created. (And then please explain how a non-binding UNGAR that wasn’t accepted by both of the parties involved has the force of an agreed and ratified treaty).
Your other claim is simply false, there was no “right of return” in the late 1880’s because there was no displaced population that wanted to return anywhere. There was no plan for returning anybody who was displaced in the late 1880’s because it wasn’t until the mid to late 1930’s that the first partition plan was floated. There was no demand for the return of refugees because the proto-Israelis repeatedly agreed to live the partitions and the creation of two states, side by side, without the need for population transfers let alone a war of extermination.
:rolleyes:
You can live on land you don’t own, if you secure the right to live on it. And of course you don’t secure that right by demanding it and calling your demands “rights”, but by actually securing the rights from its owners.
There are plenty of folks in israel that would love peace if it can be reqasonably achieved, heck, a lot seem to be willing to achieve peace at very high cost.
This is true of most cultures, I don’t understand why everyone thinks that it will work on the other guy when it would never work on themself.
Somehow Ahmedenijad has been put in the same basket as Kim Jong Il. It doesn’t help when he starts off by denying the holocaust. It is clear that he is looking for a new world order because he doesn’t like Irans place in the current world order. It would be one thing to claim that the collective western guilt over the holocaust has led the west to impose Israel on the arabs, it is an entirely different thing to claim it is a myth.
There are some elements of culture that we need to respect and honor, there are others we don’t need to respect and honor. If Colin Powell or Conoleeza Rice was our secretary of state during apartheid, I don’t think that we should have sent this highest ranking white diplomat to apartheid South Africa to accomodate their cultural preferences. On the other hand if there is a cultural prohibition against eating beef, I don’t think you order the ribeye for lunch no matter how much you like steak.
On the one hand I think Israel is handling things terribly but on the other hand, if Arab egos are what is keeping us from peace in the middle east then I don’t know how you justify all that suffering based on egos.
In what sense? I think Israel as a nation will always exist, Israel as a Zionist nation may not but that is likely to be the result of internal demographic shift more than violence or war.
I think you are overgeneralizing. Netenyahu is not Israel, Likud is not Israel, they are just a voice of Israel. There are other more reasonable voices in Israel but they get drowned out every time a Palestinian bomb kills a baby.
The notion was that the Brits were leaving - they no longer needed the aggrivation and, after WW2, they were broke - and the UN had nothing to replace them. They badly needed a plan to which the foliks on the ground could agree. The Partition Plan was their best shot.
Way I’d put it is that Israel came into being as a result of dire need. Once in existance, it doesn’t need a “reason” to exist, any more than France does.
The problems arise from the fact that, until reasonably recently, and even to an extent today, there is no serious desire in the Arab world to allow them to continue to exist - and yet, no power to make them not exist.
The shame still exists, indeed moreso: the gap between Israeli accomplishments and Arab accomplishments is widening, not narrowing. The more Israel “succeeds” in terms of culture and science and the like, the more it appears part of the cultural hegemony of the West. Hence, one source of resentment (being bested militarily) shades into another (overall resentment of being overshadowed by ‘the West’).
What if those attacks are launched from the contemplated demilitarized zone within Palestine? What do you suggest the Palestinians do? Are you suggestign taht Palestinians can roll tanks down the street a few hudnred yards from teh border with israel to enforce peace?
Does peace include eliminating terrorism because I gotta tell you, there was a time when Israel was militarily occupying Gaza and the West nak and terrorism still existed. What kind of peace do you think a peace partner has to deliver because it seems like youa re asking the palestinians to dleiver more peace without guns and tanks than you were able to secure with guns and tanks. Why can’t you give peace a chance? is tehre any doubt that you can roll your tanks back into palestine and reoccupy it if you wanted to?
That is not how the peace plan is worded. Of course it applies to all palestinian refugees (you can’t honestly believe that the peace plan was only going to deal with the palestinians that were around in 1948 and leave everyone under the age of 62 in limbo). Once again, the right of return has nothing to do with land ownership. there is a Jewish right of return and there is no land ownership requirement there. The palestinian right of return doesn’t even contemplate palestinians who had emigrated prior to 1948 being able to return to the area, only those who were displaced by the war of 1948 and after.
Fine whatever, but do you think that what is being proposed by the arab peace plan is what is commoonly thought of as the right of return? Aside from the fact that the arab peace plan addresses all Palestinian refugees, how is this exactly the same as the right of return we ahd beent alking about because the right of return I had been talking about was not nearly as conditional as the one proposed in teh arab peace plan.
What is it with you and land ownership? The right of return is the right of people (and their children) to return to where they were before the war of 1948 displaced them. What is so difficult about that concept.
Wouldn’t a demilitarized zone solve that?
I understand that UN resolutions mean nothing to you but then I wonder why so much effort was made to secure that resolution, why so much effort was made by the Jewish Agency to haggle over proposed borders? I undersstnad that Israel’s neighbors didn’t respect the borders and that Israel defended itself but you entirely ignore any role the resolution had to play.
Oddly enough Malthus seems able to think that the balfour declaration was not as meaningless as you make it out to be.
So are you saying that the balfour declaration (the basis of a lot of Jewish immigration to Palestine) was meaningless because the brits didn’t support Israel in 1948?
The Balfour declaration was signed in 1917 when are you saying thet Brits violated their promises in the Balfour Declaration (that is you don’t ignore the part that says: “it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”)
:rolleyes:
I am only talking about a right of return for people lived in Israel in 1948 and their children. if a Palestinian family that had emigrated from Palestine in 1910 wanted to exercise the right fo return I would say they don’t get it. It is a refugee issue not a nationality issue.
Modern day Israel was 67% arab in 1947 (the part of the aprtition that was supposed to become Israel was 45% arab)
Once again i don’t know why you focus on land ownership but here is the land ownership in 1943 of what is now Israel:
It looks like less than 10% of the land was jewish owned. It sounds like the rest was owned mostly by arabs.
I have read that the Jewish Agency was actively lobbying for certain elements of the partition plan (the arabs seemed to reject any sort of division outright and didn’t even engage in the process). Why the active involvement if it didn’t mean anything?
Well, I don’t know how France would react if France was getting overrun by protestants or if France was in danger of becoming majority non-ethnic French but a lot of the problems in the middle east seem to stem from Israel’s desire to remain majority jewish.
I would have thought that the arab peace plan representing pretty much everyone in the arab world but hamas and hezbollah indicates a serious desire on the part of the arab world to alloow Israel to continue to exist.
Once again, not excusing Israel’s role in the suffering but if all this suffering is the result of ego then that is more shameful than losing a war or having a crappy economy IMHO.
How do you think the right of return fits into all of this. how legitimate is the claim and how far does it extend?
Woah wait - I’m not saying that the Plan was meaningless. Certainly, had it been accepted by the parties concerned, it would have been meaningful. The folks living in the area could not have known, in advance, that Israel’s neighbours would all reject it (thus rendering it meaningless).
No, that isn’t quite the way I’d put it; rather, Israel is involved in an ethnic conflict with a certain group, and does not wish to be overwhelmed by that particular group. If Indians or Philipinos were flooding into Israel, it would not be seen as big a deal.
As for France, it has its own problems: it recently passed legislation banning wearing of the hijab.
Arab peace plans have been proceeding peacemeal. The first was with Egypt, and it still arouses considerable controversy in the Arab world.
In the ideal world, all refugees who are able to demonstrate that they personally have been displaced ought to be compensated with money damages - Jewish or Arab. In neither case should any refugee have a “right” to physically return to where they came from; after more than sixty years in some cases, that boat has sailed.
There were a few reasons that Hamas won the 2006 election. One was that the anti-Hamas groups were divided. The other was that Fatah, the big other force in Palestinian politics, the backbone of the PLO, was, and largely still is, extremely corrupt. Fatah leaders were taking development aid that was supposed to benefit the Palestinian people and embezzling it, going to the bank accounts of Fatah leaders. Yassir Arafat, for instance, died a very rich man. Hamas, on the other had, had the reputation of being incorruptible, and was building and running schools, hospitals, recreational facilities, and other things that were materially benefiting the Palestinian people.
That’s what Israel’s been trying to do. But that’s a little bit like suggesting that Saddam Hussein could have avoided the 2003 Iraq War by making a deal with the Democrats. Hamas controls Gaza and Hamas are the people engaging in most of the terrorism right now.
