They might… if the Jewish people were all dead, i suppose they might let them be buried. Maybe.
“A lot”? They voted in Hamas, which stands for death to Israel and the Jews, and condones terrorism and the bombing of kids in school-busses to get that.
wiki "
Elections for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), were held on 25 January 2006. The result was a victory for Hamas,…Co-founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin stated in 1987, and the Hamas Charter affirmed in 1988, that Hamas was founded to liberate Palestine, including modern-day Israel, from Israeli occupation and to establish an Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip…Hamas Charter (1988)
Main article: Hamas Covenant
Article 7 of the Hamas Covenant provides the following quotation, attributed to Muhammad:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. …On August 10, 2012, Ahmad Bahr, Deputy Speaker of the Hamas Parliament, stated in a sermon that aired on Al-Aqsa TV:
…Why? In order to annihilate those Jews. … O Allah, destroy the Jews and their supporters. O Allah, destroy the Americans and their supporters. O Allah, count them one by one, and kill them all, without leaving a single one."
Hamas has made it clear they want every Jewish person dead, and the land cleansed of them. And the Palestinians voted for them.
This is what bothers me, and makes me suspicious when people claim that their arguments against Israel are not anti-semitic. Because I don’t hear a lot of protests over the horrible treatment of the Kurds, or the expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians from Arab countries, or the conditions in Palestinian areas outside of Israel.
The fact is, the Arab nations found it very useful to keep the Palestinians contained in Israel. It gave them a justification for their anti-Israel actions, and it has given them a reason for constant resolutions against Israel at the U.N. The Arab nations also encouraged the Palestinians to get out of Israel because they believed they would successfully drive the Jews out and the Palestinians could then go back. It didn’t work out that way.
The Palestinians are also victims of their own leadership which has been corrupt and which has been enriching themselves on foreign aid money for decades at the expense of their people. Yasser Arafat skimmed a billion dollars from Palestinian aid for himself, and had no incentive to solve the problem and kill the gravy train.
There are bad actors on all sides of this clusterfuck. But only the Israelis seem to get the blame.
The bottom line for me is that Israel is a modern democracy with decent human rights for their citizens - including women, LGBTQ people, etc. Many of their bordering countries have abysmal human rights records, and yet escape the kind of constant censure that Israel suffers under.
Or all of the myriad and heartfelt threads about the Uyghurs put in concentration camps in their millions to destroy their culture and religion (I don’t even hear all of the screams of anger and anguish from the ME over this)…or Tibet being conquered, annexed and systematically destroyed and their people killed (deliberately) year after year. I see this more in terms of the hypocrisy of people, especially people on this board.
However, the Arab nations, China, etc., are not close allies of the US the way that Israel is, and are not intimately connected to and dependent on the US in the way that Israel is. Also, many of the Americans criticizing Israel are ourselves part of the Jewish faith and/or ethnicity community, and we are constantly told that we should cherish the state of Israel as our own historical and spiritual homeland, so naturally we feel that Israel’s actions reflect upon us personally more than, say, the actions of China or Yemen do.
I don’t deny that there’s a lot of antisemitism in much criticism of Israel, as there is always a lot of antisemitism in every widespread discussion of everything concerning Jews. But the basic principle that the US should regard itself, and is validly regarded by others, as having a greater degree of involvement and responsibility for the actions of Israel than for the actions of, say, the Arab nations or China is not per se antisemitic.
As for the question of who owes the Palestinians a place to live, I don’t see much merit in claiming that Syria or Lebanon or Jordan is somehow more obligated than Israel is to offer residency and citizenship to people who were dispossessed from territory currently controlled by Israel. For Palestinian refugees whose ancestral homeland—and that means the place that they and their ancestors were living up to within the last century, not just the place that their ancestors used to live thousands of years ago—is located within Israel or the occupied territories, it is not unreasonable for them to feel that they have a right to live in that land rather than in Syria or Jordan or Lebanon.
I recognize that there are all sorts of serious practical obstacles to Palestinians’ actually exercising a right of return. But that doesn’t mean that acknowledging the basic justice of their wish to return to the localities that they or their parents or grandparents were unwillingly displaced from is somehow antisemitic.
Right of return is NEVER going to happen, as it would be suicidal for Israeli Jews to hand over that much political power to a group that despises them and constantly talks about destroying them.
The sooner everyone gets past that, the better the chance that some kind of other solution can be found. But the Palestinian leadership has always pulled back when any other solution was remotely at hand, as Arafat did.
In the meantime, a little less than a third of Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza. Of the rest in other countries, many are kept in refugee camps or treated as second-class citizens by their host countries. And no one talks about that.
Maybe it won’t. But that doesn’t negate the fundamental justice of Palestinians’ believing that they have a right to live in their ancestral homeland.
I doubt that insisting that millions of people should just “get past” their valid desire to live in their ancestral homeland will really do anything to improve the chances of any solution other than the ever more oppressive status quo.
People who insist that the whole root of the problem is just Palestinians hating Jews, and deny that Palestinians have any kind of a legitimate grievance due to their unjust dispossession from territory that Israel seeks to control, are being wilfully blind to reality.
I don’t dispute for a moment that there are indeed a lot of Palestinians and other Arabs who hate Jews. But their antisemitism doesn’t change the fundamental justice of the Palestinians’ claim to live in their homeland. Demanding that everybody just has to “get past that” is selfish wishful thinking.
I am not blaming the Palestinian people. Partially I blame their leadership. But really, my point was that until the Palestinians give up the full right of return, the problem is intractable. And that’s not good for the Palestinians.
In the meantime, the other Arab nations have cynically used them as pawns in their conflict against Israel. One of the reasons the Palestinians have been kept in miserable conditions is to put pressure on Israel. Another reason which people don’t want to talk about is that many Arabs look down on Palestinians and don’t really want them as full citizens in their own countries.
Arabs hated Jews in 1948 before there was a refugee problem. And before 1967 Jordan controlled the West Bank, and kept Palestinians in refugee camps. Since the West Bank was part of the Palestinian state from the UN resolution, Jordan could have set up a Palestinian homeland then and there. And let the Palestinians out. I’ll let you explain why they didn’t do this.
I’m not a big fan of the current Israeli government, to put it mildly. But we have an example of what happens when a former enemy of Israel accepts its right to exist. You had a rapid peace and a rapid turnover of the Sinai.
The key question is whether the problem would become any less intractable if they did give it up. If there’s even the slightest chance that the Palestinians’ claim could be useful as a bargaining chip in resolving an otherwise intractable problem, then obviously they’d be foolish not to maintain it.
I’m not claiming that insisting on the right of return will bring the Palestinians any advantage, just that they have reason to believe that simply abandoning the right of return won’t bring them any advantage. Why should they assume that Israel would really cede any control or rights to them in exchange for their voluntarily making it easier for Israel to continue not ceding any control or rights to them?
I agree that the current stalemate is a very lousy situation for the Palestinians, but if they are right in thinking that Israel has no intention of making the situation any less lousy for them no matter what they do or don’t do, then they’re not really losing anything by refusing to relinquish their claim to the right of return.
Weren’t they offered about 95% of what they wanted when Arafat inexplicably walked away from the deal?
Well, isn’t it obvious? Jordan had formally annexed the West Bank (with the approval of the US and UK, btw). They didn’t want it as a separate Palestinian homeland: they wanted it as an expansion of their own national territory, although they did extend full Jordanian citizenship to Palestinians.
I can certainly see why Palestinians would be dissatisfied with that arrangement too (although being annexed by Jordan with full Jordanian citizenship is arguably a better deal for them than being under military occupation by Israel with no citizenship rights at all). But satisfactory or unsatisfactory, that arrangement ended more than fifty years ago. It’s Israel, not Jordan, that is responsible for the policy choices of the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
How you figure? As I understand it, Palestinian objections to the Camp David accords (if that’s what you’re talking about) included imbalance in territory swaps, the proposed subdividing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem into separate blocs divided by Israeli territory, low limits on the number of Palestinians permitted to return to Israel, and skepticism about the proposed evacuation timeline for Israeli settlers.
I don’t really know how to quantify that as an exact percentage of “what they wanted”, but I certainly don’t see how you’re getting a figure as high as 95% for it.
My point was the idea raised above that Mandate Palestine was somehow legally owned by the UK, and Israel’s legitimacy could be argued to derive from a British “gift”.
The whole point is that the balancing act of the Balfour Declaration (made when the Ottomans still controlled the territory) as between a Jewish National Home and the rights of the existing inhabitants, turned out to be impossible for the British. Israel’s statehood was wrested from, not gifted by, the British.
The characterisation of the current situation as a stalemate seems rather inaccurate, in that Israeli settlements are still expanding into Palestinian territory.
In my case, it’s because of the bigotry of low expectations, probably, although it’s hard to admit that about myself. What I’m saying is that I expect Israel to act better than Arab nations or even Turkey, because they’re a modern Western democracy and strong ally of the US. So, I hold them to a higher standard than Egypt, Jordan, or Iraq, and certainly higher than China.
Huge chunks of the Israel population are against their current government, against the settlements, and are concerned with how the Palestinians are being treated in the West Bank and Gaza. It would be difficult argue that Israeli Jews in Israel are anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, right? They just want their own country to live up to certain ideals, and they don’t expect, say, China, to live up to those.
Re. the OP, there is a so-called “one-state solution” that is supported by some Palestinians, and indeed by a minority of Israeli citizens as well. So it’s not that proponents of this solution want Israel to “vanish” so much as they (Palestinians) want full citizenship including voting rights etc. Since this would result in a huge political discontinuity, opponents of the plan often say it is tantamount to Israel vanishing. Other opponents, of course, don’t like the plan because they do not like Israel very much and would rather see Israel wiped out.
The Palestinians living in Israel already have the right to vote.
But there are some Arabic Muslim citizens of Israel, and as I understand it, they enjoy all of the same legal rights that Jewish (or Christian or atheist) Israelis do.
What is the reason why not all Palestinians have this status? Is it more because Israel is unwilling to extend it to them, or because Palestinians are unwilling to accept it? Is there a sizeable population of Palestinians who are trying to gain citizenship in the state of Israel as it now exists, but are being denied?
AFAIK, all citizens of Israel can vote. I think she was talking about the citizens of Palestine not being able to vote in Israel.