I specifically said Arabs. And Arabs did, definitely, exist then.
You must be joking. Arabs predate Islam. Not the other way around. Where are you getting your information from?
OK - you are contending that “Arabs didn’t exist until the late 19th, early 20th century.” I’m obviously never going to get anywhere with you under that definition of “Arabs.” Let me rephrase it: the ancestors of the present-day Egyptians, the ancestors of the present-day Jordanians, the ancestors of the present-day Syrians, the ancestors of the present-day Iraqis, and the ancestors of the present-day Saudis, Emirates, Yemenites, etc, have a long tradition of military might. The ancestors of the present-day Israelis do not. The ancestors of most of the present day Israelis languished in Europe for 1500 years, being massacred, raped, and forcibly converted by Europeans, while people in what is today known as the “Middle East” were raising armies, training horses, forging weapons, and battling each other.
I have a feeling that you’re mixing up the so-called “Palestinians” with Arabs. Arabs have existed from before Islam. “Palestinians” are a made-up people that miraculously appeared at start of 20th century.
Uh, “Arabs” didn’t, except for a few bedouins, exist prior to the 19th Century.
There were people who spoke Arab dialects but they no more regarded themselves as Arabs than Americans or Canadians view themselves as English.
Moreover, many of the “Arab” conquests you referred to weren’t even led by people who spoke Arabic.
Arab national consciousness was one of Europe’s “gifts”(or curses depending on your perspective) to the Middle East.
Uh, no, I didn’t mean to put this in the Pit. Did I insult you? In fact, I said I find you very intelligent.
I’ll plead guilty to misjudging Ibn. I don’t follow most Israel threads here as they all seem to end in clusterfucks. In my perusing, he always is present in Israel threads and seemed to be consistently pro-Israel, but I don’t keep tabs on his posting, so I may be way off.
I’m not sure what you’re saying here. That Israel’s moral superiority is so self-evident that any one who claims otherwise is comparable to a 9/11 truther? One thing you can’t deny is that Israel defenders are rather well represented on the SDMB. Just because your opponents are of consistently poor quality doesn’t mean you’re always right.
The ironic thing is that I am a fairly pro-Israel person. If they stopped all building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, I’d be a 100% pro-Israel person.
You’re acting really surprised, but what I’m saying is commonsense to anyone familiar with Middle Eastern history.
Prior to the late 19th and the Early 20th Century, people in the Middle East didn’t call themselves Arabs, Turks, etc. but instead identified themselves by their religion.
In fact, calling someone in the 17 or 18th Century an “Arab” would have been seen as an insult.
Arab national consciousness was actually an invention of Middle Eastern Christians looking to ally themselves with Middle Eastern Muslims and convince them of a commonality.
Furthermore, the Muslim rulers you and Terr seem to be referring to weren’t Arabic speakers.
The Arabs are first mentioned in the 9th century BC as one of the peoples that the Assyrians fought. Arabs are mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the nomads who live in the eastern desert. The founder of the last independent Israelite dynasty, Herod the Great, was half Nabatean Arab on his mother’s side. There was an Arab who was Roman Emperor. So, I’m not sure what you mean about Arabs not existing until the 19th-20th centuries. Pan-Arab nationalism didn’t really start until the 19th century, but “Arabs” as a linguistic and an ethnic group go back a pretty long way.
What are you talking about?
How are the Palestinians “a made-up people” compared to say Australians, Mexicans, Jordanians, Syrians or Nigerians?
Furthermore who “at the start of the 20th Century” identified themselves as Palestinian?
They no more identified themselves as “Arabs” than Australians and Americans view themselves as “English”.
Yes ignorant foreigners often referred to them as “Arabs” just as Muslims during the Crusades referred to their enemies as “the Franks” even those that didn’t speak French.
We certainly wouldn’t call Richard the Lion Hearted “a Frank” and we shouldn’t refer to Ibn Khaldun as “an Arab” which he’d have seen as an insult.
You don’t honestly think that Arabic speaking Christians and Arabic speaking Muslims
I think he means the emergence of a Palestinian identity - one separate from the larger Arab league or their Jordan/Egyptian/Syrian/etc roots. (Bedouin and such excepted, of course.)
If Mexicans and El Salvadorans are considered separate nationalities despite both being “Hispanic” then what’s weird viewing Jordanians, Palestinians, and Iraqis as separate nationalities?
Besides Terr hasn’t really explained his rationale for the Palestinians being “made-up”.
And how many teenagers employed by Hamas are you still calling ‘children’?
Where does it say that 7,000 Palestinian children were imprisoned? Detained does not mean prison. And sadly, children can be a threat. Sometimes those checkpoints really do save lives - like the lives of the mentally retarded kids who are carrying those bombs. :rolleyes:
Nothing at all. I was just butting in and explaining what I thought he met. I am sure Jordanians get very upset if they were being mistaken for a Palestinian, much like Guatemalans here do not like to be called ‘Mexican’. 
I’m not going to explain for Terr, but I do think the re-invention of ‘modern Palestinian history’ will give credence to his claim if he elaborates. There are some people on SDMB who have argued or suggested that modern-day Palestinians are the long-lost Canaanites of thousands of years ago, or that most Palestinians are ‘indigenous’ the same way Native Americans are in the US (as opposed to being descendants of farmers or higher-ups in the Arab or Ottoman world or whatever).
This is a very good object lesson of the phenomena I commented on above. Here, despite the glaringly obvious facts, anechinus is opining, with palpable incredulity, that some people might be so blinded that they may “even” say tha the UN is biased against Israel.
Of course, anybody who believes that the UN is not biased against Israel simply has not been paying attention.
The UN Human Rights Council, created to replace a body seen as hopelessly biased and anti-Israel, has spent almost 50% of all of its resolutions… focusing on Israel. It established a standing mandate to have Israel, and only Israel, under review every year. It’s Special Rapporteur, itself a position which was a carryover from the previous, discredited body, has a mandate to investigate abuses only by Israel and which proudly and publicly excludes any analysis of such abuses committed by Palestinians. The new SR, operating under the same mandate, went as far as to compare Israel to the Nazis and alleged that Israel was “slouching towards” committing genocide. The UNHRC is so biased that even the Secretary General has condemned their actions.
The previous body, the UN Commission on Human Rights used resolutions to criticize only 11 nations on the entire planet, and spent 15% of its discussion time and 1/3 of its country-specific resolutions on Israel. Despite the already cited 4th Geneva Convention, the permanent observer for the UNCHR demanded that the November 15th, 2002 terrorist attack against Israelis returning from prayer in Hebron, which killed several Israeli civilians and was aimed at worshipers… be supported by he UNCHR (or at least, not opposed).
This doesn’t even begin to discuss the actual nations which have served on these bodies.
Do I really need to mention how the ICJ was so blatantly biased against Israel that not only did they completely discard proper jurisprudence, but did so so flagrantly that some of the judges involved even noted it?
Shall we look at other UN responses? Can you cite, for instance, the UN response to Hama in 1982?
What was the UN’s response to Lebanon’s 2007 shelling of Palestinians?
What has the UN’s response been to the fact that many Arab countries prohibit Palestinians from gaining citizenship or gainful employment there?
Do I really need to cite for you he fact that the UN had previously found that out of all the peoples of the world, it is only “racism” for Jews to seek self-determination?
Claiming that the UN isn’t a biased political group displays, at best, ignorance.
Israelis were also “made up” around roughly the same time, and the main reasons that they maintained a cohesive identity were that they didn’t have the internecine bloodshed that the Grand Mufi helped foment and that the neighboring nations did not conquer them and (quasi)absorb them.
That is a fruitless line of argument. You could have, instead, pointed out that the UNRWA’s definition of Palestinians includes anybody “whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948”, but that’s not quite the point you seem intent on making.
Eh… claiming that I’m an “apologist” who always supports Israel and works backwards from conclusions to justify them is an indictment of my character. But fair enough, you didn’t intend it as an insult. And yes, Ibn is quite critical of Israel, but he has the same problem that many of us do… the knee-jerk anti-Israel position is mainstream on the Dope, and most people do not possess even a basic level of factual knowledge, and often use skewed reasoning and/or double standards. Ibn, much like I do, often has to spend time pointing out these errors in order to have an honest, factual discussion.
It’s actually quite telling when someone who thinks that the Balfour Declaration itself should never have been made is seen as an “Israeli apologist” because he’s outside the tent of most of our anti-Israel posters.
You’ll note that I didn’t mention morality, at all. Let alone moral superiority. Instead, I noted that disagreeing with criticism of Israel is seen by many knee-jerk anti-Israel posters as meaning that one supports literally everything Israel does. On one occasion, in a thread where I had just called for the US to freeze all aid to Israel unless Israel immediately suspended all settlement growth, someone claimed that I never criticize Israel and always support everything it does.
You, yourself, claimed that I was ‘reasoning backwards’ because I pointed out the massive deficit in newcomer’s reasoning and factual knowledge.
That’s my point. Not that I’m right because my opponents don’t know the facts or use non-fallacious reasoning (although I am right because I do know the facts and don’t use fallacious reasoning), but that the reason I so often argue against anti-Israel positions is that they are so often based on factual and logical errors and not because I support Israel unquestioningly.
There are two ways a people is defined. One is by having a country in which they are the main and founding ethnicity. Another is by having history - hundreds, if not thousands, years of history. Australians, Mexicans, Jordanians etc are the first kind. Jews, Basques, Kurds, Romani are the second kind. Palestinians are neither.
At the very start of the 20th century, the only people who identified themselves as “Palestinians” were Jews living in the area of Palestine. A bit later Arabs living in the area adopted the name for themselves.
Every single thread about Israel on this board ultimately seems to boil down to the following argument: “Israel is treated unfairly” vs. “Israel gets away with too much.” It’s strange; this never seems to happen with any other country. People with no personal connection to Israel get so passionate and worked-up about it, in a way that they do for no other country’s political affairs. I’m beginning to think that the specific issues, like this prisoner swap, are ultimately inconsequential, and the real question is, is Israel “good” or “bad”?
Considering that it was the British who created Jordan, I’m a bit puzzled why you think that Jordanians are a legitimate nationality while Palestinians are “made-up”.
In fact it was the British who created both Palestine and Jordan. Palestine in fact was created earlier than Jordan(which was originally Transjordan and prior to that a part of Palestine).
At that time Palestinian Arabs were “the main ethnicity” to use your terminology though you seem to be ignoring the fact that "ethnicity " is a fairly modern concept.
I’m also a little curious as to what makes you thinks the Jews in 1905 Jerusalem referred to themselves as “Palestinians” while the Arabs did not.
It wasn’t until the Mandate period, which was much later that both groups identified themselves as such with one side sometimes calling themselves “the Palestinian Jews” while the other called themselves “the Palestinian Arabs”.
Why are you surprised? Ultimately, it’s Jews. Ask an average Japanese or a Malay or a Nigerian if he knows who Basques are, you will probably get a blank stare. Ask them if they know who Jews are, and you will get a positive response. Have you seen anyone claim that the French or Irish or Moravians secretly rule the world? But there are such claims about Jews. Here and there throughout history I am sure there have been some blood libel claims against some other ethnicities, but you would be hard pressed to find them. Against Jews, there are literally hundreds of such incidents. etc. etc. etc.
So when people who have no connection to Israel get so worked up about it, the reason is “Jews”. There is no other explanation.
I don’t think that everyone who opposes Israel is an out and out anti-Jewish bigot, but I do think there’s a lot of subconscious and nuanced prejudice against Jews - not exactly anti-Semitism or hatred of Jews, but sort of a preconceived role that Jews are supposed to fit into, one of a passive people rather than an aggressive one. The idea of Israel existing sort of goes against peoples’ idea of what a Jew is “supposed to” be.