I can never trust anything from that region of the world anymore, I just assume it’s all posturing and sabre-rattling, as it has been for the past 10 years or so. I doubt there’s actually going to be a conflict between Israel and Iran.
Also, what might sound like the stupidest question ever, but I swear I’m serious:
From a total layman’s perspective, it seems like one of Israel’s biggest problems is that it doesn’t have enough land, and can’t acquire any more without squeezing other people out of their land.
Could Israel potentially expand its territory by building artificial islands? I’ve read about such islands in Dubai and other places. If Israel could do this, it would allow them to have more land without encroaching on anyone else’s borders.
That’s completely wrong. Israel has no lack of land for its population. Any land that it has acquired control of since its founding has been the result of being attacked by other countries and beating them back. Of the land that they acquired control of, the only portions that they annexed were the Golan Heights, because the Syrians used to shell Israeli towns from their high ground, and East Jerusalem, because that’s where Jewish holy sites, to which Jewish access had been denied for twenty years, are located. Neither of those reasons was a lack of usable land.
What Israel took from the Jordanians, who took it from the British, who took it from the Turks, who took it from the Mameluks, etc., etc. Israel just played the game using the sames rules as everyone else.
As people here have said time and time again, the West Bank was never a discrete political unit, let alone an independent one. Furthermore, until the 1990s no-one ever claimed it was or that it should be - before the Oslo Accords, even the Palestinian leadership never claimed that the West Bank was their country, instead claiming they were the rightful sovereigns of *all *of Israel, much as how the Taiwanese government once claimed all of China. So don’t call the West Bank “their land”. At best, it’s nobody’s land.
Well, much of it is “their land” in the sense that it’s the homeland of people who were living there for centuries, many of them as owners of property, and were forced to leave it and want to return to it.
It’s true that the West Bank has never existed as a modern nation-state, but it’s disingenuous to equate that with being “nobody’s land”.
Well, when you own a property, and the newly-formed United Nations decides that you may continue to own your property, but instead you use your property as a base for attacking the new adjacent Jewish country which is NOT on your property—then,yeah…you kind of forfeit your moral superiority.
Look at a map of the original 1948 partition plan…the new country of Israel was a narrow strip of land that did not force huge numbers of local Arabs to leave their homes.
They chose to start a war over it.
They lost.
yeah, I’m already sorry I posted in this thread, too.
But once in a while, I pretend that somebody might listen.
Tilting at windmills and all that.
You seem to have some issues confused. Very few Palestinians have been forced out of their homes in the West Bank. Many were forced out (and more fled) in what is now Israel, and the fact that their descendants want to return *there * - and not to the Territories - is one of the the fundamental reasons why the peace process hasn’t been successful.
This is connected to the fact that there are key differences between the parties involved regarding the very terminology of the conflict. When a Palestinian says, “Israel out of Palestine!”, what a westerner like you hears is “Israel out of the West Bank!”; most Israelis, however, hear “Jews out of Tel Aviv!”. As to what the Palestinian actually means… I wish I knew.
There seems to be an SDMB rule that all threads even tangentially related to Israel turn into the exact same thread by Page 3. This thread appears to be no exception.
Anyway, Israel will probably be at war with Iran tomorrow, Which sucks, because I had plans.
Nah, dont worry 'bout your plans tomorrow. The war can’t start for another coupla days.
In the next day or two, Trump’s gonna say some scary stuff about the Iran deal, and Iran’s gonna respond with some boldly worded warnings.
But it doesn’t look good to fire missiles the same day you make bold verbal gestures…it kinda causes the words to get ignored.
Plus, it would make Trump look like he’s right for being the tough guy.
In Israel, most vets stay in the reserves for 15 years or more, so it’s not an issue of being called “back”. You’re already available.
But there’s no expectation here of a major war right now (i.e. Tuesday ) . Probably a few Iranian missiles launched by non-Iranian soldiers (Hizballah). Then Israel will retaliate, the world will blame Israel, and life goes on.
umm…remind me, what was the topic of this thread ?
So Trump is supposed to make an announcement sometime this afternoon. I think he will cite this Israeli intelligence coup of what we already knew as a prime reason for some kind of withdrawal… but I wonder whether it will be a “see you guys, good luck with your crappy agreement” sort of withdrawal, or a “fuck you and your family, I’m burning down the house” sort of withdrawal.
Why doesn’t Israel ally with Iran, as opposed to fanning the flames? Way too provocative vis-à-vis its neighbours? Sure, everyone remembers the Iranian Revolution, but that is in the past.
This is the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that I think Jared Kushner could provide. Like, why can’t the Palestinians just become Jews, and the whole thing would be settled overnight?
Well yes, it’s true that their homeland geographically, historically and culturally is the territory of Israel proper just as much as the occupied territories. But what I was taking issue with was the description of the occupied territories in particular as “nobody’s land”. Except in the sense of having no officially recognized sovereign/national status, it’s not “nobody’s land”.
