Actually I am rather unpopular for believing that the palestinians, who spent the majority of the last 2000 years on the land should actually be allowed to keep the land. They were moved off by a coalition of europeans and americans who were guilty about the death camps and decided to give a bunch of europeans palestine.
I hate the fact that Britain took Palestine, renamed it, made refugees out of it’s inhabitants, caused 60 years of strife, have spread Zionism, support dictatorships which crush their people in this region, it’s a long list of hates.
Not nearly as much as I hate when people assert their opinions and fact free theories on this subject without having bothered to every pick up an actual history book or do even cursory reading on the subject.
-XT
Quoted for Truth. You got it pretty much exactly rightm Ryan.
Let me just add a couple of facts, on the off chance that Marmite chooses not to ignore them:
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Israel, as a state, never forced anyone out. When Israel was attacked (Emphasis on ATTACKED) and the War of Independence started, many Palestinians LEFT, as the Arab countries promised them to get more land in more central locations when they reconquered Israel. Meanwhile, the Arab nations stuck the Palestinians in tiny refugee camps (Surprise! It wasn’t the Israelis!) And when the Arab nations didn’t win, the Arab nations refused to let the Palestinians go into their own country.
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Modern day Israel includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip. How did it get them? 6 Day War. Which by the way, involved your precious Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, with support from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. (According to you, even one of them should have been able to take down Israel…) In any case, after Israel won, on multiple fronts too, it gained the ENTIRE Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. In later peace treaties, we offered Egypt to take back Sinai and the Gaza Strip, and Jordan was offered the West Bank. Guess what? Egypt took back Sinai, but Jordan and Egypt REFUSED to take back their territories. So don’t say Israel is land-grabbing. If we WERE, we’d have kept those areas.
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Another example of Egypt loosing: Egypt and Syria, with a large Arab backing, attack Israel on Yom Kippur (1973 War), a very holy day for Jews when the Israelis were not ready. At all. What happened? Israel nearly takes both capitals of both states in another multifront war. Finally, the UN ended the war. Heavy casualties on both sides? Yes. Clear victory to Israel? A resounding yes, even though Egyptian museums and history books would tell you otherwise.
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You have a problem with Civilian Casualties? Let’s look at this logically. Side A’s terrorists fires rockets at settlements out of hospitals, homes, schools, etc. Side B retaliates, using moderate force in order to cause the least possible collateral damage. Still, it HAS to fire at civilian targets, because the terrorists are hiding inside civilian targets. Don’t criticize Israel for killing too many civilians, congratulate it for killing so few.
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Final point: So Israel and Iran are equal? Alright. Let’s see, which country is a democracy? Which country has rights for all genders, races, and sexual orientations? (And yes, that includes Palestinians. Every year, at least five Palestinian parties run for parliament. How many Native Americans run for president in the US? How many Aboriginals run for president in Australia?) Which country is smaller than almost every US state, and yet is number 40 by GDP? (2008 list by World Bank) AND, which country kills anyone who disagrees with the government? Which country is a dictatorship? Which country tried to get on the Women’s Rights commission of the UN while its own women have about as many rights as an American hamster?
The fact is the Arabs and Jews fought a war and the Arabs lost. This means that they also lost the right to regain the land.
Look at history. Did Chile give back Bolivia’s seacoast? Did Romania get back Dobruja and Moldova is now independent. Did Finland get back it’s land taken by the USSR? Did Poland get back it’s land taken by the USSR? Did Germany get back the land taken by Poland to make up for the land taken by the USSR?
And the list goes on and one and on.
Forced population exchanges are very cruel but they do work. There are very few Finns in the former Finnish lands now in Russia’s hands. The Greeks and Turks exchanged lands and there are few Greeks in Asia Minor and few Turks in Greece.
After WWII the UN Charter made it wrong for forced population exchanges. Although this didn’t apply to Germans. When the subcontinent was divided that huge loss of life also re-enforced this.
But the bottom line is when the Arabs lost the war, the right to the land also went with that. UN or no UN resolution, that is the way the world has always worked.
Daily Beast article, basically agreeing with Ahmadinejad.
I’m going to ignore the rest of your assertions because I don’t feel like getting into a debate, but this is just flat out wrong. Ashkenazi (European) Jews are a minority of Israel’s Jewish population. A slight majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrachim: Eastern Jews who are descended from Middle Eastern, North African, and Indian Jewish communities. Wikipedia article. About 2% of the population are Ethiopian Jews as well.
Actually Palestinians are not native to the land, either. The Romans conquered Judah and kicked out the Judahians (From which modern Jews come). To throw salt on their wounds, the Romans renamed the land Palestine, after the Philistines, a Pagan tribe that was a big enemy of the Israelites. Later, Islam was founded, Muslims conquered the area (Future Ottoman Empire) and some Arabians adopted the name Palestinians, although they didn’t use that name until AFTER Zionism started.
Not going to offer my opinion on this (for now), but those are the facts.
I think that coming from the turf just over the boarder 2000 years ago would have a bit of prior claim on land as opposed to a bunch of europeans with no particular land ties.
Think of it this way - assume that you live in Rouen. Your family have been there since legio 2 stomped across the land and your ancestor retired out and bought a small wineshop. Britain, US and a bunch of other countries decided to turf you and all your neighbors who have also been there for the past 2000 years out and replace you with an person that has a random french name. I think you would be pretty upset.
I know that the people they turfed out in New London to make room for a private resort development caused a serious shitstorm that went all the way to the supreme court and resulted in 40 states changing their eminent domain laws.
Why should someone seize land from the people that had been living there for 2000 years? The proper response would have been to give the european jewish populations BACK their property and pay them recompense. Not to turf someone else out of the land they had been living in. The jewish population did not like getting turfed out and put into camps, so why should they get to turf people out. The proper response is to give people BACK their porperty and belongings, and pay recompense.
What if we had turfed out the French, would that have been fair? Turf out the Italians? Swiss?
I agree with most of what he said as well but I don’t think he believes half of what he said. He is not developing peaceful nuclear capability, he is developing a deterrent from Israeli nuclear capability and from US invasion (I mean seriously Iran is smack dab in between Iraq and Afghanistan, we couldn’t be better positioned for invading Iran if we wanted to). He throws around a lot of anti-Zionist remarks but also engages in holocaust denial (he can legtimately ask why suffering and injustices inflicted on the jewish people by the Nazis justifis suffering by the Palestinians but its silly to pretend it never happened) and the whole “wipe Israel from the map” rhetoric which understandably upset the Israelis (the last thing we need to do is replace 1 million Palestinian refugees with 1 million Palestinian refugees, 1 million Jewish refugees and a shooting war in the middle east.
You know that Iran is right between Iraq and Afghanistan right? You don’t think Iran would like a nuclear deterrent?
Why would you have to be insane? Why does any one country have a greater right to develop nuclear weapons than any other? Why should any country have nuclear weapons? And if they should, why shouldn’t their neighbors have it as well?
What is the problem with the lack of NPT signing? You can’t force people into a treaty. That’s worse than not following the treaty.
But Iran DID sign the treaty, and then broke it. It’s not illegal to not make a binding contract. It IS illegal to violate a contract.
Walking out sends a signal. They stick around until Ahmedenijad gets into his anti-American anti-zionist rant then you stand up and walk out. The UN general council does nto generally facilitate debate. When someone is speking, youa re the audience, the most dramatic way to express disagreement is to simply leave, loudly if you can.
If it were me I would have shown up with movie theatre size popcorn, sodas and 3D glasses.
Yep, if I was there I would have waited until his anti-west speech and then pretended to try to stifle laughter.
Wait a minute. You come into my country (as backwater as it is), take half of it and I’m an asshole for not taking the deal while I had the chance? WTF?
I thought the rationale behind the Israeli state is that lack of a Jewish state facilitated the holocaust because Jews literally had nowhere to go to avoid genocide at the hands of the Germans. How is that the fault of the palestinians in any way?
How was it ever a good idea to create the Jewish state in the middle of the former Ottoman Empire by taking half of Palestine and giving it to the Zionists? Why wasn’t bavaria a better place for the jewish state. Sure we can’t do anything about it now but to say that Palestinians at the time should have just sucked it up and realized that this was the best deal they were going to get is a bit flip. I also don’t understand why it was arrogant.
By your “you lost deal with it” philosophy, you are saying that might makes right, so if the shoe is ever on the other foot, and Israel gets its butt kicked then that’s OK too ebcause Israel was once offered a chance to survive on terms the arabs dictated?
What are the benefits of signing the treaty? What benefits has Israel sacrificed?
So if Iran dropped the NPT they could go ahead and develop nukes?
Sure why not? What makes the US so much more qualified than China, Russia, France, or the UK?
This fallacious analogy, much like the “300 years of never launching a war of aggression” fiction that you also use, is interesting and seems to be repeated quite often. It is, of course, a deeply misleading and inaccurate analogy.
An accurate one would be that Chinese people began buying land from Texans who owned it and volitionaly chose to sell it. Then the US government fell and another power took over the temporary administration of the US. And then that power pulled out and relinquished control and the Chinese people living there declared that they would achieve self determination and create a state along the rough borders of the land they already owned, and then they were invaded and their land holdings increased as they fought a defensive war against those who explicitly stated that they were waging a war to commit genocide against the Chinese.
So, yah, just a bit different from your analogy.
It’s interesting that this fiction gets trotted out quite so often. The truth is that Iran created Hezbollah as a proxy force in order to take over Lebanon for Khomenism. I wonder why that’s ignored quite so often. Why, do you think, the facts are glossed over for an untrue soundbyte?
This is revealing on quite a few levels.
First, you are pointing to a time when Jews were dhimis, de jure second class citizens, and pointing to that as some sort of golden age that people should go back to. “Why can’t they just go back to living as dhimis” is pretty much identical to “Why can’t we just go back to Jim Crow, things were much more peaceful back then.?”
Moreover, they did not ‘make’ people hate them (an interesting justification for anti-Semtisim, especially coupled with the traditional dodge that we can’t identify it as anti-Semtisim because there’s a Semitic language grouping that doesn’t only include Jews :rolleyes:)
In point of fact, European style anti-Semtisism, which now flourishes in much of the Arab world (note, anti-Semtiism not anti-israeli feelings) was, in part, an ideological result of European anti-Semitismand later the Nazis’ influence on the region.
[
](The roots of Arab Anti-Semitism )
[
](World War II: New Research Taints Image of Desert Fox Rommel - DER SPIEGEL)
To say nothing of the fact that you are, simply, wrong. A massive percent of Israel’s Jewish population are indeed from the region and settled in Israel after they were driven out of virtually the entire Arab world circa '48. Refugees who, by the way, roughly match the numbers of the Palestinian refugees created in and around the war of '48.
Fiction.
The IAEA has had its access restricted (up to and including being denied access to a facility and then only being granted access once Iran bulldozed it). In fact, the IAEA has repeated, for years, that Iran is holding out on implementing the Additional Protocols necessary for verifying non-diversion and has stated repeatedly, for years, that they cannot certify the non-military nature of Iran’s nuclear program and that disturbing questions still remain.
Specifically, just a few months ago the IAEA said:
[
](| IAEA)
This is in keeping with the IAEA’s reports for years.
Man, don’t even get me started on New Amsterdam or Constantinople!
And no, there was never a “land called Palestine”, there was an administrative sub-district under Ottoman rule and a Mandate territory under the British but there was no sovereign territory that proto-Israelis came into and took over.
No, they don’t and yes it is a lie. It’s telling that your apologia runs to arguing that the US supported Al Quaeda while it was not a terrorist group or that they funded Sadaam before they went to war to control him and after that they hobbled his rule. To say nothing of your false to facts (and uncited) claim that “They support and pay various terrorist regimes and cells”.
By the way, a nation that actually supported Al Quaeda when they were actual terrorists who had publicly stated that their goal was the murder of civilians? Who supported them with, among other things, explosives training?
Iran. Little hole in your rhetoric, that.
Fictional on multiple counts.
The people living there were not the same people who’d been living there in unbroken history for the better part of 2000 years. They could not “keep” the land because most of them did not own the land, which brings us to another fiction, they were not “moved off by a coalition” of anybody. The Zionists bought land from its legal owners under the Ottoman land codes, Europeans didn’t “give” it to them. In point of fact the Partition was drawn along ethnic majority lines and nobody was ‘moved off’ so that anybody else could ‘give’ them land.
You got pretty much every single particular wrong.
Point of fact: not only did the Zionist accept the Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition, but they accepted the later UN resolution which was drawn along ethnic majority lines and which bulked up the territory afforded to an Israeli state not with arable land, but with large tracts of desert.
Which doesn’t even touch on the fact that “half” of Palestine was not included in 1948 (or '67) Israel, since a vast chunk of the Mandate become Transjordan.
In much the same way as it was a good idea for me to teleport to the grocery store yesterday to buy some pterodactyl eggs.
A Jewish state was never “created” by anybody else: the Partition (which yet-a-gain was drawn along ethnic majority lines and included property rights for Arabs who chose to stay) was ignored and Israel was created as the result of a defensive war. The British did quite a lot to frustrate the creation of the Israeli state, they certainly didn’t do much to aid it.
Because Jews had been immigrating to land that they’d been buying from Ottomans (and Palestinians), not Bavarians? And those Jews who had bought land wanted self determination once the sovereign fell?
There are financial, technical and trade related benefits that go along with signing the NPT. Iran gained these but now is wanting to renege on the treaty they voluntarily signed.
I don’t know if they could just drop the treaty. Since they already have been developing nuclear weapons (covertly) then the answer, of course, is that they can do what they like. It would be a highly unfriendly act, and it might cause other nation states to do what THEY think they must.
Well, I didn’t mention that we were more qualified. I also didn’t mention France or the UK. However, if you think that they are all roughly equivalent, then whatever floats your boat. That’s going to be purely subjective, and I did ask it as a question.
-XT
We don’t even need to get to that point, Iran has already started the first steps of a regional arms race.
[
](Amir Taheri Says Iran Has Started a Mideast Nuclear Arms Race - WSJ)
I’d never heard this. Do you have a nonpartisan cite? AP or something liek that?
IIRC Egypt was the most important adversary of Israel. When Jimmy Carter (the anti-semite) got Sadat and Begin to agree to peace in exchange for the Sinai peninsula, I do not recall Israel offering to throw in gaza and teh west bank. Do you have a nonpartisan cite?
I don’t know what else you can do really. You can try to reduce civilian causalties but the impression I get from Israelis and Palestinians alike is that the IDF does not particularly value Palestinian lives. But the Israelis don’t seem to have a problem with this (decades of terrorism probably has something to do with this).
In the sense theya re both sovereign states.
Both, to varying degrees but why does that matter on the issue of sovereignty? Or are we allowed to do whatever we want to any country that isn’t as freely democratic as we are?
Presdient? Has a paelstinian ever been prime minister or president of Israel? Are you trying to compare apples to oranges? Every year there are Native Americans that run for congress and the senate. Sometimes they even win, we even had an Native American Vice president.
relevance?
Not sure how this makes it OK for Israel to do what it does and why it makes Iran any less entitled to do what it is doing.