Posted on 01/09/2002 4:48:50 AM PST by Sabertooth
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Not up for honest discourse today?
"I see the Pales not as a people"
Not sure, but was your "propaganda" comment self-descriptive? I have a few reasons for asking...
First, you didn't dispute a single point in the article, you only called it "propaganda." Not particularly compelling.
Second, the quote you chose to address, you took out of context. All the more easy to miss the point, I suppose. Here's the actual quote:
"I see the Pales not as a people but as a gang like the Cripes or the Bloods. I see Israel as the Homeowner's Association."
An analogy was being made. You might disagree with it, but address the analogy.
Further, the phrase "a people" is not synonymous with "people." The statement, "I see the Pales not as a people," is not equvalent in meaning to "I see the Pales not as people." No one is suggesting that "Palestinians," or Crips or Bloods aren't people.
The point being made, the one you failed to address, is that there is no Historical basis for the claim that there is any such thing as a "Palestinian people."
Palestine is one name of a particular geographical region. Just like South America, or Indochina, or Southern California. While people live in all of those places, the fact that they might have a common geographical perimeter doesn't make them "peoples," with coherent and Historically valid national identies.
That's the point being made here about the "Palestinians." That's the argument you might consider addressing. Specifics would be nice.
The severe neglect, and deterioration of the mosque while it was under Moslem control for hundreds of years illustrates that they really had no interest in that mosque, as an important religious site.
It has become a religious icon for them only as a lever against Israel. Another total Arab lie. All the Arabs do is LIE, LIE , LIE!!!
Wouldn't you call yourself an american? or maybe you would prefer a united states of american? or a north american? or whatever...
In 1875 the Temple Mount looks like a dump. This not what a productive and populated land does with it most important religious shrines. Where were all the Muslims back in 1875 to make the Dome of the Rock and Al Aksa Mosque look at least semi-decent?
How about the 800,000 Jews who were booted out of Arab lands post 1948??? All I see is population exchange. One of many that happened after WW2. Now all these surrounding Arab nations have no Jews while Israel has 1,000,000 Muslim citizens
When I said never again I meant it for the arab as well as the jew, for the german as well as the russian... How about you, or does the ghettoization of people not bother you if they happen to be the wrong people?
Let's start at the top with the main straw man argument here...
"One of the Zionist myths is that before they arrived in Palestine there was nothing but barrenness and emptiness. In essence, so the myth goes, it was a desert."
No... The Historical fact is that much of Israel then, as now, was desert. No one claims, except on hyperbolic occasion, that it was "nothing but desert." It's not an example of serious thinking to dispute those types of claims.
But you'll have to concede that there is less desert now than there was then. This is because of the efforts of Jewish immigrants and Israelis siince the late 19th Century. They were assisted by some of the indigenous Bedouins, and by itinerant Arab immigrants who came to work on the Jewish land projects. The land wasn't empty, but there wasn't a big enough population to do the work.
These Arab immigrants form the bulk of the ancestral population of the so-cailled "Palestinians." BTW, you're aware, are you not, that their leader, Yasser Arafat, was born in Cairo to Egyptian parents?
Having dealt with the straw man, we can now afford to stipulate the bulk of the supporting arguments may even be true, though their contexts can be disputed.
Doesn't change the fact the the notion of a Historically coherent "Palestinain" people, with any kind of a national identity, is unabashed fiction.
Reviewed at Amazon:
Myth buster, September 14, 2001
Reviewer:
This exceedingly well-documented book (From Time Immemorial) lays bare the false claim that Jewish settlers dispossessed Arab people from their land in Palestine. The examination of records from 1830 onward will shock most readers.
In the first place, Palestine's population barely grew for 250 years--rising from 205,000 Moslems, Christians and Jews in 1554 to only 275,000 in 1800. In the second, records from 1830, 1863, 1878 and 1893 and 1917, among others, demonstrate that when the heaviest Jewish immigration began in 1880, a large proportion of the 425,000 to 440,000 Arabs in Palestine were themselves recent immigrants.
Many came from Egypt: The 1831 invasion by the Egyptian Khedive, Ibrahim Pasha, forced Palestine fellaheen, urban dwellers and Bedouin to permanently flee Ottoman military drafts and taxes. The 1837 Great Earthquake and epidemics that followed further cut their numbers. In their wake came Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian Arabs, who settled the empty land. In 1831 alone, 6,000 Egyptian Arabs settled in Akko. But the Egyptian Arab-Hinadi, Ghawarna tribes settled in the Beit Shean and Hula Valleys and in the Jordan Valley towns of Ubeidiya, Delhamiya and Kafer-Miser. In the Hula Valley, the Egyptian ez-Zubeids later sold their land to Jewish settlers from Yessud-Hama'ala. According to an 1893 British Palestine Exploration Fund report, Egyptians composed most of the population in Jaffa.
Arab and Muslim immigrants also came from Algeria, Damascus, Yemen, Afghanistan, Persia, India, Tripoli, Morocco, Turkey and Iraq. The French conquest of Algeria, for example, led to the eventual rebellion and imprisonment of Abd el-Kadar el-Hassani, whose followers in 1856 fled to Syria and the Lower Galilee towns of Shara, Ulam, Ma'ader, Kafer-Sabet, Usha (near present-day Ramat-Yohanan), the Mount Atlas village of Qedesh and villages on Lake Hula and in the Upper Galilee, where they spoke Berber. In Ramle, immigrants spoke Qebili, a Mugrabi dialect. Circassian refugees from the Caucasus settled in Trans-Jordan and as far east as Caesarea.
Arab immigration continued to rise through World War I, despite locusts, the Ottoman draft and more epidemics. Egyptian laborers, contractors and businessmen flooded the country. By 1922, the Moslem population had more than doubled to 566,311, including 62,500 Bedouins. The 1931 Mandatory government census counted 693,147 permanent Moslem residents, including 66,553 Bedouins. It also gave the natural increase of the population as 132,211--57,125 less than the absolute increase. Only illegal Arab immigration explains this contradiction, Avneri shows.
The next census, in 1948, followed unprecedented economic growth, during which illegal Arab immigration continued. From April 1934 to November 1935, for example, 20,000 Haurani Arabs came to Palestine. These and thousands of other Arab immigrants worked on farms, construction projects (building roads, railroads and the Haifa port), and government and municipal jobs. Syrians and Lebanese Arabs were free to come with nothing but border passes, and they came along with immigrants from Somalia, Trans-Jordan, Persia, India, Ethiopia and the Hejaz. Mandatory government rules required the supervision of immigration, but Palestine's borders remained porous to all but Jews. In all, Avneri shows that 35,000 to 40,000 illegal Arab immigrants came from 1931 to 1947--on top of up to 20,000 other Arab immigrants who arrived from 1935 to 1945.
The book also carefully examines numerous historical descriptions of a desolate landscape, composed almost entirely of swamps and deserts, and sold to the Jewish people by absentee Arab landlords, appointed by the Ottoman government, at enormous profits. Dozens of sales are documented specifically, including some by the Egyptian el-Husseini family of Yasser Arafat.
Altogether, this book shatters the Arab claim of dispossession.
Might want to check this out.
You conveniently left off the end of the page which was:
Sincerely yours,
(Rev.) G. Simon Harak, S. J. Baltimore, MD
and the URL which is http://www.iap.org/ or ISLAMIC ASSOCIATION FOR PALESTINE
Might want to check this out too.
The descriptions of the barren land prior to the entry of the Jews on the scene come from multiple sources and are simply quoted by the book referenced above.
Also, I have read the book "From Time Immemorial" and find it to be both well documented and entirely plausible. Its thesis is that Palestine was essentially depopulated until the late 19th century. The rapid rise in population thereafter was due to migration of large numbers of both Jews and Arabs into the country. Since most Arabs in the country are the result of immigration (as with the Jews), neither group has an exclusive claim.
The Palestinians' claim that their families have been there since the Phillistines is totally fabricated bullshi!t. They are no more native to the land than most Blacks are native to South Africa (the Whites arriving there found only a few wandering tribes of Bushmen).
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