Posted on 06/05/2002 2:14:21 PM PDT by lucy1
As the most visible Arab-American critic of Yasser Arafat and the phony "Palestinian" agenda, I get a lot of hate mail.
I've even received more than my share of death threats.
Most of those who attack me – at least those who bother to get beyond the four-letter words and insults – say I just don't understand or have sympathy for these poor Arabs who were displaced, chased out of their homes and turned into refugees by the Israelis.
Let me state this plainly and clearly: The Jews in Israel took no one's land.
When Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in the 19th century, he was greatly disappointed. He didn't see any people. He referred to it as a vast wasteland. The land we now know as Israel was practically deserted.
By the beginning of the 20th century, that began to change. Jews from all over the world began to return to their ancestral homeland – the Promised Land Moses and Joshua had conquered millennia earlier, Christians and Jews believe, on the direct orders of God.
That's not to say there wasn't always a strong Jewish presence in the land – particularly in and around Jerusalem. In 1854, according to a report in the New York Tribune, Jews constituted two-thirds of the population of that holy city. The source for that statistic? A journalist on assignment in the Middle East that year for the Tribune. His name was Karl Marx. Yes, that Karl Marx.
A travel guide to Palestine and Syria, published in 1906 by Karl Baedeker, illustrates the fact that, even when the Islamic Ottoman Empire ruled the region, the Muslim population in Jerusalem was minimal. The book estimates the total population of the city at 60,000, of whom 7,000 were Muslims, 13,000 were Christians and 40,000 were Jews.
"The number of Jews has greatly risen in the last few decades, in spite of the fact that they are forbidden to immigrate or to possess landed property," the book states.Even though the Jews were persecuted, still they came to Jerusalem and represented the overwhelming majority of the population as early as 1906. And even though Muslims today claim Jerusalem as the third holiest site in Islam, when the city was under Islamic rule, they had little interest in it.
As the Jews came, drained the swamps and made the deserts bloom, something interesting began to happen. Arabs followed. I don't blame them. They had good reason to come. They came for jobs. They came for prosperity. They came for freedom. And they came in large numbers.
Winston Churchill observed in 1939: "So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population."
Then came 1948 and the great partition. The United Nations proposed the creation of two states in the region – one Jewish, one Arab. The Jews accepted it gratefully. The Arabs rejected it with a vengeance and declared war.
Arab leaders urged Arabs to leave the area so they would not be caught in the crossfire. They could return to their homes, they were told, after Israel was crushed and the Jews destroyed. It didn't work out that way. By most counts, several hundred thousand Arabs were displaced by this war – not by Israeli aggression, not by some Jewish real-estate grab, not by Israeli expansionism.
In fact, there are many historical records showing the Jews urged the Arabs to stay and live with them in peace. But, tragically, they chose to leave.
Fifty-four years later, the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of those refugees are all-too-often still living in refugee camps – not because of Israeli intransigence, but because they are misused as a political tool of the Arab powers.
Those poor unfortunates could be settled in a week by the rich Arab oil states that control 99.9 percent of the Middle East landmass, but they are kept as virtual prisoners, filled with misplaced hatred for Jews and armed as suicide martyrs by the Arab power brokers.
This is the modern real history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At no time did the Jews uproot Arab families from their homes. When there were title deeds to be purchased, they bought them at inflated prices. When there were not, they worked the land so they could have a place to live without the persecution they faced throughout the world.
It's a great big lie that the Israelis displaced anyone – one of a series of lies and myths that have the world on the verge of committing yet another great injustice to the Jews.
Make that more like 10,000. Maybe we should claim the moon since some Americans once walked on it.
I realize that it is a frequently used tactic to mention a retaliatory response without the initiating action. That was done by the network news during the Democratic convention at Chicago. The news showed a policeman knocking a man down with his billy club. They neglected to show the preceding 20 seconds where that man had slammed that policman from behind with a wooden barricade thus knocking the policeman to the ground.
Since you stated that there was an initial action which provoked that response, please fill us in!
Thank you! :)
The Jews took no one's land
The Jews took no one's land, which was inhabited by no one when they arrived; the Jews fought a war against no one to establish the State of Israel; the Israelis committed acts of terror and ethnic cleansing against no one to get no one to leave Israel; the Israelis later fought several wars against no one, conquering the West Bank and Gaza strip which was inhabited by no one, and spent the last 35 years militarily occupying no one and imposing martial law and repression against no one; in the mean time, no one fought back by staging cross border guerrilla raids, skyjackings, and in one famous incident, no one kidnapped and eventually killed the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Later, no one staged uprisings (the Intifada) against the occupying Israeli troops, and eventually, no one signed some agreements with Israel at Oslo, under which Israel would work towards giving no one an indepedent state in the occupied terrotories in the West Bank and Gaza strip. Israel continued to build settlements in these occupied territories and continued to chop down no one's olive orchards, continued to disposses no one of their lands, houses, and farms, and continued to cut no one off from their water supplies, and to divide no one's land up into divided "apartheid bantustans" or "indian reservations" surrounded by Israeli military checkpoints. In response, no one started to use suicide bombers to kill Israelis. Later, after 911 and various other events gave them the green light, Israel invaded, temporarily occuppied, and continues to surround several refugee camps where no one lived (after no one was expelled from Israel proper in 1948), in the name of "fighting terrorism" committed by no one.
"Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest...."
"A SPLENDID ACT OF CONQUEST".
Feel free to thrash about and hurl all the insults you want - it lets everyone see your true character.
Attack? What attack? A provocation perhaps....to entice the writer to read more than one source of information before putting words to paper....or screen.
Few seem to want to research the total history of what went on in the Mideast in the 19th and 20th centuries. I invite you to do a little research and find out the true root of the problems today. I'm sure you will not find it without deep research. The problem is no one wants to research prior to the 1920's. Who came in and "took" land and who bought it? Who bought land and and developed it and who took it when the West Bank was annexed by Jordan? Who inspired the first attacks?
"Since you stated that there was an initial action which provoked that response, please fill us in!"
There was no "initial action". There were numerous "actions" that drove the Jews to use extreme measures. The majority of these actions can be labeled as retribution. There was no help from the occupying forces. Yes, the Stern Gang, during British occupation, were labeled as terrorists, Just who is a terrorist in a land occupied by a foreign government? What steps would you take when thieves and murders constantly attacked you?
Your documented source for this quotation is...?
Insults? Nay....not so! I am pointing out you may have fallen into the mindless trap of accepting only one side of a complex story.
My character is not at test here. The test here is your knowledge of history..
Some of us are not anti-Arab biggots - we can think for ourselves and come to our own studied conclusions.. its time for the occupation to end...or end all welfare handouts to Israel.
Attack? What attack? A provocation perhaps....to entice the writer to read more than one source of information before putting words to paper....or screen. ---
------------------------------------------
Perhaps I should have been more plain. By "attack" I meant the reasons for the attack by the Jews on this settlement. I certainly was not accusing YOU of attacking!
Most of us do not have time to research history. If you have done so, then tell us what you have found and please cite your sources.
The most effective way to use this forum is to share information! Most do not have the time to search out original sources. At least give us a clue for good web sites for an historical perspective.
That's pretty weak justification, if you ask me. If I own a couple of acres, and a corner of it is rather desolate and unused, does someone have the right to move in and build a house on it just because I'm not using it at the moment? After all, it's still my land, right?
It takes two to tango, you know.
And when will it be time for the suicide bombings to end???
Show us any literature or culture from inhabitants prior to the Jews 400 B.C.
I think America should claim it. We were there first and no one has been there since.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.