Posted on 06/05/2002 2:14:21 PM PDT by lucy1
The formal start of Zionist immigration to Palestine is usually given as 1880 or 1881, but people on this planet are always moving around. The "Balfour Declaration" was just as irrelevant as comparable promises given to Arabs. The British did not hand over Palestine to the Jews. They came closer to handing it over to the Arabs. Israel was won in battle, just like the United States and just about every other place on earth was won. After World War II, the Arabs, freed of Turkish and British colonialism, tried to kick out the Jews from newly established states. In Israel, unlike Syria, or Egypt, or Yemen, or Iraq, the Jews who fought back won one small sliver of the Middle East for a tiny mostly Jewish state. All the British and United Nations resolutions had just about zero influence on this.
Since the land you are now living on was probably conquered from American Indians, now you feel yourself to have gotten as much you has been taken from you. Right?
A large proportion of Jews in Israel came from someplace else in the Middle East where their house and land was taken over. To paraphrase Peggy Noonan, everyone's been shot -- get over it. P.S. I not conceeding that the Israeli's took this poster's family's land. In most cases, the "taken" land was abandoned and/or was land no one had clear title to. However, if it was among the small portion (mostly right near the country's main airport) truly taken by Jewish conquest, this hardly confers a right for people in later generations to get it back. By that logic, no one on earth has clear title to anything.
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