Posted on 08/24/2002 4:42:48 PM PDT by zapiks44
The 'Palestinians' supported the wrong side. They lost some property. The Arabs did it again in 1967. They lost more property.
Luckily for them, they gained much more property and wealth from the Jews of the Middle East, when they ran them out of their homes in the hundreds of thousands... and those Jews had ACTUALLY been there for thousands of years.
But no one cries for them, because they were resettled in Israel, by a sane, humane, moral, just, modern society.
The 'Palestinians' should be resettled as well, in the 99.99% of the Middle East still under the control of Arabs and Muslims.
Or they can just keep fighting for that little 0.01% they lost (and never had a right to have to begin with)... and risk losing the other 99.99% in a nuclear meltdown.
On this you're wrong. On everything else you're right.
From my - admittedly secular - view the Jews claimed their God gave them the land. Other peoples never accepted that claim since the Jewish God was not theirs.
History is ambiguous in its support. For a few centuries, between 1200 and 500 B.C. Jews controlled various parts of the Holy Land - usually small parts. From sometime after Cyrus until the Roman destruction the same situation again existed - but always as dependents of larger powers.
2000 years then passed in which the Jewish people had no state of their own although they continued to live in the Holy Land in varying - usually small - numbers.
If you feel that history gives the Jews a better claim than the Arabs that's fine with me - although I must point out that logically you then feel that native Americans have a much better claim to America than Americans of other ancestry.
My view is Zhabotinsky's. Both peoples have a very strong attachment to the land. Both have lived on it for a very long period of time. But the Jews need for it is greater, their determination stronger, their power superior.
As solmar_israel suggested (a la Gandhi) the only solution to this conflict - barring a truly drastic change in attitudes - is resettling, population transfer, ethnic cleansing. That means one of the two peoples must experience a great tragedy.
So now I'm stooopid.. and I have no opinion of you other than you seem unable to make a statement without some personal derogatory comment.
I've made many, many comments on this and other threads. The overwhelming majority contain no personal derogatory comment.
you win
The Arabs today have no right to Israel.
Actions have consequences. Just as Germany lost ownership of much of the land in its possession before launching WWII, so have the wars by the Arabs nullified any historic right they may have had to the land.
Launching a war of extermination, and losing, have a price.
Additionally, they have no rights to the 'disputed territories' which weren't even theirs historically. They simply moved there in the course of the 1948 war.
In fact, Judea and Samaria is the cradle of Jewish civilization, and had a continuous Jewish presence until the 1920s.
It was then that the Arabs 'revolted' (ie. slaughtered Jews) and British ethnically cleansed much of the territories of its Jewish population (relocating them to Jerusalem and else where), under the pretense of avoiding further conflict.
Cities like Hebron (which the world considers occupied Palestinian land) have actually only been Arab since the late 1920s and until Israel liberated them in 1967. They became Arab again when Israel foolishly handed them over in the course of Oslo.
For 2000 years Jews yearned to return to Canaan/Palestine/Israel. It took the Christians of Spain 700 years to reconquer it. Peoples very often have a very strong attachment to "their" lands. Some wars never end.
Once again I recommend Zhabotinsky's "Wall of Iron". I'll post a link to it if I have the time.
That's bad and a real blow to my pride (no sarcasm). I thought I was able to express myself clearly.
I stand with Zhabotinsky and Shusteff. Tictoc in Post #28 understood the purpose of my posts and stated it better than I could - I am sad to say.
The settlements have been built on unoccupied portions of the west bank. They were wastelands that Israel has made to blossom.
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