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To: CyberAnt
I don't have a religious view of the world, so I am not comfortable engaging in religious disputations.

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.

23 posted on 08/25/2002 4:22:57 AM PDT by liberallarry
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To: liberallarry
I stand by my comment.

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.

29 posted on 08/26/2002 1:04:19 AM PDT by solmar_israel
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