Who will decide what the boundaries of the new state will be? I'm sure the Israeli wall will not be the permanent marker for all of it.
hobitbob
Quote:I recall a report on NPR that discussed how Palestinians, the majority of whom work in Israel, are unable to actually make it to work with any regularity due to the amount of time lost at checkpoints, etc.
As long as terrorists can enter through open borders those checkpoints are a necessity and will remain. They through their intafada have brought it upon themselves.
InfraBlue
In accordance with the road map the two parties will. Seeing is believing.
au1929 wrote:hobitbob
Quote:I recall a report on NPR that discussed how Palestinians, the majority of whom work in Israel, are unable to actually make it to work with any regularity due to the amount of time lost at checkpoints, etc.
As long as terrorists can enter through open borders those checkpoints are a necessity and will remain. They through their intafada have brought it upon themselves.
I think that this is a simplistic answer. The Israelis are not blameless. They do as much damage to innocents as the Palestinian militants do, and don't seem to go out of their way to avoid such damage.
hobitbob
Quote:I think that this is a simplistic answer. The Israelis are not blameless. They do as much damage to innocents as the Palestinian militants do, and don't seem to go out of their way to avoid such damage.
That is a matter of conjecture. However, consider who strikes the first blow. The Israeli's are only reacting to Palestinian terrorism. Would you expect anything different. In the same way that we reacted to 9/11 in Afghanistan. Do you think the American public would have accepted turning the other cheek?
I don't believe that the first atacks (in 1947-48) came from the Palestinians.
I do see the similarities with Afghanistan, however:
Western nation enters, destroys infrastructure, sets up weak puppet government, then withdraws support to allow Afghanistan to collapse into chaos.
Osama who? Oh, wait, it isn't patriotic to recall he is still at large.
The emigrant European Zionists can take the blame for instigating the hostilities in Palestine by their incursion and subsequent arrogation of Palestine all in the name of Zionist seperatism based on bigotry and chauvinism.
The Zionists of the first Aliyah had a benign indifference to the pre-existing polulations in Palestine. They propigated the propaganda slogan, "A land without a people for a people without a land." In Ernst Pawel's biography of Theododr Herzl, The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life Of Theodor Herzl, he writes, "He never questioned the popular view of colonialism as a mission of mercy that brought the blessings of civilization to stone-age savages...He fully believed that the Palestine Arabs would welcome the Jews with open arms; after all, they only stood to gain from the material and technological progress imported by the Jews."
Herzl was truly a product of his European supremacist culture of the nineteenth century.
In a report to Herzl written prior to the Second Zionist Congress, Leo Motzkin wrote, "Completely accurate statistics about the number of inhabitants do not presently exist. One must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs..." (Protocol of the Second Zionist Congress, Pg. 103).
He referred to Palestine as OUR COUNTRY.
When Herzl himself toured Palestine he was flatly oblivious to the Arabs there. ""The account of this visionary's journey through both past and future is notable for one conspicuous blind spot. As Amos Elan [writer, critic, New York Review of Books] has pointed out, the trip...took him through at least a dozen Arab villages, and in Jaffa itself, Jews formed only 10 percent--some 3,000--of the total population. Yet not once does he refer to the natives in his notes, nor do they ever seem to figure in his later reflections. In overlooking, in refusing to acknowledge their presence--and hence their humanity--he both followed and reinforced a trend that was to have tragic consequences for Jews and Arabs like," writes Pawel.
Some of the other Zionists were truly concerned for the aspirations of the Arabs in Palestine, however. Zionists like Ahad Ha'am who wrote in his essay, The Truth From the Land of Israel, ""We tend to believe abroad that Palestine is nowadays almost completely deserted, a non-cultivated wilderness, and anyone can come there and buy as much land as his heart desires. But in reality this is not the case. It is difficult to find anywhere in the country Arab land which lies fallow...," and Yitzhak Epstein: ""Among the grave questions raised by the concept of our people's renaissance on its own soil there is one which is more weighty than all of the others put together. This is the question of our relations with the Arabs. This question, on the correct solution of which our own national aspirations depend, has not been forgotten, but rather has remained completely hidden from the Zionists, and its true form found almost no mention in the literature of our movement," and Yosef Luria who wrote, "During all the years of our labor in Palestine we completely forgot that there were Arabs in the country. The Arabs have been 'discovered' only during the past few years. We regarded all European nations as opponents of our settlement, but failed to pay heed to one people--the people residing in this country and attached to it." Verily, there were some Zionists who felt compunction with regard to their incursions, and the plight of the Arabs in Palestine.
The Revisionists would have none of it. It was "conquest of the motherland by force!" and "the Jewish homeland for Jews!"
In the Revisionists the Zionists had their counterpart in the militant nationalism that had infected Europe in the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth.
Allan C. Brownfield writes in his essay, The Myth of Palestine as "A Land Without People,"
"More realistic, perhaps, was the assessment of the militant Zionist Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was sympathetic to the extreme nationalism he saw emerging in Eastern Europe, even on the part of the anti-Semitic Ukrainian nationalist Schevenko, whom he praised for his nationalist spirit, despite "explosions of wild fury against the Poles, the Jews and other neighbors." Jabotinsky was under no illusions about a "land without people," and recognized that, in the long run, Zionism must displace the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine."
Jabotinsky declined the cooperation with the Arabs, in pursuit of a Jewish homeland of, for and by Jews only--in a land already populated with goyim.
hobitbob
Quote:
I don't believe that the first attacks (in 1947-48) came from the Palestinians.
They came from all the surrounding Arab states. And basically they still do since they kept the Palestinians or those from the newly established State of Israel in refugee camps and not allowed to assimilate into their populations. I should point out that just as many Jews literally driven out of Arab lands with only the shirt on their backs were assimilated into Israel. These Jewish communities in those land had been their and flourishing even before the birth of Islam. I read an article the other day that the population of Baghdad was 25% Jewish at the beginning of Saddam's reign and that the last Jew in Iraq recently left Iraq. I would ask where is the compensation for the these people.
I should ask who do you think threw the first stone?
The fighting in '47-'48 was a continuation of the violence perpetuated by both the Zionists and Arabs.
The provenance of the hostilities against the Mizrahim in the Middle East was the exclusivist incursion of the Zionist emigrants from Europe to Palestine.
I should ask, who do you think started the hostilities?
