@Advocate,
Advocate wrote:
Palestine is not, and never was, a country. There was the British Mandate, which the UN divided in two. Israel formed a legitimate and recognized country in the West. The Pals will not accept a country in the East, but is holding out for the entire territory. ...
This is perhaps the most oft-repeated and tiresome canard of Zionist rationalizers. Many political entities existed in Palestine through recorded history; ranging from Jewish, Cananite and other kingdoms to the Roman & Byzantine Empires and, after the fall of the latter, the Ottoman Empire. For centuries Palestine was governed as a Province of the Ottoman Empire and the Arab & Semitic peoples there, Moslem, Druz, and Christian, lived together in relative harmony. In 1914-1918 the British and the French overthrew the Ottoman Empire in an unjustified, aggressive war. Afterwards they divided the territory of the former Empire (outside of Anatolia) between them; France taking what is now Syria and Lebanon and (theoretically at least) Mosul, or the northern section of what is now Iraq. Britain took the rest, including Palestine (then known petroleum resources played a significant role in the division). In part to secure financial support, Britain promised the leaders of the European Zionist movement an eventual "homeland for Jews" in Palestine. At about the same time they also promised the Hashemite family (then rulers of Mecca & Medina) the rule of Palestine as an Arab kingdom. In due course they broke both promises - first to the Hashemites at Versailles, and later, after WWII, the Zionists.
In the aftermath of WWII, the combined effects of The Holocaust, the huge dislocation of peoples in Europe, and lingering European anti Semitism combined to make a mass movement out of what had once been a very small cadre of Zionists among European Jews. It is hard to fault the motivation and desperation of the European Jews who fled to Palestine, by the hundreds of thousands to create a new homeland for themselves. It is a great and ironic tragedy that the early Zionist leaders among them chose to pursue an exclusively (or predominantly) Jewish controlled state in the new homeland they sought, thereby inflicting on others in the Mideast what had been imposed on them in Europe. Systematic displacement of Palestinians from their former land and homes was the result, and it was often done by force and terror. The rest is the all-too-familiar history of war and murder we know too well.
The stunning Israeli victory in the 1967 War left them in military control of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in Syria. While Israel ostensibly pursued a "Land for Peace" strategy with her defeated neighbors, it also embarked on yet another systematic displacement of Palestinians from their former homes and land in each of the occupied regions - it was clear from the start that Israel had no intention of ever relinquishing major areas of the West Bank. In now over 40 years of military occupation and rule, Israel has isolated the Palestinain population of the West Bank in separate cantonments that together now occupy less than half of the total area of the region. Israel thus has a stranglehold on the economic and social lives of the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, but accepts no responsibility whatever for their freedom and welfare. Israel promotes the fiction of Palestinian self-rule under conditions, imposed by them, that permit neither.
Now "outraged" by continuing Palestinian resistence, Israel inflicts total war on the population of Gaza.
While Israel attempts to snuff out the lives of Palestinians, Advocate pretends they also have no history.
