@firefly,
Not surprisingly, factsandlogic further add to "The Big Lie" with its version of "the facts."
factsandlogic wrote:The Arabs, whipped up by their fanatic clergy, fiercely opposed the presence of the Jews on what they considered "sacred Moslem territory." There was constant warfare between the two groups, which the British tried to arbitrate, always favoring the Arabs, whom they considered more important to their imperial interests.
The Palestinians are comprised of a number of peoples of various religious affiliations, the largest being Muslim, but also Christian, Druze and Samaritan. What these Palestinian peoples fought against was their disenfranchisement and marginalization through Britain and the Zionists' efforts to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine. British policy was geared towards that goal effectively prejudicing the Palestinians' right to self-determination in Palestine. It was only after the implementation of the White Paper of 1939 that major concessions to the Palestinians were made by Britain such as the abandonment of the partitioning of the Mandate for Palestine between Jews and Arabs in favor of a more democratic state governed in proportion to their numbers, and the curtailment of Ashkenazi immigration to Palestine. The White Paper was formally repudiated in 1948 on the day after the state of Israel had declared its independence.
Quote:In 1947, the British decided that they had enough and resigned the Mandate. They left the Arab-Jewish antagonists to their own devices and turned it over to the United Nations. Their solution was to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. The area west of the Jordan River (the "West Bank") and the Gaza Strip were allotted to the Arabs. Jerusalem was to be an "international" zone. After much soul searching, the Jews accepted the partition and, in April 1948, declared their independence in the area allotted to them by the partition. The Arabs rejected the partition out of hand. On the very day of Israel's birth, five Arab armies invaded the nascent Jewish State. In what must be considered an almost Biblical miracle, the rag-tag Jewish forces decisively defeated the combined Arab might. But Israel had suffered enormous casualties - 6,000 dead, about one percent of its population.
What factsandlogic left out of its little history is the fact that the Haganah, the precursor to the IDF, and the terrorist organizations Irgun and LEHI carried out massacres and wholesale cleansing of entire Palestinian villages and towns such as Deir Yassin, Tiberias, Haifa, Safed, Beisan, Jaffa and Acre that came under their control in the civil war that preceded the 1948 war and lasted between November 1947 to May 14,1948 upon the termination of Britain's Palestine Mandate, and the declaration of independence by the state of Israel. The Arab countries surrounding Palestine subsequently sent in their armies to support the beleaguered Palestinian population. That was the beginning of the 1948 war.
Quote:Israel not an "occupier:" Israel stayed in control of most of the area west of the Jordan River, except for the Gaza Strip, which stayed under Egyptian control. The "West Bank" and the eastern part of Jerusalem stayed under the control of Transjordan, which promptly renamed itself Jordan and proceeded to ruthlessly expel all Jews and to obliterate all vestiges of over 2,000 years of Jewish presence in that land.
In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel recovered the "West Bank," the eastern part of Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, conquered Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, and conquered and annexed the Golan Heights. During the 19 years that Jordan and Egypt were in possession of the "West Bank" and the Gaza Strip, it didn't occur to them or to anybody else that the Palestinians should have a state or even that they were a distinct nationality. The claim for that did not arise until after the Six-Day War.
It's pretty simple. Israel never had control of the West Bank before the Six-Day War, therefore, they didn't "recover" the West Bank. They arrogated it and now occupy it. Ergo, Israel is an occupier. The rest of factsandlogic's tortured history is irrelevant to this fact. To continue their tangent, though, Jordan does regard the Palestinians as a distinct nationality. After the 1948 war there were over 400,000 Palestinian refugees
east of the Jordan River. The Palestinian nationalist movement, Fatah, was formed in 1954--13 years prior to the 1967 War--by Palestinian refugees. They perpetrated their first major guerrilla attack against Israel in 1965, two years before the war. The Palestinians--as regarded as a distinct nationality--and the West Bank were to become the central issues of Jordanian domestic and foreign policy for the latter half of the 20th century.
Quote:Jews have been living in Judea/Samaria since Biblical times. The area was made judenrein (free of Jews), following the Nazi model, by Jordan, when it was in possession of the territory. After 1967, Jews moved back into the territory and a great hullabaloo was raised and is still being raised about the not more than 200,000 "settlers," who do not occupy more than 2 percent of the area. But there is no concern about the hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who, lured by the prosperity of Israel, have flooded into the area, nor of the more than one million Arabs who live in Israel proper and who enjoy full rights of citizenship.
The Arab (and Persian, for that matter) response to the Zionist arrogation of Palestine was petty, revengeful and regressive what with the expulsion of Jews from the former’s countries. That being said, it was an effect of a cause: the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
To clarify for the more obtuse, like those at factsandlogic, the problem is that Israel accommodates these settlers by walling off large areas of the West Bank, slowly circumscribing it and any chance for an independent Palestinian state through the farcical so called "two state solution." This process of circumscription entails the martial control and oppression of the Palestinian populations that lie just outside of the walled settler communities.
Who are these "hundreds of thousands" of Arabs that have flooded into the area, "lured by the prosperity of Israel"? Israel severely restricts the immigration of Arabs into the area.
The "full rights of citizenship" for the Palestinian Israelis that factsandlogic touts amounts to the right to vote, and freedom of religion. Israel is otherwise officially segregated through preferential treatment of Jews in regard to housing and community infrastructural investment, the prohibition of Arab immigration, etc.; all of this in the name of the ethnocentric existence of the state of Israel.
Quote:Israel acquired the territories (the "West Bank" and Gaza) in defense of an aggressive war waged against it. No country in history has ever been asked to return such territories. Do the Poles return the huge chunk of Germany that they acquired in the wake of World War II? Do the Czechs return the Sudetenland, do the French return Alsace-Lorraine? Of course not! Only Israel is being asked to return such territories. The last sovereign of the "West Bank" and of Gaza were the Ottomans. The "West Bank" and Gaza are unallocated territories. To speak of Israel as "occupier" is preposterous; to speak of it, as Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the UN does, as "illegal occupiers," is poisonous slander. He knows better. But unfortunately, the Big Lie of Israel's "occupation" has been repeated so long and so often that even people of good faith have come to believe it and to accept it.
So now factsandlogic reverts to describing Israel's arrogation of the West Bank as an "acquisition," whereas previously it referred to this arrogation as a "recovery." Like all other Israel apologists factsandlogic themselves have a muddled view of the conflict.
One thing is asserting that the West Bank and Gaza are unallocated territories. Another thing, which is the crux of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, is the former's oppression of the latter as it has sought to wrest control of Palestine in the name of an ethnocentric state that is necessarily oppressive and discriminatory towards the Palestinian peoples.
