@reasoning logic,
reasoning logic wrote:
I am not saying that this is accurate history but I thought you might care to check it out for yourself.
I think that your knowledge of economics is better that mine but do you think you have a better understanding of this crises than this intellectual artist does?
This intellectual's very premise is morally dubious in regard to his assertion that there was plenty of room in Palestine for separate states.
The only reason that the whole idea of separate states ever came up was because of the Zionists' insistence of a state "for the Jews" which is informed by the European ethnocentric nationalist ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ironically, these are the very same ideologies that were pursued by the Zionists' own oppressors: the Nazis. This intellectual completely ignores this fact. If this is because of genuine ignorance, then he isn't very intellectual. If he is aware of the origins of the Zionist ideology that founds the state of Israel, then he is being disingenuous and devious.
In the whole of Palestine during the time that this intellectual refers the Palestinian peoples inhabited the entirety of Palestine. Even the areas that were designated for the so called Jewish state had a majority of Palestinian inhabitants. The ideal of splitting Palestine along ethnic lines in light of this fact is morally bankrupt.
This intellectual presents a series of non-sequiturs in his argument such as assertions of underpopulation and underdevelopment, the oppression of the Palestinians by the Ottoman Empire, and the Balfour Declaration. Perceived underpopulation and underdevelopment does not justify the oppression of a people. The oppression of the Palestinian peoples at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, as well, does not justify their oppression at the hands of the Zionists. Needless to say, the Balfour Declaration hardly justifies the Zionists’ oppression of the Palestinian peoples. The British were remiss in their disregard for the rights of the Palestinians when it made that contradictory promise to the Zionists while at the same time it made similar promises to the Arabs through the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, and implications through the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Our intellectual glosses over the discrimination that the Palestinians experienced at the hands of the Zionist immigrants which lead to the former's rejection of increased immigration by the latter, and presents it as mere symptoms of anti-Semitism. The Zionists themselves recognized the discrimination and ill treatment that they dealt the indigenous Palestinians and recognized that this was to be a cause for contention and conflict between the two populations.
Ahad Ha'am widely regarded as the father of spiritual Zionism wrote as early as 1891 that:
"[The Jewish settlers] treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamelessly for no sufficient reason, and even take pride in doing so. The Jews were slaves in the land of their Exile, and suddenly they found themselves with unlimited freedom, wild freedom that ONLY exists in a land like Turkey. This sudden change has produced in their hearts an inclination towards repressive tyranny, as always happens when slave rules." 'Ahad Ha'Am warned: "We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going around it. But this is a GREAT ERROR. The Arab, like all sons of Sham, has sharp and crafty mind . . . Should time come when life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they WILL NOT easily step aside."
In 1914 he wrote:
"'[the Zionists] wax angry towards those who remind them that there is still another people in Eretz Yisrael that has been living there and does not intend at all to leave its place. In a future when this ILLUSION will have been torn from their hearts and they will look with open eyes upon the reality as it is, they will certainly understand how important this question is and how great our duty to work for its solution."
Our intellectual proceeds to fall back onto Zionist propaganda in regard to the wars between 1947 and 1948 what with references to the invasion of Israel by five Arab armies and "a war of extermination" and "a momentous massacre" attributed to the Arabs. What our intellectual fails to mention was the reason for this "invasion." The Palestinians were fighting a civil war in Palestine against the Zionists who were implementing their policy of "transfer." The Zionist forces perpetrated the ethnic cleansing of several Arab villages to remove as much of the Arab population as possible from areas that came under their control. Large numbers of Arabs fled these areas, and this is what gave rise to the refugee problem in Palestine and the rest of the region. It was after the success of this policy of ethnic cleansing that the Zionists realized the public relations disaster it would present if it were allowed to continue to the end, and summarily ceased its implementation. Less than one third of the population of Palestinians remained in the areas that the Zionists seized.
Turning to the post war situation, our intellectual points to the fact that Jordan and Egypt took over the areas that the Zionists hadn't taken over--the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively--and made the assertion that the Palestinians didn't clamor for a separate state. Actually, the situation was more complicated than that. The various Palestinian paramilitary forces that had fought the Zionists in Israel began to challenge the monarchical rulers, the Hashemites, in Jordan. Between 1970 and 1971 the Jordanian regime defeated these paramilitary forces and eventually expelled them. Later these forces coalesced into the PLO and gained the recognition of Jordan and the Arab League as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.
The error of the Palestinian leadership was the incitement to violence that carries to this very day, and the refusal to compromise in the face of the irreversible situation in regard to Jewish immigration to Palestine by rejecting the White Paper of 1939, and their disastrous decision to enlist the help of Nazi Germany in attempting to rid Palestine of the repressive rule of the British in the name of the advancement of the Zionist project, the creation of an exclusivist state "for the Jews."
