Well, colloquialism's aside, misconceptions and rewrites of history continue unabated on this thread to wit:
Quote:Yeah, how bloody presumptuous is that, actually wanting invaders out of your country.
The invader was actually Great Britain I believe who held the legal title to the land as of 1948.
Again a brief synopsis:
Contained in Jewish lore for at least four thousand years as recorded in Gensis: God told Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you." Mount Moriah - now the Temple Mount in Jerusalem - is where Jewish and Christian tradition holds that Abraham almost sacrificed his son Isaac. Isaac's son Jacob was renamed Israel by God, and given the promise of the land of Canaan (now Israel) and a covenant that he and his descendants would be "God's people."
Israel became a nation in about 1312 B.C. under the authority of King David, and since then Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. In 586 B.C., the first Jewish temple (on today's Temple Mount) was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzer, king of Babylon and the people scattered to return decades later by permission of the then conqueror, Cyrus of Persia.
The Jews would later re-establish governance of the land until approximately 67 BC, when General Pompei marched into Jerusalem to claim Judah (now Israel) as part of the Roman Empire. In 70 A.D., when the Jews foolishly challenged Rome's authority, the Romans destroyed the second Jewish Temple, slaughtering or driving out much of the Jewish population.
The Romans called the land Palestine.
Over the next 1,878 years various peoples, religions and empires, including Christian crusaders, the Ottomans and, briefly, the British marched through Jerusalem. None was interested in building a nation there.
Included in these "invaders" were the Arabs. In 636 A.D., Arab marauders came to the land and uprooted many Jews, but they did not form an Arab nation, certainly not a "Palestinian" nation.
The name "Palestine" is mentioned four times in the Bible, not once in the Koran. The name "Jerusalem" is mentioned 767 times in the Bible, not once in the Koran.
No nation, other than ancient Judah/Israel and the reborn nation of Israel in 1948 has ever reigned as a sovereign national entity in the land of Canaan.
During WWII Hitler's policies murdered, savaged, and displaced the Jewish population as no other single force had ever done. Recognizing the plight of the Jewish people who had lost so much and who had no place to go, there was broad international support for establishing a safe haven for the Jews.
At that time, Great Britain held the lawful title to the land and was willing to release it for that purpose.
In November 1947, the U.N. General Assembly voted to partition the British mandate of Palestine into two territories that were envisioned as future states - one predominantly Jewish, the other Arab. Six months later, on May 14, 1948, hours before the British withdrew, the state of Israel was proclaimed and immediately recognized by the United States and the Soviet Union.
At that moment 54 years ago, the Palestinians had a state, or a territory designated for a creation of their state. If reason had governed, two small nations might have thrived as neighbors at peace. But it was not to be.
On May 15, one day after Israel's declaration of statehood, the Arab regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria set their armies in motion with the stridently declared objective of driving the Jews into the sea. History shows they failed.
The Arabs had 250 million people; Israel, 3 million. The Arabs had 1.5 million square miles of territory; Israel, 7,500 square miles.
The Arabs failed again in 1956 at Suez and, even more decisively, in the Six Day War of 1967, which ended in humiliation, especially for Egypt, whose soldiers threw down their weapons and fled on foot back across the Sinai, with some 10,000 perishing in the retreat.
The final failure was in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which began with an Egyptian and Syrian attack on Oct. 6, the Hebrew Day of Atonement and the 10th day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
After four wars and tens of thousands of Arab and Israeli deaths, the Arab states had enough. In a series of historic blunders, they ensured the Palestinians' continued statelessness. Having spent lives and treasures to no point, Egypt and Jordan agreed to peace.
The Israelis did not take any land from the Palestinians via invasion/aggression but rather took it in battle from the Arab nations that attacked them. Through 25 years of confrontation and 28 troubled years since, no Arab country except Jordan has allowed Palestinians to immigrate in significant numbers, extended rights of citizenship or committed resources to relieving the misery in the refugee camps.
About 2 million Palestinian refugees have lived in camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt since 1948, and about 1 million live in the West Bank and Gaza. If the oil-rich Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority have such compassion for the refugees, why do they leave them in camps?
Israel has absorbed 2 million Jews from the Soviet Union and the Arab nations, at great expense, yet there are no Jewish refugee camps.
It seem that a "Palestine' is an excuse for the Arabs to justify murder of Israeli civilian men, women and children. Generations of young Arabs have no profession but violence, no ambition but martyrdom, no creed but rage.
So today, Palestinian youths strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to eternity, somehow imagining it will help secure for their people the state they could have had in 1948, except for the tragic miscalculations of their Arab brethren. The virulent hatred is flamed by militant Muslims, who have declared a holy war of terror against Israel - and the United States for supporting Israel.
Without us, they would again try to drive the Jews into the sea, and if Israel could be destroyed, some believe the Jews and the United States would no longer be the enemy. While of coure there is room to criticize Israel for its methods and/or policies, what nation among all nations is above any reproach? Yet there are those who make Israel the sole villain and think if the Arabs were alllowed to prevail, then there would be peace for the United States.
Some of us know better.
