The Israelis are no angels, but...

munchester29

Saw this thread, and just had to comment…

Why in 1948, the Israeli's decided to kick out 750,000 Palestinians?

To begin with, at the time there was no Palestine. The Arabs in Israel were always under some foreign power's rule (roman, Greek, Persian, Turkish, British). They never had their own state, and the society structure was mostly tribal.
Also, no one kicked anyone out - the Arabs ran away because they feared Israeli retribution for the war which was started by the surrounding Arab states, and supported by the Arabs that lived within what is now the Israeli state. Sometimes they even ran even though they were promised that no harm would come to them by the Israeli authorities.
Another point you might want to consider is that in and around 1948 around 600,000 Jews were driven from their homes in the surrounding Arab states (mainly because of the 1948 war), and ended up as refugees in Israel.
Final point - war is not pretty. The Arabs were the aggressors in the 1948 war, they were defeated, and as in any war - to the victor go the spoils.
Syria, Lebanon and Jordan - just to name three relevant examples are states carved out of territory conquered by England and France from the Ottoman Turks. I don't see anyone demanding these countries to submit themselves to Turkish rule or to return those conquered lands to the Turks.

Why did they hate them so much?

Simple - Since 1948 till this day, despite all Israeli efforts for peace, Israel is constantly attacked. It's only natural to hate your attacker. Israel had 60 years of wars and terror forced on it to develop this hate. What is the Arab excuse?


Why does Israel continue its illegal colonization of what is left of Palestine?

There was never a Palestinian state. The Arabs within what is now the Israeli state borders were always ruled by someone - Turks, brits, etc. Their society was more tribal then anything else. They never ruled themselves, never had their own government. and never had a state.
The whole idea of a Palestinian state is a much later idea.
Illegal colonization?
Syria, Lebanon and Jordan - just to name three relevant examples are states carved out of territory conquered by England and France from the Ottoman Turks. I don't see anyone demanding these countries to submit themselves to Turkish rule or to return those conquered lands to the Turks, or that the Arabs living in those countries are illegally colonizing it.
Seriously - it's been 60 years since Israel defeated it's aggressors for the first time, give it a break.
Also, Israel (and Israelis) want nothing more then to have peace. Israelis do not enjoy terrorists blowing up in it's streets, and Qasam rockets fired into it's cities.
But look what happens when Israel tries to leave these occupied territories - When Israel left the Gaza strip, terrorists grew bolder, attacks on Israel were intensified, the Palestinian hate of the Israelis only grew.
Look also at what happens within the "Palestinian state" itself - everybody is killing everybody else, all the billions of Euros sent from Europe & the US are funneled into terrorist activities and terrorist pockets, and nothing goes to the Palestinian people themselves who suffer, and still blame Israel for everything, even when Israel leaves them alone under their own rule.
The only impression I get from what goes on within the Palestinian authority right now, is that even if tomorrow Israel suddenly ceased to exist, and no Israelis were in the area - the Palestinians would just continue butchering each other.

Why won't they let the people they kicked out return to there homes?

Most of these people are not alive today - maybe you meant their descendants? Today there are probably millions of those - where exactly do you want them to return to? The places they ran away from are now occupied by Israelis, and these places (Haifa, Tel-Aviv, etc) will never be returned to the runaways descendants. Again - they started a war, they lost the war, they ran away. There it ends.
On the other hand, if we are talking about compensation for the lands & houses they lost when they ran - I guess it would be only fair, but then I would expect the same to be true for the surrounding Arab states - they should compensate the descendants of the 600,000 Jews driven away from their homes too. I'm sure those descendants wouldn't mind going back to get their lands and property back, but somehow I doubt it would ever happen.

Why do massacres of Palestinians by Israel and there allies not condemned as terrorism, but when the Palestinians do it, it is rightly condemned as such?

Well, the main difference between what the Palestinians do and what the Israelis do is that the Palestinians target civilians, while Israel targets terrorists. These brave Palestinian terrorists have a habit of mingling with civilians, because they consider them human shields. Hezbollah in Lebanon did the same thing in the recent war in Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters fired rockets into Israel from buildings filled with civilians. How else would they be able to cry to the whole world that Israel kills the innocent? They have to make sure there are innocents there first.
It's true that Israel caused the deaths of innocent Palestinians, including women & children. If the Palestinian fighters stopped hiding in civilian areas and amongst civilians, these incidents would have been very few. There is nothing anyone can do - in war innocent people die. You can't declare war, do your best to kill innocent people on the other side, and then expect that no innocents would be killed on your side. I do know for a fact, that many times Israeli soldiers risk their lives, and many have died because they tried to do their best to avoid civilian casualties, even if it meant taking greater risks then they should on the battlefield.


To this day Israel is taking as much Palestinians land as it can. Just recently another illegal colony in the Palestinian East Jerusalem was announced.

Not true – Israel left the Gaza strip, and got nothing for it’s effort except for more terrorism.
Jerusalem? The heart of the Jewish people for the last 2000 years and more has been freed during the 1967 war – again, a war started by the Arabs.
Let’s be honest – it’s not just Jerusalem – the Palestinians want all of Israel to be cleansed of Jews. You only need to listen to what Arab leaders in Iran, Syria & the Palestinian authority say in their speeches.

Also, why do more people not mention the fact Israel is an Apartheid state?

The Palestinians & Arabs in Israel were treated much better by the Israelis then they were by their Arab brethren (at least until they started blowing up buses). Arabs in Israel have more rights then any of their brethren in the surrounding countries.
It’s also a known fact that none of the surrounding Arab states wants to bring Palestinian refugees into their territory (which was a proposed solution to the refugee problem). Why is that? Maybe the other Arab leaders know who they are dealing with?

Just to sum things up:
Things that happened 60 years ago happened 60 years ago. no one can turn the wheel around - eventually, you have to accept reality, and the reality is - Israel is here to stay.
So far, the only ones who are even trying to achieve peace are the Israelis. The palestinians talk the talk, but action speaks louder than words - you can't sit down to negotiate peace while conntinuing with terrorist attacks.
Also, in my opinion, Israel & the Palestinians are so wrapped up in their conflict, that there is no hope for peace in the area in the near future. I'm not too optimistic about the far future either.

Hobbes

moved from Islam forum.

Mick86

munchester29 wrote:

Saw this thread, and just had to comment…

Why in 1948, the Israeli's decided to kick out 750,000 Palestinians?..............................

Oh No, not again.

jhegarty

groan......anyone have a pre 1948 map that refers to Palestine... no ... funny that....keep looking... no ... going back 2000 years , nope.. still not found one...

InFront

Look harder, that's a common myth. It was called Palestine, then later Arz-i-Filistin.

Anyone have a pre 1948 map that refers to The Republic of Ireland? No? What about a pre 1921 map referring to O'Connell street? Does anyone know where Bangladesh was up until the 1940s? No? Musn't have existed, so, eh?

Palestine was there, it was a Muslim province, that's what Palestinians are defending, not a nine-letter word.

It's a pity you don't ask where Israel was until 1948. Or more appropriately, where the Israelis were. The answer would be that Israel only existed in a religious text and that people who said they were "Israelis" were Russians and pan-Slavs, Europeans, and Americans - as their ancestors had been for hundreds of years before them.

brianthebard

In any case Palestine was a British mandate, legally set up so that Britain would see to it that Palestine would eventually be able to govern itself. Britain reneged on that.

munchester29

Without arguing the facts, the logic that says that the land belongs to the Palestinians because Palestine was there and it was a Muslim province (which just isn’t true – the occupiers at the time would kill anyone trying to maintain a resemblance of an independent state), can be extended a little further - Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?
You don't have to believe the bible, or the Koran or the new testament - there is archeological proof to these facts.
Israel was a Jewish country a very long time before Muhammad was born.
Unfortunately for the Jews, they were exiled from their land. It surprises me that the logic that says that the Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 should be allowed to return and get their land & property back, doesn't work the same way when it concerns the Jews - maybe it took them 2000 years, but they did return to their land.
Also, I don't remember the exact details, but scientists discovered that most Jews living today (all over the world - not just Israel) have a certain DNA characteristic that is unique to Jews. That characteristic passes from generation to generation, so even if the Person lives in Russia or the US or the moon - he is still a Jew, and his genes came from the same gene pool which was established thousands of years ago - guess where?
In Israel.

brianthebard

Riiiiight....

munchester29

By the way - I wouldn't be surprised if most of the palestinians living in and around Israel today are actually descendants of the remaining Jewish people who were left behind when most of the jews were exiled.
It would be logical that whoever was left behind would mingle with the region's other tribes/nations.

Family feuds are always the worst...

edanto

Why do the Israelis live in such wealth while their Palestinian neighbours are so poor?

munchester29

Mainly because all the money that was given to the Palestinians (billions of Euros) found it’s way somehow to private bank accounts in various European countries. These bank accounts are owned by Palestinian leaders who care only about increasing their wealth and nothing else.
Besides that, Israelis are not that wealthy. There is a wealthy elite (as in all countries), but nowadays there are more Israelis struggling to survive economically than Israelis who are wealthy.
You should also remember that besides fighting the Israelis, the Palestinians are always fighting amongst themselves – mainly to secure control over the funds allocated to them by the US and European governments.
When all you do is fight – it’s very hard to advance yourself in other areas. When the only thing your children learn at school (and the schools there are financed mainly by the Hamas organization) is how monstrous the Israelis are, and how heroic it is to put an explosives vest on your body and go and explode in an Israeli bus, it’s hard to focus on learning math.
Besides, think about it this way – you can work hard your entire life trying to advance yourself, or you can blow something up and go straight to heaven – where 72 virgins are just waiting to lose their virginity to you – I think the choice is obvious.
And, last but not least – the Palestinians are at war with Israel. The Palestinians also depend on Israel for work (and many of them still work in Israel despite the violence), and when you depend on your enemy for work…

wes

Following makes for interesting reading and Amnesty are very good with facts of atrocities committed by all parties.

Amnesty Search on Israel

Amnest Search on Palestine

Plenty of fact in both those links. Also Amnesty reports on Human rights violations of everyone and have the facts to back it up.

Flex

Theres over 44million Irish Americans living in the USA nowadays isnt there? What if all those Irish Americans decided to return to Ireland and reclaim the land their ancestors lived on? If the house Im living in right now is on land that belonged to some family 400 years ago should I be kicked out of my house because some persons (who has never lived in IReland, and whose ancestors havnt lived in Ireland for generations) ancestors 'owned' the land centuries ago? Or the same example, except using some Irish-Australian whose ancestors were sent to a prison colony in Australia centuries ago?

No

brianthebard

munchester29 wrote:

Mainly because all the money that was given to the Palestinians (billions of Euros) found it’s way somehow to private bank accounts in various European countries. These bank accounts are owned by Palestinian leaders who care only about increasing their wealth and nothing else.
Besides that, Israelis are not that wealthy. There is a wealthy elite (as in all countries), but nowadays there are more Israelis struggling to survive economically than Israelis who are wealthy.
You should also remember that besides fighting the Israelis, the Palestinians are always fighting amongst themselves – mainly to secure control over the funds allocated to them by the US and European governments.
When all you do is fight – it’s very hard to advance yourself in other areas. When the only thing your children learn at school (and the schools there are financed mainly by the Hamas organization) is how monstrous the Israelis are, and how heroic it is to put an explosives vest on your body and go and explode in an Israeli bus, it’s hard to focus on learning math.
Besides, think about it this way – you can work hard your entire life trying to advance yourself, or you can blow something up and go straight to heaven – where 72 virgins are just waiting to lose their virginity to you – I think the choice is obvious.
And, last but not least – the Palestinians are at war with Israel. The Palestinians also depend on Israel for work (and many of them still work in Israel despite the violence), and when you depend on your enemy for work…

This is starting to look like ethnic profiling at this stage.

munchester29

Forget everything.
Think about this:
It's a known fact that the US, various European governments and many Arab countries donated Billions to the palestinians.
Where is the money?

InFront

munchester29 wrote:

Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?

No. And please don't try to turn this into a Jewish question, as it happens those Jews who lived in the region 2000 years ago were immigrants from the area outside of Palestine. Not that 2,000 years ago is particularly relevant anyway.
For one thing, we shouldn't exactly be encouraging people operating as they did 2000 years ago, humanity is supposed to have moved on since then.

I don't particularly mind the argument that Israeli born children of immigrants are now from the area and deserve to be allowed stay there; but trying to excuse the initial arrival is completely daft, and unrealistic and shouldn't be given any attention.

maybe it took them 2000 years, but they did return to their land.

I presume Irish people are expecting the Norwegians any day now.

brianthebard

Can we lock this? Or at least spam it with owl pics soon? ktnksbye

edanto

munchester29 wrote:

Mainly because all the money that was given to the Palestinians (billions of Euros) found it’s way somehow to private bank accounts in various European countries.

First off, could you please provide some proof for that? Even if it is true, it pales in comparison to the sums received by the biggest recipient of US foreign aid. And the proportion of that aid that the Israelis MUST spend on US weapons is so high that I'm sure a good bit of it ends up in the pockets of powerful Americans who have no economic reason to find a lasting peaceful solution to the war in the middle east.

When all you do is fight – it’s very hard to advance yourself in other areas. When the only thing your children learn at school (and the schools there are financed mainly by the Hamas organization) is how monstrous the Israelis are, and how heroic it is to put an explosives vest on your body and go and explode in an Israeli bus, it’s hard to focus on learning math.

I don't agree with Palestinians waging war against Israel. But I disagree more with the Israeli practice of putting schoolchildren through adult military courts and prisons and shooting them when they are throwing stones. I think monstrous stories like that would make the most peaceful Palestinian child angry.

These brave Palestinian terrorists have a habit of mingling with civilians, because they consider them human shields. Hezbollah in Lebanon did the same thing in the recent war in Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters fired rockets into Israel from buildings filled with civilians. How else would they be able to cry to the whole world that Israel kills the innocent? They have to make sure there are innocents there first.
It's true that Israel caused the deaths of innocent Palestinians, including women & children. If the Palestinian fighters stopped hiding in civilian areas and amongst civilians, these incidents would have been very few. There is nothing anyone can do - in war innocent people die. You can't declare war, do your best to kill innocent people on the other side, and then expect that no innocents would be killed on your side.

It's no secret that Israel puts a lot of it's weapons factories and stores in areas that are arab dominated - going for the same human shield effect. Most of that paragraph above could be attacked in the same way.

Most of the Israelis that I've ever met have been real nice, not at all agressive. Having said that, plenty of them were travelling to try to rid themselves of the nightmares that they had been part of when on compulsory service in the occupied territory. That violent conditioning (do what you are told without question) is as bad as the indoctrination of Palestinian kids that you mentioned.

So, there is no getting away from the fact that they're both pretty badly behaved. But why are you so pessimistic about the chances of peace? Why couldn't social reforms make the area more comfortable to live in and provide jobs for the restless Palestinians. I think that your answer to the 'why is there a wealth difference' was over simplistic and I'm not convinced that you're right.

InFront

munchester29 wrote:

Forget everything.
Think about this:
It's a known fact that the US, various European governments and many Arab countries donated Billions to the palestinians.
Where is the money?

That's the kind of argument someone would make if they were being ironic or attempting humour. Put Israel into that quote

Forget everything.
Think about this:
It's a known fact that the US... donated Billions to the Israelis.
Where is the money?

Hoops1888

munchester29 wrote:

Forget everything.
Think about this:
It's a known fact that the US, various European governments and many Arab countries donated Billions to the palestinians.
Where is the money?

Emm does the US send money to the palestinian government?

Mucco

munchester29 wrote:

Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?

I know a few Romans who will be knocking on doors any day now to reclaim their territory. We all know what the Romans did in Judea!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI_OwW1cgk8

tallus

by munchesters reckoning, we should all own land in africa, isn't that where we all came from originaly?

philologos

munchester29 wrote:

Saw this thread, and just had to comment…

Why in 1948, the Israeli's decided to kick out 750,000 Palestinians?

To begin with, at the time there was no Palestine. The Arabs in Palestine were always under some foreign power's rule (roman, Greek, Persian, Turkish, British).

Hmm, there are various scopes to this argument of the Palestinian diaspora. But I think I'll quote Norman Finkelstein and how he addesses this topic in his bestselling "Beyond Chutzpah - On the Misuse Of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History".

page 258 Beyond Chutzpah wrote:

The Peel Commission itself similarly concluded that the unerlying causes of the Arab-Jewish hostilities were "first the desire of the Arabs for national independence; secondly, their antagonism to the establishment of the Jewish National Home in Palestine, quickened by their fear of Jewish domination". Explicitly repudiating the "racial" explanation Dershowitz ascribes to it, the Peel Report stated: "Nor is the conflict in essence an interracial conflict arising from any old instinctive antipathy of Arabs in the rest of the Arab world until the strife in Palestine endangered it."

page 257 Beyond Chutzpah wrote:

"It was only expected that Palestinian Arabs should... envy and seek to emulate their fellow-nationalists in those countries just across their northern and southern borders. For now all the Arab peoples in the Middle East they were the only people, except the people of Transjordan who had not attained or were not soon to attain full national freedom: and the Government of Transjordan had long been recognised as an independent government."

Whether or not the Palestinian state didn't exist doesn't mean that their national identity didn't exist. It is the stupid mistake of too many Zionists that the Palestinian people suddenly emerged after 1948. Even though that British records (the inverted commas are the areas in where it is taken from the Peel Commission 1936) claim that the Palestinians had just as much a desire for nationhood as the Jews did, and simply that they were inhabiting the land before then and that there was a significantly larger Palestinian population. The Jewish population was only 33% of the entire population of Palestine in 1948. The Jewish National Home, was threatening the idea of Palestinian independence. Just because Palestine didn't exist, didn't justify the fact that 33% of the population got given 55% of the land in 1948. Just because Palestine never existed doesn't make it any less valid than the ambitions for a Jewish National Home. (I'm expecting the general "but they suffered during the Holocaust reply", but it is a clear fact). The Jews were hindering the Palestinian Arab effort to get a state as other Arab nations had done in the region at the time, or at least some self-government as in Transjordan.

Also if we are going to get into the fact of other powers controlling Arabs. I find that the Israeli religious claims on the land are also somewhat dubious, if we want to say that the Palestinians haven't a right to self determination, we might as well take a critical look of Israeli claims also. In the books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther in the Bible, the Jewish people still lived normal religious life under the rule of Emperer Artexerxes, who ruled the Persian Empire, from Ethiopia to the northern mountains of Iran. However I support Israel remaining where they are, as long as they respect the Islamic and Christian religious sites (stop doing their "maintenance work" on Al Aqsa Mosque), and stop settling in the Occupied Territories, as the Israeli Supreme Court deemed illegal in the 1970s!)

brianthebard

One of the funny things about using the Bible to justify Israel is that there are orthodox jews who believe that the Israeli people were not supposed to have their own nation but were sent to wander the world. That's in the bible too munchester.

philologos

brianthebard wrote:

One of the funny things about using the Bible to justify Israel is that there are orthodox jews who believe that the Israeli people were not supposed to have their own nation but were sent to wander the world. That's in the bible too munchester.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerxes_I#In_the_Bible

Xerxes features in more than Israel during the Biblical period. It's considered to be accurately historically, but disputed by some Jewish scholars.

bonkey

munchester29 wrote:

Why won't they let the people they kicked out return to there homes?

Most of these people are not alive today - maybe you meant their descendants? Today there are probably millions of those - where exactly do you want them to return to?

munchester29 wrote:

Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?

So what you're saying is that the Jews who formed the modern state of Israel were all 2000 years old.

Your faultless logic has convinced me.

philologos

munchester? So Israel should be given back to the survivng Girga****es (excuse the swear filter), Amorites, Caananites, and Amalekites? Since theoretically they were the first to inhabit the land?

Victor

munchester29 wrote:

Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?

I think the Romans might dipute this.

Guitar1979

http://www.freePalestine.com/

Zich Heil..

philologos

just for those interested there was a documentary on Channel 4 about the divisions that Jerusalem has been under between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim populations since the Israeli takeover of East Jerusalem in 1967 called Battle For The Holy Land: Jerusalem part of a series of other documentaries on it. Next one is on Monday at 8pm. www.channel4.com/belief for more info. They are taking a look into it as it's the 40th anniversary of the 6 Day War.

Hogmeister B

munchester29 wrote:

Can anyone dispute the fact that the Jews lived and ruled in Israel (and some of it's neighboring states territories too) 2000 ago?
You don't have to believe the bible, or the Koran or the new testament - there is archeological proof to these facts.

Israel was a Jewish country a very long time before Muhammad was born.
Unfortunately for the Jews, they were exiled from their land.

.

2000 years ago the tribes that became the Franks, Germans, Spanish, Finns, Bulgars, Slavs et al were wandering around between modern-day Mongolia and Kazakhstan....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkerwanderung