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I'll bring this up again, but the Palestinians haven't owned the land for centuries. The Ottoman Turks owned it, but allowed the Palestinians to rent it and didn't interfere beyond getting their payment. The idea of fee simple or freeholder ownership of the land by Palestinians hasn't been true for centuries.

The difference wasn't the ownership, but that the Jews wanted to live there and work the land. It has also come up that Israel's farms are among the most productive in the world while the Palestinians are doing well to grow olives (which I'll trace back to water rights to a certain extent, but the quality of farming practices is first vs third world).

Redneck_Buddha wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 7:09 pm I have always referred to the Palestinians as Transjordanians. Albeit with Egyptian guns to their heads, the Jordanians massed troops against Israel leading up to the Six Day War. That's a good way to get "your" land seized in the spoils of war.

In reality, what was originally a crushing defeat for the Arab world turned out to be a golden opportunity to use the stateless population as political pawns. The Arab world has absolutely no interest in absorbing or otherwise making life better for the Palestinian people. In fact, the Palestinians have it orders of magnitude better within the disputed territories than they do as refugees in certain other locations. Ever sat surrounded by relatively affluent, young Palestinians at a hoity toity, hipster restaurant or coffee shop in Ramallah, Jericho, or Hebron? I have.

And now, we see the worst of the worst violators of human rights at the head of the UN Human Rights Council, while they continue to elevate the narrative of "apartheid" victims being abused by an illegitimate, racist government.

The leadership of Arab nations and Their often oppressed peoples are very distinct groups. Saddam and his ilk were thrilled to have people to blame for the consequences of their despotism.

Yes...but...the Brits didn't do much about all of the folks in both sides of the divide, while the Jews wanted them gone because they were letting ships full of Holocaust refugees sit on the docks to appease the Palestinians.

Just handing the Palestinians citizenship as a path to peace would work about as well as promoting Constitutional Carry by handing out Glocks in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago: an ultimately noble goal severely hampered by issues with implementation.

WE should bring this thread back on track.

Foreign policy interludes can veer way off the original track. The important thing is Democrats actively putting memes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion back into the public forum and then refusing to even come out against their members for it.

Imagine a Republican saying these things.

Further, Syria is now demanding that Israel leave Golan (their last effort to dislodge the IDF ended with Kahalani driving toward Damascus leading a column of Centurions). Cruz and Cotton have sponsored a bill to formally recognize Golan as Israeli.

Bitter Clinger wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 5:25 pm The situation was created by the Arabs in 1948. They declared that they would drive the Jews into the sea. The Arabs outside of Israel told the Arabs inside of Israel to leave so that they would not be in harms way while the Jews were exterminated (remember that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was allied with the worst of Nazi Germany during WWII).

I think that ultimately the situation was created by Hitler. Zionism in the 1900s was a relatively peaceful process, in that wealthy Jews or Gentiles in Europe could sponsor kibbutzes by buying land in Palestine, mostly from Turks who viewed the land as a rent check but never visited. The Ottomans who owned the land were every bit as foreign as the Jewish settlers, but the fact that the incoming Jews wished to live there and farm the land vs. absentee Turk landlords (remotely akin to Salutary Neglect here- we were fine with being British subjects so long as it was in name only). That relationship also points out a very important distinction- that "The Arabs" isn't a very useful grouping because it includes a lot of groups that aren't aligned. The Ottoman landlords didn't care about the Palestinians living on their land- they did what made them money. The Jews moving to Israel were glad to escape anti-Semitism in Europe, and didn't have any particular good or ill-will towards the displaced Palestinians.

Haj Amin al-Husseini asking Hitler for help (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/th ... -uuml-hrer Good summary for those less familiar) is pretty representative of the quality of Palestinian leadership from that time until now. The Palestinians have never had ANY power, and since day one their leadership has been prone to blaming the Jews for their troubles. The truth is that they became AWARE of how powerless they were when the Ottoman landlords sold the land out from beneath them, but then again these were salt of the earth sort of people.

You move that animosity forward 4 years, and add millions of people, all of whom have lost people and few of whom want to return to places that tried to kill them (I'll point out that the Holocaust was a European phenomenon, not just a German one, and that active participation by many nations led to ongoing animosity/l;ack of any desire to return even after the Nazi occupiers were gone). The massive influx multiplied the pre-existing sentiment and both sides overwhelmed the British ability to control it, and I don't think that I need to go through the entire Jewish War of Independence. But I will comment on Deir Yassin, or rather the memory of it, because even today that single event has characterized the fate of the Palestinians more than any other (their own awful decisions forming a close second). Menachem Begin is the only person who knows what really happened, but I think that the MOST LIKELY course of events is a firefight between Irgun and a group of militia in a tell in which a few civilians were killed. The important part was not so much the event as its perception- even Ben-Gurion recognized the value of PORTRAYING the event as a massacre, and it became that in popular memory.

Palestinian friends (educated people, not the guy on the street in Gaza shouting death to Israel) can recall their grandparents talking about fleeing because they thought that the Jews would murder them. That the memory survives to this day is a testament to what it meant to a bunch of illiterate farmers in 1948. The people who could leave did, but the ones without a choice stayed and form the group that is identified as the Palestinians today (i.e. excluding the educated people who saw the writing on the wall and got out).

Arabs could have been easily absorbed into neighboring Arab countries (note that the "Palestinian" Arabs do in fact already have their own country, it is called Jordan). Instead, the Arabs governments chose to make political fodder out of their own brethren and they were incarcerated into so-called "refugee camps" in Gaza, Judea and Samaria (Judea and Samaria are the correct names for the "West Bank' of the Jordan River)

I agree that the Palestinians could've been absorbed into neighboring nations, but none of those nations wanted them. That may be my main objection to the classification of people as a group of "Arabs"- they don't view themselves as a group. I would argue that they're socially closest to the Jordanian Arabs, BUT the Hashemite royalty of Jordan has no desire to increase a 70/30 split that already runs against them. Lebanon is such a complex patchwork that its capacity to absorb anything is limited (the Druze spent most of the 1980s sitting on hilltops with RPGs and heavy machine guns pointed in every direction, and that's just one of 4 major groups). Both nations tried harder than the others to absorb the Palestinians, and both had their own tragic stories about trying to do so. Conversely, EVERY Arab nation saw Israel as an excuse to focus legitimate domestic opposition toward a foreign "threat", and used the Palestinians as a touchstone for shaking that fist even as they did nothing to help the people.

I have been in these "camps", they are simply cities like any other Arab city. And it is absolutely correct, if the Arabs in Gaza simply took the concrete that was provided to them by Israel, and used it to build hospitals and schools instead of terror tunnels into Israel proper, then they would improve their own lives immeasurably.

I won't argue with that. The one caveat that I would add that is germane to the present discussion is that water remains a huge factor in their development.

Arabs living in Israel proper enjoy most all of the rights that any Jewish citizen does, including representation in the Knesset and more recently, some have even gone to serve in the IDF. Bottom line, the only way that I can make sense of it all is to believe in the concepts of good and evil and that what we see taking place is a most stark example of that very classic battle between light and darkness.

I think that's a pathway forward. In some ways, that trail was blazed by the Old Yishuv, who were treated as a some sort of middle ground between proper Israelis and Palestinians in the early days of Israel. I think that ultimately, the only real solution for peace is that the Palestinians view Israel as a home that they can share. However, I will reiterate that the problem is more or less exterior to Isarelis and Palestinians. While Israel could allocate more water the Palestinian areas and the Palestinians could stop devoting their meager resources toward pointless terrorism, the bigger issue is that Israel is still prepared to defend itself from a coordinated attack by every nation surrounding it. The issue isn't so much that the IDF has a bunker mentality as that it must do so. Existential threats, especially threats that have been realized in living memory, has necessarily led to most decision making being ultimatley decided by the principle of ein breira, and as applied to the Palestinians that removes any option which would threaten national survival. However, to the extent that surrounding nations can improve both in terms of political stability and a genuine interest in peace(i.e. we'll see what becomes of Iraq and Syria), I think that Israel should set hard limits on its expansion into Judea and Samaria.

I'll also point out, trying to keep the historical debate somewhat on topic, that civil debate is absolutely possible if the participants don't start by throwing verbal bombs at one another (e.g. the subject of the thread).

Bitter Clinger wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:01 pm

MaduroBU wrote: ↑Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:53 pm I'll stand up and say that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians concerns me. The Palestinians have not made themselves a very sympathetic group, between atrocious leadership and bring used as an excuse to exterminate Jews by all of Israel's neighbors since 1948. Israel has a unique mandate as an ethno-state (something that we in the West wouldn't tolerate under virtually any other circumstance), but they're also a Western democracy. They're also unqiue in that the religious and political climates of their neighbors put them in a strategic position that we cannot understand in the West. Giving up Golan would put all of Northern Israel (including Tel Aviv) in Syrian artillery range, while giving up the West Bank would make a 9 mile wide strip of land connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If you live in Texas you think "Who cares?". If you have relatives who remember how they maintained 10:1 kill ratios in wadis along the Golan to save the country, those strategic and tactical considerations are very real. "On Both Banks of the Suez" and "The Heights of Courage" are great reads, but they also put into perspective how close and personal the Yom Kippur war was versus the conflicts that we can recall which all took place an ocean away. The Israeli position toward Palestineans hinges upon an absolute unwillingness to allow them to act as a third column or as a means of cedeing strategically vital territory (e.g. WB or Gaza, particularly with no Sinai buffer).

I think that there are valid criticisms of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, but it's also extremely easy to forget how much history goes into those conflicts. It's also too easy for us to minimize the fear and reactions of a group of people who have faced extermination at least twice in the span of 30 years. You cannot encapsulate the complex decisions in a Twitter post or a Facebook rant, and if you do, it's bound to appear (or maybe actually be) an anti-Semitic trope that does nothing to advance important discussions.

Some of the harshest critics and some of the most ardent defenders of Israeli policies are Jews. That diversity of opinion is supported by a shared understanding that NONE of the opinions voiced are motivated by anti-Semitism. That safety is a necessary precursor to meaningful debates on Israeli policy, and Omar's flippant comments completely undermine it. I don't know if she hates Jews or if she is just a moron, but it is clear that she moved her own aims backward by saying something idiotic.

If one is familiar with the Israeli Army rules of engagement, one would come to realize that they are the most humane fighting force in the world. More than one soldier has given their life in order to prevent the death of an innocent civilian. As far as the "Palestinians" (which BTW is a made up word that came into existence after 1948) who seem to by and large only be able to find unarmed civilians to murder - in a land where everyone serves in the military at one time or another - if these Arabs laid down their weapons (rockets, AK's, knives and homicide vests) tomorrow, there would be peace. If the Jews laid down their arms, there would be only a massacre of another 6 million-plus Jews.

I don't think that the IDF disbanding is a realistic scenario, and I agree that in the extremely unlikely event that it happened, all of Israel's neighbors would capitalize on the weakness by attacking. I'll agree that the local Arabs in the British mandate of Palestine weren't really a cohesive group until 1948, but circumstances since that time have made the term and the grouping real.

I don't agree that the Palestinians could ensure peace by disarming, because they aren't the threat. The Palestinians do the most damage on a day to day basis, but only because of the detente between Israel and it's Arab neighbors since 1973. If the multitude of Palestinian groups all laid down their arms, the issues of land and water would be just as acute for Israel and the Palestinians. The IDF does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties against a set of opponents who routinely use terror rocket attacks and human shields while retaliating in kind against attacks on their home soil. The restraint shown on a daily basis by the IDF IS impressive, but it's not the heart of the issue. Rather, the Palestinians in Israel (who generally represent the folks who didn't have the resources to leave...most "Palestinians" live outside of Israel if they have the option) don't have the resources to create a real economy, with the added trouble that aid or remittances are shunted towards funding terrorism.

I think that shaping the discussion as a right vs wrong debate and trying to figure out which participant is the "bad guy" minimizes the legitimate motives of both groups. By way of example, Begin did bad things but he also did a lot of good, and he was always committed first and foremost to the survival of Israel. His actions made sense in that context, and I think that approaching how the Palestinians think with the same view (i.e. "why did they do this?") gives a much more accurate view of the players involved and the choices to be made.

The only clear things are that the violence has solved nothing and that the problems prevent easy answers. It is extremely difficult to find a way to admit that a group of people whose world view has incorporated huge amounts of virulent anti-Semitism and whose interests have been frequently co-opted by nations that would gladly exterminate Israel may have valud claims. I'll reiterate that Israel's unilateral capitulation to even some Palestinian demands wouldn't solve the problems because Israel is and must remain on guard against existential military threats. To that end, I think that the real pre-requisite to improving conditions for the Palestinians is a normalization of relations with stable neighbors (i.e. more akin to Jordan than Egypt).

As a regional player, Israel doesn't have the clout to accomplish this end. To the extent that we're a much larger player (both militarily and in terms of oil purchases), we might be able to do more.

I'll stand up and say that Israel's treatment of the Palestinians concerns me. The Palestinians have not made themselves a very sympathetic group, between atrocious leadership and bring used as an excuse to exterminate Jews by all of Israel's neighbors since 1948. Israel has a unique mandate as an ethno-state (something that we in the West wouldn't tolerate under virtually any other circumstance), but they're also a Western democracy. They're also unqiue in that the religious and political climates of their neighbors put them in a strategic position that we cannot understand in the West. Giving up Golan would put all of Northern Israel (including Tel Aviv) in Syrian artillery range, while giving up the West Bank would make a 9 mile wide strip of land connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. If you live in Texas you think "Who cares?". If you have relatives who remember how they maintained 10:1 kill ratios in wadis along the Golan to save the country, those strategic and tactical considerations are very real. "On Both Banks of the Suez" and "The Heights of Courage" are great reads, but they also put into perspective how close and personal the Yom Kippur war was versus the conflicts that we can recall which all took place an ocean away. The Israeli position toward Palestineans hinges upon an absolute unwillingness to allow them to act as a third column or as a means of cedeing strategically vital territory (e.g. WB or Gaza, particularly with no Sinai buffer).

I think that there are valid criticisms of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, but it's also extremely easy to forget how much history goes into those conflicts. It's also too easy for us to minimize the fear and reactions of a group of people who have faced extermination at least twice in the span of 30 years. You cannot encapsulate the complex decisions in a Twitter post or a Facebook rant, and if you do, it's bound to appear (or maybe actually be) an anti-Semitic trope that does nothing to advance important discussions.

Some of the harshest critics and some of the most ardent defenders of Israeli policies are Jews. That diversity of opinion is supported by a shared understanding that NONE of the opinions voiced are motivated by anti-Semitism. That safety is a necessary precursor to meaningful debates on Israeli policy, and Omar's flippant comments completely undermine it. I don't know if she hates Jews or if she is just a moron, but it is clear that she moved her own aims backward by saying something idiotic.