Re: Ideally, the British should not have created the Jewish homeland
The British tried to stop the refugees of the holocaust from immigrating to Palestine in the middle and late 40's. It was rather nasty of them, all things considered, because by then they knew why the Jews were so desperate to get out of Europe.
Some of the early Jewish settlers committed acts of terrorism against the British in an attempt to allow free immigration.
An incredibly horrible thing was done by the Nazis to the Jews (and others, but the main focus was on the Jews) in WWII. Those who survived were effectively a culture composed of paranoid near-schizophrenics, and who could blame them? They had all been scheduled to become lampshades and soap, or used in sick experiments done without anesthetic, or just burned after having their teeth knocked out for the metal in them. It was an action so horrific it is beyond comprehension, and it was done by what was arguably as advanced a modern society as existed at the time - and a very Christian one, too.
So who could the survivors trust? No one, quite obviously. They had an ancient heritage of coming from the area of Palestine, Europe had become one big memory of a murder scene, so many moved to Palestine. They tried, and sometimes succeeded, in buying property in the region. The local Arabs had a relatively benign, southern red-neck kind of hatred for Jews, and many moved out when they found that Jews were moving in as neighbors.
Local Arabs initiated some nastiness against the traumatized Jews, and were angered at the intensity of the response. The locals had no understanding of why the Jews were so touchy, and the Jews were quite reasonably under the impression that everyone was out to torture, degrade, and kill them, unless they killed first.
So it's an unfortunate mess, ultimately the fault of the Nazis (primarily) and there's a little bit of blame for everyone.
The United States, England, France, and very especially Germany, came to a full realization of what had happened under the Nazis only after some time had passed, and by then it was pretty hard to get judgmental towards the wounded survivors of those actions.
So the Arabs did get something of a raw deal, with most of world almost always siding with Israel whenever a dispute arose, but nothing near what happened to the Jews. An attempt was made to compensate the Palestinians for their obvious loss, by funding the refugee camps and encouraging and subsidizing them to move back to Palestine. Unfortunately their culture seems to have been twisted by their leaders to train their children only for hatred and revenge (and zero useful skills), and the camps became a breeding ground for some rather nasty aspects of human nature.
But remember, when the Arabs controlled Jerusalem, they wouldn't let the Jews get near what the Jews considered their holy places. After the Jews took Jerusalem (in 1967?), they made it a city open to all faiths. The Jews have tried pretty hard to be fair, for a bunch of people who had basically been driven crazy. The Arabs, I think through misunderstanding more than anything else, have tried hard to not get along.
Personally, I think anyone who believes in God is delusional, and a good candidate for sooner or later committing acts of extreme degenerate behavior (the Christian Nazis in WWII, Bin Laden and his Moslem crew more recently), but I try to live and let live, as long as the wackos don't hurt anybody.
- Now you can all be mad at me, and stop fighting with each other -
:-) |
