>>Yet,in those or other cases, I do not know of a whole country being given to the people who were killed and facing extermination. I am not saying giving the Jews Israel was wrong but you make it sound like it was some kind of divine right, or a forgone conclusion since so many died during the Holocaust. I do think you are right that guilt was the motivator but that doesn't make the Jews more deserving than others who have or are going through similar circumstances.
Ted, said land was a territory that belonged to England, not the Arabs. It actually was desolate and not many people lived there until after World War I. Mark Twain toured it in the 1800s, and he was shocked at the fact that no one lived in the "Holy Land".
Z, come on........England annexed the land, I think, during the time of the crusades; they were a colonial power...one that we revolted against due to their heavy handed ways. The fact is is that there already were Palestinians living on that land when the Zionists began to settle it in the twenties. Do you think the average Palestinian whose family has lived in what is now Israel for over 500 years gives a rat's ass what M. Twain's perception was of the Holy Lands or what England's illegal claims to the land are?
In England's vision, the Jews were to get not only what is Israel proper now, all of Palestine, which includes the currently disputed territories and what is now Jordan, but when it came down to it in '47, Jordan had already been given away (in the '20s, to the original King Abdullah in return for quelling an uprising against the British) by the British to the Arabs, and the Jews got about half of what was left over, and the rest was divided up between Syrian and Jordan. Jordan is a Hashemite kingdom- Abdullah and his men were brought in from the outside to rule over a Palestinian majority, and remains the same today.
And who was England to determine the destiny of this region? Can you not for a moment see the other side of this argument? I don't know where you live but say its Atlanta. Can you imagine the outrage if the US gov't stepped into Atlanta and gave the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta to Georgia's blacks as reparations for the slavery years? Atlanta whites would be up in arms.
Well, England stepped in and made these arbitrary divisions and expected everyone to be happy with them. Of course, the England of 1947 was still very much a colonial power and still very much practised a noblesse oblige form of diplomacy. And because of its guilt over the Holocaust gave a portion of this land to the Jews as some form of backhanded reparation. It was backhanded because at that time Israel was this mostly barren [except for the north]plot of dirt with no oil or other natural resources to speak of other than the Mediterranean Sea. So, in a sense, Israel was the equivalent of giving someone second clothing as a Xmas present. That's what England and the West felt was sufficient return for the loss of 6 million lives.
Why would Israel deserve the land any less than the Hashemites do?
Because according to US real estate law.........continuous occupation of the land allows for squatters' rights......rights that the Palestinians got screwed out of by England's arbitrary division of the land.
By the way, you might ask why the Palestinians haven't revolted against the Hashemites the way they have against the Israelis. They actually have. Arafat tried to overthrow King Hussein in the late '60s, and King Hussein killed over 5,000 Palestinians. The Palestinians haven't tried that again. Israel would never do anything like that to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians know it. That's why the Palestinians aren't afraid of Israel and feel free to keep attacking.
At the same time, Hussein became more enlightened.....he married American and his heir..his son...is even more enlightened and is putting into place significant reforms in Jordan. As a consequence, Jordan is a speck of hope in an otherwise dark situation.
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