Please read this article. Until the Arabs/Palestinians get over the idea that they are going to destroy Israel and the Jews, they will not find peace within themselves or elsewhere.
sfgate.com;
Scumbria, and I say to you, how can they find peace when they have remained homeless for over 60 years? The article you've posted tells the Israeli side well. However, there is another side......the Palestinian side, and that side needs to be heard too. That's why I have gone through the article point by point.
Views on the Middle East
Mideast struggle was never about land
David Horowitz Friday, April 26, 2002
FROM HIS besieged Ramallah headquarters, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called for "millions of martyrs to march to Jerusalem -- this is our destiny." Arafat's agenda is a wave of suicide bombers to obliterate the "Zionist presence" in Islam. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell does not seem to understand this, nor do most of the nation's press. But it is the meaning of Palestinian deeds. It is what is intended by the targeting of Jewish children and their mothers. It is what is meant by Palestinian maps that omit the state of Israel.
Arafat is a very destructive idiot...no question. In fact, I think both he and Sharon need to be taken out of the picture......give them a football field in which they can carry out their decades old blood feud.
If there is any hope in this mess, the US and other nations need to get both Israel and Palestine beyond Sharon and Arafat.
It is what was proclaimed in the rejection of a peace plan that included the vast majority of Palestinian negotiating demands. It is what is openly stated in the Palestinian Liberation Organization's "covenant," which calls for the obliteration of the "Zionist entity." It is what Palestine's spiritual leaders, the Grand Muftis of Jerusalem, preach. This is the Palestinian agenda:
the elimination of Jewry from the Middle East.
This issue is brought up by Israel repeatedly. Do you honestly believe that the Palestinians believe that they can get Israel out of the Middle East? Israel is the region's military superpower......the other Arab countries are afraid to attack her but yet you think the Palestinians are willing and able to do just that....the argument is ludicrous and would be laughable were it not said in a very serious, hushed tones.
Israel claiming this as a justifiable argument for their moving into the WB and Gaza is the same as the US squashing Cuba because Castro has threatened to destroy the US.
Do you buy this argument from either the US or Israel? I don't.
The Middle East struggle has never been about a Palestinian state or land.
It isn't about the land? I don't know about you but if my family had owned or farmed land or ran a business for a couple of centuries in the same place, I would be pretty p*ssed when I was forced to vacate that land.
Frankly, this is another Israeli argument that I have trouble buying. If it isn't about the land, then it must be about religion. And if its about religion, then the Palestinians are simply racists, and they aren't worth the time of day.
Again......I can't buy this argument anymore....its mostly always about the land......and the money.
The Palestinians were given both the West Bank and a state in 1947 -- and they rejected both, declaring a war on Israel that has lasted more than 50 years.
That's right......they were told by their good Arab friends to leave their homes; that they [the Arabs] would kick ass and the Zionists would be forced to vacate Palestine, and then the Palestinians could move back in and resume their lives. What the Arabs didn't realize was that the new state of Israel had already amassed an army 100k strong, many of whom were from the Yishuv units in Europe. In addition, just before war broke out, the Yishuvs had received a major shipment of arms from Czechoslavakia that provided additional fortification for the fledging Israeli army.......the Arabs had an army of 55k.......they didn't stand a chance.
And the Palestinians got screwed, the Israelis wouldn't let them come back home and so they were put into refugee camps........so much for the new Palestinian state.
Israel occupies a minuscule 1 percent of the Arab Middle East and less than 10 percent of the entire area mandated as Palestine by the British, which was not even a political entity -- let alone a nation -- when the Jews were granted a sliver of land.
So what.........another Israeli defense. First, the Palestinians were mostly unsophisticated farmers/sheepherders. Yes, they had not formed a nation....again, so what?
That does not change the fact that they had lived there for centuries and certainly had squatters' rights.......a legimate provision of English and American Law. They were entitled to the land.......it was theirs until the British interceded and promised a portion of it to the Zionists.
And yes, Israel got only 1% but it was the creme......mts in the north with water, a long coastline on the Mediterranean providing good shipping access, a good port in Haifa and the most arable land in all of Transjordan.
It was just a "mandate" the British carved out of the former Turkish empire. Jordan -- a nation also created by Britain -- occupies 80 percent of the original British Mandate. Nearly 70 percent of Jordan's inhabitants are Palestinian Arabs. Yet Jordan is not the target of a Palestine liberation movement.
That's right........Jordan also screwed the Palestinians and massacred thousands. The Palestinians are derelict for not holding Jordan responsible but is that surprising? The Hassadim are not all that enamored with the Jewish state but can you imagine them siding with Egypt against Israel?
How is this possible? It is possible because the Hashemite minority that rules Jordan is not Jewish. The Middle East War is not about land and not about injustice. It is a religious war against the Jews.
Here we go again.........because the Palestinians are not attacking their Arab bros, it must be religion and not the land. BS.......again........its all about the land.
In 1949, Jordan annexed the entire West Bank and held it for 18 years.
Yes, Jordan took that liberty after Ben-Gurion and King Abdullah had put together a peace treaty...essentially giving tacit approval to Jordan to annex the West Bank. I am sure Ben-Gurion did that to keep the peace in the region.
The Arabs then made and lost a war against Israel, and refused to make peace. The Jews kept the West Bank to prevent the Arabs -- in the absence of a peace -- from using it as a staging area for a third war. Not once in these 18 years was there a complaint from the Palestinians or the Arab states about the injustice of Jordanian occupation of the West Bank. Not once was there an outcry that Jordan had annexed the Palestine "nation." That is because the Palestinians consider themselves Arabs and Muslims first and foremost, and because being "Palestinian" is a remote afterthought.
Yes, and there is also the argument that the Palestinians see themselves as southern Syrians. I see this as another one of those tangents that gets everyone off the main subject. Besides, I don't see it as a valid argument.
After all, the truth is the Zionists had no history of statehood......should they have been denied their quest for statehood? If we didn't deny them on that basis, how can the Palestinians be denied their quest?
Zionist settlers first began arriving in the already existing Jewish communities of Palestine in the 1880s. They were hoping to end the persecution of the Jews, which was a result of their stateless condition and their expulsion 2000 years ago from Judea and Samaria, which is today known as the West Bank. At the time of the Zionists arrival, there was no Palestinian nation in the region.
Not formally but informally......because people don't incorporate legally does not make their sense of home less valid. Incorporation is a simply a legal validation of a place but is completely unnecessary to give someone a feeling of home.
Today, more than half the land given to the Jews under the British Mandate was desert. But within a generation the Jews had made their desert bloom. Today, the boundary between Israel and Syria is still referred to as the "green line," because the Israeli side has become fertile ground while the Arab side is still a desert. The Jews also built the only industrial and democratic nation in the entire Middle East.
Yes, the Israelis have done an incredible job......they are to be commended. I am not proposing that the Israelis give up Israel.
The only tolerant society in the heart of Islam. To this day, Israeli Arabs have more rights than the inhabitants of any other state in the Arab Middle East.
Yes, but to this day, they don't have as many rights as the other Israelis.
What is the crime of the Jews -- a tolerant, democratic people -- that they should not have been welcomed into this desert from the beginning? Their crime is that they are heathens in the empire of Islam. The Palestinian terrorists and their sponsors, Arafat and the Palestine Authority, orchestrate the genocidal agenda. There will be no peace until they are defeated or destroyed.
Their crime is that of usurpers....interlopers. They were the newbies on the block. The Israelis choose to ignore that aspect of their history. And yet its key......without their acknowledgement that they in a sense "pushed" out the Palestinians, albeit legally in most cases, then there will be no peace.
David Horowitz is president of the Los Angeles-based Center of Popular Culture and the editor in chief of www.frontpagemag.com
Mazel-tov!!!
ted |
