America and Israel comparison revisited....
I think it well wothwhile to repeat the following paragraphs from that article and remember that both Israel and the US bear much in common with regard to having built something out of literally nothing, rather than having this nation handed to them on a silver platter and developed through the efforts of some other nation's foreign aid and grants.
Both are pick-up nations created out of ideas, with populations drawn from all over the globe; they are self-made nations in a world where most nations had nationhood handed to them on a silver platter. A Frenchman or Japanese is so far removed from nation-building that he no longer has any moral stake in it; the energy and struggle that created France or Japan are none of his business. He washes his hands of them. Americans and Israelis still remember that nations do not create themselves.
Proto-Americans arrived here and proto-Israelis over there uninvited, from Europe, and set about making homes for themselves in the large empty spaces between indigenous settlements. They were small minorities at first, far from home and (in many cases) in strikingly unworldly frames of mind. Europeans can't conceive of creating a nation in such a manner.
The indigenous Indians and Palestinians confronted America and Israel with roughly similar moral problems from the start. But American and Israeli settlers had to leave Europe; they felt the pressure at their backs. And once they arrived in their new lands, everywhere they looked they saw empty space, and so they naively assumed that there would be room for everybody. In the years immediately after the First World War, Martin Gilbert writes, "less than 10 percent of the land area of Palestine was under cultivation. The rest, whether stony or fertile, was uncultivated. No Arab cultivator need be dispossessed for the Zionists to make substantial land purchases. The potential of the land, on which fewer than a million people were living on both sides of the Jordan, was regarded as enormous."
WHY DOES THE United States belong to Americans? Because we built it. We conceived the idea and put it into practice bit by bit. Why does Israel belong to Israelis? True, Jews have lived there in unbroken succession since the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in the year 70. True, Jews were hounded out of their homes in Europe and the Arab Middle East, had nowhere else to go, and demanded the right to live. But ultimately, the land of Israel belongs to Israelis for the same reason America belongs to Americans: Because Israelis conceived and built it--and what you create is yours.
If you want a homeland, you must create one. You drain swamps, lay out farms, build houses, schools, roads, hospitals, playgrounds, movie theaters, office parks (and don't forget the discount souvenir shops). That's how America got its homeland, and that is why Israel belongs to the Israelis.
Very strong article and makes many points that I have strongly held myself. The Palestinians built very little in the years following the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Their Arab "brothers" cared only enough to use them as pawns in the greater game of propping up their own illegitimate regimes through hatred and fear of Israel. So far as I'm concerned the Palestinians had their chance to live cooperatively with the Jews, who had just as much right to settle on confiscated Ottoman land, as any of them had.
The Jews didn't have the right to kick them off of their land, mind you. However, we know that because the British army was governing the territory and were pro-Arab, there were likely very few dispossessed Palestinians during the pre-1948 years. Any land gained by a Jew from a Palestinian was most likely the result of a financial transaction (and even more likely one where the Palestinian didn't really have a deed to the land in the first place).
Only after 1948, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, after the Arabs attempted to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, were Palestinians dispossessed, either as a result of living on strategic ground, or because their own Arab "brethren" encouraged them to flee into the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and Syria.
But they surely did not finance or organize the building of Israel, nor the infrastructure (though they benefitted from being provided jobs as a result). That the Jews, and their European and American Financiers can lay credit to.
In fact, King Abdullah dispossessed the Palestinians far more by making them subjects of the Hashemite crown and limiting their ability to self-develop and/or profit by selling their land to the Jews. The Jordanians denied them their "nationhood" (whatever that actually is) directly through such subjugation.
Hawk@I'mbackandI'mfiesty.com |
