You always speak as if not only was the attachment of Jews to Israel farcical, but as if there were no Jews in Israel, when Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority or plurality since the Eighteenth Century at least, in modern times.
I did not say the attachment was farcical, I said that it was not sufficient to support a territorial claim, and that it was only considered sufficient because of the sympathy British Christians has for Judaism.
Jerusalem is a very small part of the area in question. The figure I have for 1882, as good a date as any for the start of Zionist-inspired immigration, is 25,000 Jews and roughly 4-500,000 Arabs.
As for the land being "somebody else's home", it was the Turks who ruled, or rather misruled the land, whose capital was in Damascus. The local people never had sovereignty.
Whether or not the local people had sovereignty is completely irrelevant. There was a local population, and that population did not want to live in a Jewish State – not hard to understand, since they weren’t Jewish. When a group of colonists tried to seize sovereignty, this population fought against them.
The Zionists didn’t have sovereignty at that time either. Why should their claim to establish a State in that territory on their terms have been considered superior to the claim to self-determination of the existing population? Shouldn't the desires of the existing population have had some place in the mixture? |
