The rest was taken with terror and pens...non-Arab pens!
Len.. are you including the West Bank in your calculation?
And btw, it's not like the Israelis had a monopoly on land grabs and using coercion and force to take land from people they considered to be enemies.
Especially when the Arabs were doing more than their part to incite race baiting and hate-mongering, something that continues to this day with Iran's "President" Ahmadinejad threatening to wipe Israel off the map.
The reality of history is that once the Ottoman Empire was defeated, the British and French followed historical precedent and decided how to carve up the spoils. Nothing knew about this. They did the same thing with the German colonies in the Pacific, as well as in Africa.
The fact that Arab landholders were, quite likely, individuals who usurp that land from other poorer, Arabs lacking deeds to the property, does not make them somehow more entitled to the land. They merely switched colonial masters from Turkish to British and French, and as such (right or wrong) they decided who owned the land and under what terms it could be sold.
We need to get past this whole cyclical, and unproductive, argument of who did what to whom.
We need to insure that any Palestinian state does not facilitate or harbor totalitarian (secular or Islamic) values, or hostilities towards neighbors, to include Israel.
We need to have the extremists on both sides overshadowed by people willing to live in peace with each other, sharing a mutually beneficial economic relationship and more focused upon the future than the past.
But it takes two parties to arrive at any proper compromise. And so long as Israel is a democratic society, with free and fair elections, as well as extending citizenship to non-Jews (20% of Israel's voting citizens are Arab), they deserve to be defended against non-democratic and antagonistic enemies.
This is the challenge, from my perspective. The Palestinians are a few short steps from statehood, but now they have to prove to the rest of the world that they deserve to have it.
Hawk |
