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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (86904)	11/7/2000 10:01:42 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

These comments on the Palestinian's hatred for Israel were made in 1953 by Moshe Dayan, who I think we may suppose knew something about it. They are equally relevant today. Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home. Let us not shrink back when we see the hatred fermenting and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who sit all around us. Let us not avert our gaze, so that our hand shall not slip. This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life... I am quite sure that Dayan was familiar with the old saying "as ye sow, so also shall ye reap", and that he would be in no way surprised by what is happening now. What do you expect from the Palestinians, really? The other Arabs don't want them, and will give little more than a rhetorical flourish to help them. The Israelis are as determined as ever to build a state "as Jewish as England is English", a state where the Palestinians can never be anything more than an eternal underclass. Does it surprise you that they behave abominably? That many of them feel that it might be better to die on their feet than to live on their knees, or that they might not prevent children who cannot be offered a life worth living from going out and dying for an utterly impractical ideal? I don't approve of the Palestinians who deliberately provoke violence, but I can understand their actions. The actions of a Sharon, who is secure and privileged, who has no fear of powerlessness or want, and who retires to the rear as soon as the violence he provoked breaks out, seem far more despicable to me. Of course the Palestinians are not like us; they have traditions and ways that we despise. Do they therefore deserve life as a conquered people? Widows still burn in India, perhaps we should re-establish the Raj; Africans still mutilate the genitals of women, shall we therefore oppose independence for them, and bring back the colonial powers? If people we like steal land from people we do not like, is that somehow more justified than the opposite situation. There is, of course, no solution. Perhaps we should give Palestine back to the Palestinians and let the Jewish State be established in New York City, where the Jewish people are already more numerous, prosperous, and secure than their counterparts in Israel. Perhaps they could make the Bronx bloom, which would be an accomplishment. I assume that you can recognize a tongue in a cheek.

To: E who wrote (86904)	11/8/2000 8:21:31 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

The emotional level here seems to be reaching a point beyond my comfort level, and I am tempted to let the whole thing drop. Nonetheless, there are points seldom made that are relevant here, so I will make them, and then let the whole thing drop. The 1948 war was of course not the beginning of anything. If there was a beginning, it came in 1897, at the first Zionist Congress in Basle. The method the Zionists would use was made sufficiently clear in 1901, when Theodor Herzl presented a draft charter for the establishment of a Jewish-Ottoman Colonization Association to the Turkish authorities. The 3rd article of the proposed charter would have granted the Zionists the right to deport the native population. At this time, there were around 24,000 Jews in Palestine, most of them aging men who had come to the holy land to end their days in religious contemplation. We all know that between 1900 and 1948 some 600,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine. It is interesting to look at the method: histories often point out that the Zionists purchased virtually all of the land that they occupied. What is often not pointed out is that most of these purchases were made from absentee landlords, without the consent or often the knowledge of the peasant tenants that actually occupied the land. A good example was a single sale in 1920, in which the Sursock family, which was based in Europe and rarely if ever saw its estates in Palestine, sold holdings containing 22 villages and 8000 peasants to the Zionists. The tenants were expelled with derisory compensation (around 3.50 British pounds per head), and ended up in the growing urban shanty towns that held so many who had met the same fate. Is it any wonder that these people, the first wave of Palestinian refugees, rioted (the word "pogrom" is not quite appropriate, I think) against Jewish settlement in the mid 30's? Is it any wonder that they supported the enemy of their enemy? Of course these sales were perfectly legal, in the strict sense. But imagine the perspective of the tenants. They would of course be accustomed to land changing hands; it would matter as little to them as the difference between being Turkish subjects and British subjects. They would simply pay their percentage to a different middleman. Until one day someone showed up, with police at their beck and call, with a piece of paper that gave them the right to expel the tenants. Can you blame the tenants for being a bit perturbed? How many of the attacks against Jewish immigrants reported by Zionist historians were acts of resistance against eviction? By calling the Zionists "legal immigrants" you seem to take the position that since the British were strong enough to take Palestine from the Turks, they had the right to do any damned thing they wanted with it, and if they chose - for their own purposes, and against the will and interests of the indigenous population - to settle a foreign population there the only rightful step the locals could take would be to dry up and blow away. And of course the Palestinians rejected the partition plan. What else could they have done? It must have seemed the height of insanity to them. If someone bought your mortgage from the bank, seized your house by force, settled it with outsiders against your will, and then proposed to partition it between you and the settlers, how would you feel about it? <edit> Another quote to think about: Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine?... They treat Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unscrupulously deprive them of their rights, insult them without cause, and even boast of such deeds; and none opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination" That was written by Ahad Aham, a Jew and a Zionist... in 1891.