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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SirRealist who wrote (16622)	1/17/2002 3:49:20 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

nice post, SR. I noticed some inaccuracies in Horowitz: At the moment of Israel’s birth, Palestinian Arabs lived on roughly 90 percent of the original Palestine Mandate – in Transjordan and in the UN partition area, but also in the new state of Israel itself. There were 800,000 Arabs living in Israel alongside 1.2 million Jews. At the same time, Jews were legally barred from settling in the 35,000 square miles of Palestinian Transjordan, which eventually was renamed simply "Jordan." These numbers are almost reversed. In 1947, there were about 650,000 Jews and 1.2 million Arabs in Palestine (not including Transjordan) These numbers doubled within a couple of years once they began letting the refugees in. The Arab population in the slivers called Israel had actually more than tripled since the Zionists first began settling the region in significant numbers in the 1880s.The reason for this increase was that the Jewish settlers had brought industrial and agricultural development with them, which attracted Arab immigrants to what had previously been a sparsely settled and economically destitute area. It's hard to figure increase purely in the areas of Zionist settlment. In Palestine, Muslim population rose from about 250,000 to 1.2 million in 1880 to 1947, almost a five-fold increase. The rest seemed factually okay. The part of McConnell argument that struck me as wrong was But your treatment is one-dimensional: there were years during Oslo when the PA's behavior was quite responsible, when its suppression of those Palestinian elements that rejected Oslo and any peace arrangement were sincere and forceful. The PA's behavior seemed to correlate with the actual state of the peace process – the Palestinians acted responsibly prior to Rabin's assassination, far less so after Netanyahu succeeded him and began to stall and delay full implementation of the agreement. My response, cynical of course wherever Arafat is concerned, is of course Arafat behaved himself at first. During the first years of Oslo, he got and didn't give. He got land, guns, legitimacy, and of course he needed time to set up his security services, make sure his Tunisian cronies were in position and his own power secure. He would have had to be stupid indeed to start shooting then! But his conduct was unsatisfactory from the start -- as Horowitz noted, he kept telling people in Arabic, don't worry, this is just a truce, it's temporary. He had promised to stop incitement, to educate for peace, to recognize the existence of Israel, not by one sentence one time, but really in everyday speech. He never did any of this but everyone chose to overlook his behavior. What the US really did wrong to the Palestinians was to raise hopes then not be able to fulfill them. History tells us that dashed expectations have caused more revolutions than starving masses. Buchanan has always struck me as a caricature of a self-important caricature, and his importance to anything Middle Eastern can only be overestimated. Ouch. ;-)

To: SirRealist who wrote (16622)	1/17/2002 11:20:57 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Horowitz repeats the claim that the Israelis are the most-persecuted ethnic [group] in history Well, the obvious conclusion I would draw from this statement, if I were a Jew, is that the Jews are always hated and always persecuted, almost always unreasonably, so why bother trying to satisfy other people? It can't be done. Which conveniently allows one to live an unexamined life. One is victimized, one is a victim, therefore all criticism is unfair and should be ignored. Personally, I reject the argument that Jews have a superior claim to any land in the Middle East due to being God's Chosen People. It may be true, it may be false, but it's got nothing to do with international law and conventions. I reject the argument that Jews have a superior claim to any land in the Middle East because they lived there two thousand years ago. Over the past ten thousand years, or so, many different ethnic groups have lived there - why favor one over another? I think it's fundamentally dishonest to one the one hand claim that the land in the West Bank and Gaza belongs to the Palestinians, and on the other hand allow militant Jewish religious groups to settle there. Period. The Israelis are a little schizo about this stuff. To their credit, most of them recognize it. I hope they realize how their own actions contribute to the polarization of the situation. Once you get on the back of the tiger, it's hard to get off, but mistreating it only makes it worse.