Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : WAR on Terror. Will it engulf the Entire Middle East? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E. T. who wrote (1698)	3/23/2002 1:09:14 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32591

Are you belittling the suffering of the Palestinians, because they were backward, nomadic not technologically or western educated. Why do you say that, how is that relevant It is relevant to how they lost the war, and why they left. Their society was nowhere near as organized as Jews; this had to do both with the fact that they were not Western as with the fact that their leader, the Mufti, had consolidated his power on village fighters and a policy of assassination (it's estimated he killed about 2000 opponents in the 20's and 30's). Therefore, those who should have been running Arab Palestinian society were terrorized; when war approached, they left (over 200,000 evacuated before the end of the Mandate). The uneducated villagers who were left were highly susceptible to panic. I do not belittle the sufferings of the Palestinians, but I am trying to put it into context, a context which your Palestinian sources are trying their best to ignore or rewrite. The unspoken assumption is that the Jews have an obligation to behave with perfect morality in all circumstances, an obligation which the Arabs do not share. The Arabs certainly do not offer to pay reparations or take back the Jewish refugees from the conflict. The context was a war for the land. If the Jews had lost, they would have been killed or driven off. This is what happened in all places where they did lose the land, like the Old City of Jerusalem, or the Gush Etzion towns. The war did not end in 1949; there was merely a truce, with an ongoing state of war. Ben Gurion, who was already swamped with Jewish refugees, decided he could not afford to take back Arab refugees. There was no peace. Who knew how many of the refugees would be holding guns when the war broke out again? Because Israel is more powerful now, it's easy to forget that it was not more powerful then; it was only the disorganization and unpreparedness of the Arabs that let it win the war, and it cost 1% of the Jewish population to do so. There were many transfers of population in the wars of the 1940's. Fourteen million people became refugees in the partition of India; they all got resettled in the new India and Pakistan. 300,000 Jewish refugees from Europe and over 500,000 Jewish refugees from the Arab lands were resettled in Israel. Only the Arab refugees from Palestine were never resettled, quite deliberately. Indeed, the immeidate aftermath of the war, the Arab countries were concerned to prevent the refugees from returning, lest this imply recognition of the new state of Israel.