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

To: E. T. who wrote (1716)	3/24/2002 1:55:24 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 32591

ET, there are always two positions on Israel/Palestine. From the names you cite, it sounds like you are reading only the revisionists historians, without having read the standard historians they were fighting, or those historian's responses. You've been listening mostly to one side. If you're trying to get to the truth I think it's important to look at as many contemporaneous reports as possible, before people had a chance to rewrite history to suit their political positions. What we know is that everybody with money cleared out of the country between the partition vote in Nov 47 and the end of the Mandate in 48. Large sections of the Arab populations certainly did evacuate at this time. For example, all but 3,000 of Haifa's 70,000 Arabs evacuated in a very orderly fashion (the British lent them trucks). Golda Meir in her memoirs says that she and Ben Guion stood on the beach for hours telling them not to go, they had nothing to be afraid of, and were told 'we know we don't have to fear the Hagannah. But we have to go. We'll be back' Meaning, after the Arab victory. If the Israelis tell each other that the Arabs all left voluntarily, it's because that's what most of the Jewish population saw happening. In other places, there was a combination of general panic, intensified when the fantasy victory that the Arabs believed in collapsed, plus Israeli policy in certain locations. The Arabs naturally expected that the Jews would do to them in victory what they would have done to the Jews in victory, i.e. kill them and drive them out. This also increased the panic. Well, you make it sound now that Arabs are not people, that the populationn that was indigenous to Israel, no longer had rights because of treaties signed by nonrepresentatives The Jews are also indigenous to Israel, you know. And at least half the Arabs showed up in Palestine on the heels of Zionist development. Palestine was a very sparsely populated part of Syria in the the nineteenth century. Every state in the Mideast got arranged by colonial rule and alliances with local rulers; the difference in Palestine was that the British promised it to both the Jews and the Arabs at various times. There wasn't one representative government anywhere, except for the one the Jews made for themselves in the Yishuv. If I leave a war torn region, it doesn't follow that I lose my property rights as a result. Generally it does, especially if your side started and then lost the war. Did the German refugees get their property back in Poland, East Prussia, and the Sudatenland? No. Are they going to? No way. I guess the Serbs were trying to do the same to Kosovars, recently, boot them out of the country and keep them out, take away their papers, bulldoze their homes and now they have nothing This is wrong on both counts. First, there is no comparison between the Serb's pure aggression on a non-threatening Kosovo and the Jews repelling four invading Arab armies who would have massacred them if they had won. Second, the Kosovars have their homes back -- thanks to the US. Finkelstien writes, someplace I can't remember where, that for the indigenous Palestinians at the time, they accepted the Jewish influx as something they could do nothing about and so for the most part accepted it. Total bs. The Arabs attacked and marauded the Jewish settlement continually; but the Jews were tough cookies and had acquired their land legally (the local effendi made a killing selling the Jews worthless desert and swamp, which the Jews reclaimed). Then the Mufti organized riots and massacres, first in 1920, then larger in 1929, then again in the Arab Revolt of 1936. The Arabs just never had the organization of the Jews, and the Mufti's assasination campaign (against other Arabs) kept Palestinian Arab society disorganized. Also, the Jews had motivation; for them, it was win or die. This wasn't true for the Arabs. As many Jewish folks got their swiss bank money that had be misappropriated and in fact, their is a movement for certain German firms to pay for the labour Jews were forced to provide. Perhaps reparations are in order. You're a little confused. Germany paid reparations to Israel in the 1950s. The Jews never got squat from the Swiss, first most accounts had intermediaries with access to them (moving money was illegal in the 1930s) who took all the money, and when that wasn't true, the Swiss just stonewalled -- paperwork please? you say the account owner is dead? where is the death certificate? They were unpersuaded by the response that Auschwitz did not provide death certificates. Israel has offered reparations to the displaced Arab refugees since 1949. These have generally been refused as part of the Arab program to refuse to recognize Israel. The refugee problem was deliberately kept alive and made as bad as possible to provide grist for the mill in the war against Israel.