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

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (48)	7/3/2002 1:31:16 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3959

We are in the process of sorting that now since the early IDF went ahead and established a Jewish nation without addressing the second issue which is the rights of the people living in Palestine. Good, you've read it. First, a note on nomenclature: IDF stands for Israeli Defense Forces (Hebrew: Tsahal). This is the Israeli army, which only came into being in 1948. Before 1948 the Zionist affairs were handled by an NGO called the Jewish Agency. After the riots of 1929, the British permitted a limited self-defense militia to come into being, which was called the Hagannah. (The Arabs of Palestine had village-based militias under the Mufti, but they had no organization equivalent to the Jewish Agency. This was one reason why they reacted to partition and war in such a self-destructive manner. But that's another story) The problems with the Balfour declaration are twofold at bottom: First, the British implicitly promised Palestine to the Arabs after they had promised it to the Jews, and throughout the 20's and 30's tried to back away from their promise to the Jews, stopping Jewish immigration in 1935, at the very time that a million Jews were desperately trying to get out of Europe. Promising the same land twice over will naturally make for problems! Second, the whole thing was a contradiction in terms in Arab eyes. To them, you cannot have Jewish control over a single acre without prejudicing their natural and Allah-given right to rule everything. How the Jews treated the Arabs (in fact, they treated them pretty well and brought them unprecedented prosperity) is in this view, entirely besides the point. The mere existence of the Zionists was an unforgivable injury. Most Zionists were in denial about this Arab reaction for many years, saying to themselves, they will get used to us in time, what law of nature is it that the Arabs, who control 99.9% of the Middle East, cannot allow us to have our 0.1% of land? I remember Golda Meir in her autobiography saying in a kind of perplexity "We have to conclude that they just cannot forgive our existence." It was the Revisionist Zionists, led by Jabotinsky, who said, of course the Arabs react like that, most people (especially uneducated peasants) react like that to foreign interlopers in their land, we just must set up the "Iron Wall" -- that is, work at destroying their hope that they can get rid of us. Only then will they even consider working out any modus vivendi. Jabotinsky is the ideological father of the modern Likud Party.