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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (50105)	10/7/2002 10:43:44 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Jerusalem has had a Jewish plurality or majority since the eighteenth century. Jews were definitely there before the State of Israel, who do think fought the War of Independence in 1948? I don't have the reference with me now, but my understanding is that the Jewish population of Palestine before the first aliyeh was in the range of 20-30,000, most of whom were elderly and and come there purely for religious reasons. They bought their land and reclaimed most of it from wasteland. We've been through this before. Most of the land purchased was not wasteland, it was productive agricultural land. The land was purchased from absentee owners; tenants were evicted with minimal compensation, often none at all. It was these evictees - the first generation of Palestinian refugees - that provided the willing bodies for the early anti-immigration movement. The relocation of a large Jewish population to a small, occupied, portion of land in which most of them had no cultural or historic roots was an astonishing act of colonial hubris; like many other acts of colonial hubris (think of the British re-introduction of French forces to Vietnam after WW2), it has created a seemingly unstoppable spiral of violence. You can't move populations around like pieces on a chessboard and expect to maintain peace. It doesn't work. Unfortunately Balfour, Herzl et al failed to understand this, and those who had nothing to do with the decisions are paying the price.