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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (50106)	10/7/2002 11:13:41 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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. I have seen figures closer to fifty thousand (they were rising slowly throughout the nineteenth century). It was mostly a religious community, in the four "sacred cities" -- Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias -- but it was a community and had been there continuously except when it had been slaughtered by Crusaders. Most of the land purchased was not wasteland, it was productive agricultural land There was a great deal of both. Large tracts of Palestine had become wasteland by the mid-nineteenth century due to the low population of the region and general Ottoman misrule. The Jews usually paid off the tenants, though they had no legal obligation to do so. Why this is the Jews' fault for buying the land and not the landowner's fault for exploiting their tenants and making a fortune selling their tenants' land, I have yet to figure out. Oh, I forgot, it's always the "colonialists" fault, they have no business buying land from the owners or disturbing the romantic and traditional feudal arrangements. Excuse me, don't real colonialists usually conquer the land with the aid of native princes? 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; I find it an act of hubris to claim that Jews have no cultural or historic roots in Jerusalem or Judea. I should think that that would be one point that was not under dispute (except by Arafat, of course). By the same token, would it be correct to state that most Arabs have no cultural or historic roots in Mecca or Arabia? 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. Two poionts: First, Balfour, Weizman, et. al had no intention of moving anybody, they intended to live side by side with the Arabs. It was the Arabs who decided that this was intolerable and that negotiating any sort of modus vivendi was out of the question. Well, there were prominent members of the Nashishibi clan who were in favor of negotiating a partition, but the Mufti had them assassinated. Second, lots of populations have been moved and peace recovered. A million Muslims from Bulgaria, a million Greeks from Turkey, 600,000 Jews from the Arab lands, three million Germans from the Sudatenland, 14 million refugees from the partition of India, to name just a few. Only the Palestinians became permanent refugees, only the Jews were expected not just to take Jewish refugees but all the Arab ones as well. Why is that I wonder?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (50106)	10/7/2002 11:23:07 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Can you argue with this? What are they fighting for? BY EVELYN GORDON What are the Palestinians really fighting for? Anyone who wants an honest answer to this question should study the list of the intifada's "achievements" offered by various Palestinian public figures in honor of its second anniversary last week. Dr. Ali Sha'ath, the son of Palestinian Authority cabinet minister Nabil Sha'ath, for instance, told a conference in Abu Dhabi two weeks ago that the intifada has three principal achievements to its credit: It has undermined Israel's security, weakened Israel's economy and caused Jews to leave the country. An unnamed Palestinian public figure interviewed by Ha'aretz columnist Ze'ev Schiff last week offered a similar list of achievements. First, he said, the Palestinians have gotten better at killing Israelis: Whereas in the early days of the intifada, dead Palestinians outnumbered dead Israelis 11 to 1, the ratio is now down to 3 to 1. And second, Israel's status in the court of international public opinion has plummeted. What is noteworthy about these lists is that all of the cited "achievements" are Israeli losses rather than Palestinian gains. The speakers did not, for instance, claim that the intifada has brought the Palestinians any closer to their declared goal of an independent state -- largely because, in honesty, they could not. Two years ago, Israel and the United States jointly offered a Palestinian state on all of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank, including east Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Today, Israel is refusing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority at all, and the world's only superpower is backing this refusal. Nor is it possible to claim that the intifada has increased the Palestinians' personal well-being. Over the last two years, gross domestic product has fallen more than 50 percent, unemployment is approaching the 50% mark, and the Israel Defense Forces' reentry into the cities and towns it left seven years ago has imposed a daily burden of roadblocks and curfews unparalleled during the 28 years of Israeli rule that preceded the PA's establishment. Yet despite this, a survey published last week by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center found that 71% of Palestinians think the intifada's achievements are sufficiently significant to justify continuing the violence. THE ONLY conclusion to be drawn from this concatenation of facts is chilling: To the Palestinians, the goal of creating their own state takes second place to the goal of undermining the Jewish one. Only this can explain why the list of "achievements" cited by Palestinian public figures has nothing to do with improved Palestinian prospects but everything to do with deteriorating Israeli ones: the worsened personal security, the economic crisis, the international contumely. And only this can explain why an overwhelming majority of Palestinians favor continuing a policy that has made their personal lives a misery and distanced the achievement of statehood. Israelis, Americans and Europeans have frequently found the ongoing Palestinian support for the violent conflict inexplicable. Over and over during the last two years, statesmen, journalists and ordinary people have asked the same question: How is it that the Palestinians have failed to realize that violence undermines their cause? But if the "cause" is to hurt Israel rather than to promote the Palestinian welfare, the deep commitment to the intifada makes perfect sense. The "achievements" cited by the Palestinians are very real: Israelis' sense of personal security has deteriorated, Israel's economy has suffered and its international status has plummeted. If those are the goals, the intifada is a superb tactic for attaining them. The assumption that the Palestinians simply do not understand what the violence has cost them is extraordinarily patronizing. It implies that an entire society is too stupid to grasp such obvious facts as that they are personally less well off today than they were two years ago, that they have lost much of the sympathy they once received from the world's only superpower, or that Israelis are much less willing than before to allow a Palestinian state within shooting distance of their major population centers. That this assumption has nevertheless gained such widespread credence is largely due to the fact that the alternative -- that the Palestinians understand full well what they are doing -- is simply too disturbing for most people to contemplate. But it is time for Israel and the world to face up to what the Palestinians are really saying: that for an overwhelming majority of them, the "achievements" of undermining Israel's economy, security and international support are worth the steep personal and national price they have paid. And as long as this is so, the idea that a Palestinian state would end the conflict is a pipe dream -- because the Palestinian goal is not a thriving Palestine alongside a thriving Israel, but a dying Israel, even at the price of a dying Palestine alongside it. The writer is a veteran journalist and commentator. jpost.com