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

To: Dayuhan who wrote (60682)	12/9/2002 9:43:59 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It is nonsense to say that Jewish claims to Palestine were purely religious, by juxtaposing hypothetical claims by Phillistines or Canaanites. However important religion was in preserving the historical community of Jews, Jews existed to make historical claims in a way that Phillistines and Canaanites did not. Israel, and later, Judea, did exist. Israel disappeared after Babylonian exile, but Judea was revived, and eventually fell into the hands of the Romans, where it was absorbed into the administrative district of Palestine. After an attempt to cast off Roman rule, the Second Temple was destroyed and the Jews were dispersed around the periphery of the Empire. This was a traumatic event in the history of the Jewish people, exceeded only by the Holocaust, and shaping their history. Your cavalier dismissal of their claim to an historical homeland is absurd. The only objection to righting that wrong is the harm done to contemporaries. The "Palestinians" never existed as a unique political or cultural entity. Their political aspirations were expressed in terms of pan- Arabism, primarily. Under existing rules, Jews had a right to immigrate, and most of them had aspirations for only a small portion of Palestine. (Jordan took about 80% of the territory when it declared independence). The only major question, then, was one of population, that is, rules governing immigration and efforts to buy out Arabs. These were the peaceful means that Zionists envisioned to secure a Jewish State. All the Arabs had to do was to fight politically and diplomatically against Jewish advantages, and to refuse to sell, or to make a counter effort to buy out Jews. After all, a lot of refugees were not deeply committed to Israel, and might gladly have emigrated elsewhere if they had the means. There was nothing in the rational situation to explain the rise of bellicosity, especially the cheering for Hitler. You try to focus on the initial hostility of Palestinians to Jewish settlement. But initially, there was not so much hostility, Arabs were glad to find buyers for their land, and often sold off very poor land, only to be shocked when the Zionists managed to irrigate and fertilize it, and make it workable. Jewish investment in Palestine generally made it more economically productive, and raised the living standard for everyone. It took Lawrence of Arabia to make the Arabs fight the Ottomans. There was no anti- colonialist movement among Arabs against the Mandatory authority, which, after all, created the rules under which Jews immigrated, and where a foreign power administering "their" territory. Why pick on the Jews, especially beginning at a time when they fell far short of their goal of attaining a majority, and when the British foreign office was more prone to support the Arab point of view than that of Jews? Remember, the British limited Jewish immigration out of Nazi Europe, and refused to allow the relocation of many displaced persons of Jewish descent to Palestine, at the behest of the Arab powers. No, the "Palestinians" were not having a "natural reaction" against colonialism, they were getting caught up in the fervor of pan- Arabism and the rise of Ba'athism.....