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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (2679)	2/11/2004 9:53:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

Its irrelevant who occupies a land? Its irrelevant to the point about who controlled the land. You made a specific statement. " From 700 AD to the 20th century, the land was ruled by Muslims" that was the point that is irrelevant to the larger question (as well as not entirely true), your statement about "it was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs" is irrelevant to the debate over your earlier statement not irrelevant to the larger question. And most of the Palestinians don't descend from people who lived in the area through most of that time and when it was ruled by Muslims there was no call for Palestinian state or thought of a Palestinian nation. All of this isn't an argument that they should not have a state or that there is no Palestinian identity now (and of course it also isn't an argument for such a state). If that is your point, then please explain to me why we have given the Indians billions and many reservation acres? Other then their ability to assimilate into a large, rich, powerful, democratic, and relatively free country, they got a worse deal then what is on offer for the Palestinians. The land was never theirs to control......they took it. Like Americans and Australians and others from the natives, like Russia from Poland and Poland (through the force of the USSR) from Germany. Actually if you go back further like every country in the world from the people who controlled it previously. Are we all going to state blowing up busses and pizza places and discos? And the Israelis will get it........much worse than what's going on currently. Maybe they will. If they do it will probably be returned 3 times as hard on the Palestinians and we will have another generation or more of fighting rather then peace for both sides. Most Indians died from European diseases, not slaughter. True but many of them where slaughtered and the rest largely pushed off their land in what would now be called ethnic cleansing. however, Indians occupied only a fraction of the land. Their overall populations were very small because they were nomadic hunters and not farmers. And as nomadic hunters they had a large range that was theirs to use. We moved in and took it away. While they got screwed, its not because of the amount of land they got or the money. They were screwed by the white man's biases towards them that would not allow them to progress or to practice their culture as it had been practiced previously. If you don't count disease (which was their biggest problem) they mostly got screwed by being on the losing side of wars, and by slaughters and forced marches to reservations which gave them not only much less land to use but also often much worse land. The biggest way they get screwed today is by the combinations of Federal bureaucracy with often corrupt or incompetent local Indian leadership that together put in place a lot of barriers to business and that keep most on the reservations very poor. "The Palestinians certainly would not want assimilation in to a Jewish controlled state." You've got it very wrong. Its the Israelis who are terrified of the Arabs getting assimilated into Israel. Notice the above bolded part. I didn't bold it when I first typed it because I didn't think it would be necessary If the Indians/Native Americans would have been the majority in the US I doubt they would have been allowed to assimilate esp, if they had led a long campaign of terrorism. The Jews don't want the Palestinians to assimilate either because they fear the Palestinians getting control. My point was not that the Palestinians where rejecting some supposed fair offer of assimilation but rather that the conditions (demographic situation, and a stronger hatred between the two parties) in Israel/Palestine don't give them the same opportunity that the Indians/Native Americans had here and that if the Palestinians would be a small minority in a merged country that most of them wouldn't want that option. Tim