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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (28902)	2/10/2004 11:39:52 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793699

I dunno, Steven. I'd go along with you if you wanted to blame politics, e.g., the Balfour Declaration, which always seemed to me like a mighty thin reed to hang anything on, given the position that the British Empire was in at the time, not to mention the iffy-ness of relying on the British Empire as justification for anything. And I have zero interest in the Biblical arguments in favor of Zionism and the Jewish State of Israel. But buying land by paying the fair market value to a willing seller with a good and marketable title -- that, I cannot condemn.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (28902)	2/11/2004 12:16:36 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793699

Evicted with minimal compensation, the former tenants generally ended up in urban shantytowns, with no employable skills. Why do you make so much of the plight of these people? Yes, they had it rough. However, there were not that many of them (much of the land the Zionists bought was previously wasteland), and they were compensated, something that nobody else would have bothered to do, as there was no legal obligation. As you point out, they were merely cannon fodder to their leaders, not controllors or even catalysts of the situation. What would have gone differently if not a single fellahin had been evicted by the Zionists? Is it really your argument that it would have made a difference? It was the leadership looked at the situation and decided that their strategic goal was not achieving a tolerable political situation for everybody (something that the Brits always supported; the Balfour declaration spoke vaguely of a Jewish "homeland" with protection for the rights of Arabs), but destroying the Jews absolutely. Did this leadership ever care two straws for the welfare of the fellahin? the assumption that Arabs would be evicted from the entire area once the Zionists achieved sovereignty was only natural Leaping from the idea that since the Jews evicted some tenants when they bought land to the idea that if they did achieve sovereignty they would evict everybody, is quite a stretch. It certainly was the opposite of the demographic pattern during the years of Zionist development, when the Arab population of Palestine grew sharply, and fastest of all the areas of heavy Jewish immigration (eg. the Arab population of Haifa tripled from 1922 to 1947, while the population of Nablus only grew 50%). Though arguments that the Arabs feared expulsion do have considerable weight on their side; it is natural to project onto others what you would do yourself. However, it was the strategic decision of the Mufti not to brook any ideas of negotiation with the Zionists, and he made sure his policies were followed by the Arabs of Palestine by having his opposition assassinated. In all reasonableness, you must assign responsibility for that strategic decision to the man who made it, not to some 'catalyst' twenty years before. The landlords enclosed the commons in England too, and drove off the surplus tenantry. In England it helped generate the Industrial Revolution. Was that all the doing of the landlords who enclosed the commons, or were more factors involved, and more decisions? I've never claimed that the land transfers were illegal or immoral. Factually, however, they had consequences Factually, everything has consequences. You just keep harping on the cosmic quality of Jewish guilt in buying land for Zionist development because you buy the Arab argument that only Arabs have a right to live there or have sovereignty. No other rationale makes sense. On the scale of post-WWII population transfers and national creations, Israel was quite small, not even in the same league as the partition of India/Pakistan or the movement of German populations back into Germany from the Sudatenland or Konigsberg.