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

To: neolib who wrote (198189)	8/19/2006 11:30:06 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

I could care less about the state boundaries. The population is what counts. Jews were largely imported into Israel from both Europe and Arab states. lol. The population of what? The Ottoman Empire was the political entity. "Palestine" wasn't a country, "Palestineans" weren't a "group". Damascus was the most important city in the area politically, which is why Jordan, Lebanon and Israel were never on any Syrian maps--as far as they were concerned, the whole area should be Syrian. Want to agree with them? Shall we take a vote of everyone in those "countries"? Why do each those 4 countries have "legitimacy"? Why shouldn't they just be Syrian, as they arguably were prior to WWI (to the extent that they were anything other than part of the Ottoman Empire, at any rate)? When Jews came to the area in the late 19th and first quarter of the 20th C--before the Ottoman Empire was broken up--it was a non-event for the most part. People come, people leave. They had permission to come. The first riots over Jewish immigration occurred after the break-up of the Empire, in 1921 I think it was, when political groups were jockeying for position in the suddenly very uncertain political situation. There were 000s of Jews there at the time, which is why the Arabs were making a fuss--Britain was giving away new "Sultanships" to their favorite Arabs, and had in 1917-18 double promised (to groups of Jewish and Arab supporters in the war) the land that eventually became Israel--so some ambitious Arabs who wanted their little sultanship riled up the masses. The solution to the problem that was eventually adopted by the UN was the two state solution, which made no one happy but which Ben Gurion's backers forced unhappy Jews to accept. Unhappily, no one forced unhappy Arabs to accept it, and allow both groups to live in both territories. Yeah, I know, it was all the Jews' fault. They pull strings and the world jumps to their tune, lol. and just one more thing--your cavalier "I could care less about state's boundaries" shows how you lack historical perspective on the very idea of a state. It is a common fault today; indeed, has been a common for at least a century now, and produces a great deal of confusion. It is too long a story to go into here, but try reading about the Treaty of Westphalia and the 30 Years' War. Now there was a war without any enforceable rules or quartermaster generals--a complete disaster where a third of the population of central Europe was killed, a huge number of cities looted and burned to the ground and that led to the above mentioned treaty and the creation of the modern nation-state and firm boundaries. One longish but good book to start with is The Shield of Achilles by Phillip Bobbit. Gives a lot of background information for those who don't know much about early modern Europe, a group that includes most Americans.