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

To: neolib who wrote (225331)	3/28/2007 12:44:24 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

A white enclave in South Africa would have been small compared to all of Africa as well. What you need to do is compare Jewish land to Pal land within Palestine. Why? The conflict has never been inside the borders of Palestine. There were no Arab Palestinians when the Brits drew the borders in 1918 or 1922; as far as they were concerned, the area that is today Jordan, Israel and the territories was all part of Southern Syria, and you can see that by the way the conflict progressed. Did the Arabs of Palestine fight on their own for Palestine? No indeed, they hardly fought at all, in fact most of them just ran to other countries (what the Brits called the 'effendi class' evacuated before May 1948); the Arabs of all the neighboring countries fought for them. As the King of Jordan declared at the time, he considered that Palestine and Transjordan were the same country. Syria certain feels that it should still be part of Syria, as should Lebanon. So why does Israel get to fight all the neighbors, whose aim was to destroy Israel and divide it between themselves (you may be sure that there would have been no Arab Palestine had the Arabs won any of the wars, just as there was no whisper of Palestine when Jordan & Egypt held the territories), but when we look at the nature of the conflict, then and only then, we must look inside the borders of Mandatory Palestine and nowhere else? At the very least, the conflict concerns the territories that used to be called Syria, Arabia Deserta and Egypt. You might note that prior to Partition, the total amount of land purchased by Jewish interests was not large (IIRC something on the order of 10%) whereas Partition and a succession of wars has done MUCH better at acquiring land. Even the original land purchases suffered a glaring defect in that they were bought from foreign owners. 80% Palestine has been government-owned since Ottoman times, which complicates this discussion. 'The Jews only owned 10%' sounds terrible, but you have to notice that the Arabs only owned about 15%. The rest belonged to the sultan, and passed to British, then Israeli hands. As for buying from foreign owners, well, depends how you define foreign. Mostly they were in Damascus, which wasn't a different country yet, or had only just become one due to the redrawing of the maps. The Zionists paid off the tenants too, not that anyone really cares who makes this argument. And from whom can anyone buy land except from the owner? Was it somehow the Zionists' fault that Palestine had a feudal system of land ownership? What level of purity are you really demanding here? I agree that Arabs accepting that Jews will remain in Palestine is one necessary condition, but it is not what we would call sufficient conditions. What are sufficient conditions for peace? The acceptance is the big thing, the rest can be negotiated. The Israelis want peace badly. So far the Arabs have just used peace as a lure to extract concessions while moving their own goalposts back, not forward.