Neither Abbas nor Obama can explain how anyone could have recognized a UN-designated Palestinian state that Palestinian leaders and the Arab states themselves have rejected.
The designated Palestinian state consists of all the land outside of the designated Israeli state.
I'll post it here for you again:
'UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.'
Please explain to me which part of the above you fail to understand?
The [1917 Balfour] declaration also promised that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine."
'...Israel, and the Zionist movement that created it, has consistently been in the wrong in it's conflict with the Palestinians. The Zionist movement took their land, that is, it deprived them of sovereignty over that land. The Palestinians had done nothing to provoke this usurpation. Sovereignty was the right of the Palestinians, of the inhabitants of Palestine, not of the settlers who came with the express purpose of establishing an ethnic state that could reasonably be seen as a mortal threat to the Palestinians and as a grievous assault on their rights. Given this threat, the Palestinians were right to make no concessions of sovereignty to the Zionists and, given that the Zionists would not abandon their project, there was no room for compromise. However, a real opportunity for peace arose with the Israeli conquest of the Occupied territories in 1967, when the Palestinians made concessions they did not, as a matter of right, have to make. This opportunity was decisively abandoned by the Israelis, not so much by the occupation itself as by an extremist settler movement and the policies that supported, nurtured, and sustained it.
The settler movement constituted a new mortal threat to the Palestinians, worse than the previous one. The Palestinians were entitled - indeed rationally compelled - to resist this threat, and they were justified in supposing that violent resistance was required. Moreover, nothing in the character of that resistance supports the claims that the Palestinians are consumed by anything more than the entirely normal hatred that is born of warfare and that generally dissipates with peace. The claim that Palestinians are permanently bent on destroying Israel and consumed by inextinguishable hatred now shows itself to be baseless. The Palestinians' desperate attempts to defend themselves against catastrophic dispossession are no evidence whatever for that claim. What you say and feel when someone has trapped you and is progressively making your life intolerable is no evidence for how you will act when that person relents and departs.
What makes the Israeli position particularly indefensible is it's utter gratuitousness. There is no conceivable reason for Israel to promote the settlements that have been the cause of so much misery. The settler movement is built on psuedo-Biblical foolishness, bad history, greed, and - worse - a sort of racist Messianism that deserves no tolerance, consideration, or respect. Israel could have not only peace but vastly increased security tomorrow if it chooses: It has all the options and the Palestinians none. The fussing about negotiations, trust, and hatred are nothing but self-deceiving excuses for more bloodshed.'
For his part, Palestinian Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat walked out of negotiations, went back home and launched the second Intifada.
No he didn't. This is another lie.
Read on:
Chomsky: The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
Invoking Islamic Jew hatred as justification, the Palestinians conducted a three-year, brutal campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli pizza parlors, wedding halls and discotheques.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e14120.htm
Chomsky: ...We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
In 2005, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon decided it was against Israel’s security interests to govern the 1.1 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Sharon dismantled all of the Jewish settlements and pulled Israeli forces back across the 1967 borders between Israel and Gaza, without even any land swaps.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/unpubl ... awal/#ngfc
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B’Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza’s land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. “So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands,” it concludes, “Israel’s claim of an ‘end of the occupation’ is questionable.”
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: “Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control.”
The world’s leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain “an imprisoned enclave,” while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza’s borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will “create worse hardship than is seen today.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.136686
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan: "The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...
You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
Many times over the last 63 years, both the international community and the State of Israel have offered the Arabs of Palestine their own state. Each time, these offers have been met by more violence against Jewish citizens. Neither President Abbas nor President Obama are ignorant of this fact. They simply both choose to ignore it.
'...The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.
...Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
...The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this.
No. Hopeless that you actually are so delusional that you think there is or ever was a sovereign entity called Palestine. Palestine is to Israel as Oz was to Kansas.
Was there a sovereign entity called Israel before 1947? No, there wasn't.
Jerome, do you support ethnic Nationalism and ethnic cleansing?
Jerome, I've addressed all of your points so far in this thread, and you've addressed none of mine, other than to try - and fail - to paint Michael Neumann as an anti-Semite. So I think it's time you began answering some of my questions.
Can you please explain how, in your words, 'the settlements are a direct result of Arab terror against the Jews'?
From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has had the only united, independent, sovereign "Nation-State" that ever existed in "Palestine" west of the Jordan River. I promise you, I'm not making this up.
You are making it up, as I've already shown above. Also, there was no such place called Israel at any time in the past 2000 years. And even if there had been, this still wouldn't give the Zionists any legitimate claim to the land today and a right to dispossess the Palestinians. You may as well be claiming that the Danes have a rightful claim of ownership of Newfoundland, or that the Italians have a claim on Britain due to the Romans having once occupied the land for 350 years. Your 2000 year old debatable history is no basis for justifying ethnic cleansing in today's World. The Nazis tried that one and nobody takes their claims seriously either.
Still, Israel is a state now and nobody is disputing this. What is being challenged is Israel's occupation of the West bank and it's imprisonment of Gaza. This is today's reality, and this is the issue under discussion. Not what the Middle-East looked like 2000 years ago, not whether the Zionists had a right to carry out ethnic cleansing and terror in 1947-1948, and also not where, or how, the word 'Palestine' first originated.
Are you kidding me? You refer to Palestine repeatedly, you refer to the UN Partition plan, they were partitioning the land of Palestine.
Right! It is/was the name of the region! the name "Palestine" doesn't even have roots in Arabic. The name "Palestine" refers to a region of the eastern Mediterranean coast from the sea to the Jordan valley and from the southern Negev desert to the Galilee lake region (if memory serves me correctly) in the north. The word itself derives from "Plesheth", a name that appears frequently in the Bible (apologies for even going there) and has come into English as "Philistine". Plesheth, (root name - "palash") was a general term meaning rolling or migratory. This referred to the Philistine's invasion and conquest of the coast from the sea. They did not speak Arabic. They had no connection, ethnic, linguistic or historical connection with Arabia or Arabs. The word Palestine (or Palestina) originally identified the region as "The Land of The Philistines", a war-like tribe that inhabited much of the region alongside the Hebrew people. But the older name from antiquity for this region was not Palestine, but Canaan. From the beginning of history to this day, Israel-Judah-Judea has had the only united, independent, sovereign "Nation-State" that ever existed in "Palestine" west of the Jordan River. I promise you, I'm not making this up.
And who came up with this fiction? Have you authored a book on the history of Palestine? Who is your source? Even though Byrnzie has refuted you repeatedly, I would like to add:
“(The Arab invaders of the 7th century A.D.) made Moslem converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”
“Palestine became a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century. Almost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics — including its name in Arabic, Filastin — became known to the entire Islamic world, as much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance…In 1516, Palestine became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less Arab or Islamic…Sixty percent of the population was in agriculture; the balance was divided between townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group. All these people believed themselves to belong in a land called Palestine, despite their feelings that they were also members of a large Arab nation…Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
Leon Hadar, in a review of a book by Dr. Shlomo Sand, professor history at Tel Aviv University, The Invention of the Jewish People, states:
“Countering official Zionist historiography, Sand questions whether the Jewish People ever existed as a national group with a common origin in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He concludes that the Jews should be seen as a religious community comprising a mishmash of individuals and groups that had converted to the ancient monotheistic religion but do not have any historical right to establish an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.”
And again you can not say they didn't want to split their land, but it wasn't their land, you are all over the place, grasping at everything because it is all weak.
what do you think about the lavon affair, or operation susannah as it was called? ya know, when israel had operatives plant bombs at movie theaters and other places us and uk military frequented in the efforts to blame the bombings on muslims and draw us into their war??
what are your thoughts on the irgun and lehi, jerome?
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
It wasn't much different in ancient times as it is today. The Religion of Palestine mainly includes a large section of Sunni Muslims and a considerable section of the Christians and Jews. The Jewish community in Palestine accounts for 0.6% of the total population in the Gaza strip. There is also Jewish community in the West Bank area. About 17% of the population in West Bank is Jew.
There are about 0.7% of Christians in Palestine in the Gaza strip while the percentage of Christian community in the West Bank is 8%. People from various religion of Palestine are an integral part of the land of Palestine. The Sunni Muslims accounts for 86% of the Palestinian population. There are about a meager 2% of Shi'is Muslims in Palestine. Thus it holds that the Islam community accounts for 88% of the population in Palestine.
The Christian community also includes Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Armenian Orthodox. There are about 1.2% of Greek Orthodox, 0.6% of Roman Catholics, 0.6% of Protestants and 0.03% of Armenian Orthodox in Palestine.
Besides the above, there are people from other religious communities in Palestine. These include the Bahai and the Samaritans. There are about 0.1% of Bahai in Palestine. The Samaritans also account for 0.1% of the population in Palestine.
Dude, I gotta ask, did you cut and paste that or did you have all that info in your head? If you had it in your head, that's amazing. If you cut and paste, where'd you get it from?
Byrnzie has a lot of data on this issue at his finger tips. I know he's well read. I was honestly interested in if he had this stuff memorized. It's impressive.
Byrnzie has a lot of data on this issue at his finger tips. I know he's well read. I was honestly interested in if he had this stuff memorized. It's impressive.
I know...he must have a massive collection of bookmarks/favorites...sometimes I wonder if they're sorted by typical zionist argument, or if he is just able to recall things he's read that quickly ....def beyond me. It would take me hours to get all the shit together that he's posted in this thread. It is impressive, for sure.
Byrnzie has a lot of data on this issue at his finger tips. I know he's well read. I was honestly interested in if he had this stuff memorized. It's impressive.
Some stuff I have memorized, but most of it I have stored as e-mails, or I just remember the names of particular essays and/or articles, relevant to the particular issue under discussion, and know where to find them. I've also typed whole sections from various books I've read and e-mailed them to myself, or kept them as Word documents.
But a lot of stuff I just search for. Sometimes it takes a while to find the info I'm looking for, but I'm an obstinate bastard, so I'll always find it eventually.
When was the country of Israel founded and by whom?
Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, the date on which David Ben Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel. Palestine, if we accept that such a state already exists (which some people do), was created in 1988 when the PLO declared national independence (an interesting note - the recent attempt to get Palestine admitted as a member of the UN would seem to assume that a state of Palestine already exists, since only states can hold UN membership)
Until 1967 Israel had recognized borders with Egypt and Egyptian occupied Gaza, with Jordan and the Jordanian occupied West Bank, with Syria and with Lebanon. They were not in question. After 1967 until today Israel's borders with respect to Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights are undefined since sovereignty over these territories is disputed. Palestine (again, assuming its existence) has never had definite borders.
What was the language of the country of Israel? How many immigrants into Israel could actually speak Hebrew? How many Israeli's today can speak Hebrew? Most of them can only speak Russian and/or American English.
[/quote]
Palestine's is Arabic.
Israel has 2 official languages, Hebrew and Arabic (surprised?). Israel works very hard to teach hebrew to immigrants moving to the country. Pretty much every Israeli today can speak Hebrew (the percentage that cannot is irrelevantly small). Many Israelis can also speak Russian and/or American English, but this group overwhelmingly can and do also speak Hebrew, and native Russian and English speakers are not close to outnumbering native Hebrew speakers as a percentage of the country's population.
It wasn't much different in ancient times as it is today. The Religion of Palestine mainly includes a large section of Sunni Muslims and a considerable section of the Christians and Jews. The Jewish community in Palestine accounts for 0.6% of the total population in the Gaza strip. There is also Jewish community in the West Bank area. About 17% of the population in West Bank is Jew.
There are about 0.7% of Christians in Palestine in the Gaza strip while the percentage of Christian community in the West Bank is 8%. People from various religion of Palestine are an integral part of the land of Palestine. The Sunni Muslims accounts for 86% of the Palestinian population. There are about a meager 2% of Shi'is Muslims in Palestine. Thus it holds that the Islam community accounts for 88% of the population in Palestine.
The Christian community also includes Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Protestants and Armenian Orthodox. There are about 1.2% of Greek Orthodox, 0.6% of Roman Catholics, 0.6% of Protestants and 0.03% of Armenian Orthodox in Palestine.
Besides the above, there are people from other religious communities in Palestine. These include the Bahai and the Samaritans. There are about 0.1% of Bahai in Palestine. The Samaritans also account for 0.1% of the population in Palestine.
[/quote]
The above is a pretty good account, although it seems to include Israel in its calculation without making that explicit (the Bahai comment gives it away - as far as I know there isn't a Bahai community in Gaza or the West Bank, but there is a very prominent Bahai community in Israel centered around the Bahai temple in Haifa, which is a pilgrimage site for Bahai worldwide). I would note that the official religion of Palestine (according to the PLO) is Islam.
There is a country of Palestine now, based on the same law that established the country of Israel in 1947.
[/quote]
The 1947 UN vote on the partition plan actually isn't a law. The UN General Assembly is a deliberative body only; it has no legislative authority whatsoever. The 1947 vote was to accept a proposal for the partition of the British Mandate. Israel accepted the proposal. The Palestinians rejected it. Had both parties accepted it the proposal would have gained legal authority as a treaty.
They didn't have to try and become independent. They always were independent, according to International law. See 'U.N Resolution 181' if you're confused about this.
[/quote]
Byrnzie, I think the question was directed at affirmative actions on the part of the Palestinians. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was actually set up in 1964, before the Six Day War (which is also somewhat telling since at the time Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, not Israel, and the PLO's military activities, meant to liberate Palestine, were directed at Israel, not the Egyptian and Jordanian occupiers of Gaza and the West Bank).
Why are you spreading racism, bigotry and bad history on this message board? You asked the above questions in order to simply bait, provoke, and insult. Now why would you do that?
[/quote]
Answering these questions does not require any creativity or imagination, just a good working knowledge of the relavent history.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
What good do the "palestinians" think is going to come out of sending 250+rockets into Israel this past week alone? Do you think Israel is going to sit idly by and not defend herself? Remember, the Israelis don't teach their kids how "honorable" it is to their family to engage in suicide bombings, either.
get out of the settlements and stop stealing land and perhaps it will stop the rockets. one is clearly a reaction to the other..
the oppressor is claiming to be the victim again...it is actually quite exhausting....
I'm not sure this is really supported by logic. Rocket fire from Gaza really picked up only after Israel removed all settlements from the Gaza Strip. And even if you posit that the rocket fire is motivated by anger over the settlements in the West Bank rather than by a simple animosity towards Israel (which is, I think, at least debatable), the intentional indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations (which is what is happening with these rockets) is a recognized war crime and can't be morally defended...psychologically understood, perhaps, but not defended.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Here are the groups that have the greatest claim to the city:
A. The Muslims, who ruled it and built it over 1191 years.
B. The Egyptians, who ruled it as a vassal state for several hundred years in the second millennium BCE.
C. The Italians, who ruled it about 444 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.
D. The Iranians, who ruled it for 205 years under the Achaemenids, for three years under the Parthians (insofar as the last Hasmonean was actually their vassal), and for 15 years under the Sasanids.
E. The Greeks, who ruled it for over 160 years if we count the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek. If we count them as Egyptians and Syrians, that would increase the Egyptian claim and introduce a Syrian one.
F. The successor states to the Byzantines, which could be either Greece or Turkey, who ruled it 188 years, though if we consider the heir to be Greece and add in the time the Hellenistic Greek dynasties ruled it, that would give Greece nearly 350 years as ruler of Jerusalem.
G. There is an Iraqi claim to Jerusalem based on the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests, as well as perhaps the rule of the Ayyubids (Saladin’s dynasty), who were Kurds from Iraq.
What's interesting about this list is that every single entity you named gained their "claim" through conquest, including the Arabs (who conquered the city from the Byzantines, and then reconquered it from the Crusaders). If that is what you'd like to rely on then by the logic of your own argument Israel has the best current claim to all of Jerusalem as the most recent successful conqueror of the city and its current possessor.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
Here's what Hamas have said regarding their support of the international consensus on a two-state solution that is supported by the whole World - excluding the U.S, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau:
Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal: “We are with a state on the 1967 borders, based on a long-term truce. This includes East Jerusalem, the dismantling of settlements and the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.’
That's disingenuous. All you have to do to see that the Muslim world is awash in virile anti-semitism is spend any time at all reviewing media from the region. Look at the relevant materials on MEMRI.org (note: I don't agree with their politics per se, but I have no reason to distrust the accuracy of their translations).
You'll also notice that the Hamas quote speaks about (a) a "truce," which implies a temporary, rather than a permanent state of affairs (i.e. they'll accept a Palestinian state on the '67 borders for the moment, but don't expect them to agree to a permanent peace with Israel), and (b) as even Norman Finkelstein has recently stated publicly, calling for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is equivalent to calling for the destruction of Israel since the influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel would upset the demographic balance of the country overnight and spell the end of Israel as any sort of meaningfully Jewish state.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
What good do the "palestinians" think is going to come out of sending 250+rockets into Israel this past week alone? Do you think Israel is going to sit idly by and not defend herself? Remember, the Israelis don't teach their kids how "honorable" it is to their family to engage in suicide bombings, either.
get out of the settlements and stop stealing land and perhaps it will stop the rockets. one is clearly a reaction to the other..
the oppressor is claiming to be the victim again...it is actually quite exhausting....
I'm not sure this is really supported by logic. Rocket fire from Gaza really picked up only after Israel removed all settlements from the Gaza Strip. And even if you posit that the rocket fire is motivated by anger over the settlements in the West Bank rather than by a simple animosity towards Israel (which is, I think, at least debatable), the intentional indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations (which is what is happening with these rockets) is a recognized war crime and can't be morally defended...psychologically understood, perhaps, but not defended.
if it is a war crime, which i believe it is, then charge them with it. stop dropping bombs on the heads of civilians and stop expanding illegal settlements! it's not that difficult of a concept to grasp....
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.- Hemingway
You'll also notice that the Hamas quote speaks about (a) a "truce," which implies a temporary, rather than a permanent state of affairs (i.e. they'll accept a Palestinian state on the '67 borders for the moment, but don't expect them to agree to a permanent peace with Israel)
A ten or twenty year truce is better than anything we've seen in the past 60 years.
The only way to find out if they're serious would be to try it.
as even Norman Finkelstein has recently stated publicly, calling for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is equivalent to calling for the destruction of Israel since the influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel would upset the demographic balance of the country overnight and spell the end of Israel as any sort of meaningfully Jewish state.
I'm sure this matter could be settled financially.
You'll also notice that the Hamas quote speaks about (a) a "truce," which implies a temporary, rather than a permanent state of affairs (i.e. they'll accept a Palestinian state on the '67 borders for the moment, but don't expect them to agree to a permanent peace with Israel)
A ten or twenty year truce is better than anything we've seen in the past 60 years.
The only way to find out if they're serious would be to try it.
as even Norman Finkelstein has recently stated publicly, calling for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is equivalent to calling for the destruction of Israel since the influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel would upset the demographic balance of the country overnight and spell the end of Israel as any sort of meaningfully Jewish state.
I'm sure this matter could be settled financially.
:roll:
"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."
— Socrates
What about those who say that the time for a two-state settlement has passed – that it is no longer, practically speaking, feasible to implement?
That’s a factual question, and you have to go through it. I have, with detailed maps and so on. There is a practical way to resolve the settlements. The thorniest question of course is the refugees. I’ll admit it’s not an easy one to resolve. I’m presently working on a book with a Palestinian scholar [Mouin Rabbani] whose judgment I completely trust, and according to our division of labour he’s going to handle the refugee question, within our shared framework. I’ll see what he has to say.
From NormanFinkelstein.com
There never was an israel before 1948. Palestine was not created by the PLO. There is a video of Golda Meir shortly after the creation of israel on the Land of Palestine, still referring to the land she usurped to create her precious war mongering state as Palestine. Whatever argument you want to use do not erase the fact that refugees still have their keys and titles to the land, hence their Right to Return to it. There is no silly quiz, no zionist answers to a silly quiz that can magically make these keys and the titles to the homes and the people who lived in these homes disappear.
You gotta stop being so self-rightous. Whether or not the refugees do or do not have a legitimate right of return is beside the point. Rights are not absolute. They function contextually, and often have to bow to the necessities of reality. In America everyone has a right to free speech. But that right doesn't mean that I can walk into a crowded movie theater and yell "fire."
The reality of the situation today is that for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians Israel will have to end the occupation and the Palestinians will have to give up on the right of return. That's just the reality.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
if it is a war crime, which i believe it is, then charge them with it. stop dropping bombs on the heads of civilians and stop expanding illegal settlements! it's not that difficult of a concept to grasp....
"Charging them" is not a viable solution. First, it isn't necessarily clear who "they" are. The people actually firing the rockets aren't exactly prominent, well-known individuals, and its not necessarily all that easy to connect the people organizing and directing the rocket teams (if they are centrally organized and directed) to the crime in a manner sufficient to sustain a prosecution. Second, charging them with a crime would be unlikely to cause them to cease firing rockets. Until the people charged can actually be arrested and brought to trial a legal proceeding is incapable of restricting their actions. And clearly, to arrest them they would either have to leave Gaza (very unlikely) or you would have to go into Gaza to get them (which would be very ugly).
In the meantime Israeli civilians would still be living with rockets falling on their heads. No state can sit by while its civilians are under attack. Defending the population against foreign aggression is THE primary responsibility of a government. I agree that Israel should stop building settlements, but that doesn't mean that they do not have a legitimate right to respond with force when Israeli civilians are indiscriminately being shelled. I also agree that Israel should not be dropping bombs on the heads of civilians, but as I noted elsewhere, it seems pretty clear that at least for the moment Israel is trying very hard to avoid civilian casualties, and for the most part is succeeding.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
I'm sure this matter could be settled financially.
:roll:
If you have something to add to this discussion then go ahead and add it.
We both know I never add much and we have diametrical opposite views on this but, if I understand this correctly you think that not only does Israel have to allow all of the 2nd generation "refugees" right of return but that somehow they owe them reparations as well? I would like to hear how that works.
"The really important thing is not to live, but to live well. And to live well meant, along with more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles."
— Socrates
You gotta stop being so self-rightous. Whether or not the refugees do or do not have a legitimate right of return is beside the point. Rights are not absolute. They function contextually, and often have to bow to the necessities of reality. In America everyone has a right to free speech. But that right doesn't mean that I can walk into a crowded movie theater and yell "fire."
The reality of the situation today is that for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians Israel will have to end the occupation and the Palestinians will have to give up on the right of return. That's just the reality.
No, that is the whole point. They do have a legitimate right and that is what keeps the whole zionist movement going, a big chunk of it is to deligitimize that clear and concrete right to their land. About 90 percent of threads on Palestine is trying to prove that there was no Palestine, that there are no Palestinians, because there is no other way to justify the creation of a state on another nation's land and the crimes that were and are committed. Self righteous? You are trying to control the narrative by defining what the context is and what the reality is...that's pretty humble.
More on the humble zionist:
"In the mainstream, Zionist-inspired narrative, Israel’s “right to exist” precedes and supersedes all else and, in fact, does so uniquely in the world of nations, since under international law, no other nation has or demands such a right. For Israel to have this right entails the obliteration (and not even acknowledgement) of a similar parallel right of the displaced population, the Palestinians, to also exist." The Struggle of an Un-People, DINA JADALLAH-TASCHLER
And who better to take the narrative (power) back, than Saree Makdisi:
"In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel's founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine's Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people's history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians' renunciation of their rights. As Israel's foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word "nakba" from their lexicon.
Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people's mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people's right can be secured at the cost of another's.
Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples' rights are equally protected....
Palestinian citizens of Israel – officially referred to by the state as deracinated "Arabs" because it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the fact that they are Palestinian – face institutionalised forms of discrimination far worse than those once encountered by African Americans. For example, while Jewish Israelis who marry non-citizens (or residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) are entitled to have their spouses come live with them, Israeli law explicitly denies that right to Palestinian citizens who marry Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinian citizens are also denied various other privileges, including access to state lands, reserved exclusively for Jews."
First, the goal of Zionism has nothing to do with delegitimizing the Palestinians (though there are many Zionists who do, unfortunately, try to do so). Zionism is simply the desire for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish homeland. There is nothing inherent in Zionist thinking that requires one to believe that the Palestinians are not a people and do not have their own legitimate claims.
When Israel talks about its right to exist it is not demanding anything different than what every other sovereign nation on earth enjoys. No other nation talks about its right to exist because no other nation's right to exist is questioned the way that Israel's is. Israel isn't asking that they be treated in some exceptional manner. They're asking that they be treated the same way that every other nation is treated, that their right to exist be simply accepted the same as the U.S. or Egypt or France or Vietnam. Basically, they just want people to stop talking about how to get rid of Israel.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
We both know I never add much and we have diametrical opposite views on this but, if I understand this correctly you think that not only does Israel have to allow all of the 2nd generation "refugees" right of return but that somehow they owe them reparations as well? I would like to hear how that works.
No, I'm saying that I think the Palestinian leadership and the refugees would probably accept a financial settlement in place of a return to Israel. Though I'm I'm not 100% sure about this, I've heard it mentioned before by people such as Norman Finkelstein, who's ear is closer to the ground than mine.
When Israel talks about its right to exist it is not demanding anything different than what every other sovereign nation on earth enjoys. No other nation talks about its right to exist because no other nation's right to exist is questioned the way that Israel's is. Israel isn't asking that they be treated in some exceptional manner. They're asking that they be treated the same way that every other nation is treated, that their right to exist be simply accepted the same as the U.S. or Egypt or France or Vietnam. Basically, they just want people to stop talking about how to get rid of Israel.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/14/fearsome-words/
'...These claims – we’re just a people like any other, we just want to go home – are the last bastion of lsrael’s crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel’s rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era.
...If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ‘subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps?
There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.
...Hitler ‘understood’ that peoples had a right to their homeland. The ‘national’ part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of ‘peoples’, races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?
Of course this was nonsense. The ‘German people’ was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their ‘homeland’ were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing’s worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson’s and Hitler’s endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of ‘the Germans’ for the Nazi era.
...The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel’s famous right of return. Don’t take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance – the values our nations share". To explain in what sense ‘Jews’ have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not the ‘homeland’ of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.
‘Jew’, in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. ‘Jew’ means ‘of Jewish ancestry’. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it’s something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.
For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there. Thus Article 7(a) of Israel’s Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates’ list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include… negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control. Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009: "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)
So a miracle appears among us. The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty. This is why we always hear that Israel – not Israelis – has a right to exist. What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of ‘the Jewish people’. The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself. When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a ‘people’ in the sense of an ethnic group. (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain’s ‘patrial’ immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.) But ‘the Jewish people’ have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal. Why? Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice. Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies. Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university’s ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.
...We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival. We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights. We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it. The ‘self-determination of peoples’ is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies. Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.'
No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
No, irrational Islamic Jew hatred is just a convenient fantasy that you've concocted to justify and excuse Israel's continuing construction of racist, illegal, Jewish-only settlements on land stolen from the Palestinians.
Just like the Holocaust, right? :roll:
you know as a rule i dont like to speak for other people but i feel confident in stating that byrnzie does not think the holocaust is 'just a convenient fantasy' as your quote of his post is suggesting. i would shudder tot hink anyone who contributes here on a regular, or even semi regular basis thinks that hitlers final solution wasnt a very real event. and i dont think those same people would think it was anything but an extremely heinous and deliberate act. it pisses me off no end that people who would scream bloody murder if they were forced from their land, separated from their livelihood, community and family and denied the rights that we all take for granted seem to be of the opinion that somehow the israeli govt has the right to enact these same injustices upon the palestinian people. and that they think the palestinians should just roll over like dogs.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
First, the goal of Zionism has nothing to do with delegitimizing the Palestinians (though there are many Zionists who do, unfortunately, try to do so). Zionism is simply the desire for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish homeland. There is nothing inherent in Zionist thinking that requires one to believe that the Palestinians are not a people and do not have their own legitimate claims.
When Israel talks about its right to exist it is not demanding anything different than what every other sovereign nation on earth enjoys. No other nation talks about its right to exist because no other nation's right to exist is questioned the way that Israel's is. Israel isn't asking that they be treated in some exceptional manner. They're asking that they be treated the same way that every other nation is treated, that their right to exist be simply accepted the same as the U.S. or Egypt or France or Vietnam. Basically, they just want people to stop talking about how to get rid of Israel.
You are contradicting yourself. Zionism has nothing to do with deligitimatizing Palestinians, just simply the desire for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Where does the legitimate right of Palestinians fit into that equation? And again to quote Saree Makdisi, a Christian Palestinian, who breaks down what your definition of Zionism and what you have suggested, no right of return, like no one else:
They [Palestinians] have no rights, let alone a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.
On the contrary: the Palestinians must accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. “We” are a people, Netanyahu was saying; “they” are merely a “population.” “We” have a right to a state–a real state. “They” do not. “They” have to recognize “our” rights; “we” owe “them” nothing in return, except, possibly, a curt nod of dismissal from “our” view into the walled-off ghettoes and cantons which we might (perhaps, if “they” behave well) be persuaded to build for “them” on “our” land–and “they” had better be grateful even for that. sareemakdisi.net
Edit, in his response to speech given by the elected Zionist at the helm.
What pisses me off are lazy comparisons. The occupation is really bad. But it is not equivalent to the holocaust, either in moral terms or in purely descriptive terms. Recognizing their dissimilarity and avoiding such comparisons doesn't detract from valid criticisms of the occupation, of which there are many. The same is true of Apartheid. The occupation is really bad, but it is demonstrably not the same thing as Apartheid. The analogy between the two is lazy and obscures the reality of the occupation.
A good friend of mine recently commented on such analogies. He said that when his children were very young he noticed that they would categorize things based on what they were first exposed to; so for one kid all four-legged animals were dogs and for another all four-legged animals were hippos. What he was getting at is that the occupation can be grouped with Apartheid as a "bad thing" (four-legged animal), but it has distinctive features, and should be understood as its own phenomenon, not through a lazy analogy to some other, different event.
you couldn't swing if you were hangin' from a palm tree in a hurricane
Comments
The designated Palestinian state consists of all the land outside of the designated Israeli state.
I'll post it here for you again:
'UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognised the remaining Palestinian territory outside the new state’s borders as the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it mapped the borders of that territory with great precision. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principles that grant statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in its implementation.'
Please explain to me which part of the above you fail to understand?
'...Israel, and the Zionist movement that created it, has consistently been in the wrong in it's conflict with the Palestinians. The Zionist movement took their land, that is, it deprived them of sovereignty over that land. The Palestinians had done nothing to provoke this usurpation. Sovereignty was the right of the Palestinians, of the inhabitants of Palestine, not of the settlers who came with the express purpose of establishing an ethnic state that could reasonably be seen as a mortal threat to the Palestinians and as a grievous assault on their rights. Given this threat, the Palestinians were right to make no concessions of sovereignty to the Zionists and, given that the Zionists would not abandon their project, there was no room for compromise. However, a real opportunity for peace arose with the Israeli conquest of the Occupied territories in 1967, when the Palestinians made concessions they did not, as a matter of right, have to make. This opportunity was decisively abandoned by the Israelis, not so much by the occupation itself as by an extremist settler movement and the policies that supported, nurtured, and sustained it.
The settler movement constituted a new mortal threat to the Palestinians, worse than the previous one. The Palestinians were entitled - indeed rationally compelled - to resist this threat, and they were justified in supposing that violent resistance was required. Moreover, nothing in the character of that resistance supports the claims that the Palestinians are consumed by anything more than the entirely normal hatred that is born of warfare and that generally dissipates with peace. The claim that Palestinians are permanently bent on destroying Israel and consumed by inextinguishable hatred now shows itself to be baseless. The Palestinians' desperate attempts to defend themselves against catastrophic dispossession are no evidence whatever for that claim. What you say and feel when someone has trapped you and is progressively making your life intolerable is no evidence for how you will act when that person relents and departs.
What makes the Israeli position particularly indefensible is it's utter gratuitousness. There is no conceivable reason for Israel to promote the settlements that have been the cause of so much misery. The settler movement is built on psuedo-Biblical foolishness, bad history, greed, and - worse - a sort of racist Messianism that deserves no tolerance, consideration, or respect. Israel could have not only peace but vastly increased security tomorrow if it chooses: It has all the options and the Palestinians none. The fussing about negotiations, trust, and hatred are nothing but self-deceiving excuses for more bloodshed.'
No he didn't. This is another lie.
Read on:
Chomsky: The Barak proposal in Camp David, the Barak-Clinton proposal, in the United States, I didn't check the Canadian media, in the United States you cannot find a map, which is the most important thing of course, check in Canada, see if you can find a map. You go to Israel, you can find a map, you go to scholarly sources, you can find a map. Here's what you find when you look at a map: You find that this generous, magnanimous proposal provided Israel with a salient east of Jerusalem, which was established primarily by the Labor government, in order to bisect the West Bank. That salient goes almost to Jericho, breaks the West Bank into two cantons, then there's a second salient to the North, going to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which bisects the Northern part into two cantons.
So, we've got three cantons in the West Bank, virtually separated. All three of them are separated from a small area of East Jerusalem which is the center of Palestinian commercial and cultural life and of communications. So you have four cantons, all separated from the West, from Gaza, so that's five cantons, all surrounded by Israeli settlements, infrastructure, development and so on, which also incidentally guarantee Israel control of the water resources.
This does not rise to the level of South Africa 40 years ago when South Africa established the Bantustans. That's the generous, magnanimous offer. And there's a good reason why maps weren't shown. Because as soon as you look at a map, you see it.
Solomon: All right, but let me just say, Arafat didn't even bother putting a counter-proposal on the table.
Chomsky: Oh, that's not true.
Solomon: They negotiated that afterwards.
Chomsky: That's not true.
Solomon: I guess my question is, if they don't continue to negotiate -
Chomsky: They did. That's false.
Solomon: That's false?
Chomsky: Not only is it false, but not a single participant in the meetings says it. That's a media fabrication . . .
Solomon: That Arafat didn't put a counter-proposal . . .
Chomsky: Yeah, they had a proposal. They proposed the international consensus, which has been accepted by the entire world, the Arab states, the PLO. They proposed a settlement which is in accordance with an overwhelming international consensus, and is blocked by the United States.
Solomon: If you don't talk -
Chomsky: Yeah, they did talk. They talked. They proposed that.
Solomon: Once they walked out of Camp David,
Chomsky: They didn't walk out of Camp David . . .
Solomon: Both camps . . .
Chomsky: No, no, both sides walked out of Camp David.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... e14120.htm
Chomsky: ...We then discovered the United States immediately moved to enhance terror in the region. So, let's continue. On September 29th, Ehud Barak put a massive military presence outside the Al Aqsa Mosque, very provocative, when people came out of the Mosque, young people started throwing stones, the Israeli army started shooting, half a dozen people were killed, and it escalated.
The next couple of days -- there was no Palestinian fire at this time -- Israel used U.S. helicopters (Israel produces no helicopters) to attack civilian complexes, killing about a dozen people and wounding several dozen.
Clinton reacted to that on October 3, 2000 by making the biggest deal in a decade -- to send Israel new military helicopters which had just been used for the purpose I described and of course would continue to be.
The U.S. press co-operated with that by refusing to publish the story. To this day, they have not published the fact.
It continued when Bush came in. One of his first acts was to send Israel a new shipment of one of the most advanced military helicopters in the arsenal. That continues right up to a couple of weeks ago with new shipments. You take a look at the reports, from say Jenin, by British correspondents like Peter Beaumont for the London Observer. He says the worst atrocity was the Apache helicopters buzzing around, destroying and demolishing everything.
Now, this is enhancing terror, and we may easily continue. On December 14th, the Security Council tried to pass a resolution calling for what everyone recognized to be the obvious means for reducing terror, namely sending international monitors. That's a way of reducing terror.
This happened to be in the middle of a quiet period, which lasted for about three weeks. The U.S. vetoed it. 10 days before that, there was a meeting at Geneva of the high-contracting parties of the 4th-Geneva convention, which has unanimously held for 35 years that it applies to Israel. The meeting condemned the Israeli settlements as illegal, condemned the list of atrocities -- willful destruction of property, murder, trials, torture.
What happened in that meeting? I'll tell you what happened in that meeting. The U.S. boycotted it. Therefore, the media refused to publish it.
Therefore, no one here knows that the United States once again enhanced terror by refusing to recognize the applicability of conventions which make virtually everything the United States and Israel are doing there a grave breech of the Geneva convention, which is a war crime.
These conventions were established in 1949 in order to criminalize the atrocities of the Nazis in occupied territory. They are customary international law. The United States is obligated, as a high-contracting party, to prosecute violations of those conventions. That means to prosecute its own leadership for the last 25 years. They won't do it unless the population forces them to. And the population won't force them to as long as they don't know it's a fact. And they won't know it's a fact as long as the media and loyal intellectuals keep it secret.
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/unpubl ... awal/#ngfc
In a recent study entitled One Big Prison, B’Tselem observes that the crippling economic arrangements Israel has imposed on Gaza will remain in effect. In addition, Israel will continue to maintain absolute control over Gaza’s land borders, coastline and airspace, and the Israeli army will continue to operate in Gaza. “So long as these methods of control remain in Israeli hands,” it concludes, “Israel’s claim of an ‘end of the occupation’ is questionable.”
The respected organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) is yet more emphatic that evacuating troops and Jewish settlements from inside Gaza will not end the occupation: “Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery, and restricting entrance and exit, it remains in control.”
The world’s leading authority on the Gaza Strip, Sara Roy of Harvard University, predicts that Gaza will remain “an imprisoned enclave,” while its economy, still totally dependent on Israel after disengagement and in shambles after decades of deliberately ruinous policies by Israel, will actually deteriorate.[4] This conclusion is echoed by the World Bank, which forecasts that, if Israel seals Gaza’s borders or curtails its utilities, the disengagement plan will “create worse hardship than is seen today.”
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/ne ... s-1.136686
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior adviser Dov Weisglass who was one of the initiators of the disengagement plan:
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...
You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/henry-sieg ... ocess-scam
The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam
Henry Siegman
London Review of Books 2007
'...The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.
...Israel’s disingenuous commitment to a peace process and a two-state solution is precisely what has made possible its open-ended occupation and dismemberment of Palestinian territory. And the Quartet – with the EU, the UN secretary general and Russia obediently following Washington’s lead – has collaborated with and provided cover for this deception by accepting Israel’s claim that it has been unable to find a deserving Palestinian peace partner.
In the course of a war launched by Arab countries that sought to prevent the implementation of the UN partition resolution, Israel enlarged its territory by 50 per cent. If it is illegal to acquire territory as a result of war, then the question now cannot conceivably be how much additional Palestinian territory Israel may confiscate, but rather how much of the territory it acquired in the course of the war of 1948 it is allowed to retain. At the very least, if ‘adjustments’ are to be made to the 1949 armistice line, these should be made on Israel’s side of that line, not the Palestinians’.
Clearly, the obstacle to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict has not been a dearth of peace initiatives or peace envoys. Nor has it been the violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle to rid themselves of Israel’s occupation, even when that violence has despicably targeted Israel’s civilian population. It is not to sanction the murder of civilians to observe that such violence occurs, sooner or later, in most situations in which a people’s drive for national self-determination is frustrated by an occupying power. Indeed, Israel’s own struggle for national independence was no exception. According to the historian Benny Morris, in this conflict it was the Irgun that first targeted civilians. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 ‘triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past Arabs had ‘sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’
...The problem is not, as Israelis often claim, that Palestinians do not know how to compromise. (Another former prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, famously complained that ‘Palestinians take and take while Israel gives and gives.’) That is an indecent charge, since the Palestinians made much the most far-reaching compromise of all when the PLO formally accepted the legitimacy of Israel within the 1949 armistice border. With that concession, Palestinians ceded their claim to more than half the territory that the UN’s partition resolution had assigned to its Arab inhabitants. They have never received any credit for this wrenching concession, made years before Israel agreed that Palestinians had a right to statehood in any part of Palestine. The notion that further border adjustments should be made at the expense of the 22 per cent of the territory that remains to the Palestinians is deeply offensive to them, and understandably so.
Nonetheless, the Palestinians agreed at the Camp David summit to adjustments to the pre-1967 border that would allow large numbers of West Bank settlers – about 70 per cent – to remain within the Jewish state, provided they received comparable territory on Israel’s side of the border. Barak rejected this.
Was there a sovereign entity called Israel before 1947? No, there wasn't.
Jerome, do you support ethnic Nationalism and ethnic cleansing?
Can you please explain how, in your words, 'the settlements are a direct result of Arab terror against the Jews'?
No inconsistency here then?:
You are making it up, as I've already shown above. Also, there was no such place called Israel at any time in the past 2000 years. And even if there had been, this still wouldn't give the Zionists any legitimate claim to the land today and a right to dispossess the Palestinians. You may as well be claiming that the Danes have a rightful claim of ownership of Newfoundland, or that the Italians have a claim on Britain due to the Romans having once occupied the land for 350 years. Your 2000 year old debatable history is no basis for justifying ethnic cleansing in today's World. The Nazis tried that one and nobody takes their claims seriously either.
Still, Israel is a state now and nobody is disputing this. What is being challenged is Israel's occupation of the West bank and it's imprisonment of Gaza. This is today's reality, and this is the issue under discussion. Not what the Middle-East looked like 2000 years ago, not whether the Zionists had a right to carry out ethnic cleansing and terror in 1947-1948, and also not where, or how, the word 'Palestine' first originated.
And who came up with this fiction? Have you authored a book on the history of Palestine? Who is your source? Even though Byrnzie has refuted you repeatedly, I would like to add:
“(The Arab invaders of the 7th century A.D.) made Moslem converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”
“Palestine became a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century. Almost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics — including its name in Arabic, Filastin — became known to the entire Islamic world, as much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance…In 1516, Palestine became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less Arab or Islamic…Sixty percent of the population was in agriculture; the balance was divided between townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group. All these people believed themselves to belong in a land called Palestine, despite their feelings that they were also members of a large Arab nation…Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
Leon Hadar, in a review of a book by Dr. Shlomo Sand, professor history at Tel Aviv University, The Invention of the Jewish People, states:
“Countering official Zionist historiography, Sand questions whether the Jewish People ever existed as a national group with a common origin in the Land of Israel/Palestine. He concludes that the Jews should be seen as a religious community comprising a mishmash of individuals and groups that had converted to the ancient monotheistic religion but do not have any historical right to establish an independent Jewish state in the Holy Land. In short, the Jewish People, according to Sand, are not really a “people” in the sense of having a common ethnic origin and national heritage. They certainly do not have a political claim over the territory that today constitutes Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, including Jerusalem.”
And again you can not say they didn't want to split their land, but it wasn't their land, you are all over the place, grasping at everything because it is all weak.
what are your thoughts on the irgun and lehi, jerome?
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Thanks.
Byrnzie has a lot of data on this issue at his finger tips. I know he's well read. I was honestly interested in if he had this stuff memorized. It's impressive.
Some stuff I have memorized, but most of it I have stored as e-mails, or I just remember the names of particular essays and/or articles, relevant to the particular issue under discussion, and know where to find them. I've also typed whole sections from various books I've read and e-mailed them to myself, or kept them as Word documents.
But a lot of stuff I just search for. Sometimes it takes a while to find the info I'm looking for, but I'm an obstinate bastard, so I'll always find it eventually.
Israel was founded on May 14, 1948, the date on which David Ben Gurion declared the independence of the State of Israel. Palestine, if we accept that such a state already exists (which some people do), was created in 1988 when the PLO declared national independence (an interesting note - the recent attempt to get Palestine admitted as a member of the UN would seem to assume that a state of Palestine already exists, since only states can hold UN membership)
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Until 1967 Israel had recognized borders with Egypt and Egyptian occupied Gaza, with Jordan and the Jordanian occupied West Bank, with Syria and with Lebanon. They were not in question. After 1967 until today Israel's borders with respect to Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights are undefined since sovereignty over these territories is disputed. Palestine (again, assuming its existence) has never had definite borders.
East Jerusalem
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Israel's are Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Be'er Sheva, and Eilat. Palestine's would probably be Ramallah and Bethlehem.
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Palestine's is Arabic.
Israel has 2 official languages, Hebrew and Arabic (surprised?). Israel works very hard to teach hebrew to immigrants moving to the country. Pretty much every Israeli today can speak Hebrew (the percentage that cannot is irrelevantly small). Many Israelis can also speak Russian and/or American English, but this group overwhelmingly can and do also speak Hebrew, and native Russian and English speakers are not close to outnumbering native Hebrew speakers as a percentage of the country's population.
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The above is a pretty good account, although it seems to include Israel in its calculation without making that explicit (the Bahai comment gives it away - as far as I know there isn't a Bahai community in Gaza or the West Bank, but there is a very prominent Bahai community in Israel centered around the Bahai temple in Haifa, which is a pilgrimage site for Bahai worldwide). I would note that the official religion of Palestine (according to the PLO) is Islam.
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The 1947 UN vote on the partition plan actually isn't a law. The UN General Assembly is a deliberative body only; it has no legislative authority whatsoever. The 1947 vote was to accept a proposal for the partition of the British Mandate. Israel accepted the proposal. The Palestinians rejected it. Had both parties accepted it the proposal would have gained legal authority as a treaty.
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Byrnzie, I think the question was directed at affirmative actions on the part of the Palestinians. The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) was actually set up in 1964, before the Six Day War (which is also somewhat telling since at the time Gaza and the West Bank were occupied by Egypt and Jordan, not Israel, and the PLO's military activities, meant to liberate Palestine, were directed at Israel, not the Egyptian and Jordanian occupiers of Gaza and the West Bank).
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Answering these questions does not require any creativity or imagination, just a good working knowledge of the relavent history.
I'm not sure this is really supported by logic. Rocket fire from Gaza really picked up only after Israel removed all settlements from the Gaza Strip. And even if you posit that the rocket fire is motivated by anger over the settlements in the West Bank rather than by a simple animosity towards Israel (which is, I think, at least debatable), the intentional indiscriminate shelling of civilian populations (which is what is happening with these rockets) is a recognized war crime and can't be morally defended...psychologically understood, perhaps, but not defended.
What's interesting about this list is that every single entity you named gained their "claim" through conquest, including the Arabs (who conquered the city from the Byzantines, and then reconquered it from the Crusaders). If that is what you'd like to rely on then by the logic of your own argument Israel has the best current claim to all of Jerusalem as the most recent successful conqueror of the city and its current possessor.
That's disingenuous. All you have to do to see that the Muslim world is awash in virile anti-semitism is spend any time at all reviewing media from the region. Look at the relevant materials on MEMRI.org (note: I don't agree with their politics per se, but I have no reason to distrust the accuracy of their translations).
You'll also notice that the Hamas quote speaks about (a) a "truce," which implies a temporary, rather than a permanent state of affairs (i.e. they'll accept a Palestinian state on the '67 borders for the moment, but don't expect them to agree to a permanent peace with Israel), and (b) as even Norman Finkelstein has recently stated publicly, calling for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees is equivalent to calling for the destruction of Israel since the influx of millions of Palestinians into Israel would upset the demographic balance of the country overnight and spell the end of Israel as any sort of meaningfully Jewish state.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
A ten or twenty year truce is better than anything we've seen in the past 60 years.
The only way to find out if they're serious would be to try it.
I'm sure this matter could be settled financially.
:roll:
— Socrates
What about those who say that the time for a two-state settlement has passed – that it is no longer, practically speaking, feasible to implement?
That’s a factual question, and you have to go through it. I have, with detailed maps and so on. There is a practical way to resolve the settlements. The thorniest question of course is the refugees. I’ll admit it’s not an easy one to resolve. I’m presently working on a book with a Palestinian scholar [Mouin Rabbani] whose judgment I completely trust, and according to our division of labour he’s going to handle the refugee question, within our shared framework. I’ll see what he has to say.
From NormanFinkelstein.com
There never was an israel before 1948. Palestine was not created by the PLO. There is a video of Golda Meir shortly after the creation of israel on the Land of Palestine, still referring to the land she usurped to create her precious war mongering state as Palestine. Whatever argument you want to use do not erase the fact that refugees still have their keys and titles to the land, hence their Right to Return to it. There is no silly quiz, no zionist answers to a silly quiz that can magically make these keys and the titles to the homes and the people who lived in these homes disappear.
The reality of the situation today is that for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians Israel will have to end the occupation and the Palestinians will have to give up on the right of return. That's just the reality.
"Charging them" is not a viable solution. First, it isn't necessarily clear who "they" are. The people actually firing the rockets aren't exactly prominent, well-known individuals, and its not necessarily all that easy to connect the people organizing and directing the rocket teams (if they are centrally organized and directed) to the crime in a manner sufficient to sustain a prosecution. Second, charging them with a crime would be unlikely to cause them to cease firing rockets. Until the people charged can actually be arrested and brought to trial a legal proceeding is incapable of restricting their actions. And clearly, to arrest them they would either have to leave Gaza (very unlikely) or you would have to go into Gaza to get them (which would be very ugly).
In the meantime Israeli civilians would still be living with rockets falling on their heads. No state can sit by while its civilians are under attack. Defending the population against foreign aggression is THE primary responsibility of a government. I agree that Israel should stop building settlements, but that doesn't mean that they do not have a legitimate right to respond with force when Israeli civilians are indiscriminately being shelled. I also agree that Israel should not be dropping bombs on the heads of civilians, but as I noted elsewhere, it seems pretty clear that at least for the moment Israel is trying very hard to avoid civilian casualties, and for the most part is succeeding.
If you have something to add to this discussion then go ahead and add it.
We both know I never add much and we have diametrical opposite views on this but, if I understand this correctly you think that not only does Israel have to allow all of the 2nd generation "refugees" right of return but that somehow they owe them reparations as well? I would like to hear how that works.
— Socrates
No, that is the whole point. They do have a legitimate right and that is what keeps the whole zionist movement going, a big chunk of it is to deligitimize that clear and concrete right to their land. About 90 percent of threads on Palestine is trying to prove that there was no Palestine, that there are no Palestinians, because there is no other way to justify the creation of a state on another nation's land and the crimes that were and are committed. Self righteous? You are trying to control the narrative by defining what the context is and what the reality is...that's pretty humble.
More on the humble zionist:
"In the mainstream, Zionist-inspired narrative, Israel’s “right to exist” precedes and supersedes all else and, in fact, does so uniquely in the world of nations, since under international law, no other nation has or demands such a right. For Israel to have this right entails the obliteration (and not even acknowledgement) of a similar parallel right of the displaced population, the Palestinians, to also exist." The Struggle of an Un-People, DINA JADALLAH-TASCHLER
"In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel's founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine's Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.
Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people's history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians' renunciation of their rights. As Israel's foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word "nakba" from their lexicon.
Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people's mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people's right can be secured at the cost of another's.
Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples' rights are equally protected....
Palestinian citizens of Israel – officially referred to by the state as deracinated "Arabs" because it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the fact that they are Palestinian – face institutionalised forms of discrimination far worse than those once encountered by African Americans. For example, while Jewish Israelis who marry non-citizens (or residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) are entitled to have their spouses come live with them, Israeli law explicitly denies that right to Palestinian citizens who marry Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinian citizens are also denied various other privileges, including access to state lands, reserved exclusively for Jews."
When Israel talks about its right to exist it is not demanding anything different than what every other sovereign nation on earth enjoys. No other nation talks about its right to exist because no other nation's right to exist is questioned the way that Israel's is. Israel isn't asking that they be treated in some exceptional manner. They're asking that they be treated the same way that every other nation is treated, that their right to exist be simply accepted the same as the U.S. or Egypt or France or Vietnam. Basically, they just want people to stop talking about how to get rid of Israel.
No, I'm saying that I think the Palestinian leadership and the refugees would probably accept a financial settlement in place of a return to Israel. Though I'm I'm not 100% sure about this, I've heard it mentioned before by people such as Norman Finkelstein, who's ear is closer to the ground than mine.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/10/14/fearsome-words/
'...These claims – we’re just a people like any other, we just want to go home – are the last bastion of lsrael’s crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel’s rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era.
...If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ‘subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps?
There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.
...Hitler ‘understood’ that peoples had a right to their homeland. The ‘national’ part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries. It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of ‘peoples’, races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs. Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction. The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it. Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?
Of course this was nonsense. The ‘German people’ was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their ‘homeland’ were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs. But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing’s worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson’s and Hitler’s endorsement of ethnic nationalism. It infects even our condemnations of ‘the Germans’ for the Nazi era.
...The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel’s famous right of return. Don’t take my word for it. Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance – the values our nations share". To explain in what sense ‘Jews’ have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate." AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship. On the other hand, a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years. Palestine, it seems, is not the ‘homeland’ of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.
‘Jew’, in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. ‘Jew’ means ‘of Jewish ancestry’. In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**) Like skin colour, it’s something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.
For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there. Thus Article 7(a) of Israel’s Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates’ list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include… negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people." The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control. Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009: "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)
So a miracle appears among us. The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty. This is why we always hear that Israel – not Israelis – has a right to exist. What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of ‘the Jewish people’. The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself. When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a ‘people’ in the sense of an ethnic group. (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain’s ‘patrial’ immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.) But ‘the Jewish people’ have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal. Why? Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice. Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies. Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university’s ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.
...We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival. We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights. We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it. The ‘self-determination of peoples’ is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies. Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.'
Just like the Holocaust, right? :roll:
you know as a rule i dont like to speak for other people but i feel confident in stating that byrnzie does not think the holocaust is 'just a convenient fantasy' as your quote of his post is suggesting. i would shudder tot hink anyone who contributes here on a regular, or even semi regular basis thinks that hitlers final solution wasnt a very real event. and i dont think those same people would think it was anything but an extremely heinous and deliberate act. it pisses me off no end that people who would scream bloody murder if they were forced from their land, separated from their livelihood, community and family and denied the rights that we all take for granted seem to be of the opinion that somehow the israeli govt has the right to enact these same injustices upon the palestinian people. and that they think the palestinians should just roll over like dogs.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
You are contradicting yourself. Zionism has nothing to do with deligitimatizing Palestinians, just simply the desire for Jewish national self-determination in the Jewish homeland. Where does the legitimate right of Palestinians fit into that equation? And again to quote Saree Makdisi, a Christian Palestinian, who breaks down what your definition of Zionism and what you have suggested, no right of return, like no one else:
They [Palestinians] have no rights, let alone a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.
On the contrary: the Palestinians must accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. “We” are a people, Netanyahu was saying; “they” are merely a “population.” “We” have a right to a state–a real state. “They” do not. “They” have to recognize “our” rights; “we” owe “them” nothing in return, except, possibly, a curt nod of dismissal from “our” view into the walled-off ghettoes and cantons which we might (perhaps, if “they” behave well) be persuaded to build for “them” on “our” land–and “they” had better be grateful even for that. sareemakdisi.net
Edit, in his response to speech given by the elected Zionist at the helm.
A good friend of mine recently commented on such analogies. He said that when his children were very young he noticed that they would categorize things based on what they were first exposed to; so for one kid all four-legged animals were dogs and for another all four-legged animals were hippos. What he was getting at is that the occupation can be grouped with Apartheid as a "bad thing" (four-legged animal), but it has distinctive features, and should be understood as its own phenomenon, not through a lazy analogy to some other, different event.