Lying about Middle Eastern Land
One of the few things unchallengeable about the Middle East conflict is that it has virtually nothing to do with land. Arab countries already control 6,145,389 square miles of land. That is almost twice the land area of the United States, which is 3,537,438 square miles, and about the same as the land area of Russia. Israel, even when including all of the "occupied territories" retained from the 1967 SIx Day War, controls less than 10,000 square miles.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip comprise about 2300 square miles (a bit less when deducting Jerusalem and its suburbs from the account), which is about half the size of the Everglades. The Moonbats-against-Israel lobby wants us to believe that with 6,145,389 square miles, the Arabs want war and genocide, but with 6,145,389 plus 2300 more, then they will want peace. If Israel only trades “land for peace” with the land-deprived Arabs, and never mind that its abandonment of the West Bank would leave an Israel ten miles wide and waiting for the Arab armies to annihilate, then all will be well.
The "anti-Zionists" want the world to believe that the entire Middle East war is due to the fact that those evil selfish Jews are unwilling to share their 10,000 square miles with the poor land-starved Arabs. But in reality, the obvious true cause of the Middle East war is the fact that the Arab world is unwilling to allow the Jews to control even a sixth of one percent of the territory of the Middle East. The Arabs, controlling more land than any other ethnic group on the planet besides the Russians (most of whose land is frozen tundra), are simply unwilling to share even the tiniest sliver of the Middle East with the Jews.
If the "anti-Zionists", for their part, get what they want, then there will be no Jews left alive in Israel.
11 Comments:
It is the conceit of the intellectualoid that with their superior reasoning power they can find a middle ground with anyone.
They fail to realize that someone who wants you dead twice can agree to kill you only once, and you are still dead.
Square acreage of land is nothing. I bet most of that land you refer to is uninhabitable - deserts or mountains.
What matters is whether land has water, access to ports, is farmable, or has oil. And morally what matters is, who owns it and who is taking it from them at gunpoint?
And what it's about is Israel's zealots, who would prefer to bulldoze shops built and owned by Palestinians for generations, so they can put their own houses there.
If you can't back up your argument with facts or history, but have to resort to false inflation of meaningless data, why don't you just change your argument instead? Seriously.
As for the blatant racism of other commentors - do you even believe what you're saying? It makes no sense. Can you imagine designing a car engine, building a house, balancing a checkbook, or whatever else we all have to do in our lives, with logic like that? No. It would be impossible. The car wouldn't run, the house would fall to pieces.
Then why would you build your life, with reasoning like that? Why wouldn't you think more?
Mr. Weinert - please! My eyes are hurting!
Re Land? I really don't think that most western folks who have such a strong opinion about the "ME conflict" have ever googled a map of Israel in relation to the ME. Once anyone does that - game over. It's all perfectly clear ( especially after 9/11 and what we now all understand about Islamic jihad.).
Might I suggest that David Horowitz post on a side bar - a simple map displaying for all visitors - Israel vs. the ME? What would be even better would be a little online game, where folks would "guess" the correct map - give 3 or 4 options, with one option being the (apparently prevailing distorted) view that Israel must somehow occupy at least 25% of the ME? Just for fun! Just for the shock value!
The definition of a liberal is someone who cares so much about the poor that he is willing and eager to pick your pocket and give your money to others in order to soothe his conscience.
Therefore, all Western Zionists are liberals.
Back in the 1920s, prominent Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky noted that Palestine belonged to the Arabs. He also said that the Jews have suffered so much that it was morally right to take a little bit of Arab land away from them in order for the Jews to have a homeland.
Now, the United States and Canada, combined, have more land than the Arab world. According to Jabotinsky's reasoning, the Anglo-Americans have so much land that it is morally right to take Maryland away from them and give it to the Jews to have a homeland. The people who lived there could simply move elsewhere in the Anglo-American world, to a sparsely populated place like Wyoming or Arkansas or Nova Scotia.
See how stupid Jabotinsky's logic was?
The Palestinians are acting like the Marylanders would have if the Zionists had decided to turn Maryland into the Jewish national home. It is thet Palestinians who were driven out of their homes, who had their land stolen from them, who were forced out of their homeland by Irgun and Lehi terrorists, and by the country that honored those ethnic cleansers.
Jabotinsky himself predicted that, even if the rest of the Arab world were to accept the Zionist project, the Arabs living in Palestine would never agree to just give up their homes and lives and move away. Therefore, according to Jabotinsky, it would be necessary for the Jews to use massive force in order to take all the land and force the Palestinians to accept this massive theft.
Quite simply, the Palestinian refugees want to return home, and those still living in Palestine want to live where they are and govern themselves instead of living under a brutal military occupation. The Israeli government wants to keep the refugees from returning to their homes, and wants to retain control of the West Bank and Gaza without granting citizenship or respecting the human rights to the Gentiles (both Christians and Muslims) who are living there.
Arabs and Jews had been living peacefully in the Holy Land for centuries; the hatred did not begin until the Zionists arrived there with their ethnic cleansing plan. Since the only Jews most Palestinians have contact with are those who are occupying their land and trying to drive them out of the country, the Palestinians are naturally going to assume that all Jews are bad. As Israeli newspaper columnist Ran HaCohen pointed out, if you want to end Palestinian terrorism, all you have to do is end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. You can have a one-state solution in which ethnicity is completely irrelevant and where the resulting country is neither Jewish nor Arab, or you could have a two-state solution honoring the 1967 borders; either way, the occupation would end, and so would the terrorism.
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=857
http://www.antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=3660
It is amazing how many Western Zionists insist that a Jewish state must exist (rejecting the one-state solution above) and that this Jewish state must be on this land that was taken from the Arabs. Why can't American Zionists insist that the American government create a Jewish state on all the government land out in Utah and Nevada that it owns, or on big chunks of federally owned land in Alaska? Or do they prefer to force some Arabs off of their privately owned land and out of their privately owned home in order to soothe their conscience? Why can't the Zionists in Europe recommend that a Jewish state be put in Bavaria, the land of Munich, Nuremberg, and Dachau? Those Nazi death camps were run by the Germans, not the Palestinians. Most Palestinians say that it was European Christians who conducted pogroms and genocide, and thus it would be only fair that the European Christians give up their own land for a Jewish state if one is truly needed; what they say is unfair is that European Christians force them to give up their land when they had been innocent of all those crimes.
Truly, Zionism in the West is politically liberal, if not socialist, and definitely anti-capitalist. Anyone who respects property rights has little choice but to side with the Palestinians here, especially the Christian ones.
*The State Department lists Marxist Palestinian terrorist organizations, and Islamic Palestinian terrorist organizations, and Jewish terrorist organizations. It does not know of any Christian Palestinian terrorist organizations. Thus, those who hate terrorism must reject Israel, and take the side of the Christian Palestinians.
"One of the few things unchallengeable about the Middle East conflict is that it has virtually nothing to do with land."
No, nothing at all to do with land:
"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple."
-- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.
"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937
Why would anyone think this has anything to do with land?
Uh, there are more Jews living in the States than Israel...let them go live in Brooklyn...
Steve,
Its a shame that incisive analysis, while bringing out some excellant analysts and commentary, should also bring out a few wingnuts and anti semites - but hey, how else expose and draw poison out of the body politic (lol)?
sam240
I think you've got the wrong analogy with the state of Maryland. Let's say that tomorrow, the US decreed that Maryland would be the home of the Jews, Jews would control it and govern it - and even if you're not a Jew you still get to stay right where you are, in Maryland. Do you have a problem with that? Do you have a problem with living in a Jewish state (assuming you're not Jewish yourself)?. That's precisely what a huge number of Arabs chose to do and they and their descendents are still living in Israel. You need to read up on your history a bit to understand exactly how all those "Palestinian" refugees came to be. While you're reading up on it, find out how many Jews live in the remaining vast, vast miles of land controlled by the Arabs.
Caroline,
I see several flaws with your argument.
First, we should note that the majority of residents of Palestine did not agree to give up their homeland to the Jews, nor did they have any voice in the bodies that made the decision (such as the UN). If the British government created a plan to make Maryland the Jewish homeland, and forced it on the people of Maryland against their will, then I would have had a problem - it would be a fundamental violation of democracy. Would you view it as acceptable if the British did that?
It's sneaky of you to have the US government make the decision, since Maryland has representation in the United States government. However, if the US government has the power to hand over Maryland to the Jews, then it certainly has the power to make Delaware the Palestinian state, to hand over the government and control of the state of Maryland to the Palestinians, and to let non-Palestinians live there if they accept Palestinian control. I don't want the federal government to have that much power, so, yes, I would have a problem with the US giving control of one of its states to any ethnic or religious group.
If Maryland came to have a Jewish majority through Jews moving there and buying land, or through its residents converting to Judaism, I wouldn't have a problem with it. That's how private enterprise works. But if the government were to change boundaries in order to create a state with a Jewish majority and a large Gentile minority for them to control, or if it were to force Gentiles to move out in order to create this majority, then there I would have a problem. If the government were to deny Gentiles in Maryland even the right to vote for the state legislature - like the Israeli government denies Gentiles in the West Bank and Gaza the right to vote for the Knesset - then I would have a problem.
By 1947, the Jews had managed to own only 6% of the land in the Palestine Mandate. They made up only 30 to 35% of the population. The UN partition plan gave the Jewish state 55% of the land in the mandate area. The borders were set out to put nearly all the Jews in the mandate into the Jewish state - as well as 25% of the Arabs. This made the final population 60% Jewish and 40% Arab - a clear gerrymandering. If the Jews had simply turned just the land they bought into the Jewish state, it would have been fine, but they forced people and their land into the state against their will.
As for the source of the Palestinian refugees ...
In a January 9, 2004, interview with Ha'aretz, Israeli Benny Morris stated exactly how the Palestinian refugees came to be. He had found over two dozen instances in different villages where Zionists massacred innocent Palestinian women and children in 1947 and 1948. While condemning the massacres, he acknowledges that Israel had a policy of expelling Arabs and goes so far as to praise the policy. According to Morris, the
"Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population."
Morris regretted that the Haganah did not drive more Arabs out of Israel. He stated that what the Israelis did to the Palestinians in 1948 was ethnic cleansing; he also stated that this ethnic cleansing was acceptable. The Palestinians, who where ethnically cleansed, would not agree with the second statement.
There were many Palestinians who fled their homes under the threat of murders and rapes carried out by Irgun and Lehi terrorists. Once the war ended, and the threat of murder by these terrorists ended as well, many of the refugees wanted to return to their homes, even if it meant living as part of a predominantly Jewish state. The government of Israel refused to let them return. Bosnians driven out of their homes by Serbian terrorism have the right of return; Palestinians driven out of their homes by Jewish terrorism must have the same right.
Israeli policy did involve ethnic cleansing. It did and still does involve the theft of land. Jews control and govern the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, refusing to give any Gentiles living there citizenship or a vote. This, as I mentioned earlier, is the crux of the problem.
The West Bank settlements are also a problem. They should be dissolved, not because they are Jewish but because they were set up illegally. There is a town in New York called Kiryas Joel which is Jewish. The land was bought by Jews; it was freely sold by their previous owners; nobody's rights were violated in creating the town. There's nothing wrong with Kiryas Joel. In the case of the West Bank settlements, however, the Israeli government seized the land from individual Palestinian landowners; the settlers knew the land had been stolen when they moved in; and the Geneva Convention prohibits the building of such settlements. If I buy a stolen car, I can't keep it; neither should people be allowed to keep stolen land. (Jews who lived in what is now the West Bank or Gaza prior to 1948, and their descendants, should be entitled to keep the land they owned then, however.)
Jews expelled by Arab governments should have the right to return to their old homes as well. But let's return to the Maryland parallel. If the state of Arkansas were to force Jews living there to leave the state, would that mean that it is just to force Marylanders out of their homes in order to give Jews a refuge? By your logic, it would; after all, both Arkansans and Marylanders are Americans. Palestinians had no say in any of the governments that drove Jews out of their homes. The governments of those countries deserve condemnation for those acts, but the Palestinians do not.
It is the Israeli government which maintains a brutal occupation, not the Jewish people; it is the Israeli government which is committing evil, not the Jewish people as a whole.
P.S. The government of Morocco should withdraw itself from Western Sahara, and the Moroccan settlers should leave their homes there, too. The principle in question is the same.
sam 240 -
Jews expelled from their Arab homelands should have their right to return there huh? Then why don't you spend your time hollering about that? You know as well as I do that there are no Jews left in that vast territory of land controlled by the Arabs. They were kicked out for no reason whatsoever while the vast bulk of palestinian refugees are the result of numerous wars initiated by the Arabs against the tiny tiny state of Israel. That tiny slice of land under Jewish control was just too much for the Arab/Islamic sensibility to stomach and if you were honest with yourself you would see that.
Returning to your Maryland analogy, it's not just the Jewish state of Maryland that was created by a foreign power in your analogy - it's a huge bulk of the rest of the United States - all handed to the non-Jews. You accuse the foreign powers of gerrymandering to create a Jewish majority in the tiny piece of the whole pie allotted to form a "Jewish state"? And you're outraged by that presumably? I'll save my outrage for the plain fact that the Palestinian refugees could have easily been absorbed half a century ago into the vast territories of the surrounding Arab states (all those Jews kicked out of Arab lands were readily accepted into Israel as I'm sure you know - to live alongside the many Arabs that stayed put and now number at least 1/5th of the israeli population) but instead they have been denied absorption so that they can be used as pawns by the surrounding Arab Muslims to sway liberal westerners like yourself to unknowingly (or perhaps knowingly) aid them in their jihad and "final solution". People sometimes wonder to themselves what THEY would have thought or done if they had actually lived in the 1930's and 1940's and witnessed the holocaust in progress. Well, now you know...
Caroline,
Your points are all well observed and correct, but I wonder sometimes if there is much of a point.
In my experience, anyone who dispassionately understands the whole Israeli situation -- especially one who learns the historical roots of the conflict -- is bound to side with Israel. They have no choice in the matter, unless the real issue is that they hate Jews.
I wonder, though, how much of this sort of nonsense is due to honest disagreement, and how much is really due to the mentality that hates Zionists first and finds the "reasons" later. It's not that the historical record is impossible to find -- it is that these people have no real desire to know; anymore than a Klan member would desire to learn about the authentic struggles of black people.
I am sorry for appearing cynical, but I strongly believe that the aniumus against Israel and Zionism has nothing to do with real history or real facts, and is simply anti-semitism in a tawdry disguise. It is as useful to argue against these people as it would be to argue against that Klan member I mentioned.
My real worry is that Israelis themselves, and especially their government, have been buying into the lies told about them. I worry that they are not acting like they have a healthy sense of self-preservation. It boggles my mind that these individuals, in some sort of misguided "compassion", actually allow themselves to show weakness; when history clearly shows us that weakness is met with contempt and ultimately bloodshed. I dearly hope that Israel does not manage to destroy itself in this manner. Recently, I am beginning to despair, though.
Anyway, be well, Caroline! I hope you have managed to reach someone.
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