<< Question: Who gave the Jews the right to form modern Israel? My knowledge of the late 20th-century history in the Middle-East is somewhat limited. Did they take the land by right of arms? Did the U.K. finally give in and give it to them? Did God come down and say, "Here, take this land. Oh, those people? Just kick them out, they're not important?"
Did they pay for they land they took? Did they pay for the radio station they blew up? When those tanks rolled into the refugee camp, did they make sure to drive around the kids, the tents with sick, the old and slow? Don't tell me a kid defeating his home is wrong. When kids are picking up rocks and sticks and attacking soldiers, to me that is a sign that something is VERY wrong with the nation who is sending out the soldiers. Do you need to kill kids to defend Israel? IF you want peace, talk to them. If you wish to kill them, kill them. But don't kill kids and call it peace. Don't roll tanks imto refugee camps and than complain to me about sucide-bombers. I get enough of that junk from my own Government and their own homemade hypocrisy. If you want peace, show us you want peace. All you are showing us right now is an animal trapped in a device of its own making, thrashing about in rage and fear, striking out almost at random. Remember the old saying: If you live by the sword... >> It would take you five seconds to look this up and find the information for yourself. After World War 1, the British government, which ruled the territory of the middle east, declared that it favored a Jewish state in Palestine. This is known as the Balfour Declaration. After the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews, the United States and the United Nations declared a partition of Palestine, with a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. Jerusalem was supposed to be shared. Israel was noticeably smaller in the initial draft. However, the Arabs and Palestinians said no. (It should be noted, every Arab state was allied with the Nazis during World War II. You can argue that this was because of anti-English anti-imperialism, but it remains the truth). The Arabs attacked Israel trying to destroy it. Israel won the war, and became an independent country. Thousands of Palestinians fled, becoming refugees living in Lebanon and Jordan, mostly, in squalid refugee camps - camps the wealthy Arab states could easily have paid to turn into comfortable, modern towns, only the Arabs hate and mistrust the Palestinians even more than they hate Jews. Why do you think they have never permitted Palestinian refugees to become citizens of their countries? This way, they always have a ready supply of desperate refugees to use against Israel. They can also always use Israel as a distraction from their own failures to modernize their countries and make their people's lives better. Continuing the history lesson, from 1948 to 1967, Israel appealed to the Arab countries to make peace but was always turned down. In 1967, facing an imminent attack, Israel preemptively struck back at Egypt first, seizing the Sinai peninsula, and at Jordan, seizing the West Bank - and all of Jerusalem. (People who say that Israel should trust the Arabs need to realize that the Jewish holy sites in eastern Jerusalem were off-limits to Jews from 1948 to 1967 and were not maintained by Jordan during that period. Since Israel recovered eastern Jerusalem, all the holy sites there of all 3 faiths have been more or less, for the most part, kept open to all the faithful. The world didn't give a shit during the 19 years when no Jew was allowed to pray at the Wailing Wall in eastern Jerusalem, the holiest site in all Judaism.) After 1967, Israel again tried to make peace, not wanting to maintain an occupation over the Palestinians, but again the Arabs refused, despite the UN resolutions that everyone knows about. People have long yelled at Israel to trade land for peace, but nobody has ever yelled at the Arabs that this means they have to trade peace for land. You can argue if you want that Israel's existence is an imposition, that it represented guilty Europe and the US assuaging their own consciences for the Holocaust by forcing a Jewish state on innocent Arabs. As I said, the Arab countries were all allied with the Nazis, so their innocence is not apparent to me. As for why the Arab people should suffer because of what their governments do - well, they're still suffering. That's why countries should be democratic. The fact is, there could have been a Palestinian state in 1947. There could have been one in 1967. If the Arabs then had been willing to accept Israel's right to exist, all the bloodshed since then could have been avoided. What happened since the late 1960s is, Israel finally decided the Arabs were never going to accept them and make peace, so Israel had to defend itself. Especially after the 1973 war, Israel realized the very narrowness of pre-1967 Israel was hard to defend. The Labor government decided to plant settlers in the West Bank, Gaza strip, and Sinai. In retrospect, this turns out to have been a mistake, since it made disentangling Israel from the rest of Palestine very difficult. At the time, however, it appeared to be the best way to provide Israel with defensible depth of territory, especially as at the time there was not the slightest sign that any Arab country would ever be willing to make peace. In 1978, Anwar Sadat of Egypt proposed signing a peace treaty with Israel in return for getting the Sinai peninsula back. He flew to Jerusalem and talked with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. President Jimmy Carter offered to help and peace talks were held at Camp David. Eventually, the two countries agreed (for which, a few years later, Sadat was murdered by Muslim extremists). In the early 1980s, Israel forcibly demolished its settlements in the Sinai peninsula and returned the territory to Egypt. This caused great political turmoil in Israel, but they did it. And Israel and Egypt have been at peace ever since. A cold peace, but young Egyptians aren't dying anymore. Some of them are murdering Western tourists to their country, but hey, as long as it isn't Jews killing Arabs, nobody seems to care. Let the Muslims kill as many people as they want. I don't want to recount the entire history of Israel here, especially as I am not qualified to do so. But whoever asked the questions above (notice that I do not quote names, as a way of depersonalizing the discussion) seemed to know less than nothing about the very birth of Israel and seemed to display less than no genuine curiosity about it either, so I thought I'd fill in a few blanks. Tom Beck "I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I didn't realize I'd also see the last." - Jerry Pournelle
