On May 20, 6:56 am, Zev <zev_h...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> "Mitchell Holman" <Noem...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>
> news:Xns9AA3EB1767292ta2eene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
> >jgarbuz<jgar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in news:14771226-6929-4274-9e0e-
> > 6701f668e...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >> On May 19, 9:01 pm, Mitchell Holman <Noem...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>>jgarbuz<jgar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in news:4732c59f-0205-4998-ae6d-
> >>> 392f82161...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>> > On May 19, 7:39 pm, Mitchell Holman <Noem...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>> >>jgarbuz<jgar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
news:0c01c1ca-8ac2-4bf5-83e2-
> >>> >> 3a0456410...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> >>> >> > On May 17, 6:01 pm, MissMiss <lilhor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >>> >> Where did the Israelis get any "right" to the lands
> >>> >> they hold?<
>
> >>> > From the League of Nations in 1922 at the San Remo conference.
>
> >>> Were the people who were living on the land get any
> >>> voice in who it was being "awarded" to?<
>
> >> No. Why should they have been?
> > Because they lived there?
>
> Suppose Archie Bunker doesn't like the inflow
> of South Americans and Chinese
> into his Queens neighborhood.
> He has good reason.
> He's unfamiliar with the language, culture, and religion.
> He complains, but the decisions are not made in Queens.
> He gets together with his friends,
> who declare themselves "Queensians".
> They obtain weapons and try to use force
> to prevent a change in their neighborhood.<
Of course not. Every predominantly Jewish neighborhood that I lived in
in New York since 1949 rapidly turned Black and Hispanic, and those
who didn't care to remain quickly left. But I recall some white
neighborhoods, mostly Italian and Irish that sometimes physically
resisted the black influx with some degrees of violence back in the
1950s and '60s. But Jews preferred flight over fight.
> Perhaps a better example would be
> Muslims moving into Marseille.
> I used this example only because
> most Americans know who "Archie Bunker" is.
> (The inspiration for Archie Bunker was Alf Garnett,
> the character from the BBC sitcom "Til Death Us Do Part",
> on which "All in the Family" was based).
>
> My question is:
> Do these people have more or less rights
> than the Palestinians who "lived there",
> you refer to above?<
You hit the nail on the head. It wasn't that Jewish immigrants were
directly harming any Arabs, but the Arabs didn't want to see Palestine
become majority Jewish and come under Jewish sovereignty. They made
all kinds of complaints to the British, most of which were proved to
be baseless in reality by the Royal Peel Commission in 1937, which was
set up to investigate the situation on the ground. The Arabs were
claiming that Jewish purchases of land were causing Arab landlessness,
but deep investigation showed that such Arab claims were way
overblown. No more than 1,000 Arab families were displaced by Jewish
land purchases up till 1937. And the commission noted that overall,
despite the rapidly growing number of Arabs due to much better health
conditions, that the Jewish influx had created a much higher level of
prosperity overall. And that the drift from the land into jobs by many
rural Arabs was just a natural response to industrialization as occurs
everywhere when industry comes into a most rural agricultural society.
Nonetheless, the commission proposed the idea of Partition into a very
tiny Jewish state and a very large Arab state. The Jews were not happy
with the idea, but the Arabs quashed it completely. They refused to
even meet with the commission to even discuss such an idea. Had they
chosen to cooperate, Israel today would be smaller than the proposed
Palestinian state of today. Israel would not have the Negev, or much
of anything besides the coast. But the notion of ANY kind of Jewish
state of any size was anathema then as it is to Hamas today.
> >> The League of Nations created many entities
> >> not always to the satisfaction of local residents.
>
> > And that explains why the Israelis are in a
> > constant state of war. The local residents weren't
> > consulted.<<
They were consulted by the King-Crane commission from the United
States in 1919, and over 90% of the Arab population rejected the idea
out of hand of any Jewish homeland of any size in Palestine. But the
League ignored the findings and went ahead anyway in approving the
Balfour Declaration. I bet that if the American government polled
white communities in the US as to whether they would allow American
native Indians to live next door, most Americans would object to
American Indians moving into "their" neighborhood. That is only to be
expected.
> You mean they should have taken a poll?
> Really, there wasn't anything whiched represented
> "local residents" which could have been consulted.
> That's the point of my "Queensian" story above,
> and that's the lie of all those who say
> that the Jews stole the Palestinians' country.<
They were polled by two American congressman, King and Crane, who
initially sup****ted the Zionist claim, but found 90%+ of the Arabs in
Palestine and Syria opposed to any such idea. And so they recommended
that the US and the League turn down the Zionist programme, correctly
arguing that it would be strenuously opposed by the Arab residents. As
indeed it was, starting from 1920 onwards. So the question remained,
should the 9 million Jews in the world forever give up any hope of a
country of their own, and accept being kicked around forever by the
racist Jew haters just to placate the will of 700,000 Arabs in
Palestine - or not? There were many who stated at the time, that if
the Zionist program were to be accepted, that it would have to be at
the point of a bayonet, and would mean war with the Arabs forever. So
the League was not blind to the risk involved. Nevertheless, the
promise to the Jews had been made, and now the HOPE was that maybe
somehow that by giving the Arabs independence in the rest of the Arab
speaking countries that had been under Ottoman rule for 400 years
would more than make up for it. But as we see, it didn't work. The
Arabs are an intransigent warlike race not capable of compromise or
civilized behavior, especially due to Islamic fanaticism. SO there is
nothing new under the sun.
That is when Jabotinsky stated his famous "IRon Wall" proposition,
that the Jews would have no choice but to build their homeland behind
an Iron Wall. But the leftist socialist Jews who were mostly in charge
of the movement at the time, believed that with the coming of
socialism and "progress" that all these national and ethnic and
religious differences would fade away, and that in time the Jews and
Arabs would see the benefits of cooperation. Well, it's 85 years later
and such halcyon hopes are as yet to bear fruit. Behind the Iron Wall
appears to be the only way Jews can survive. Reality is often sad.
That's life.
> BTW, prominent ME Arab leaders sup****ted
> Jewish immigration into the ME, and said so.
> (references on request)<
Yes, but it wasn't so much that they sup****ted the Zionist program, as
that in 1919 they needed the JEwish influence in Britain and America
to help gain independence for the rest of the Arab world. You see,
India was still under British colonial rule, and most of Africa and
Asia was too, so there was no reason why the Ottoman Empire in its
entirety shouldn't have remained under British colonial rule. After
all, to the victor goes the spoils. That was life since the dawn of
civilization. You defeated it, you owned it. There was no other way of
thinking. Then came mr. president Wilson, with his grand American
ideas of democracy and :"self-determination," blah blah blah, and so
the British, French and Italians had to bend to American will, as it
was the US entry into the war that tipped the scales in favor of the
Allies in 1917. And so Wilson's idea of a "League of Nations" that
would consider the needs of the local people for the first time in
human history was finally adopted by the Allies and many colonized
areas hoping that it would lead to their own independence from the
colonial countries in time. Ironically, the conservatives in the US
Senate blocked the treaty and refused to ratify it, to WIlson's
chagrin, leading to his breakdown, and so the US itself never joined
the League. But in regards to this little backwards afterthought,
Palestine, which was hardly of any im****tance whatsoever to anyone
except to Jews and Christian Evangelical zionists, a promise had been
made to the Jews for their sup****t behind the Allies, and so the
desire of millions of Jews for a state of their own in their biblical
homeland had to trump the will of a few hundred thousand non-Jewish
residents of the area. That was the bottom line, for better or for
worse.
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