The overriding condemning judgement of commentators expressing opinions like the foregoing seems to be that 1. Israeli Jews are horrible monsters who are acting like Nazis and perpetrating unforgivable crimes against the innocent Palestinian Arabs who've done nothing wrong; 2. Jews don't belong in Palestine because they never should have gone there in the first place; 3. The Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the region and therefore the Jews have no legitimate claim to the land; 4. The Israeli Jews should just go away and leave the land to its rightful owners, the Palestinian Arabs.
The following is a summary of my answers to the above charges and my attempted objective views about the whole Israeli-Palestinian conflict that has raged on for more than a hundred years.
It is my contention that complaining about who did what to whom 90 years ago, 70 years ago, 50 years ago, 40, 30, 20 years ago and now solves nothing.
1. The Jews are there now. There have always been both Jews and Arabs in the region. As you will admit, there is nowhere else for the Jews to go. Telling the Jews they have to go is a mute point, and it's as useless as saying that all non-latinos should leave the western states so that the original Mexican owners can have their land back. It's not going to happen, so forget it. The two sides are going to have to learn to live with each other.
2. There is no such thing as an indigenous Palestinian. Palestinian Arabs and Jews are ethnically the same people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine#History
"the region has a long and tumultuous history as a crossroads for religion, culture, commerce, and politics. The region has been controlled by numerous different peoples, including Ancient Egyptians, Canaanites, Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, the Sunni Arab Caliphate, the Shia Fatimid Caliphate, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mameluks, Ottomans, the British and modern Israelis and Palestinians. ...3. As there are no indigenous Palestinians, and since Palestinian Arabs and Jews are ethnically the same people, there is no occupation or colonization. It's a civil war.
During the Bronze Age, independent Canaanite city-states were established ...
Ethnically the population of Canaan showed great stability, and although Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites and Phoenicians all came to achieve distinct cultural identities, they were all descendants of the people who settled in farming villages in the region in the 8th millennium BCE."-- So the original indigenous inhabitants were Canaanites. Do you know where we can find some Canaanites so we can give them their land back?"
It's not 'ethnic cleansing'. It's not 'genocide'. It's not 'colonialism'. Bosnia was ethnic cleansing. Rwanda, the Armenians and the Holocaust were genocide. South Africa was colonialism. The Arab-Israeli conflict is not the same thing. It's a civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine#Modern_period
"In 1947, following World War II and the Holocaust, the British Government announced their desire to terminate the Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly voted to partition the territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jewish leadership accepted the proposal but the Arab Higher Committee rejected it; a civil war began immediately, and Israel was declared in 1948."
4. Britain had the right to give settlement rights, it was their land to do with as they please by right of conquest and spoils of war as with the conquering Ottoman Turks, Christian Crusaders, Arab Caliphates, Byzantines, Romans, Ancient Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Ancient Egyptians before them. France was a party to this also.
5. Both Arabs and Jews had agreed to share the land with the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement of 1919. The British reneged on promises to the Arabs. The Arabs reneged on the Agreement. The Jews held up their end of the bargain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal–Weizmann_Agreement
6. The whole point is to promote peace in the region, not to squabble about who was right or wrong to be there, nor who did what to whom. Taking sides in this, buying into the propaganda and hyperbole, complaining about who is currently doing what to whom, serves nothing and no one but to feed into the hatred and prolong the conflict. Both sides have committed violent acts against each other in the past, and both are continuing to do so. The Palestinians are no more innocent than the Israelis. There is no innocent side in this, both sides are at fault.
7. B'Tselem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B'Tselem
"B'Tselem's stated goals are "to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel". In December 1989 the organization shared the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize with the Palestinian group, Al-Haq."
-- Good, so I guess this means that not all the Jews are genocidal maniacs.
"B'Tselem also campaigns against the death penalty and the human rights record of the Palestinian Authority. On 17 February 2005, the organization called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to commute the sentences of Palestinians condemned to death and abolish the death penalty. Abbas had shortly before ratified the death sentences of a number of Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel or of other criminal charges." ...-- The violence has been committed on both sides. The Palestinians will find little sympathy for their cause as long as they are willing to kill civilians indiscriminately. It does nothing to promote peace calling the Israelis genocidal Nazis and demanding that all the Jews leave Palestine. Peace is the goal. Both sides will have to decide to give up using violence as a tool and decide to share the land in order to achieve peace. Neither side is willing to do so at this point. As long as the Palestinians support Hamas in their violent acts and the Israelis support their military in its violent acts then there will never be peace. That's why I've quoted Harlan Ellison's solution to enclose the area in a dome and lock it up for a couple hundred years. They have to be forced to live together. Practically, of course, we don't have the means to do that now but how about a permanent UN force to keep the peace?
"It points out that Israel has the right to defend its civilians and that attacks on Israeli civilians were defined under international law as "war crimes". But Israel does not have the right to "trample on the rights of an entire population, in a patently arbitrary and indiscriminate manner." ...
"Thirteen Israeli civilians and eleven members of the Israeli security forces had been killed by Palestinian civilians and five security personnel killed by their Palestinian counterparts. Whilst also drawing attention attention to Human Rights violations by the Palestinian Authority the report's main concern is the use of excessive force by Israeli forces in dispersing demonstrations by unarmed Palestinians, in particular the use of live ammunition. It called for an international commission of inquiry." ...
"A B'Tselem report devoted to Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians reported that from June 2004 to 17 January 2009, 19 civilians and 2 soldiers were killed in Israel by rockets and mortar fire by Palestinians. Four of them were minors.
According to the UN, cited by B'Tselem the number of rockets fired at Israel was as follows:
2005: 1194 Qassam rockets (an average of 100 a month)
2006: 1786 rockets
2007: 1331
2008: 2048 rockets and more than 1672 mortar shells."
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