Are Jews "Unrightly" Occupying Israel?

[WinePusher]

Former white house press corps member Helen Thomas made a statement that Jews are occupying Palestine and they should "go home." This statement was defended in far left precincts such as Rosie O' Donnell, the former actor.

First, I'd invite both these people to read history and maybe Rosie O' Donnell (if shes not to afraid) should read the bible.

1) Are the Jews unrightly occupying Israel.

2) Was the United Nations justified in creating this state.

[micatala]

Former white house press corps member Helen Thomas made a statement that Jews are occupying Palestine and they should "go home." This statement was defended in far left precincts such as Rosie O' Donnell, the former actor.

First, I'd invite both these people to read history and maybe Rosie O' Donnell (if shes not to afraid) should read the bible.

1) Are the Jews unrightly occupying Israel.

Yes and no. The British essentially gave Palestine to the Israels, after having in some sense promised it to Arabs as well. The Israelis are not responsible for Britain's duplicity, but neither are the Palestinians.


What would you say if someone stole something of yours and then gave it to a third party. Does the third party have a right to what they received?

2) Was the United Nations justified in creating this state.

Was it the UN's country to give away?

Were the current occupants of the country allowed a say in what happened to the country?

Should a conquering power have a say in who rules a country when it gains independent or should the residents determine that on their own?

[TheLibertarian]

Yes. I dislike thieves, be they welfare addicts or nations.

[DeBunkem]

I'll second that, and add that if you haven't given it back for 50 years it gives you no more right to keep it than when you stole it. Ariel Sharon even admitted Israel was occupying Palestine.

[JoeyKnothead]

If we had to return every piece of land someone's ancestors "stole" from another we'd all be wandering this globe aimlessly and endlessly.

Long live Israel! Long live the Israelis!

[micatala]

If we had to return every piece of land someone's ancestors "stole" from another we'd all be wandering this globe aimlessly and endlessly.

Long live Israel! Long live the Israelis!

That is a legitimate point. How far back do we go? That's why I said yes and no.

However, I think it is clear the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. To the extent people were expelled from Israel who lived there prior to its establishment, or had to flee for their lives, those people and arguably their descendants have a legitimate claim.


There is no easy solution to this, unfortunately.


To me, the most legitimate claims belong to the longest term residents. The British really had no legitimate claim. Arguably, one could say the same of the Ottoman's or other conqueering powers.

[Goat]

If we had to return every piece of land someone's ancestors "stole" from another we'd all be wandering this globe aimlessly and endlessly.

Long live Israel! Long live the Israelis!

That is a legitimate point. How far back do we go? That's why I said yes and no.

However, I think it is clear the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. To the extent people were expelled from Israel who lived there prior to its establishment, or had to flee for their lives, those people and arguably their descendants have a legitimate claim.


There is no easy solution to this, unfortunately.


To me, the most legitimate claims belong to the longest term residents. The British really had no legitimate claim. Arguably, one could say the same of the Ottoman's or other conqueering powers.

That would go all the way back to the Romans... There hasn't been 'home rule' in Israel since Herod, and even he could be considered a 'foreign king'

[JoeyKnothead]

From Post 6:

That is a legitimate point. How far back do we go? That's why I said yes and no.

However, I think it is clear the Palestinians have a legitimate grievance. To the extent people were expelled from Israel who lived there prior to its establishment, or had to flee for their lives, those people and arguably their descendants have a legitimate claim.

With respect to one whose opinions I value, I disagree. The Palestinians, IMO, have disowned the land by targeting civilians indiscriminately. Wage war on civilians and you lose all moral authority to possess lands you claim.

There is no easy solution to this, unfortunately.

Recognize the right of Jews to have a homeland. Given the Middle East is so huge, I see no problem with Jews having a state - such a small state - where they control their most holy and revered places.

To me, the most legitimate claims belong to the longest term residents.

Weren't Jews in the area before Muslims / Arabs?

The British really had no legitimate claim. Arguably, one could say the same of the Ottoman's or other conqueering powers.

Didn't the Muslims / Arabs take these lands from the Jews?

[ChaosBorders]

1) Are the Jews unrightly occupying Israel.

No. I don't think it was a wise idea to give it back to them by displacing the Palestinians when we had plenty of wide tracts of unused land in our own nation we could have set up a state for them in. But we did, and it wouldn't really be any more fair to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to take away the land they were born on anymore than it was fair to take it away from the Palestinians in the first place.

That being said, expanding further and making settlements in territory that is still vastly made up of Palestinians isn't really cool.

2) Was the United Nations justified in creating this state.

I don't really think they were justified making it where it is, but they did so we need to deal with it.

[cnorman18]

I don't normally care to get into these debates; they normally generate more heat than light, and opinions are rather often more dependent on one's prejudices and assumptions than on the facts. I do not exclude my own opinions from that, and one reason I avoid these debates is that the statements made in them rather often enrage me. As I've said before, the most essential element in civil and rational debate is respect for the other fellow's opinion; simply smearing those who disagree with you as evil, cowardly butchers, e.g., is neither civil nor probative. Shouting insults belongs on the street corner, not in a debate forum.

All that said: Here are a few facts that are rarely acknowledged on this topic.

(1) Most of the land that became Israel proper in 1948 was either legally bought and owned by Jews, much of it for decades, or was largely uninhabited. The land was, for the most part, legally purchased from absentee Arab landlords, often at astronomically inflated prices which the Jews paid anyway.

(2) Very few Palestinians were forcibly evicted from their property. There were excesses and massacres, a few - Deir Yassin was one of them, and a horrid atrocity it was - but the overwhelming majority of "refugees" left what later became Israel at the urging of Arab military commanders. This can be easily proven from Arab newspaper stories and editorials at the time.

(3) Further proof of the overstatement of Palestinian "displacement" can be found in the simple and plain fact that not all the Arabs ever left. There were Arab citizens of Israel from the very beginning, and there still are - with the same rights and privileges as any other Israeli citizen. Very many Arabs stayed in Israel at the time of partition; they were not forced to leave nor otherwise molested, and prefer, then and now, life under the Israeli government to living under any Arab regime. Arabs work, vote, own and run businesses, buy and sell property, and serve in the Israeli Army, the Israeli Knesset, and in every Israeli government agency. (How much of that was true of blacks in South Africa? The charge of "apartheid" is factually inaccurate, and always has been.)

(4) More Jews were expelled from Arab nations - forcibly, at gunpoint and after being relieved of all their worldly possessions - than there were Arabs who left Israel. I've never heard a single word about the rights of, or reparations to, those displaced persons, many of whom lived in Jewish communities in the West Bank that were quite literally thousands of years old. Which brings us to -

(5) Jews were not strangers to Israel in 1948; not all of the Jews left Israel in AD 70, and there has been a continuous Jewish presence and population in Israel for more than three thousand years.

(6) The stated goals and tactics of the Palestinian terror organizations ought not be ignored here. They are the complete destruction and eradication of the State of Israel and the expulsion or extermination of every Jew in the Middle East. The proposed Palestinian state in the West Bank is to be Judenrein, "Jew-free"... and somehow it is the Jews who are said to be "racists" and "intent on ethnic cleansing." How do you "negotiate" with someone whose only interest and goal is killing you and your family and destroying your home?

The unfortunately harsh security measures that Israel imposes on the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza are terrible, but the consequences of simply dropping them would be far worse. Attempted terror attacks and suicide bombers are stopped in Israel literally every single day. When those attempts are no longer being made, the Israelis can drop their security concerns; to do so before that happens would be collective suicide. Yes, it's terrible that pregnant women in labor are stopped and searched on their way to the hospital; but who is to blame for that? The Israelis - or Palestinian terrorists who disguise suicide-bomb mass murderers as pregnant women in labor?

No one is saying that Israel is perfect. There have been excesses, overreactions, even atrocities; I have a particular problem with the "settlements," as indeed do most American Jews. Those "settlements" need to be evacuated and closed, with very few exceptions. They are a thumb in the eye to any attempt at a "peace process" of any description.

That "Gaza solution," however, may help no more in the West Bank than it did in Gaza. When Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza, the Hamas leadership focused their resources not on building a state and helping their own people, but on stepping up attacks on Israel. Since 1948, every single concession and compromise and withdrawal Israel has attempted in pursuit of peace has been used by the Palestinians as an opportunity for more violence, more terror, and more attacks on Israeli civilians. Israel sanctioned and armed the Palestinian Authority on Arafat's assurance that serious efforts would be made to end terrorism; which promises were followed by Arafat being caught trying to smuggle in weapons and bombs on the Karine A, with documentary evidence of Arafat's direct involvement in terror attacks.

The priorities of the Israelis are peace and security, period; the priority of the Palestinian leadership is, judging by their actions and indeed by their formally and publicly published charters, to kill Jews. It's hard to see how an objective and factual analysis would put ALL the blame for this perennial crisis on the Israelis.

The problem of achieving peace in the Mideast is a difficult one, and attributing pure-as-the-driven-snow innocence to one side and heinous, unmitigated evil to the other isn't going to help. Never. As in, Not Ever.

My own solution remains the same. Just stop the terror campaign; after that, anything is possible and anything is doable. That has even been proposed by one Rafey Habib, a pro-Palestinian activist, in a post from DeBunkem here:

....So I beg you now, you launchers of rockets,
Lay down your arms: what have they brought in
Fifty years? Nothing. Your killing of civilians
Can bring nothing but shame. In taking
Life, innocent life, your blame
Will burn in the eyes of God....

....Let us sit down with our enemy.
Talk with him as though
He were our friend.
(One day we must remember: the Jews
Are our brothers, descended
From the same father Abraham.
The Jews are not our enemy, no
Matter what deeds are
Perpetrated in their name; the
True Jews of the world are friends; they
See your suffering, and they bleed
With you; they are ashamed
Of those who pretend to act in their name,
One day we must live with them as friends)....

....Let us use a courage higher than your rockets,
Stronger than his tanks:
Let us tear down this wall; and all walls between us.
Let us sit down, and talk. And let us spread
This message through our people: no more
Violence, no more talk of wiping out
The enemy. It is not just violent acts which bring
His violent retribution, but violent words.
Let him know that he is safe.
Greet his fear with true courage:
The greatest courage is to know
One day we must live as friends....

You can't claim that you want peace when you're currently involved in planning and carrying out the deliberate targeting and mass murder of innocent noncombatants as a primary goal on a daily basis. You can't accuse your enemy of committing war crimes when your own war crimes - hiding and transporting weapons, bombs and fighting men in schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances and among civilians - are the immediate cause of the practices to which you object. All of those activities are explicit and egregious violations of the Geneva Convention, which makes it clear that the deaths of civilians are on the hands of those who deliberately endanger them, as is the routine practice of Hamas & Co. Whether or not Israel has committed "war crimes" is debatable; whether or not Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah, et. al., have committed war crimes absolutely is not, and that FACT is too often ignored or discounted.

Habib sees it; stop the mass murder campaign, and then we can talk. How is that not incredibly, glaringly obvious?

I have said my piece now, and I may or may not participate further in this thread. I will NOT respond to insults, diatribes, propaganda (including deliberately inflammatory cartoons from hate sites), or accusations of dishonesty or a hidden agenda.