Re: The old days - Aboard the Apollo - 1973
I don;t think my post is that hard to understand - though perhaps you may have a tendency to deliberately misunderstand it. So I'll explain it.
"Are you in the valence of a nazi as regards the Muslims?" means "are you dramatising the same attitude towards moslems as the nazis dramatised towards jews?
" up in the Hitler bunker." As I live in new Zealand in the southern hemisphere everything that happens to the north of here is "UP", hence "up in the Hitler bunker".
"It is not only they who have to change their attitudes to the world. It is you and yours as well. " The first "they" refers to the people being referred to objectively in the discussion i.e. the Muslims. "you" refers to you. "yours" refers to your fellow jewish people including of course the people of Israel.
"The first step" to be taken is something far more fundamental than any agreement made with Arafat. The fundamental issue that needs to be confronted and handled is that Palestine was their land for thousands of years and they were booted out in 1948. If the Jewish people whose ancestors vacated the land two thousand years ago have a "right of return" then why don't the existing Palestinians who were evicted from that land within living memory not have that same right? And if Hitler's demand for greater lebensraum was unacceptable then why should Bibi's demand for similar lebensraum today be OK?
The above paragraph is full of incomplete data and some false data. The analogy comparing Palestinian lebensraum to Nazi lebensraum is absurd. There is no parallel whatsoever between the Nazis and the Palestinian people.
Leon's "fundamental issue' is bogus. Look at this sentence, "The fundamental issue that needs to be confronted and handled is that Palestine was their land for thousands of years and they were booted out in 1948. Leon does not even tell us who "they" are. It sure as hell was not the Palestinian people because that area of Palestine was occupied by Arab peoples from Jordan and from Egypt. There was no Palestinian people until some time in 1948 after the United Nations voted to divide Palestine between the Jewish people and the Arab people who were citizens of Jordan and Egypt who were then living there.
Leon writes bias and half truths further into that paragraph by stating that 'they' were booted out in 1948. The truth is that the ownership of the land was taken from them by a vote in the United Nations, I would hardly call this being booted out. I am sympathetic to them losing their legal rights to their land but they lost it by a legal ruling of a consensus of world governments, they were not booted out. On the other hand, he writes that the Jewish people's ancestors vacated the land 2000 years ago. The actual fact is that the Romans decided to oust the Jewish people from their land. There was a big war where the enormous Roman Army was opposed by a much, much smaller army of Jews. The Jews fought to the last man to stay on their land and they put up a strong fight, but the sheer size of the Roman army won this stupendous battle for the Romans. From that time forward, the Jewish people dispersed to all corners of the world and had no homeland of their own for nearly 2000 years.
Leon writes as if the Palestinian people were booted from their land, suggesting the use of force, while the ancestors of the Jewish people vacated their land, suggesting no use of force. He suggests further that they vacated in order to go somewhere else. The truth is that the Jordanian and Egyptian citizens in a certain area of Jordanian territory lost about 55% of their territory through a vote by the United Nations, while retaining the other 45%. The Jewish people were the ones who were booted out by force and they lost , not 55% of their territory but the full 100%. So when they were booted out they had no place else to go. Nobody really gave a damn, there was no United Nations to see that they had a place to call home. they were forced to be nomads for nearly 2,000 years. You talk about half truths, bias and inaccurate writing, Leon's sentence explaining the plight of both the Arabs in Palestine in 1948 and the ancestors of the Jewish people in 70 AD shows us an excellent example of how to twist words, using half truths, leaving out critical details, and applying personal bias to make one side look like a victim and then suggesting that the other side acted in a manner similar to the way the Nazi's behaved during WWII. He takes this concept so extremely far that he suggests that a person such as myself is acting in a Nazi like manner if I sympathize in any way with the Israelis.
Deal with it.
In my opinion the equating of Israel's desire to have a homeland with anything to do with the Nazi's stealing territory from European nations for Lebensraum (Living Space) for the German people is so vile, dishonest and hateful that I question either the sanity of the person or else the knowledge of history of the person making those comparisons.. Nevertheless, many people are in Leon's camp on this issue. I myself have sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people. I am in favor of a two state solution. The vote of 1948 did favor the Jewish people over the Arabs citizens of Jordan and Egypt who were then living in Palestine. To me the Jewish people had to be given a homeland but I am not a religious Jew and I don't feel that their homeland had to be in Palestine as per a biblical prophecy. After WWII, the international community of nations was sympathetic to the Jews and voted for them over the Palestinians because of the severe losses Jews had suffered at the hands of the Nazi's. The Palestinians did not contribute to the atrocities against the Jews in WWII and yet they were punished by the UN. I believe that is what constitutes their main complaint and they definitely have a valid point there. Nevertheless, the UN voted the Jews 55% of Palestinian territory. Israel has been there for 66 years and has built a modern and vital country there.
The 1948 UN vote cannot now be undone. The Jews and the Palestinians need to come together on this and work out an equitable two state solution. It is because of religious beliefs, both Jewish and Muslim that no settlement has been worked out. There are ways out of the impasse but to find a way out, both sides would have to be willing to make concessions. The peace deal brokered by president Clinton was one such effort, it seems as if the Israeli government went for it while the Palestinian government under Arafat almost went for it but backed out with no explanation at the last minute. In any viable peace deal BOTH sides will have to make some serious concessions. They BOTH might have to give in on several things that are sacrosanct to them. BOTH sides have a legitimate claim to the territory. I do feel that legally, the Israeli's have the stronger claim because of the vote of the UN in 1948. Having the legally stronger claim does not necessarily mean they have the morally superior claim. To me fulfilling a Biblical prophecy carries virtually no weight while to both Christians and Jews, it carries an enormous amount of weight. To reach a settlement both sides have to be willing to compromise some of their core beliefs I don't know if this will ever happen. As the song says, "It takes two to Tango."
I am going to write my opinion below. I have already dealt with the issue myself and as far as your beliefs, I do not agree them. I don't have to deal with anything. I know what your views are, I strongly disagree with them but I thank you for expressing your views and I have no problem whatsoever with you and I disagreeing on this topic. Probably on a lot of topics we agree but this isn't one of them.
In the Palestinian versus Israeli argument, people hold strong views and probably those views are never going to change. To continue an argument on this topic is never productive. It stirs up a lot of animosity but neither side is likely to ever change their minds.
Here are my closing remarks to you. I couldn't disagree with you more. First of all the Palestinian people were not booted out of the land in 1948. In 1948 what was then Palestine belonged to Jordan. The Arab people who lived there were Jordanians and Egyptians and were not referred to as the Palestinian people. Going back a little further, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WWI, the British Balfour declaration divided up a large territory of the Ottoman Empire into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Trans Jordan. The part of Trans Jordan west of the Jordan River was referred to as Palestinian.
European Jewry was decimated by the Nazi's during WWII. Of a world Jewish population of about 19 million in 1938, the Nazi's killed off roughly 1/3 of them. The surviving Jews of Europe had nowhere to go, no country would take them in. A Zionist movement which had started in the 19th century campaigned in the United Nations, newly founded in 1945, to take the territory of Palestine away from Trans Jordan and give it to the Jewish people as a site for a new Jewish homeland. The British were the custodians of the land at that time, having seized it from the Ottoman Empire after WWI.
A vote was held in the United Nations. Its funny Leon, but Progressives such as yourself nowadays campaign for the United Nations to make rulings on world issues, rather than having independent countries such as the USA, USSR or China calling the shots. Progressives champion the authority of the UN now but conveniently ignore one of the first important rulings which the UN ever made. In a fair and legally held vote of the world's countries, a new Jewish state, Israel was legally created and voted about 5,800 sq miles of the territory formerly controlled by Jordan. The remaining 4,500 sq. miles was voted to belong to the native Arab people who were living in that zone who up until then were citizens of either Jordan or Palestine.
Thus a 4,500 sq mile piece of land had been approved by the United Nations to be the homeland for the Arab people indigenous to that part of Palestine. That should have been the end of it. The Jews were happy to have their portion of the land and if the indigenous Arab people living there would have accepted the UN edict, we would have had a 2 state solution and the two new countries would have lived side by side in peace.
Alas, this was not to be the case because immediately after the vote several Arab countries, including Egypt, Syria, Jordan and the newly created Palestinian zone attacked Israel en masse. The Israeli's were fighting for their existence and somehow managed to win the war against a foe much larger than themselves.
That first skirmish was in 1948 and it was followed up with two further wars started by the same group of Arab countries, one war in 1956 and the other in 1967. Unbelievably, Israel won both those wars as well. Each time the Israeli's won a war against the Arab countries, they took some land from the Palestinian portion of the land as voted to the Arab peoople in 1948. They had to do this to establish more defendable borders if there were to be more future attacks. In this manner, Israel's land increase from, 5,800 sq mi up to over 8,000 sq. mi., while the Palestinian portion shrunk down to around 2,500 sq. miles.
That is a thumbnail sketch of how Israel got their land and the Palestinian people came into existence and came to occupy a certain portion of Palestine. The land itself was controlled by the Ottoman Empire for about 1,300 years and the country of Turkey, having roots in the Ottoman Empire, became the custodians of the land up until the end of WWI. Since Turkey was on the losing side in WWI, they lost control of the land to the British. After WWII, the United Nations held a legal and binding vote to determine whether a Jewish state should be created and legally receive a portion of the territory known since Roman times as Palestine. It was a close vote but it passed.
The vote was a compromise vote, some land was going to be won by one group and some land was going to be lost be another group. The vote was held by the United Nations, a legally organized and constituted international organization. As a result of that vote Israel was awarded a tiny tract of land. That is just the simplicity and truth of how Israel came into existence and came to control most of what was once called Palestine.
Lakey
