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busterbrown

(8,515 posts)
Fri Jul 25, 2014, 08:12 PM Jul 2014

Does anyone have a problem with this dissertation?

Published By: Jews For Justice In The Middle East
Berkley 2001....


The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs’ inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.

The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in this booklet will show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).

The Arab community, as it became increasingly aware of the Zionists’ intentions, strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of the British. The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)

In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn’t matter. The Arabs’ opposition to Zionism wasn’t based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people.

One further point: being Jewish ourselves, the position we present here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. We do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystalized in the late 1930’s and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation.

But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem, as we shall see.

The complete post: http://www.ifamericansknew.org/history/origin.html

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Does anyone have a problem with this dissertation? (Original Post) busterbrown Jul 2014 OP
No problem here Vincardog Jul 2014 #1
Well here’s the complete piece.. busterbrown Jul 2014 #3
Aha. With that link, you address several of the points I had brought up. nt Erich Bloodaxe BSN Jul 2014 #5
Well, a couple. Erich Bloodaxe BSN Jul 2014 #2
This message was self-deleted by its author busterbrown Jul 2014 #4

Erich Bloodaxe BSN

(14,733 posts)
2. Well, a couple.
Fri Jul 25, 2014, 08:27 PM
Jul 2014

First, when I see people saying 'What really happened', I kinda want them to put in a lot of footnotes and references to show that they actually have sources that back up 'what really happened'.

Second, it looks like it cuts off midstream, and you didn't provide any link to continue reading, so maybe the missing references I want are there, just in a section I'm not seeing.

Without any sorts of references, I can't tell how much of that is factual or opinion, or written with a particular slant.

This part:

Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).


sounds pretty weird. Is there anywhere in the world where you can simply 'buy land' away from individuals these days and have it change ownership to the country of the people buying it? I thought nowadays if countries were going to absorb new areas, they had to 'buy' that land away from the government of the other country to which it belonged. The way it's written there looks more like the way America stole land away from Native Americans.

Response to Erich Bloodaxe BSN (Reply #2)

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