Israel Hate is Anti-Semitism

[Shaktimaan]

293. OK, I see what you're saying.

You're not opposing a Jewish state. You're opposing the right to install it on land you see as belonging to Palestine.

I am saying that sovereign or non-sovereign, the land belonged to the indigenous people, the Palestinian Jews (15%?), the Palestinian Arabs and the Bedouin. It most certainly did not belong to the Zionist Jews and Britain had no MORAL right to allow Zionist immigrants to pile into Palestine with the avowed intention of creating a Jewish State there.

I'm not saying it belonged to the Zionists by any implied right, any more than it belonged to anyone based on their ethnicity or place of birth. I do see the attractiveness of your solution. It is simple and at least at first glance, it appears to be fair to everyone involved. After all, that's more or less how ethnic nation-states in Europe were formed, right? Various ethnic majorities ruled over their various homelands from the time of their inception, guiding their evolution from warring tribal lands all the way up to the modern nation-state.

Here's the problem... no one really saw it that way at the time. The Middle East back then had been under the occupation of the Ottoman Empire for the past few hundred years. The concept of modern nations did not exist for them. The Palestinian Arabs had a far closer affinity towards the Arab Muslims living in Syria, Lebanon or Jordan than they did for the Bedouins, Druze or Jews who lived a few miles away. This is why the Arab Congresses sought the formation of a single nation between all of the Arab majority lands in the region. (And in fact they had been promised this in exchange for their support in WWI, a promise England and France later reneged on.) It's also probably why that same Arab Congress made sure that one of their very first resolutions was to make sure that only other Arab speakers were eligible to participate.

The violence perpetrated by the Arabs against the Jews in Palestine was undeniably sparked by the sudden influx of Jewish immigrants. But it had little to do with the fear that foreigners would pour in and prevent the indigenous Arabs from establishing their own rightful state. There was still very little support for an individual Palestinian state among Arabs living there; they still hoped for the larger Pan-Arab state they were promised. No, their fear centered around being politically disenfranchised as Arabs, (not Palestinians), by the hordes of Jews arriving all the time. They had no issues with immigration in general, just as long as the immigrants were Arabs and Muslims just like they were. And a lot of Arabs from other nearby states DID move there around this time. Even Arafat was not an indigenous Palestinian. He did have Palestinian family but he was born, educated and grew to adulthood in Egypt. He fought for the Egyptian Army. He identified as a Palestinian and fought fiercely for its liberation from Israel, but I always wondered... how can anyone who isn't from Palestine spend their life trying to oust Jewish immigrants when he lacks any specially granted right to live there himself? How can one immigrant say "Get off this land and give it back to its rightful owners, people like me, who is also an immigrant, just like you."

So giving away a US state was illegal, but giving away another peoples’ land was not!.......What sort of ethical argument is that?

Well, what is the ethical argument behind giving the land over to the random assortment of people who happened to be living there at the time of the Ottoman's defeat? What about that random moment makes it the "right" one to determine WHO should govern WHAT land? Why not instead look at splitting the different nations and ethnic groups into respective states? Why not consider what decisions would best benefit the world at large and best fulfill the ideals of the most indigenous people?

What we ended up doing there, for the most part, was use your method. How did that work out? The modern middle east is strikingly similar across all states. Morocco for example, has a majority Arab Muslim population, from which the king and government was drawn, as well as most of the economic and political leaders of the nation. But there is also a large minority population of Berbers, the ORIGINAL indigenous inhabitants of the land. And this is what most of the mideast looks like. States have a ruling Arab majority that controls everything important. And the ethnic minority who were the original inhabitants end up politically and economically marginalized to varying degrees. So THIS is your idea of the most ethical solution?

What about the US was so important that it could not sacrifice just a small fraction of its empty land to make a state for the Jews?

Well, for one thing it wasn't the historical homeland of the Jews. They had no desire to go there. Besides that it had the same problem as Palestine did. In most cases the Jews immigrating there weren't moving into land that Arabs had already built on. They weren't evicting Arabs and stealing their houses. They were mostly buying empty, unwanted land and altering it to fit their needs. There would be no difference between that empty land in Palestine and the empty land in Nevada. No matter how empty it might be, the established local population would still consider it "their" land. Except in Nevada's case, they would be right.

In Palestine though, it wasn't just that no official Palestinian state existed there yet. Forget the state. There wasn't even a plan for a Palestinian state at the time immigration rights for Jews were being drafted. The Arab Palestinians didn't get it together and begin describing themselves as a distinctly independent nation until decades later. They didn't begin demanding sovereign national rights over Palestine until Israel was all but built and ready to declare independence.

The Vietnamese example holds no water. The Jews did not need temporary refugee relief. They needed control over their own state to ensure a future free from persecution. Leaving the task of protecting the world's Jewish population to some other, random state with no real invested interest in the job offered them a guarantee only of such a plan's eventual failure.

When South Vietnam was over-run by the Communists and many South Vietnamese became refugees, the US provided a haven for them.......It didn’t force them on the Philippians or some other defenseless people, it took care of them itself

It took care of 90,000 refugees itself. It left countless more behind, waiting on rooftops for helicopters that never came. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the NVA were killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hoa in 1975. Sources have estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 South Vietnamese died in the re-education camps. Slave labor in the "New Economic Zones" caused 50,000 estimated deaths. And the number of boat people who died fleeing Vietnam in rickety boats is estimated between 100,000 and 500,000.

And those are the numbers for a refugee rescue and resettlement that's considered a success. I think we can forgive the Jews for being leery of such a plan.

It is just that there was no ethical argument for Britain and the US to impose that state on a poor people with no power to defend themselves.

Defend themselves? From what? How would the Jewish influx of people to Palestine negatively impact the indigenous inhabitants in any way, had they shared the land peacefully as a bi-national state or freely partitioned it into two states instead of resorting to war? What do you suppose that region would look like today?

The key issue we differ on is your belief that the whole of Palestine belonged solely to its inhabitants, the people living there at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. I see no reason to consider them the de facto rulers and owners of Palestine merely because they lived on a small part of it. The Jews who moved in built on the land no one was using yet. The UN Partition Plan that sought to split the area into two states featured a Jewish majority in the Jewish state and an Arab one for the Arab state.