Poland aside, you fail to note that a good 50% of Germany's Pre-WW2 area was occupied by the USSR. (East Prussia and all of West Prussia and Pomerania east of the Oder.)

Bringing this back to the Palestinean situation, you seem reluctant to make distinctions between Palestineans and Syrians and Jordanians and Egyptians labelling them all as "Arabs," and making this a fight between two sets of interests only. Wrong.

The Soviet analogy stands. Israel (that is to say, the portion of the former British mandate of Palestine that was partitioned for Jews in the 49 UN plan) was invaded by the alliance of Arab states that surrounded the ex-mandate territory, crossing in some cases through the UN-administered portion of Palestine set aside for Palestineans. Israel won, thanks to American military support. Israel proceeded to occupy Jerusalem (not set aside for Jews in the 1949 plan) and about half of the Palestinean territories and embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear all Arabs out of the conquered territories. What was left of the original Palestine mandate (about 25% of the total area) was occupied by Jordan (the West Bank) and Egypt (the Gaza strip). In subsequent wars in 1967 and 1976, the Israelis conquered the remainder of what had been the Palestine mandate and eventually, in the name of creating buffer space, occupied the Sinai (which had always been Egyptian) and Golan Heights (which had always been Syrian).

The Israelis were at war with the Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. They weren't at war with the Palestineans because the Palestineans didn't have a state of their own and had no army. They ended up occupying the entirety of the internationally-designated portion of the Palestine mandate set aside for Palestineans. I think that "fairly won territory" is an oxymoron, but even by your disturbing definition, First, half of all Israeli territory was conquered.

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You cannot use HIS speech to attack MY arguments. We're very different. He's a true believer. I'm skeptical. It just so happens that his beliefs and my skepticism overlap in this particular instance.

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[ October 21, 2001: Message edited by: Sol System ]

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What if Germany had taken them over twenty years earlier, and they had basically become accepted as being part of Germany? Would it have then been okay for the USSR to do the same stuff they ended up doing in reality?

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Only if 'them' had attacked Germany, rather than the other way around.

MAKING war on your neighbors is unacceptable.
However, if you make war on your neighbors, and get spanked, you deserve what you get.

Your problem with my problem is that you seem to be having difficulty telling the moral difference between starting a fight and finishing it.

Kids on a playground. One of the kids is beating up the other, smaller kids and taking their lunch money. This is bad.

The British colonized Palenstine. When they withdrew, they didn't give it to the Palestinians, they gave the land to Jews, many of who started coming over by the bucket load from Europe.

So, what you've got is a European power coming over to the Middle East, essentially taking it over, and then, when they finally leave, not giving it to the people who owned it before, but to another group of people!

Is that moral? I mean, I can understand why the Palenstines were pissed -- especially cause the British broke their promise to give the country back to them, and gave it to someone else.

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The Israelis were at war with the Syrians, Jordanians and Egyptians. They weren't at war with the Palestineans because the Palestineans didn't have a state of their own

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Quibble #1: You forgot to include the Iraqis and the Lebanese in the first war, they attacked, too.

Quibble #2: By that time, you mean. They HAD had a state before the first attack. The fact that the U.N. didn't give them ALL of the area was their beef (and where are the UN-supporters here?)
Which begs the question of whether Palestine was any more a state than an idea. It's a name of a region, but not a nation any more than the U.S.'s Appalachia. It didn't exist before the UN partitioning, it ceased to exist one day later in the war, so was it ever 'really' there?

And let me say that the guy who stands by and cheers on the lynch mob is just as much the enemy as the guy who holds the rope. (And if you don't think the Palestinians helped the invaders... naive. In fact, the encyclopedias say that the invaders were there "to help the native Arabs destroy Israel.")

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the British broke their promise to give the country back to them

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WHAT promise? certainly you're not referring to the Balfour Declaration, which said the exact opposite, and British insistence that the territory that they held "should not be considered in any future boundaries of any Arab state."

See?
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~gov46/uk-promis-arabs-1915.gif

[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]

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I guess I don't completely agree with how you see moral. For some reason, I didn't think you thought what happened to the American (as in, the continent) Indians was moral ... ?

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I don't. The Indians were invaded by hostile occupying forces, enslaved, forcibly relocated, etc usually without having attacked or assisted in any attacks, first When they were treated with respect, or left alone, there was generally little conflict. (Always some, but that level of conflict existed long before whites came.) They had to be taught to hate the Europeans, and they (the Euros) did a good job of teaching. So I wouldn't consider most Indian attacks and such as part of a separate conflict, but part of one large one.

[ October 23, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]

Conservatives, at least the current model, are not known for liking the United Nations. Yet, here we have a conservative repeatedly granting that the United Nations had the authority to do something.

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Quibble #2: By that time, you mean. They HAD had a state before the first attack.

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The fact that the U.N. didn't give them ALL of the area was their beef (and where are the UN-supporters here?)

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Which begs the question of whether Palestine was any more a state than an idea. It's a name of a region, but not a nation any more than the U.S.'s Appalachia. It didn't exist before the UN partitioning, it ceased to exist one day later in the war, so was it ever 'really' there?

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And let me say that the guy who stands by and cheers on the lynch mob is just as much the enemy as the guy who holds the rope. (And if you don't think the Palestinians helped the invaders... naive. In fact, the encyclopedias say that the invaders were there "to help the native Arabs destroy Israel.")

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Wasn't the rhetoric of the time about 'pushing the Jews into the sea?' I'd think that meant they intended genocide... pretty much ANY action is justifiable when you're trying to avoid that, including seizing the territory of the guys cheering on the lynch mob.

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As for the Balfour declaration and stuff: Yeah, the British were making promises to both at once. The Balfour declaration, ahem:

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Balfour Declaration, letter prepared in March 1916 and issued in November 1917, during World War I, by the British statesman Arthur James Balfour, then foreign secretary in the cabinet of Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Specifically, the letter expressed the British government's approval of Zionism with "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The letter committed the British government to making the "best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." (from Encarta)

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Meanwhile, that little figure you might have heard of called Lawrence of Arabia was working with the Arabs to clean the Ottomans out of their lands. The Palestineans essentially won the freedom of their own land, which is a lot more than, say, what the Poles or Hungarians managed to do. There were also numerous British foreign policy communiques, most notably that of McMahon, that supported the idea that every national group who fought against the Ottomans would be given the right to self-determination and self-rule of their own submerged states once the war was won. The British and French carried through with this promise first to the Saudis, and then after a mandate period, to the Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, Jordanians. But not the Palestineans, because (a)the British and French gave away half of Palestine to the Jews, and (b) didn't take action when Israel, "justly," as you say, occupied the remaining parts of the Palestine mandate, forever preventing the Palestineans from their right to self-determination. They and the Kurds are the only people who didn't get a state of their own after the old empires were dismantled at Paris in 1914.

So yeah, the British made promises to two people and couldn't keep both. Let's burn Liam to death.

On a side note, one of the later, more cynical views of history, is that the UN stood by and let the Jews declare the state of Israel despite the lack of a consensus in Palestine of who owned what because they thought that Israel would be promptly demolished by its angry neighbors and it would all be a moot point anyway. Nobody seriously thought the Israelis could win the 1948 war and thought that if they were stupid enough to intentionally piss of the Arab peoples around them that they deserved to be beaten up. Of course, when they not only won but increased their territory, they were rather quick to back off.

[ October 24, 2001: Message edited by: Mojo Jojo ]

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Conservatives, at least the current model, are not known for liking the United Nations.

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I am not 'the current model.'

Or to quote another...
'I am unlike any life form you have encountered before.'

[ October 24, 2001: Message edited by: First of Two ]