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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The_Tom: [QB] [QUOTE] Quibble #2: By that time, you mean. They HAD had a state before the first attack. [/QUOTE] Incorrect. They had been a subject people under the Ottomans, then a British mandate, and once things went to hell in 1947 the British pulled out and it became a UN protectorate. They had no government nor institutions of their own, and certainly no military. [QUOTE] The fact that the U.N. didn't give them ALL of the area was their beef (and where are the UN-supporters here?) [/QUOTE] Yes. And from where they were standing, they had a legitimate point. It had all been theirs before WW1, albeit dominated by Ottoman overlords. Now they were being told to give away half. It was a rational response to reject the '47 partition plan in referendum, although history has since changed that so now the Israelis say that the '47 partition plan should be dismissed and the Palestineans say it should be binding. [QUOTE]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?[/QUOTE] Well, people a state make, not boundaries or dirt. The Palestineans are a people who can be grouped under the collective term "Arabs" just as the Welsh are a people can be grouped under the collective term "Celts." When the Ottoman Empire fell, the League of Nations carved out the British mandate of Palestine along ethnic lines, drawing a line between Palestineans and Jordanians, Egyptians, Lebanese and Syrians. The mandate system meant that the British would act as their supervisors until they had built up the institutions to become an independent state of their own. Under Wilson's 14 points, they had the right to self-determination. That was denied once Zionists showed up and staked a claim to half of their land. [QUOTE]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.")[/QUOTE] Yes. I'm not saying the Palestineans weren't part of the side attacking Israel. But saying that they should be punished for the Pan-Arabism-fueled aggression of extremists in power in Egypt and Syria at the time is ridiculous. They didn't like half (and the better half, I might add) of "their" land suddenly being doled-out to these unrestricted immigrants who just showed up in the hundreds of thousands. They wanted to assert political control over it. Their friendly, albeit bully-like neighbors, were willing to help out. [QUOTE]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.[/QUOTE] Not quite. The institutions of Israel, certainly. And I'm sure the looney fringes wanted outright ethnic cleansing and/or extermination. But for Joe Average Palestinean, all he wanted was a government in Jerusalem that would rule the entirety of Palestine according to the wishes of the majority, not half of "their" land being handed out to someone else who would found a religiously-based state in a land where that religion had not existed in a substantial form forty years earlier. As for the Balfour declaration and stuff: Yeah, the British were making promises to both at once. The Balfour declaration, ahem: [QUOTE]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)[/QUOTE]...was indeed a statement of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and was a result of the Rothchilds pouring a rather large sum of money into the British treasury during WWI to bail them out when war expenses threatened to bring down the Bank of England. This "donation" was granted on the condition that Britain would do what it could to help the Zionist movement once the Ottomans were expelled. 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. A cynical view of history, and not necessarily mine ;) [/QB][/QUOTE]
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