Israel. Here’s the thing.

[Cyrano]

On the day in 1948 when Israel declared statehood, they were attacked by Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq. Every single day since then, they have been in a constant state of war, hot or cold, with one or another Arab state, or Palestinian faction. Every conflict has either been won outright by Israel, or brought to a close by a cease fire or treaty.

But here’s the thing. While Israel has lost battles, they can’t afford to lose one single war. The loss of a war would be the end of the Jewish state and, very likely, human slaughter on an epic scale.

The foregoing is a simplification, but it’s been the basic reality of the Middle East for the past sixty six years.

Having said that, I find Israel’s actions today excessive and disproportionate, and their government as right wing as our own Neocons. Hamas and other extremist groups are intransigent, yet some way must be found to deal with the Palestinians. Israel was founded as a democratic state and they can’t forever occupy territories and have second class citizens.

It’s a seemingly impossible situation. Yet, when some day in the future it is finally resolved, it will be through diplomacy and compromise. It’s in everyone’s interest to bring about that day as quickly as possible.

[redgreenandblue]

1. Declared a state, on territory that was already inhabited....

...with the explicit goal of conducting ethnic cleansing of the territory.

Yup, that usually does not result in peaceful co-existence. It didn't in the USA.

[Cyrano]

2. In 1948, the Holocaust was fresh in

everyone's mind. No one was thinking about "ethnic cleansing."

Jews had been migrating to Palestine since the 1880s and they were living peacefully with the Arabs for many decades. During WWII, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem decided he was Hitler's ally and it was all downhill from there.

[redgreenandblue]

14. I take David Ben-Gurion by his words:

"Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? "

[Cyrano]

35. You need a link. Try the link below.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a book authored by New Historian Ilan Pappé and published in 2006 by One World Oxford.

In his review of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, New Historian Benny Morris writes: "At best, Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians; at worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two." adding that "Such distortions, large and small, characterize almost every page of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ethnic_Cleansing_of_Palestine

There have been many books written about "ethnic cleansing" on the part of Israel, most of which have been shown to be total bullshit.

[Threedifferentones]

38. In 1948 colonialism was still in full swing. Britain, France and their American business partners

were quite accustomed to carving up the Middle East, without regard for the wishes of the actual inhabitants of those "heathen" lands.

Like all colonial efforts, including of course our own nation, the creation of Israel involved the TAKING of land by FORCE. When the Palestinians were made to leave they all objected, but what happened if they refused to leave? They were made to with violence.

Anyone with a brain could have predicted that creating Israel would lead to decades or even centuries of violence. We (American and British) did it anyway, at a time when we were routinely organizing the rest of the world using violence.

This basically reveals (once again) that your average "western" Christian white person did not really care what Muslim people thought.

WE did not see THEM as equals, so we felt justified in STEALING their land.

I have no doubt that if the Muslim part of the world had obtained the same sort of technological and military edge they would have treated Europe just as brutally, but that does not mean we should pretend that Israel is some sort of good guy in a land filled with "terrorists."

[former9thward]

3. False.

With the U.N. mandate there were supposed to be two states -- one Jewish and one Palestinian. The Palestinians were told by the Arab states to leave their homes because the joint Arab countries would drive the Jews into the Sea and they could have it all. So due to this greed the Palestinians threw away their opportunity to have a state. Both Jews and Arabs have lived in the area for thousands of years.

[DanTex]

4. The original Zionist idea consisted of ethnic cleansing, no?

Create a new nation by moving to place where there were already people living, and kick those people out.

Of course, the same can be said for a lot of other modern countries, including the United States. The major difference is that the ethnic cleansing that occurred in North America was virtually complete, whereas the ethnic cleansing in Israel was not, and is still ongoing.

[former9thward]

7. The Palestinians were offered their own state.

They refused, they wanted it all. Jews were living there also. Palestinians wanted their own ethnic cleansing. They wanted to drive the Jews into the Sea.

[DanTex]

11. I'm talking about before the UN resolution.

The original idea of moving a bunch of people to current Israel/Palestine involved ethnic cleansing, necessarily.

I'm not disagreeing that both sides have made a lot of mistakes since then. In 1948, I can imagine how the idea of handing over half of the land that they used to own 100% of to people who moved there over the past 50 years or so didn't seem like a good bargain to a lot of Palestinians, but in retrospect they should have taking it.

[cpwm17]

19. The thing is, in reality it was the Zionists that aggressively violated the UN resolution

that was passed by mostly white nations in the General Assembly that allegedly created Israel (The UN had no legal or moral authority to do such a thing.)

The fighting with the neighboring nations took place in the territory that was supposed to remain Palestinian. The Zionists tried to take it all, which was their goal all along. They accomplished much of their ethnic cleansing campaign in 1947. They violated the UN resolution they claim gave them legitimacy. That's why they ended up with far more territory than suggested in the UN resolution.

Obviously they had no right to seize any of it.

[former9thward]

22. Your alternative history won't fly.

It was the Arabs that invaded the Jewish state. Israel did not invade anybody. They fought back and when you start a war, like the Arabs did, and lose, there are consequences.

[Threedifferentones]

39. Israel was created on other people's land! No, they didn't invade, we did it for them!

How on Earth do you create a nation on land that is currently occupied without invading and conquering?

Israeli apologists want to act like the Palestinians gave up their home willingly and then went back on their word.

They were forced to accept Israel at gun point, and they still are today. That is the crux of the matter.

If the Jewish people have an unending ancestral right to own Jerusalem, then all of us of European or African descent need to vacate the American continents immediately, to keep our logic consistent, because we have no such claim to our own nation's land.

Face it, anyone could have predicted that taking that land and creating Israel in the ME would lead to lots of violence. They did it anyway, and judging by how I hear Christians and Orthodox Jews talk, I'd say it is pretty clear they did it anyway because they have no problem killing Muslim people. God's will be done and all that.

The conservative Israeli leadership and the fundamentalist Arab "terrorists" deserve on another. It's just a shame that so many innocent people have to be caught up in the middle, on both sides.

[former9thward]

23. The entire Middle East is an area created by outsiders.

Most of the problems in Iraq, Syria, etc. resulted from the French and British drawing borders after WW I to suit their own interests. But history is history and we can't go back. People have to work with what we have.

[DanTex]

25. Carved up by outsiders, yes, but the people who live in other parts of the middle east

are mostly the descendants of the same people who lived there the last few hundred years. Israel is different in this respect.

I agree that we can't go back and we have to work with what we have. The same holds for the US -- yes, white people moved here and stole land and did ethnic cleansing and so on. But we're not going to send all white people back to Europe to make up for past injustices.

The problem in Israel is that it all happened much more recently, so the people displaced by Zionist immigration are still (very) upset about it. And also, unlike the US, the ethnic cleansing wasn't really completed -- there's still a lot of Palestinians in Palestine, and there are many Palestinians who feel they were wrongly kicked off their land and want it back.

[ieoeja]

29. But very few Palestinians were kicked off their land.

They left, not because Israel kicked them out, but to aid the invading armies out to destroy Israel. The number of Palestinians kicked out of the country numbers in the low thousands. Millions chose to leave on their own.

Of course, there is nothing compelling them to stay on the land they owned. They would still own that land.

Except that they did not own the land. They were share-croppers on land owned by others. Initially, that land was owned by sheiks in Damascus and Cairo. But they were happy to sell the land to Jewish immigrants since it was, generally speaking, not very good land before modern farming techniques changed the landscape.

So let's pretend Palestinians are allowed to enter Israel. What happens now?

"My grandfather told me tales of when he farmed this land."

"I've changed it a lot since I bought it about 60 years ago. But feel free to walk around it a bit if you want. Close the gate behind you when you leave."

[DanTex]

30. "Displaced" might be more accurate than "kicked off".

And I'm not just talking about the refugees, I'm also talking about the very notion of a bunch of foreigners deciding to move to a place where there are already people living, and then deciding to create a new country there.

I'm not advocating kicking out the Israelis and returning the land to the Palestinians, by the way. We can't go back and change what happened, we have to deal with the current reality.

It's a very difficult situation, and I don't see any good outcome. What I see is indefinite continuation of the occupation and what is effectively apartheid, and I also see indefinite continuation of Palestinian resentment and terrorist groups like Hamas. What's going to change?

[Karmadillo]

34. This research regarding Plan Dalet & Dar Yassin would seem to support your position.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-plan-dalet-the-green-light-for-zionisms-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine/5326140

<edit>

On that day in 1948, two months before Israel’s unilateral declaration of independence in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was at the UN, Zionism’s in-Palestine political and military leaders met in Tel Aviv to formally adopt PLAN DALET, the blueprint with operational military orders for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Deir Yassin

They did not and never would refer to the crime they authorised as ethnic cleansing. Their euphemism for it was “transfer”.

<edit>

The prime fear factor was the slaughter by Zionist terrorists of more than 100 Palestinian men, women and children at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem. As Arthur Koestler was to write, the “bloodbath” at Deir Yassin was “the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem.”

It was, however, Menachem Begin, Zionism’s terror master and subsequently prime minister, who provided the most vivid description of how well the slaughter at Deir Yassin served Zionism’s cause. In his book The Revolt, he wrote:

“Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah (the underground Jewish military organization that became the Israeli Army), was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the road and their fall, together with the capture of Kastel by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces… The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin!’”

more...

[WatermelonRat]

41. The original plan was to purchase land to settle on and live side-by-side with local arabs

That's largely how it went at first, but as with any large scale migration, significant tensions began to develop with the locals. Thanks to the Palestinian equivalent of those "Minutemen" that harass immigrants in Texas and the Jewish equivalent of those "Aztlan" nutjobs that want to reclaim the SW United States for Mexico, everything went to hell.

[COLGATE4]

6. Thank you for pointing this out.

The historical revisionism that has been going on for some time now on DU obscures this very basic point that the overriding concern for many Palestinians is still a Jew-free Palestine, with every Jew being driven into the sea. Unfortunately (for them) the Israelis are not going to go quietly into that dark night.

[COLGATE4]

8. What is obvious is that, if Israel were really interested

in 'exterminating the Palestinians' they could do it without much difficulty. The fact that their military operations have been conducted with a relatively small loss of life disproves this canard.

[tech3149]

32. You neglect the point that outright extermination would make Israel a parhia

Israel is playing a long game of incremental extermination and disenfranchisement. Israel has always used their control over Palestine to evoke some militant reaction and respo0nd as the victim just trying to defend themselves. Hamas is foolish to respond with whatever ineffectual means they have at their disposal, but what would you do?
To my way of thinking, the best tool that Palestinians have are cell phones and internet access. Once the world can truly see the subjugation they have endured for 60 years the rest of the world will isolate and condemn Israel.
The only existential threat that Israel faces is it's own government.

[WatermelonRat]

42. I did the math. If the killing went on at the rate it has for the past few weeks

it would take over 200 years to depopulate Gaza. That's a hell of a long game.

[smirkymonkey]

12. I really don't think so.

If that were the case they would already be gone. It is true that Hamas wants to eliminate Israel however. They are not "freedom fighters", they are Islamic fundamentalist terrorists and it baffles me why so many fail to recognize that.

[DanTex]

9. It seems like an impossible situation to me.

The only outcome I see is continued occupation and essentially an apartheid state for the indefinite future. This will continue to breed resentment and fuel terrorism from groups like Hamas. Which will bring more retaliation from Israel. And so on.

[cpwm17]

10. The ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians was started in 1947

The huge stream of refugees entering the neighboring nations provoked a justifiable response.

Your claim can't be taken seriously, even if the ethnic cleansing campaign happened later. Brown people, just like white people, do not like having their homeland taken away.

Israel can start by taking the "peace talks" seriously. The ball is in Israel's court. The Palestinians are the subjugated ones. They have nothing to offer.

In reality, the "peace talks" are obscene. The Israeli side is forcing the Palestinians to negotiate for their freedom, which always fails by design.

[NCTraveler]

33. "The ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians was started in 1947"

How long does it take for one of the worlds more powerful countries to ethnically cleanse a region? What you just said goes 100% against the thought that ethnic cleansing is occurring at the hands of Israel.

[L0oniX]

13. "Everyone" should have a place where they can live in peace with access to nessesities...

and the outside world. Deny that and people will fight.

[Cyrano]

16. That's why Israel was established

by the U.N. partition of Palestine. Unfortunately, the Arab world never accepted Israel's existence and it's been an ongoing war ever since

[L0oniX]

18. Ok so Palestinians don't get to have a place in the world. Got it.

[Cyrano]

21. Of course they have a place

But time and again, for 66 years, the Palesinians and the Arab world has refused to take yes for an answer.

[magical thyme]

27. Maybe instead of "giving" the Jews somebody else's homeland, the UN should

have given the Jews half of Germany.

But that wouldn't have met with their real goal of breaking up the Middle East, ramping up local hostilities to the max, distracting the local people with perpetual war while the western countries took their oil.

[jwirr]

31. We used to do that the the Native Ameircans - set them down in the middle of their enemies. I does

not work.

[randome]

15. Fuck all religions. Every single one of them.

Any collection of people who want to think they are somehow 'different' (i.e. better) than everyone else gets no sympathy from me. If either Israel or the Palestinians truly lived according to a philosophy of kindness, one or both would simply leave the killing fields behind.

But that would entail 'giving up'. And neither side can have that, can they?

Greedy killers, all of them.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[SomethingFishy]

36. +1..

You know it's funny, Religion does nothing good when you are alive. All the religious seems to think that they are going to get their "reward" when they die. Whether it be 72 virgins, or a trip through the "Pearly Gates", religion is based on the concept that you can hurt as many people as possible, as long as it follows the rules in that stupid little book, and receive your reward for all eternity after you die.

I just wish I could be there to ask "yeah, how'd that work out for you?

[sufrommich]

17. The Palestinians are pawns in the MiddeEast.Cannon fodder

for Arab states that will never accept the state of Israel.

[Larkspur]

20. The biggest threat to the Jewish state is demographics

The Palestinian and Arab population currently slightly exceeds the Jewish population and the former's birth rate exceeds the Jewish one. Within a generation, Jews in Israel will be in a definite minority position, just like the whites were in South Africa.

[Cyrano]

24. Regarding Israel's "ethnic cleansing" of Arabs

There have been posts on this thread stating that Israel's aim is "ethnic cleansing."

Think about this. Israel has a nuclear arsenal that exists purely as a deterrent. They would never use it unless attacked with a nuclear weapon.

No Arab state has a nuclear weapon. How comfortable would you feel if one of them had the bomb? Who doesn't believe that there would be an attempt to smuggle a dirty bomb into Israel and detonate it? For that matter, we in America face exactly the same threat.

So exactly which side is it that has "ethnic cleansing" in mind.

[magical thyme]

28. you don't need a nuclear weapon to set off a "dirty" bomb

Iran has the Uranium to make a "dirty" bomb.

Any place with modern hospitals has enough radiological material to make a "dirty" bomb.

I have no doubt the Arab countries would like to be rid of Israel just as much as Israel would love to be rid of them.

I just don't blame them for wanting to be rid of Israel. The UN had no right to give away land that wasn't theirs to begin with. The fact is it has been a resource war since the day that Israel was declared a country on other people's homeland.

[The2ndWheel]

26. Borders are a tricky thing

Not too many of them have been drawn on a map without violence figuring out where they would be. The borders that have been drawn on maps with little to no regard for any realities in the environment don't end up working for sure.

So as long as neither side really ever wins in Israel, there's no reason it'll ever stop. Look at the mess that Africa and the Middle East have been over the decades. America or countries in Europe wouldn't be the stable(quibble if you want, you get what I mean) countries they are today without a hell of a lot of violence in previous years. When there wasn't a global governing body that tried to interject itself into matters.

Just for fun, imagine if the UN had existed when America was becoming a nation.

If you want borders to make sense, you have to let the people living in the area figure it out. Whatever that means. If a distant party tries to do it, it doesn't work.

[BlueCheese]

37. The great tragedy is that the Oslo Accords failed.

Israel will probably not have a government as left-wing as Ehud Barak's again. That was the best chance for lasting peace. It was right there for the Palestinians-- all they had to do was say yes.

Arafat reportedly said to President Clinton that if he accepted that deal, Clinton's next visit to the region would be for Arafat's funeral. Now, of course, he's dead anyway, and nothing has improved.

[Chathamization]

40. Which Arab states would invade Israel now?

I can only think of possibly Syria to retake the Golan Heights, and even that seems unlikely. They didn’t do anything when Israel bombed them 7 years ago. Egypt and Jordan both seem fairly committed to coexistence, and Lebanon’s not much of a threat. The main source of conflict seems to be the occupation of the Palestinians.

And if we look back – ’56 was Israel, the UK and France attacking Egypt because Egypt nationalized the Suez canal; ’67 was Israel launch an attack on Egypt after years of tensions; and ’73 was an attack launched by Egypt after Sadat’s efforts to secure a peace agreement were rebuffed. After the war, Israel agreed to one and the two countries have been at peace. It’s not as simple as “the Arabs are constantly trying to destroy Israel.”