David Gould -
No. If I occupy your country and install a government and run your country and tax your country, in what sense do you exist as a nation except in the mind?
You have missed the point, which is that the various invaders took over
a pre-existing nation, not a desolate parcel of land. In other words, they
invaded and
controlled a nation which wasn't theirs.
The Jews continued to remain in their land (though many of them were booted out) and that land continued to be
the nation of Israel. At various points, the invaders (a) withdrew of their own accord, (b) were ousted by the Jews, or (c) were replaced by other invaders.
In every case, the bottom line remains unchanged - that the Jews continued to dwell in their own land, comprising a distinct and (when it wasn't being invaded) independent nation. The fact that other nations occasionally controlled the land, is irrelevant. The nation of Israel did not spontaneously cease to exist with every new invasion, nor did the Jewish people evaporate into thin air. My argument remains unchallenged.
History shows that the nation of Israel has been invaded and controlled by many different people. Those same people did
not establish a state of their own - they merely ruled over a pre-existing state which was never theirs in the first place. Your argument requires (a) the land itself to have
changed hands, (b) the land itself to have been
resettled by a new ethnic majority, and (c) the land itself to have been designated an entirely different nation by that new ethnic majority.
In short - your argument requires the nation of Israel to have been totally eliminated, which it never was.
And that i smy point - the mind is where all countries exist. Names on a map are irrelvant. Because the history of Israel is irrelevant, you claim no legitimacy but as I do not understand what your basis for a legitimate claim actually is I cannot really comment
The Jewish claim to the land is very simple:
clear, irrefutable, historical facts.
and I do not care what 'the Palestinians' (by which you mean one individual Palestinian, I assume) claimed at some time or other.
Well, that's too bad. The men I quoted, have done nothing but
recite historical fact. If you won't hear the facts from the "Palestinians" themselves,
who will you hear them from?
But let's take a closer look at one of those chaps, shall we...?
- The representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations submitted a statement to the General Assembly in May 1947 that said:
Palestine was part of the Province of Syria
and that,
politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political entity.
- A few years later, Ahmed Shuqeiri (later the chairman of the PLO) told the Security Council:
It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.
Hmmmm. Well, we have (a)
the representative of the Arab Higher Committee to the United Nations, and
a man who later became the chairman of the PLO.
These men submitted
official statements to the United Nations, on behalf of the "Palestinian" people.
Are you
still going to tell me that these
official statements are totally irrelevant?
They claim they lived there
Yep.
it is clear that they did
Yep. They came into
Israel's historic homeland and lived there for
a very short period of time.
No, they were not pushed out at all. The whole point is that it was the
invading Arab armies of 1948 who told the "Palestinians" to get out of the way because they were about to wipe Israel off the map. Those same "Palestinians" were promised the spoils of war. Those same "Palestinians"
were denied entrance into the Arab states after the war had ended. (Yep, you heard right - their Arab "brethren" refused to take them back in again!) The "Palestinians" had never owned the land on which they were currently squatting - they had merely infiltrated it over the years. Most of them had originally come from Syria and Jordan.
thus israel should give them the occupied territories.
Why? It was never theirs to begin with! They just wandered in from the surrounding Arab nations, and started to make themselves at home!
It is called sharing. It is a good thing to try.
The Israelis
offered to share, but the "Palestinians"
refused, because they wanted it all!
Here's the history -
again:
- Even after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the beginning of the exile, Jewish life in Palestine continued and often flourished. Large communities were reestablished in Jerusalem and Tiberias by the ninth century. In the 11th century, Jewish communities grew in Rafah, Gaza, Ashkelon, Jaffa and Caesarea.
- Many Jews were massacred by the Crusaders during the 12th century, but the community rebounded in the next two centuries as large numbers of rabbis and Jewish pilgrims immigrated to Jerusalem and the Galilee. Prominent rabbis established communities in Safed, Jerusalem and elsewhere during the next 300 years. By the early 19th century-years before the birth of the modern Zionist movement-more than 10,000 Jews lived throughout what is today Israel.
- When Jews began to immigrate to Palestine in large numbers in 1882, fewer than 250,000 Arabs lived there, and the majority of them had arrived in recent decades.
- Palestine was never an exclusively Arab country, although Arabic gradually became the language of most the population after the Muslim invasions of the seventh century.
- The end result of the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence was the creation of a Jewish State slightly larger than that which was proposed by the United Nations two years before. What remained of that almost-created second Arab Palestinian State was gobbled up by Egypt (occupying the Gaza Strip) and by Trans-Jordan (occupying Judea-Samaria (the "West Bank" of the Jordan River) and Jerusalem.
- In the next year (1950) Trans-Jordan formally merged this West Bank territory into itself and granted all those Arabs living there Jordanian citizenship. Since Trans-Jordan was no longer confined to one side of the Jordan River, it renamed itself simply "JORDAN." In the final analysis, the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of Palestine. Astonishingly, they wanted even more...
- From 1948-67, when all of Judea-Samaria (the West Bank, including Jerusalem!) ended up under Arab (Jordanian) control, no effort was ever made to create a second Palestinian State for the Arabs living there.
- Yes, that's right - the idea to create a Palestinian state was first proposed after this land had already left Arab hands! The Jordanians certainly had no intention of creating an Arab Palestinian state - and if I was a Palestinian, I'd be somewhat peeved at the fact that my Arab brethren possessed the most disputed sections of Israeli territory for nineteen years, and didn't do anything with it! If the Palestinians really belonged there, why didn't they create their own state while they had the chance? Why didn't they do what the Jews had done?
BTW, you might want to study Zionism some time. You'll find that it was
the Jews themselves who first had the idea of re-establishing the nation of Israel. The wheels were set in motion long before the UN vote of 1947. It wasn't a Western idea - it was a
Jewish idea.
