Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
There were many pogroms in Islamic countries even before 1948, displacing 10's of thousands of Jews. Israel was a point of no return, it was create Israel and repel the 1948 attack or annihilation.
I'm not disputing that the Jews have had a tough deal over the centuries. However, the settlement of the area of land we are talking about had been stable for centuries under the Ottoman Empire. Up until 1897 when it came within the Zionist's sights.
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
I can't refute your figures of 15% of land, but otoh what does that mean? Was the other 85% specifically owned by Arabs or was some land owned by the 'state' or was common? I think you would agree that statistic is potentially highly misleading.
Much as I hate using Wikipedia as a reference, in this case it has some well-attributed data (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate...Land_ownership). This puts the Jewish land-ownership somewhere between 7 and 8% in 1947, somewhat less than my 15% figure (which came from "The Middle East since 1945" by Stewart Ross since we're into quoting sources - it's a good overview book although not very detailed and obviously wrong in some of its numbers!). The data also shows that in most districts more than 2/3 of the rest of the land was in private Arab ownership, with the big stand-out being Beersheba where 85% of the land was publically owned. Even with Beersheba being a big chunk of the Israeli partition I'm sure a detailed analysis would show that a substantial amount of privately Arab owned land ended up in the Israeli partition and very little Jewish owned land ended up in the Arab partition.
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
Blame the Arab landlords for selling the land.
I'm just trying to give a more balanced view than the picture you create with your posts of happy Arabs walking away from their land with big fat cheques and no-one suffering.
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
Where is your evidence the Zionists had no intention of sticking to the agreed boundaries?
Mainly their actions. They captured vast swathes of Arab territory between UN resolution 181 and the end of the mandate, including territory (Jerusalem) that was supposed to be administered by the UN. During the 1948 war they forcably expelled large numbers of Arabs when there was no security-related reason for doing so. The public statements of such luminaries as Golda Meir and Sharon would certainly support this view as well. (My favorite Golda-ism is ""There is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.")
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
If the Jews were 10% how was it 45,000 vs 8,000?
Armed militants, not total population. On the Zionist side there were at least 40,000 in Haganah, and the rest came from the Irgun and Stern Gang terrorist groups.
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
It's easy to say that but how many even exist today??
Not sure I understand what your point is here. There are plenty of secular democratic states in the world (the UK for example). Is secular the word you are having problems with?
Originally Posted by
tony de wonderful
You have to agree that there was no Palestine as such which was carved up, just a region first run by the Ottomans then British. There was no nation state called Palestine. As Euro powers withdrew from colonies and parts of the Empire a 'carve up' of the land was very common.
I'm not disputing any of this, but it was a region that had been stable under the Ottoman's for hundreds of years before the Zionists took a liking to it. The really irritating thing is that they originally considered a sparsely populated area of Argentina for a Jewish state, and the British government offered an area of East Africa - but because their scripture told them god had promised them Palestine they had to go for an area with an existing settled population. Religion really sucks sometimes (all of them!).