[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]orion wrote:
[quote]IrishSteel wrote:
[quote]Gregus wrote:
I said no such thing. Merely underlying that ISRAEL is INDEED an occupying state. Pure and simple. Antisemitic or not. That’s a fact disguised by clever arguments.
[/quote]
And if the Navajo took over the American Southwest again, they would also be an occupying force then as well? Thanks for clearing that up for me. . . [/quote]
And if they did, would you accept their “right” to occupy you or would you fight them tooth and nail?
What if you could not win because China supports them?
[/quote]
Oh, this is classic! Navajo Joe done waded back into a Navajo discussion.
(Doc, don’t miss this)[/quote]
It is a curious habit of mind. When bereft of an historic basis orion, among others, relies on the bizarre analogy. Or Makavali, who denies the validity of history, calling it “pandering to a fairy tale,” chooses to believe a different fairy tale, that Jews landed on a country called Palestine and accomplished a criminal state by forcing out the long-resident inhabitants.
JoeGood gave a brief narrative, one that the Palestinians must reject out of hand in order to claim the whole of the land. But the truth, however evasive, is always worth re-examination. Israel was founded, not by UN fiat, not by invasion, but by careful work, investment, and nation building from the middle of the 19th centrury. (The Ottomans were considering granting Jewish souzerainty well before WWI, chiefly because the value of Turkish holdings increased by their effort. Without the Holocaust there may have been an Israel, so it is a fiction that Israel is a solely a product of European guilt at Arab expense. )
Whether you read Segev or Finkelstein on the subject, the nakhba was a disaster for Arabs, and for the Jews. While a few towns were forcefully evacuated, in others, Jews begged their Arab neighbors to stay. If Gazans recall that Israelis drove them out by tanks, recall that only Egypt had tanks in 1948. In many places, the terror was propagated by the Arabs themselves, in the mistaken hope that they would rise and defend their towns; instead, they fled. The loss of a binational state in 1948 was a binational tragedy perpetrated upon two peoples by their neighbors, not by one people alone against another.
If the Palestinians are miserable for 62 years, blame first Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, who conspired to keep them destitute for their own political ends. And next blame the UN, which has purposefully maintained the misery, rather than encouraging devolopment in the West Bank and Gaza, specifically at the behest of arab nations. Then we can get around to the misery of the Occupied Territories, which might have been a nation-state years ago were it not for Arafat and a policy of a one-state solution.
One can argue against this narrative, as have the Soviet-trained Palestinian propagandists, who seem to have won the War of Public Opinion. But the narrative stands, against the Received Wisdom which seems to reign, unchallenged, whether in Europe or New Zealand.
