[quote]GDollars37 wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
No point in continuing this thread. The anti-Israel folks don’t even have facts to support their vitriol or know the history.
FYI, Israel offered to give up 95% of the disputed lands in 2000 at the Camp David Summit.
That’s incredibly simplistic. You either don’t know what the real reasons for the impasse were, or you’re ignoring them. The issue of an Israeli road bisecting Palestinian territory has been mentioned more than once now. East Jerusalem is another issue. And the right of return is another, although that will never happen. The Israelis made an offer they knew Arafat could not accept. The “anti-Israel” Western media bought it, hook, line and sinker.
…
And it’s kind of funny how “the disputed lands” suddenly becomes just the West Bank and Gaza, as though all of Israel proper just magically appeared in the hands of Jewish settlers (hint: ethnic cleansing played more than a small role, as even right-wing Israeli historians like Benny Morris concede).[/quote]
And from this last paragraph, are we to conclude, as you seem to, that “all of Israel proper” has no right to exist as a state–not within borders of 2000 at Camp David, or 1967, or 1948, or 1947? Must the Palestinian “West Bank” refer to the territory as defined by Hamas, that is, all the land from the Jordan to the Mediterranean?
What makes that position–which you barely occlude–legitimate? Not land claims–those belong to the Ottomans and the British Mandate, which held most of the territories in the cartoon map at the head of this thread, or to the absentee landlords of Beirut and Damascus. Legitimate because of the suffering endured by the Palestinians themselves, held captives in refugee camps, not by Israelis, but by their Arab brothers? Don’t bother to answer, GKD; you have your opinions washed in a small reservoir of highly selected “facts.”
Speaking of which, I do not know what fulcrum you must stand upon to call the (disputable) revisionist historian, Benny Morris, a “right-winger.” From a review from his work:
Morris argues that the 700,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in 1947 left mostly due to Israeli military attacks, but also due to fear of impending Israeli attack, fear of being caught up in fighting, and expulsions, but not as the result of an expulsion policy…
The book shows a map of 228 empty Palestinian villages, and attempts to explain why the villagers left. In 41 villages, he writes that the inhabitants were expelled by military forces; in another 90 villages, that the inhabitants panicked because of attacks on other villages, and fled. In six villages, he writes, the inhabitants left under instructions from local Palestinian authorities. He was unable to find out why another 46 villages were abandoned.
Your heavy “hint” about “ethnic cleansing” needs thought and perspective. How is that quantified? It isn’t. In the excerpt above, it is not clear which “military forces” caused the expulsion of the nakba. Some Palestinians remember, for example, that they fled before Israeli tanks. But Israel had no tanks in 1948; their villages were emptied by Egyptian tanks, and by the British-trained army of Transjordan. As well, blame Arab provocateurs, who hoped that rumors of Zionist expulsions would incite solidarity, only to instill fear and panic, and perpetuate the abandonment of their towns and homes. Why would renters stand and fight when their Arab brothers’ armies would vanquish the “invaders?”
The panic had many fathers. There were Zionists who promoted the expulsion or their neighbors, and there were many Zionists who fervently opposed it.