Why is Israel the good guys????

Hi, Yaro!If you're really interested you might want to read a history of the region. Paul's summary was pretty good, but there's a lot more relevant information. For example, there's the Balfour Declaration, and you might be surprised when you learn just how much land the Jews had purchased in Palestine.Addressing the thread's topic, Israel isn't the good guy. In my view there is no good guy.--Percy

Nothing recent, but back in '88 I decided to remedy my ignorance of the region's history and checked a book on the subject out of the library. Since I'm an archivist who puts Richard Nixon to shame I can actually look up the book: One Land, Two Peoples by Harry B. Ellis, Copyright 1972. This is from a summary I emailed out at the time:

1. There has never been an independent Palestinian state.
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2. Arabs ruled the region for only a relatively short while after the time of Mohammed. Turkey ruled Palestine for centuries up till WWI.

This is from a longer email drawing upon the same book: --Percy

The region was already not under self-rule and hadn't been for centuries. After WWII both the Jews and Arabs were invited to be part of the decision-making process concerning how to return Palestine to self-rule. While no polls were conducted, it is quite possible that Jews outnumbered Arabs in the region by this time.The process was conducted under the auspices of the infant UN, not Britain. It was proposed that Palestine be divided into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, divided up into non-contiguous regions based upon demographics (I found a map of the proposed boundaries at Partition Plan - apparently not all the shades made it to the webpage format, so I'll just add that the International Zone is just the white region around Jerusalem - the rest of the white areas are Jewish).The Arabs rejected the proposal, they refused to compromise on their position of no Jewish state in Palestine whatsoever, and they gradually withdrew from all processes of discussion, compromise and negotiation.The date for implementation came and the Arab states invaded the newly formed state of Israel. The Arab states lost and Israel took some of the Palestinian land that the UN had given to the Arabs (Jordan got by far the larger portion of the intended Arab region, including Jerusalem).While the facts behind Israel's birth are not what one would hope for in an ideal world, the UN *did* try to conduct a fair and open process that would have satisfied your desire, indeed all our desires, for inclusion of "principles of democracy or fairness." The Arabs decided not to participate. Their position was, in effect, "There will be no Jewish state in Palestine, we will not compromise on this, we will fight if a Jewish state is created." If you doubt this, here is an example of Arab intransigence. These are the words of Azzam Pasha, secretary of the Arab League, in one of his declarations to the UN: While no one would dispute that the Palestinian Arabs were disenfranchised, further back in time the Jews experienced their own disenfranchisement. And the Jews displaced prior inhabitants. Which disenfranchisements are you going to choose to redress and which to ignore? The Jews once had a state in Palestine for centuries, while the Palestinians never did. The Jews owned a great deal of land in Palestine by the end of WWII, probably more than the Palestinians. By what logic can you deny any Jewish claim whatsoever to a right to statehood?--Percy

All I referenced at their website was the map because that was the only place where I found the map. As I said, the source for my information was a book written in 1972 that I read 15 years ago, and from some archive email I have from 1988. I am already on record several times now as believing both sides are at fault. Apparently I won't be balanced in your view until I start blaming only Israel. If you want to dispute my presentation of the facts go right ahead, but please don't subject us to something as incongruous as someone with your polarized pro-Arab views accusing someone in the middle of lack of balance.--Percy

Hi, Holmes!Wow! All I can say is that your post is absolutely breathtaking in both its length and in the degree of rabid pro-Arab bias displayed.I'm not pro-Israel. The biases in both your position and the rabid pro-Israel position are equally abhorent to me. I think you really need someone as rabidly pro-Israel as you are pro-Arab to do this up right. Maybe after you both exhaust yourselves on each others bulwarks you'll realize that neither side has a monopoly on either truth or martyrdom.--Percy

You need to get your facts straight. What I said was: I thought finding the map was important because it shows how small a part of the originally planned Arab state Israel took in the 1948-1949 Arab/Israeli war. Google found the map for me, it found it at only one webpage, and the page has no anchors by which I could position the link at the map. You gotta beef, talk to Google, or complain to your pro-Arab sites that their history sections are either incomplete or not indexed by Google. Heck, blame me if you want, maybe there were better search terms than the ones I thought of and the map can be found at plenty of neutral sites. But quit this silly "you're getting your information from biased sites" garbage. I haven't gotten information about Arab/Israel affairs from anywhere other than the daily news for over a decade. (If your answer is, "Aren't you aware that all the major news outlets are controlled by the Jews?" then all I can do is roll my eyes. Did you know that the evolutionists have secret fossil factories where they manufacture the fossils they seed in the ground before they "discover" them?)I earlier stated that I thought Jews might have outnumbered Arabs in Palestine ("it is quite possible that Jews outnumbered Arabs in the region" in Message 22), and now I wish that I had read the page upon which I found the map, because looking at that page again and this time reading it I notice that it has some demographic information, beginning right after the map. It says that my speculation was wrong: "The Arabs constituted a majority of the population in Palestine as a whole-1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews." It goes on to make pro-Israel apologies for why Arabs outnumbered Jews, but I assume the numbers are correct.You and Holmes and the other pro-Arab apologists ought to get together with the pro-Israel apologists - it'd be a lot of fun to watch. I see no reason that I should engage with extremists on either side. By the way, is there anything, anything at all, that you blame the Arabs for?If you or Holmes or anyone decide you'd like to engage in a shared search for common ground, then in that case I'm available for discussion. But I'm not really interested in this rabid "dispute everything, concede nothing, I'm right, you're wrong" stuff. In human affairs there's always plenty of blame to go around.--Percy

Not surprising to see a more reasoned post from someone just after he's been accused of extreme bias, but yes, you are. Unfortunately there's no 12 point program, but why don't you start by reading some of the stuff you wrote in the I Don't Understand the Israel/Palestinian Problem thread. Then reread your Message 30 of this thread. Does it all seem rabidly pro-Arab to you? No? Then sorry, guy, can't help you.Look, Holmes, I'm a centrist. If you and Rei want to explore the origins of the Jewish state in greater detail then it sounds interesting and I might participate, but not if at every turn I'm faced with charges of underhandedness and unfairness, like that the UN was just a puppet of GB's desire to satisfy promises to the Jews and so forth, or that what I wrote is "less than totally honest", or even worse, "The first part is a lie."Arab history is just as full of deception, insurrection and betrayal as any other region's history, and their role on the world stage during the formation of Israel was not one of innocent victim. Or maybe it was, but in that case it seems that this should be a realization deriving from the discussion rather than a required a priori assumption.--Percy