- November 9th, 2023, 10:58 am
#449440
Lagayscienza wrote: ↑November 9th, 2023, 6:18 am If Israel would just give a little, offer the Palestinians something, at least a hope of establishing an independent Palestinian state, then I could see a way for this to be resolved. Otherwise this horror will continue.What Israel will never offer is its own annihilation, which is what most Palestinians want.
"In 2014, 60% of Palestinians said the final goal of their national movement should be "to work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea". A poll published in 2021 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research revealed that 39% of Palestinians support "the two-state solution" and 59% are opposed;…"The Palestinians would have had a state of their own for many decades if the Arabs hadn't rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-state_solution
"The Arab get-togethers from Bludan onward had been marked by disunity, mutual suspicion, and cross-purposes. The antagonisms and suspicions undermined any hope of firm, realistic decision-making in the League councils. At the same time, in order not to appear weak-kneed and hesitant, moderate rulers—such as 'Abdullah—allowed themselves to be pressed into extremist policies (or at least utterances), lest they be seen as insufficiently zealous. All paid lip service to Arab unity and the Palestine Arab cause, and all opposed partition. But all were at a loss about how to prevent it. Most, though they could not admit it to the others (or, perhaps, to themselves), knew that their armies were weak. Egypt and Jordan’s military commanders estimated that the Haganah would prove formidable; other Arabs may have been more optimistic. One thing was clear, however: there could be no intervention so long as the British were in Palestine. None wished to fight the British, with whom most were aligned and who all understood were too powerful to challenge.
Still, having committed themselves to oppose partition, the Arab leaders felt they had to do something. The public bluster, the fear of their own populations whom they had helped whip up with militant rhetoric into a frenzy, and the pressure of fellow Arab politicians and leaders all combined to egg them on. The Arab states had embarked on a course leading to war. What remained to be seen was who exactly would take part and how it would all end."
(Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. p. 73)
"The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal. Most lamented the imperative of giving up the historic heartland of Judaism, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), with East Jerusalem’s Old City and Temple Mount at its core; and many were troubled by the inclusion in the prospective Jewish state of a large Arab minority. But the movement, with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann at the helm, said “yes.”
The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat “no”—as they had in 1937, when the Peel Commission had earlier proposed a two-state solution. The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that “no,” the Palestinian Arabs, in November–December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution’s implementation. Many Palestinians may have been unenthusiastic about going to war—but to war they went. They may have been badly led and poorly organized; the war may have been haphazardly unleashed; and many able-bodied males may have avoided service. But Palestinian Arab society went to war, and no Palestinian leader publicly raised his voice in protest or dissent.
The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea and ridding Palestine “of the Zionist plague.” The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to “save” Palestine or “save the Palestinians,” definitions more agreeable to Western ears."
(Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. p. 396)
"Such sentiments translated into action in 1948. During the “civil war,” when the opportunity arose, Palestinian militiamen who fought alongside the Arab Legion consistently expelled Jewish inhabitants and razed conquered sites, as happened in the 'Etzion Bloc and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Subsequently, the Arab armies behaved in similar fashion. All the Jewish settlements conquered by the invading Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian armies—about a dozen in all, including Beit Ha'arava, Neve Ya'akov, and 'Atarot in the Jordanian sector; Masada and Sha'ar Hagolan in the Syrian sector; and Yad Mordechai, Nitzanim, and Kfar Darom in the Egyptian sector—were razed after their inhabitants had fled or been incarcerated or expelled.
These expulsions by the Arab regular armies stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states. The mindset characterized both the public and the ruling elites. All vilified the Yishuv and opposed the existence of a Jewish state on “their” (sacred Islamic) soil, and all sought its extirpation, albeit with varying degrees of bloody-mindedness. Shouts of “Idbah al Yahud” (slaughter the Jews) characterized equally street demonstrations in Jaffa, Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad both before and[410] during the war and were, in essence, echoed, usually in tamer language, by most Arab leaders. We do not have verbatim minutes of what these leaders said in closed inter-Arab gatherings. But their statements to Western diplomats, where caution was usually required, were candid enough. “It was possible that in the first phases of the Jewish-Arab conflict the Arabs might meet with initial reverses,” King Farouk told the American ambassador to Egypt, S. Pinckney Tuck, just after the passage of the UN General Assembly partition resolution. “[But] in the long run the Arabs would soundly defeat the Jews and drive them out of Palestine.” A few weeks earlier, that other potentate, King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia, had written to President Truman: “The Arabs have definitely decided to oppose [the] establishment of a Jewish state in any part of the Arab world. The dispute between the Arab and Jew will be violent and long-lasting. . . . Even if it is supposed that the Jews will succeed in gaining support for the establishment of a small state by their oppressive and tyrannous means and their money, such a state must perish in a short time. The Arab will isolate such a state from the world and will lay siege to it until it dies by famine. . . . Its end will be the same as that of [the] Crusader states.” The establishment of Israel, and the international endorsement that it enjoyed, enraged the Arab world; destruction and expulsion were to be its lot. Without doubt, Arab expulsionism fueled Zionist expulsionist thinking during the 1930s and 1940s."
(Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. pp. 409-10)
"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
Location: Germany
) to rid their country of a brutal, USA-sponsored/nurtured/financed, military occupation.
- By Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
- By Steve3007