Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Xenophon]

That's a common refrain re: the recurring Israeli-Arab contretemps. "The Arabs and the Jews have been fighting for thousands of years." Far as I can recollect, before 1948 there was no such conflict. (OK, some Zionist-British scrapping in the aftermath of WW2.) Before that, till WWI put an end to the Ottoman Empire, the vicinity of what became Israel was pretty quiet between the end of the Crusades and the advent of Allenby c. 1917. Before the Crusades? The Byzantine Empire was involved in a number of wars with the Arabs, Sassanids and Turks, but after "that awful day" at Manzikert in 1071, things were fairly peaceful. Afore that...what, the Jewish Revolt in the 1st. Century A.D.? Doubtless you can scrape up a few other scraps, but the received meme tracing an ongoing Jewish-Arab war from Moses' "Endloesung" to the Canaanite question down to the present day is largely contrived.

[Sy Borg]

That's a common refrain re: the recurring Israeli-Arab contretemps. "The Arabs and the Jews have been fighting for thousands of years." Far as I can recollect, before 1948 there was no such conflict. (OK, some Zionist-British scrapping in the aftermath of WW2.) Before that, till WWI put an end to the Ottoman Empire, the vicinity of what became Israel was pretty quiet between the end of the Crusades and the advent of Allenby c. 1917. Before the Crusades? The Byzantine Empire was involved in a number of wars with the Arabs, Sassanids and Turks, but after "that awful day" at Manzikert in 1071, things were fairly peaceful. Afore that...what, the Jewish Revolt in the 1st. Century A.D.? Doubtless you can scrape up a few other scraps, but the received meme tracing an ongoing Jewish-Arab war from Moses' "Endloesung" to the Canaanite question down to the present day is largely contrived.

The Canaanites (Arabs) were often mentioned in the Bible as enemies to the Israelites.

Deuteronomy 7:1-6
'When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the LORD will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire. "For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth.

[amorphos_ii]

Interesting. Are we saying that there is only, and can only be peace in the Lavant when the Israelis are conquered or otherwise subdued and powerless?

I think it needs a kind of EU situation, but that the Israelis as any other nation/peoples should have their own space. Even better would be one neutral world army [UN?], yet with so many interests by the given parties, like the yanks, UK and EU who want everything they can get mostly for them, who’s going to agree to a united world?

The more intelligent option would be to have no distinctions such as race, religion or culture, but affected people wont forget things like the current conflict for a very long time. Just like they haven’t forgot everything that the Israelis have done to them since 1947.