Population exchanges have happened before and led to stable homelands‏

Population exchanges have happened before and led to stable home-lands‏

• One fact remains – Jews living today are of Semitic, middle eastern descent and historically come from the area of mandatory Palestine. The bulk of Israel’s Jews are of more immediately Middle Eastern descent, i.e., Yemenite, Syrian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Persian, Libyan, Egyptian, Iraqi, etc. Population exchanges have happened before and led to stable homelands. But in this case, the desire to keep Palestinian victimhood alive, they are denied citizenship in every Moslem country except Jordan, kept in refugee camps and even when they are permanently settled in other countries (such as the US), their status are refugees is maintained by the UN.

• Among the issues brought up, first of all the Balfour Declaration was repudiated, and in the first place was never intended to go being the mere settlement issue—not full blown nation-state as we see in Israel today. Next, even IF it had, the author points out that you can’t just muscle in on an area by the corrupt desires of the Brit Empire (what right did they have to the area that they could make deals) and the other problem was that they had PREVIOUSLY promised the whole region to the Arabs. As far as history, and race, and the issues surrounding who was where first, this argument is said to be tedious and hare-brained due to multiple problems:
  First, just because your ancestors were there at some distant point in the past does not mean you can dig your heels in later on what someone has settled later. I am part Brit. Neither I nor my family have any territorial “recall” rights to Brit territory, nor any of Her Majesty’s remaining dominions. We would not like it if a group of Catawba Indians, who previously lives in what is now South Carolina, declared that “behold, we hold this sacred land for all Catawba”, and (like Palestine) the rest of us get kicked out and must flee by international decree to Florida or Georgia, due to some rather questionable—at best—authority due an edict from the UN.
  Again, Britain aquired this region via conquest in the fallout of WW1, but that’s NOT the same as saying it had moral or legal authority to carve Palestine up like a roast.
  As to the oft-repeated claim that “palestine” was never a nation, but a region, that is said to be a strawman argument. No one really disputes this, but is focused instead on the issue of displacement of the people forced out when Israel was created in 1947 after what had been mostly majority Arab presence in the region for hundreds of years.
  The Pentagon and the SC National Guard might have something to say about this. No? So, does the overall size of Arabia matter in all the hoopla about “oh, we ONLY want so very little!”, as commonly seen on comparative maps of Israel vs. the rest of Arabia.
  The claim that there is more legal authority for Israel than nations previously set up by mass displacement and force is threadbare if we look at history of morals and ethics. What went for 1500 does not go for 1947 and the force against hundreds of thousands of Arab Palestinians who’d lived there under VARIOUS regimes.
  In any case, modern genetics and anthropology suggest strongly that the Jews evolved FROM the Hittites—they did not conquer them, nor the Canaanites, as the Bible said. Speaking of that, modern legal parlance has no brief of Biblical text as justification for nation-states that displace others. Or existing at all.

• Here is a fact: in the 1930′s the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a known collaborator with Hitler and personally responsible for the death of 12,000 Bosnian Jews. This is a published FACT in the book “Icon of Evil”. So, the next time anyone says that Palestinians, Arabs, or Moslems had NOTHING to do with the Holocaust, think of this FACT. The Arabs had many things to do with the Holocaust and their Grand Mufti (may he NOT rest in peace) is personally responsible for the death of at least 12,000 European Jews.

• Do the Arabs have a right to a land of their own? Yes, they do, just as do other ethnic or national groups. Matter of fact, there is not just one Arab land but 21 of them (not including Palestine), covering 5,120,000 square miles and home to 345,840,398 Arabs.
  Do the Jews have a right to a land of their own? Right now there is just one Jewish land — Israel — covering 8,000 square miles and home to 5,702,700 Jews (plus 1,423,500 Arabs). Seems proper that this little smidgen of land could be left to the Jews.
  If the Jews didn’t have Israel, where would they go for a land of their own? No where in the world.
  But if the Arabs in Palestine (the West Bank) had to leave — and so far no one is asking them to — they have a choice of 21 Arab lands to go to.
  Yes, there are all sorts of claims to homes, buildings, farms, businesses, etc. But who besides the Jews (and some friends here and there) thought that these was much of an issue when the Jews were virtually exterminated in Eastern Europe during World War II.
  The Jews said, “Yes, we share the land with the Arabs,” when the United Nations partitioned the land. But the Arabs (not just the Palestinians) said, “No,” and went to war with the Jews. The Arabs lost their chance then; they tried war again two more times and lost twice. Why can’t 345,840,398 Arabs live in peace and let 7,116,200 Israeli Jews live in peace, too?

• Why in the world would the U.S. take over Israel? Of all of the absurdities I have been reading here this one takes the cake. We have to stop looking at this from a historical perspective; that history has been wiped out and all these people have known, on both sides, is war. Sure if we look at the past still the only right answer would have been that that the land should have been purchased rather than taken by force; none tried that.
  The Israelis and Palestinians have been are still being used as pawns in a game that only a few understand they have both been betrayed and lied to often by the very people that they call allies. The U.S. uses Israel like a child as an excuse for its foreign policy that would otherwise be inexcusable and the Arab countries use the Palestinians as a buffer and a sideshow to hide the wrongs that they commit in the name of Islam.
  The leadership of all involved has succeeded in their mandates which is to let this land and its peoples as pawns to be brought out whenever it helps their separate but equally selfish agendas. Thus the peoples of this land must find a way to create a dialog among the lay people not withstanding the leaderships designs or opinions.

• “palestinians, who owned 97% of the land” that would be a day, since for 400 years Ottoman Turks “owned” the land and did not recognize private ownership of land, except in the cases of royalty or nobility, or where land was granted like to Circassians or Albanians. Not to mention that 73 of British Mandate territory was given to Jordan and French created Syria, also gave them southern Lebanon, to which they never had a claim. So there you go, “palestinians” have the 90% of “palestine” split into 2 states of Jordan and Syria, and then a bonus of southern Lebanon I guess they don’t have a claim to Israel, West Bank or Gaza.