Transfer of Territory and Populations after War

Well, I am still wound up about the situation in Israel, and I want to make the following comment.  This post is motivated by the fact that every encounter between Israel and the Palestinians, and every peace proposal demands that the Israelis, having seized land from their enemies as a result of being attacked, must give every square inch of it back, and that the intransigent descendants of the "Palestinians" who lived within the territory that is now Israel must be granted an unconditional "right of return." 

As with so much involving Israel, it is strange that much of the world seems to demand things of Jews that it would never demand of anyone else.  The most abominable slaughter in the Sudan or Congo go virtually unnoticed; wholesale ethnic killing in Syria or Pakistan seems just fine with people; but let the Israelis build a wall or some houses and the act instantly decried as an abomination.  Even fighting back against endless attacks is characterized by far too many as unacceptable.

I thought that the territorial and resettlement demands placed on the Israelis would be better understood in light of some precedents from the century before the founding of Israel, so here is some information on that subject.

The Franco-Prussian War

In 1870, the French lost a war to the newly unified Germany.  This war was, in large part, the result of manipulation of the French by the German diplomatic Genius Bismarck:

"The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War was a conflict between the Second French Empire against the German states of the North German Confederation led by the Kingdom of Prussia. The conflict emerged from tensions caused by German unification. Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck planned to provoke a French attack in order to draw the southern German states—Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt—into an alliance with the Prussian dominated North German Confederation.

Bismarck adroitly created a diplomatic crisis over the succession to the Spanish throne, then rewrote a dispatch about a meeting between king William of Prussia and the French foreign minister, to make it appear that the French had been insulted. The French press and parliament demanded a war, which the generals of Napoleon III assured him that France would win. Napoleon and his Prime Minister, Émile Ollivier, for their parts sought war to solve political disunity in France."

Note that even though the origins of this war were so clouded, at the end of it, the French, who had technically started the war, were forced to cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans.  This was regarded as eminently appropriate, and no one raised a voice in protest (other than the many residents of the are who did not particularly appreciate the prospect of becoming Germans.)


World War I

Well, this time the Germans lost and were held responsible for the war.  Back went Alsace and Lorraine to France; but this was only one of the territorial transfers exacted from Germany at the end of the war.  Here's a map showing former German land broken off to form Poland and several other territorial losses suffered by Germany.  Note that all of the later recriminations about the terms of the treaty ending World War I centered around what were thought to be excessive reparations; no one thought the loss of territory suffered by Germany was inappropriate.

In addition, the other perceived malefactor in World War I, the Austro-Hungarian empire, lost so much territory in the settlements that it virtually ceased to exist:

The Germans' and Austrians' other strong ally, the Ottoman Empire, also was stripped of so much territory that it brought an end to hundreds of years of rule:


No one demanded that any of these countries had a right to have this territory returned to them.

World War II

The loss of Germany's new territories acquired through the means of aggressive war (pretty much in the same manner as Jordan's acquisition of the West Bank) is pretty well known, so I will just provide a map here, without much comment:
 
Lesser known is the stripping of Japan of territories it had acquired by aggression:

"The Treaty of Peace with Japan (commonly known as the Treaty of San Francisco, Peace Treaty of San Francisco, or San Francisco Peace Treaty), between Japan and part of the Allied Powers, was officially signed by 48 nations on September 8, 1951, at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, United States. It came into force on April 28, 1952.

This treaty served to officially end World War II...

The document officially renounces Japan's treaty rights derived from the Boxer Protocol of 1901 and its rights to Korea, Formosa (Taiwan) and the Pescadores, Hong Kong (then a British colony), the Kuril Islands, the Spratly Islands, Antarctica and Sakhalin Island."

Although other examples could be given, I think that this should be sufficient to demonstrate that the stripping of territory from the attacking power was widely practiced in the century before the creation of the State of Israel, and was considered an appropriate consequence for having started a war of aggression, as the Arab states surrounding Israel have done numerous times, (in order to deter future aggressive conduct.)

Transfer of Populations

To demonstrate the appropriateness, in world opinion, of the transfer of populations, where those populations were sufficiently irredentist and revanchist, I want to mention what happened at the end of World War II.

"Millions of German Reichsdeutsche (German citizens) and millions of ethnic German Volksdeutsche (citizens of other European states) were forced to migrate to Germany during the later stages of World War II and the post-war period. The areas of expulsion included former eastern territories of Germany which were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union after the war, as well as areas annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany in pre-war Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, northern Yugoslavia and other states of Central and Eastern Europe.

By 1950, a total of at least 12 million Germans had fled or been expelled from east-central Europe into the areas which would become post-war Germany and Allied-occupied Austria."

Much of this was accomplished through the "Potsdam Agreement:"

"The Potsdam Agreement was the agreement between three of the Allies of World War II, United Kingdom, United States, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, for the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany
The Three Governments, having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner."

The Allies had acknowledged the legitimacy of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, which was about to form a Soviet satellite state. Urged by Stalin, the UK and the US gave in to put the German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line from the Baltic coast west of Świnoujście up to the Czechoslovak border "under Polish administration.   The cession included the former Free City of Danzig and the seaport of Stettin on the mouth of the Oder River (Szczecin Lagoon), vital for the Upper Silesian Industrial Region.

The Germans in Czechoslovakia, known as Sudeten Germans but also Carpathian Germans, were expelled according to the Beneš decrees—from the Sudetenland region, where they formed a majority, from linguistic enclaves in central Bohemia and Moravia, as well as from the city of Prague.

Though the Potsdam Agreement only refers to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, expulsions also occurred in Romania, where the Transylvanian Saxons were deported and their property disseized, or in Yugoslavia. In the Soviet territories, Germans not only were expelled from northern East Prussia (Oblast Kaliningrad) but also from the adjacent Lithuanian Klaipeda Region and other lands settled by Baltic Germans."

This was considered appropriate for the following reasons:

"The long-term goal of Nazi Germany was to Germanize or eradicate the population of Poland, Czechoslovakia and certain western parts of the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany's Generalplan Ost envisioned the eventual extermination of between 45 to 70 million "non-Germanizable" people from Central and Eastern Europe, but they lost the war before these aims could be achieved."

This is virtually an identical goal, albeit on a larger scale, to the intention of the "Palestinians" and the surrounding Arab states, toward Jews in Israel since its founding. 

With Israel, however, everything has changed.  Now, as a result of a propaganda effort extending for several decades, it has become world opinion that it would be some sort of abomination if the countries that repeatedly attacked Israel lost a shred of territory as a result; and it has also been decided that the Israelis must allow not only the intransigent population of Palestinians who left Israel in 1948 be allowed to return, but that all of their descendants, generation after generation, be allowed to declare themselves Israeli citizens.  I think it is obvious that both of these claims- essentially the denial of the right of Israel to impose any consequences on attacking Arab nations, thereby licensing them to attack again and again, and the allowing the surrounding Arab population to drown the Israelis in a flood of millions of "refugees," only a few percent of whom have ever set foot in Israel- are both schemes to eliminate the State of Israel.  What is not obvious to most is the degree that these conditions demanded of Israel are contrary to the normal, virtually inevitable, results of waging aggressive war- conditions that, of course, only apply when Jews are attacked.

At this point, given what has happened in recent decades, I believe that, in the interests of long-term stability, Israel should have followed long international precedent and simply annexed the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.  Intransigent, violent segments of the Arab population should have been treated like the Sudeten Germans and expelled.  This behavior is consistent with accepted international law, and Israel's failure to muster the will to apply the lessons of World Wars I and II to its own situation has contributed as much as anything to the disastrous conditions which exist in the Middle East today.

I certainly didn't feel this way a few years ago, but Hamas has taught me to see things differently.  Maybe if they abandon their commitment to slaughter all Jews worldwide, and stop their constant bombardment of Israel, I will change my mind again.

Comments

Infidel753 said…
This is an important point and I've often been struck by these analogies. Actually, at least through the 1970s, there were a few irredentists in Germany who still wanted to claim Silesia and Pomerania, but everyone, including most Germans, considered such people crazy and an embarrassment.

That's the way it goes with Israel, though. People hold it to standards they don't apply to any other country, and seem oblivious that they're doing so.
Green Eagle said…
Well, there are still a few people who demand that the U.S. give the southwest back to Mexico.

I suspect that the situation with the Sudeten Germans was very much on the minds of the people dividing up the land in Palestine, it having only happened a couple of years before.

By the way, I believe my wife is a descendant of some original irredentists- her family was from the Italian alps, and her grandfather and his brothers left Italy because they refused to serve in the Austrian military.
Sam240 said…
"The centre of the war is in Palestine, but its dimensions are much wider. When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves — this is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves and our moral and physical position is not bad. We can face the gangs... and were we allowed to mobilize all our forces we would have no doubts about the outcome... But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. Militarily, it is we who are on the defensive who have the upper hand but in the political sphere they are superior. The land, the villages, the mountains, the roads are in their hands. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside. They defend bases which are theirs, which is easier than conquering new bases... let us not think that the terror is a result of Hitler's or Mussolini's propaganda — this helps but the source of opposition is there among the Arab" -- David Ben Gurion, at the Mapai Political Conference, June 7, 1938.

"Everyone, with the exception of those who were blind from birth, already understood loong ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, 1923.

"In the Land of Israel there are only 70,000 Jews and no less than seven thousand Arabs who are, despite their inferiority and lack of culture . . . the lords of the land. . . . the regions of the country worth settling are already settled and cultivated by the Arabs." - Yossef Haim Brenner, 1913 (in his Collected Writings, volume 8.)

"During the Next 20 years we have to create a Jewish majority in the Land of Israel. This is the essence of the new historical situation." - David Ben-Gurion, 1917.

"Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky

"How can we complain about their deep hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the Gaza refugee camps, and before their very eyes we are possessing the land and the villages where they, and their ancestors, have lived . . . We are the generation of colonizers, and without the steel helmet and the gun barrel we cannot plant a tree and build a home." - Moshe Dayan, at the funeral of Roy Rotberg, May 1, 1956.

(Continued below)
Sam240 said…
One more little bit:
"It is estimated that the Jews of the world number fifteen or sixteen million people. Half of them lead, quite literally, the life of harried, homeless dogs. The Arabs number about thirty-eight million. They occupy Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the whole of the Arab peninsula -- an area which, if we deduct the deserts, is about half the size of Europe. . .
The requisitioning of a tract of land from a people of vast holdings to make a home for a wandering people -- this is an act of justice. And if the owner refuses (which is quite natural), he must be forced into it." - Ze'ev Jabotinsky, The Morality of the Iron Wall, 1923.

Let's accept Jabotinsky's argument for a while. The United States has so much land that we can set aside a small amount for the Jewish people. The state of North Carolina sounds nice. All of those Gentiles in North Carolina can go live in one of the other 49 states. And the use of force to accomplish it doesn't morally wrong, according to Zionist thought.

Perhaps there's something wrong with Jabotinsky's argument.

The early Zionists were well aware that the creation of Israel would require some sort of what we would call ethnic cleansing - and mass expulsion of the sort Green Eagle recommends is what we call ethnic cleansing.

Even worse, Green Eagle wants to complete the exterminationist policy that the Zionist invaders had in mind. As the likes of Ben-Gurion, Dayan, and Jabotinsky admitted, the land belonged to the Arabs, and the Zionists stole it from them.

Expelling the Arabs from the Occupied Territories is not like driving the Germans from the Sudetenland. It would be like driving the Cherokees out of North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. It is like driving the First Nations to reservations because they are resisting foreign invaders.

The Arab population driven out from Israel by Zionist terrorists in 1948, as well as their descendents, should be permitted to return to the places they were driven out. Why should they be punished for resisting what Ben-Gurion himself declared to be a force that was politically in the wrong?

(Note: Have you ever read "Original Sins" by Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, or "Jewish State or Israeli Nation?" by Boas Evron? Both books argue, among other things, that Zionism is inherently racist, as it required the ethnic cleansing of mass expulsions to be put into effect. There are also descriptions of how early Zionism regarded the European Jewish culture of the early 20th century as inherently defective, and how most Zionists of the period wanted there to be no Jews in Europe. Fascinating.)
Green Eagle said…
Sam, really, your endless compendium of lies and misrepresentations is just too much for me to be bothered with. If they fool anyone here, I will just have to live with that, but I just don't give a damn if you go on living with your hatred and racism.
Green Eagle said…
By the way, Infidel, may I say that until your comment, I'd never met anyone else who thought about the comparison between the Sudeten Germans and the situation in Israel. You are a person of very wide knowledge indeed.
Sam240 said…
Green Eagle --

Your statement that Israel should have annexed the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights following the 1967 War shows your anti-Arab racism, for it was Israel which started the 1967 War.

"On June 5 1967 Israel launched a strike against Syria, Egypt and Jordan which became known as the Six Day War."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/panorama/hi/front_page/newsid_7875000/7875655.stm

“I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.” Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68

“Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan...[said] many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland...[Dayan stated] ‘They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land...We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot.

And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.’” The New York Times, May 11, 1997

--Both of the two above quotes are from The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict, by Jews for Justice in the Middle East

Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan both declared that it was Israel that started the 1967 War. Given that Israel was the aggressor, the country has no right whatsoever to occupy the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

Are you going to believe Rabin and Dayan, or are you going to claim that they are pro-Arab liars?
joseph said…
Sam,

You obviously went to some web site and collected a bunch of quotes which mean nothing out of context. I'm not sure what your points are supposed to be but let me try answering some:

1. Nasser amassed his troops on the Israeli border, kicked out UN peacekeeping forces and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. Before the Straits were closed, Israel said that closing them would be an act of war. That Egypt was clearly preparing for war is undeniable. Israel captured the West Bank after pleading with Jordan to stay out of the war. Nasser told Hussein that he was winning, that is why Jordan got involved.
2. There has been a bill, condemning the Armenian tragedy, in Congress for many years. It never comes up for a vote because Turkey is violently opposed to it. Passing the bill would damage relations with Turkey. It has nothing to do with Israel. Israel stays away from the Armenian issue for the same reason. To repeat, IT IS THE TURKS WHO DON'T WANT A DISCUSSION OF ARMENIA.
3. Benny Morris says that Israel did expel some Palestinians, but his criticism of Ben Gurion is that he didn't expel enough. When you have thugs trying to kill you, expulsion is the least extreme and best measure.
4. Zionists wanted more Jews in Israel. Color me not stunned.
5. In 1934, for example, Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party prepared a draft constitution for Jewish Palestine that put the Arab minority on an equal footing with its Jewish counterpart "throughout all sectors of the country's public life." The two communities were to share the state's duties, both military and civil service, and enjoy its prerogatives. Jabotinsky proposed that Hebrew and Arabic should enjoy equal rights and that "in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice versa.
6. Arabs started showing up in Palestine when Jews started coming. Read the Peel Commission records. It was the Jews who turned the swamps into orange groves.
7. You may be right that the Arabs will not accept Jews in Israel. That is too bad for them. If they choose to live in misery rather than cooperating with Israel and living better, then so be it.
Sam240 said…
Joseph,

Green Eagle is arguing that Israel has a moral right to take over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights because the Arabs invaded Israel in 1967. Specifically, he compares them to the Nazis, holding that the aim of Nazi Germany was to Germanize or eradicate the population of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the western portion of the Soviet Union. Therefore, just like it was right to kick 12 million Germans out of their homes after World War II, it is morally right to expel the Palestinians from their homelands.

There are several problems with Green Eagle's argument. First, he neglects to mention that about 2.1 million people died in the above expulsion. The wikipedia article on the expulsion of Germans that he linked to give a range of possible deaths from 473,000 to 2.5 million. My number comes from Matthew White's “The Great Big Book of Horrible Things,” which covers the 100 deadliest man-made catastrophes of all time. [For the curious, the cut-off is 300,000 deaths, which applies to such events as the War of the Allies, the Crimean War, and Idi Amin.] With 4 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a comparable death rate following Green Eagle's recommended actions would leave about 600,000 dead Palestinians. That put it in a tie for 67th place, with the Goguryeo-Sui Wars and the Sino-Dzungar War.

International law has, fortunately, changed since the expulsion of Germans, which means that the continued occupation of conquered land and the forced transfer of population are both illegal. This means that the aftermath of World War II cannot serve as precedent.

But what would the “Arabization” of Israel look like? Well, before 1882, when the first Zionists arrived in what was then Palestine, the area was largely Arab. According to Justin McCarthy, who has provided the best population estimates of Ottoman-era Palestine, there were 15011 Jews and a combined 411454 Muslims and Christians (mostly Arabs) in the area. The population was 3.5 percent Jewish.

The Arabs didn't have to make the area Arab, or engage in the eradication of population (through expulsion) to obtain an Arab majority. It was already there. The best comparison to Green Eagle's description of Nazi aims, pre-1950, would have been the Zionists, who wanted to Judaicize and/or eradicate the population. The Zionist program relied on expulsion of the native population rather than mass murder, but it was still criminal. (Would Green Eagle accept a “Christianization” program for the United States which relies on the expulsion of America's Jewish population? If not, then why accept what the Zionists were doing?) The Palestinians, like the Czechs and Slovaks and Poles, were faced with foreign invaders.

Then we have 1967, when, according to Green Eagle, Israel was attacked. The problem there is that the state of Israel started the 1967 War with an aerial attack on Egypt. How could it be a war of defense when Israel made the first strike? Even if international law had permitted an attacked nation to keep territories it gained, the war did not begin with an attack on Israel, and this ruins Green Eagle's argument.

The quotes in the first two posts – showing the declared aim of the Zionists involved stealing land from people and expelling its inhabitants – were found in Beit-Hallami and Evron's books, and verified from other sources. (Note that Beit-Hallami and Evron are both ethnic Jews from Israel, which would tend to negate any smears of anti-Semitism made against them.)

Sam240 said…
Now, responding to some of your points.

1.Nasser's closure of the Strait of Tiran to Israeli shipping and to non-Israeli shipping carrying “strategic cargo” was itself a response to Israeli raids on Syria and Jordan. The closure of the strait to Israeli ships was academic, as no Israel-flagged vessel had used the Strait for over two years before the closure was made. Roger Fisher, of Harvard Law School, argued that Egypt had a good case that this restriction was permissible (New York Times, June 9, 1967); other academics claimed otherwise. Nasser was willing to have the World Court arbitrate the issue, but Israel would not agree to this (Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, pages 138-139). Had it not been for Israeli resistance, a resolution to the closure could have been reached by peaceful means.

You claim “That Egypt was clearly preparing for war is undeniable.” However, Yitzhak Rabin denied it, according to the source I found. My local library does not have Le Monde, but the Dayan quote from Jews for Justice in the Middle East does appear in the New York Times, just as they claimed, so it seems the Rabin quote is real. Menachim Begin also denied it: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” This was said at the National Defense College on August 8, 1982, and reported in the New York Times on August 21, 1982.

Both Rabin and Begin stated that there was no proof that Nasser was getting ready for an attack – Rabin said that there weren't enough forces in the Sinai to launch an offensive war – and continued by saying that Israel launched the war with an attack. I'll have to go with their statements here.

2.You have conflated several points that I made.
*First, the Israeli government has gone beyond legislative indecisiveness and engaged in acts of censorship regarding the Armenian Genocide. When the Israeli government tried to close down an academic conference on Genocide because several papers mentioned the Armenian Genocide, that is censorship. When the Israeli government prevented a one-hour television broadcast on the Armenian Genocide from airing, that was an act of both censorship and denial. (See The Banality of Denial, by Yair Auron.) The U.S. Congress might be unable to come up with a resolution about the Armenian Genocide, but the American government isn't trying to stop people from learning about it. Israel is actively trying to keep people from even learning about the Armenian Genocide

*Look at the rhetoric used by Talaat Pasha to rationalize what the Ottoman Empire was doing to the Armenians. (http://net.lib.byu.edu/estu/wwi/comment/morgenthau/Morgen25.htm) For example, "These people refused to disarm when we told them to. They opposed us at Van and at Zeitoun, and they helped the Russians. There is only one way in which we can defend ourselves against them in the future, and that is just to deport them."

Remove the middle sentence, and you get Green Eagle's position regarding the Palestinians. When Green Eagle sounds just like someone who ordered genocide, there's something wrong. The first sentence is something the Israeli government would claim. And what about collective punishment? It's impossible to make a distinction between the innocent and guilty, for those who are innocent today may be guilty tomorrow, according to both Talaat and Green Eagle. Talaat's rhetoric is similar to that used by the Israeli government. Given that Israel doesn't want people to learn about Talaat's rhetoric, one wonders if it's because learning about what Talaat said about the Armenians would lead people to doubt Israel's statements about the Palestinians.

(continued below)
Green Eagle said…
Sam, if you think I am going to bother wading through your endless posts, forget it. You even made my wife mad with your mendacious attitude. So I hope you enjoyed the exercise typing that all out.
Anonymous said…
The victors get to set the new rules and boundary lines as Churchill did. Hitler wanted more than just disputed lands back to Germany.
The world approved of Israel becoming a State, unfortunately they ignored the promise of a Palestinian State.
When we study the history of America it should be no surprise America takes what it wants. Through two world wars, the world has experienced the imperialistic tendencies of America through its superior military force.
Israel is just another fact forced on the area by the victors of the war and backed by American and world forces for its defense.
Palestinians should get their own State and would probably be easier to deal with if they did, but that won't give them what they feel is their land.
America is not known for the good treatment of those America defeated until WW II. Losers always have lived under the "thumb" of the victors and that won't change.
It was no secret in 1948 that Israel would become a flash point of aggression and attacked by its neighbors, thus the agreement by western powers (the victors) to defend Israel with its military power.
I happen to believe the treatment of Palestinians by Israel has been oppressive.
joseph said…
Sam,

Let us start with a few preliminaries. Green Eagle is smarter and cleverer than you, me and our six brightest friends all put together.
Nest, let me set forth some axioms. An identifiable people, subject to persecution, with nowhere else to go, are entitled to a refugee homeland. Jews fit the category. Palestinians didn't until some time in the 1970s, but now they do. Green Eagle has been clear that he favors a two state solution. It is clear that the Palestinians don't. Polls show about sixty percent of Palestinians oppose a two state solution. The notion that Hamas would accept it is laughable. The quotes you cite are all in English, in Arabic they say something different. What they say, in English, is that if it passed a referendum, they would accept it. Since there is no chance of that happening, the words are meaningless. If Hamas was in favor of a two state solution, they might change their charter, which not only calls for the destruction of Israel, but the murder of all Jews, everywhere. Now to the points
1. The US government was desparately trying to stop the war, which they saw coming. Eisenhower had promised that the Straits would remain open as part of the ceasefire agreement in 1956. The US government knew that war was imminent, do you seriously think that Egypt did not? And if the Straits were so unimportant, why close them? https://history.state.gov/milestones/1961-1968/arab-israeli-war-1967
2. Every Jewish kid knows about the Armenian tragedy. Hitler famously said that he could murder the Jews because the Turks murdered the Armenians and nobody said anything. The connection to the Holocaust is so well known among Jews suggesting that Israel doesn't want its kids to know about it reveals a fundamental lack of understanding of what Jews know.
.
joseph said…
3. There simply was no ethnic cleansing, there was removal of some Palestinians (though some left voluntarily and some at the urging of the Arab leadership) as half the Arab populace stayed. Ethnic cleansing means a removal of at least a large majority of a group, it just didn't happen. As Benny Morris noted, those removed were an existential threat to Israel. And by the way, there was an equal of greater number of Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Arab countries. There are few, if any Jews, left in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and the rest. Removing almost all is what ethnic cleansing is.
4. It is clear from you population figures that Arabs showed up when Jews started coming. If the Jews had gone to Antarctica, other people would have shown up.
5. England doesn't have a constitution either. Israel's basic law does protect all groups and treats them as equals.
6. "The Commission found that "though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary, improvement in the economic situation in Palestine has meant the deterioration of the political situation".[6] Addressing the "Arab charge that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained," noting that "Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamp and uncultivated when it was purchased."[7] They write that "The shortage of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population".[7] "Endeavours to control the alienation of land by Arabs to Jews have not been successful. In the hills there is no more room for further close settlement by Jews; in the plains it should only be allowed under certain restrictions."[4]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_Commission
7. The idea that Arabs will accept Jews in the area flies in the face of the Hamas Charter and the historical record. The only way Jews are accepted in the area is as second class citizens. That is dhimmis. I don't know what they have to do to convince you that the murder of Jews is their goal. They only keep saying it over and over. In 1947 Jews contributed more than 50% of NDP. Agriculture made up less than 15% of NDP. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/a-brief-economic-history-of-modern-israel/ The vast majority of land in 1948, and before, was government land not owned by anybody.
Lastly, you seem not to understand the problem, it is not Israel, it is the Palestinians (a term which meant Jews before 1948, Palestinian as separate from other Arabs not existing at that time). The Palestinians seem to be obsessed with winning, not improving their lives. As Golda Meir said, "Peace will come with they love their children more than they hate ours." But as long as Hamas proudly proclaims that it loves death like the Jews love life, that will not happen
Green Eagle said…
Joseph,

Thanks so much for going to the great trouble to answer Sam, and the same specious arguments that we hear over and over again. I've just gotten so tired of repeating the truth ad infinitum that I couldn't deal with him.

As if, at this point, any rational person could possibly believe the malignant nonsense that the Israeli Jews are intent on destroying the surrounding Arab countries, or that Hamas, which has, as you say, committed itself to the extermination of all Jews, really is a victim here that just wants to live in peace.

Sad to say, so many of the people who take Sam's viewpoint seem to be relatively intelligent people; speculation about why they choose such irrationality on this one issue quickly leads you to some really ugly conclusions.

And on a second issue, I appreciate your compliment, but might I suggest that it is a slight exaggeration?
Sam240 said…
Green Eagle -- I don't believe that Israel is intent on destroying Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Lebanon. However, the Israeli government is intent on maintaining control of the region between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. Perhaps you misunderstand the difference.

As for your claim that Hamas is intent on the extermination of all the World's Jews -- provide a source!

Now I'll reply to Joseph.

Let me begin by admitting an arithmetic error. McCarthy gave 403795 Muslims and 43659 Christians for the population of Palestine in 1882, the year that Zionist settlement in Palestine began. That makes 447454 Gentiles; I accidentally added both the “4” and the “3” in the Christian numbers to the thousands column to get 411454.

Which means I'll start with your point 4, which deals with population.

We have about 327000 Gentiles in Palestine in 1851, according to McCarthy, and 663904 Gentiles in Palestine, according to the 1922 census. You say, in response to that, “It is clear from you population figures that Arabs showed up when Jews started coming. If the Jews had gone to Antarctica, other people would have shown up.” The Jews started coming in 1882; where did all the 447454 or so Arabs that were already there come from?

According to my numbers, between 1851 and 1882, there was an increase of 1.0168% per year in the Arab population in Palestine – and this was all before the first Zionists arrived. It was due to the excess of Arab births over Arab deaths. If we extrapolate this rate of increase to 1922, we get 670643 Arabs in Palestine by 1922. The census numbers say 663904, which is very close to what our projection says. The population increase of Arabs in Palestine between 1851 and 1922 was 1.0% per year – it was that way for the three decades before the Zionists started to come, and it was that way for the four decades after the Zionists started to settle in Palestine. It wasn't necessary for any Arabs to move into Palestine for that population increase to take place.

Going back to your other points.

0.I'll start with your axioms. For the sake of argument, let's accept that “an identifiable people, subject to persecution, with nowhere else to go, are entitled to a refugee homeland.” The Romani people have been subject to persecution; most famously, Hitler tried to exterminate them from the face of the earth. European nations continue to discriminate against them. Therefore, according to your axiom, they are entitled to a refugee homeland. We'll suggest a 100-mile radius centered on your home as this refugee homeland. Since this homeland has a lot of non-Romani living there, in order to get a Romani majority in this homeland, it will be necessary to expel a lot of people, including you and/or your neighbors, and to do so by force. Therefore, the Romani are entitled to conduct ethnic cleansing on you and/or your neighbors in order to obtain their homeland.

I don't think you would be willing to accept this conclusion. I also think that at least some of your neighbors would engage in military action in order to keep their homes, or return to them after having been expelled. No entitlement to a homeland can possibility entail an entitlement to conduct ethnic cleansing in order to obtain it, or an entitlement to subject conquered people to decades of military occupation in order to maintain the homeland.

This isn't academic – in order to get a refugee homeland in Palestine, it was necessary for the Zionists to expel hundreds of thousands of Arabs, and to maintain Jewish control in the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, it is necessary for the Israeli government to subject four million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza to military occupation. Furthermore, during the first four decades of Zionism, there was somewhere else for the Ashkenazi to go – it was called the United States. More of them went to New York City than to Palestine.
Sam240 said…
1.The website you refer to states that the United States was worried about the possibility of war, but does not state that the United States knew on June 4 that Israel would start a war the next day. There is a good reason for that – the State Department didn't know that Israel was about to launch a war.

According to Dean Rusk, the United States Secretary of State in 1967, the United States government did not know that an attack on Egypt was imminent, especially since the Israeli government told LBJ at the end of May that they wouldn't take any unilateral action for two weeks. Rusk would later write, “We were shocked … and angry as hell when the Israelis launched the surprise offensive. They attacked on a Monday, knowing that on Wednesday the Egyptian vice-president would arrive in Washington to talk about re-opening the Strait of Tiran. We might not have succeeded in getting Egypt to reopen the strait, but it was a real possibility.” (Dean Rusk, As I Saw It, pages 386-387; quoted in Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, page 129.)

Note that, according to Rusk, the Israeli government deliberately broke its promise to the United States government that it would not start a war during the first week in June, which is why it didn't see the war coming. If the US government didn't see it coming, it's not surprising that Nasser didn't.

As for the closure – the shipping channels in the Strait of Tiran ran entirely through Egyptian territorial waters. Egypt did not close them to all shipping; several non-Israeli ships that were carrying neither military goods nor oil were permitted through the channel. The State Department website you cite notes that the Israeli military launched an attack on the village of Samu, then in Jordan, in November 1966; Finkelstein notes that Israel destroyed 125 homes, a clinic, and school during the attack (page 124). Your cited website also mentions an aerial attack on Syria in 1967 (it came in April). Since Israel was launching military attacks on some of its neighbors, Nasser decided to close the strait to Israeli shipping and to any materials which could be used for military aggression.

2.The “every Jewish kid knows” wasn't accurate when I was last in school back in 2000. As late as 2007, there was a controversy when ADL head Abe Foxman denied that there was a Genocide of Armenians; it wasn't until May of this year that Foxman admitted that the Armenian Genocide was, in fact, a genocide. It's also a good thing that the Israeli government is finally starting to reverse its position (http://asbarez.com/123385/after-years-of-denial-foxman-recognizes-genocide/ ), but, as Yair Auron pointed out in The Banality of Denial, Israel had engaged in censorship on this subject for decades.

However, the Israeli government still engages in discrimination against ethnic Armenians. The use of Armenian-owned land to create a Jews-only parking lot in Jerusalem, for instance, can only be described as racism. (http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/jerusalem-s-armenians-outraged-as-city-approves-jews-only-parking-lot-in-old-city-1.410694)

3.The United Nations came up with a final count of 711,000 Palestinian refugees from the area that became Israel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_the_Palestinian_Refugee_flight_of_1948). The UN also stated that there were 1,237,000 Gentiles within the borders of Mandatory Palestine, which included the West Bank and Gaza in addition to Israel (see section III in http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/D442111E70E417E3802564740045A309). This means that 57.5% of all Gentiles in Palestine, nearly all of whom were Arabs, were ousted from their homes by Zionists. The percentage of Arabs who were expelled from their homes within what became Israel (that is, within the 1967 borders) must be higher. This means that, by your standards, ethnic cleansing did happen.
Sam240 said…
Does Israel actually follow the guarantees given in the Basic Laws? I urge you to read “Pulled Apart” from the October 14, 2010, issue of the Economist. The city has built a three-meter-high wall (almost ten feet tall) circling the Arab neighborhoods of the city, cutting them off from the rest of Israel. While the city routinely issues building permits to Jews, it refuses them to Arabs, meaning the the majority of Arab homes are technically illegal. The government provides street lighting and garbage collection for the Jews, but not for the Arabs. The Jews have sewers, while certain Arab areas, lacking them, feature sewage in the streets.

The effect of all this is to drive the Arabs living in Lod away from predominantly Jewish political parties and towards Islamic extremists. Fundamentalist provide some municipal services that the government has ceased to provide, and it's no surprise that some Arabs support those who actually provide the community services that Jews in Lod take for granted. In response, some Jews in Lod want to create vigilante groups to control the Arabs. (http://www.economist.com/node/17254422)

The discrimination in housing is endemic in Israel. According to Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Israelis probably hold the world record in real-estate ownership. More than 90 per cent own their apartments or homes, thanks to massive public housing programs and generous government subsidies. This is true as far as Jews are concerned. Ninety-nine per cent of public housing programs exclude Arabs. When Arabs build their own homes, the constructions are considered illegal – and they are. To receive a permit to build in any locality, a master plan is required. The Israeli government, in its wisdom, saw to it that masater plans have been approved in only four out of 150 Arab localities.” (Original Sins, page 95.)

Israeli governments, both on the national and local levels, have given the non-discrimination clauses in Israel's Basic Laws the same high regard and level of implementation that the governments of the Jim Crow South gave to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution.

6.It turns out that https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/peel1.html provided only the official summary of the Peel Report, and is the source of all quotes in this section unless noted otherwise. The full report is at http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/Cmd5479.pdf, and, as it runs to 423 pages, I don't have time to read the whole thing now. Here, I'll quote from Chapter 2 of the official summary:

“In order to obtain Arab support in the War, the British Government promised the Sharif of Mecca in 1915 that, in the event of an Allied victory, the greater part of the Arab provinces of the Turkish Empire would become independent. The Arabs understood that Palestine would be included in the sphere of independence.

In order to obtain the support of World Jewry, the British Government in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration. The Jews understood that, if the experiment of establishing a Jewish National Home succeeded and a sufficient number of Jews went to Palestine, the National Home might develop in course of time into a Jewish State.”

The Arabs wanted what they were promised – an independent Palestine. Furthermore, given that the Poles had gotten their independent Poland, the Southern Slavs had gotten an independent Yugoslavia, and the Czechs and Slovaks had gotten their independent Czechoslovakia, the Arabs should get the same right to self-determination as the Poles and Czechs and Southern Slavs had. This would mean immediate independence.
Sam240 said…
(The final bit in response to your seven points, Joseph)

Furthermore, Hamas has changed its political positions in the quarter-century since its inception. Cata Charrett, in Understanding Hamas, notes that more recent documents, such as the 2006 election platform, are more in tune with the group's present position than the original Covenant, and quotes Menachem Klein on the subject (http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/understanding-hamas.html). Klein, who has served as a member of the Israeli team on negotiations, explains the tension between charters and present positions, and notes that a number of phrases from the covenant have been reinterpreted. In a number of cases, Hamas has taken stands that are in direct contradiction to its charter, and Klein states that the Covenant has become more of a historical document than an active statement of aims (See his Hamas in Power, http://www.offiziere.ch/wp-content/uploads/2007-4330419.pdf.) I would prefer it if Hamas were to amend its charter; however, as Klein notes on page 450 [page 10 of the pdf], Hamas does not refer to its charter in any of its political documents.

Finally, we should look at the case of the city of Lod, within Israel. As long as the local government provided services to the Arab population, and gave it some approximation of equal rights, the city's Arab population was content with predominantly Jewish leadership. It wasn't until they were put under a situation similar to occupation, complete with a wall around the Arab ghetto, that they turned to Islamic leaders, and much of that was because those leaders actually provided services. Similarly, in Gaza, much of the preference for Hamas over Fatah was that the former aimed at providing the services government ought to provide, while Fatah's leadership was more concerned with lining its pockets. If Israel were to stop its military occupation, make the residents of Gaza and the West Bank citizens, and actually treat Arabs as equals, Arab resistance would end.

(Joseph, please, please, please make your next post a cross-post between here and theunderground lawyer. I'd rather reply to you there than at Green Eagle's site.)
Green Eagle said…
Sam, do you think anyone read that last outpouring of nonsense?

You are abusing the right to leave comments here. You are acting exactly like so many right wingers who just throw so many false claims and twisted interpretations of things out there, knowing perfectly well that no one is going to waste their entire lives trying to set you straight- which is impossible anyway.

If you really want us to pay any attention to you, try writing comments of a reasonable length, and ones with arguments that have not been long since refuted.

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