Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: New Israeli search method at West Bank checkpoint worries Palestinians [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Was the Zionist maxim "a land without people, for a people without land". This phrase denied the reality that there was a long-standing Arab population of considerable size in the lands of the Mandate. It denied that that population had any real connection to those lands. It denied, in short, any legitimacy to the Palestinian presence the area.
Had there been an acknowledgement that there was a large indigenous, or nearly indigenous(at least 13 centuries old by 1900)Arab community in Palestine, with developed agriculture, with culture, with a tradition of education, there could have been a much more conciliatory situation. Instead of that, the Zionist leadership acted as if Arabs were nothing in Palestine, had no real right to stay there, had no reality of their own, and could easily be ignored or driven away if the need arose. Can you not see how this could be a problem?
And I didn't say it was ALL because of the Occupation. But the occupation AND the settlements have played a massive role in deepening the tensions, tensions that existed, in significant part, because of the evictions of 1948(and Israel, today, would lose nothing in at least admitting that those people WERE forced out and that it should be admitted that they had and retain a real connection to the lands of the Mandate, a connection that has to be honored in some way). Yes, there were and are Arabs who hate Jews(though, unlike Europe, there weren't many that wanted them to be exterminated from the whole Earth). And it needs to be admitted that it was never fair to imply that Palestinians and the other Arabs should be considered the successors in villainy to the Caesars, the Inquisition, the tsars and Hitler. And the record of relative amity and tolerance between Jews and Arabs in North Africa(and Jews and Muslims in Iran for much of Iranian history)is important, because it shows that, if peaceful co-existence could happen between those groups in the past, it could happen in the future-that Arabs are not irredeemable antisemitic monsters in the way that people like Netanyahu and his apologists like to make them out to be.