Aid for Israel
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Monday, August 17, 2026 14:58
VIEWED: 9651
PAGE 9 of 11
Well, the Brits screwed the Palestinians over from the very beginning (British mandate of Palestine)
Quote:
The Palestinian Arabs felt ignored by the terms of the Mandate. Though at the beginning of the Mandate they constituted a 90 percent majority of the population, the text only referred to them as "non-Jewish communities" that, though having civil and religious rights, were not given any national or political rights. ... In contrast the text included six articles (2, 4, 6, 7, 11 and 22) with obligations for the mandatory power to foster and support a "national home" for the Jewish people. Moreover a representative body of the Jewish people, the Jewish Agency, was recognised.
The Palestinian Arab leadership repeatedly pressed the British to grant them national and political rights like representative government, reminding the British of president Wilson's Fourteen Points, the Covenant of the League of Nations, British promises during World War I, and their natural rights as a people. The British however made acceptance of the terms of the Mandate a precondition for any change in the constitional position of the Palestinian Arabs. For the Palestinian Arabs this was unacceptable, as they felt that this would be "self murder". During the whole interwar period the British, appealing to the terms of the Mandate, which they had designed themselves, rejected the principle of majority rule or any other measure that would give a Palestinian Arab majority control over the government of Palestine.
... Not having a recognised body of representatives was a severe handicap for the Palestinain Arabs compared to the Zionists. The Jewish Agency was entitled to diplomatic representation e.g. in Geneva before the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission, while the Palestinian Arabs had to be represented by the British.
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Always look upstream.
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Quote:This goes back to 1918, it didn't start in 1948 or even 1935.
If you were part of a people without a homeland, a people that had barely survived a genocide that killed millions wouldn't you want somewhere
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Always look upstream.
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Hello,
I wanted to address a couple of comments.
Q1) If I were an oppressed people, recently the subject of attempted genocide, wouldn't I want somewhere safe to call my home?
A) Absolutely. If I were an oppressed person in the world, there would be two options at the top of my list. 1 - Carve out a safe place of my own, or 2 - migrate to someone else's safe place where I am welcome.
As far as I know, no nation wanted to absorb tens or hundreds of thousands of immigrants. So, that leaves carving out my own home. It so happens the Jewish people have an ancestral homeland that was lost in ancient times, and it must have seemed like a natural choice. In practice, they chose a region which may possibly be the most hostile environment for Jewish people anywhere in the world. They are completely surrounded by enemies, with their backs to the sea. I often wonder if there weren't more practical choices. However, the Israelis have matured in power, and seem fully capable of defending the little strip of land they call home, however impractical a choice it may have been in the beginning.
Q2) Aren't we morally superior to suicide bombers because a) we value our soldiers highly enough to not 'waste' them by strapping bombs to them, and b) we don't intentionally target civillians?
A) I'm not entirely sure. We generally aren't desperate enough to 'waste' our soldiers in suicide missions or attacks, but if we were in desperate circumstances, I'm sure we would do so rather than embrace defeat. As for not targetting civilians, I will grant you that we haven't done it lately. However, it is within the living memory of this nation that we firebombed civilian population centers in Germany and Japan. This carpet firebombing of cities did not target military bases or installations, but rather sought to break the enemy's will to fight and obliterate their infrastructure. One might convincingly argue that in the midst of the 'morally purest' war of the 20th century, the United States engaged in the wholesale slaughter of civilians as part of a terrorist campaign against our enemies. We were fortunate enough to be able to do this without blowing up our own troops.
The idea of civilians being safe in the midst of war is a fairly new and exotic concept in the history of warfare, and it is a concept that I believe would dissolve swiftly if we ever again faced a war where we did not completely outclass our enemies in every measurable way.
None of this makes the targeting of civilians palatable to me, nor am I suggesting that we give three cheers for terrorist bombers. But if we bother to take five minutes to imagine ourselves in our enemy's shoes, we might come to understand why they feel compelled to use these tactics. They are far less evil than we imagine, and far more desperate than we've considered.
May we never be in their place.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Quote:I think you’re thinking of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which was ratified in 1922 by the League of Nations, but it goes back further than that. The Holocaust, as awful as it was, was just the proverbial straw. Jews had been subject to discrimination an a scale largely unheard of in the last 1000 years. Zionism began in the 19th century in Russia as a response to centuries of abuse and widespread Pogroms that killed thousands of Jews and terrorized thousands more. The Holocaust pretty much proved what many Jews and Non-Jews alike had known for decades. Absent a Jewish nation, Jews will always be an underclass subject to discrimination and slander by anyone who needs a scapegoat to blame or something to hate.
Originally posted by SignyM:Quote:This goes back to 1918, it didn't start in 1948 or even 1935.
If you were part of a people without a homeland, a people that had barely survived a genocide that killed millions wouldn't you want somewhere
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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So the answer to Jewish persecution is to grab someone else's land and persecute them.
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Always look upstream.
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Quote:No, the answer was opening immigration, in particular, out of Russia and Poland and later Germany and France, to a non-Christian part of the British Empire. The eastern fifth of the Palestinian Mandate seemed like a logical place to start considering it had ancestral significance in the Jewish religion.
Originally posted by SignyM:
So the answer to Jewish persecution is to grab someone else's land and persecute them.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:So OOC, since the Brits were so generous with other people's land, why didn't they open up their own borders? They didn't they want to give up their own precious land, jobs, and cultural/ religious homogeneity perhaps, so they decided to shuffle the problem off on someone else? Someone who wasn't "worth" as much as the Brits or the Jews? With their relative generosity towards the Jews and disregard for Arab Palestinians it sure comes across that way.
No, the answer was opening immigration, in particular, out of Russia and Poland and later Germany and France, to a non-Christian part of the British Empire. The eastern fifth of the Palestinian Mandate seemed like a logical place to start considering it had ancestral significance in the Jewish religion.
So, the Palestine Mandate was a big cock-up which resulted in the lot of dispossessed and pissed-off natives. And all because the so-called Xtian nations didn't want to put up with Jews in their own borders, and it still goes on that way. (But come to think of it, persecuting natives is something American colonialists did to ensure their own "freedom from persecution", so I guess its a comforting and familiar story to us.)
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Always look upstream.
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You'll note the key word here - desperation.
Post WWII, the Jewish people were awful damned desperate, and sure, let's not blind ourselves, committed some awful deeds they felt necessary to secure the continued existance of their people.
It is that they CONTINUE to do so, that rooks me.
And as stated above, historically the middle eastern nations were as a rule LESS hostile to them than anyone else - but when a people whom you have historically sheltered, offered aid, comfort and hospitality starts slaughtering your people and taking your precious land, over there, that's an offense of a level I cannot effectively describe to most westerners, on top of which, both sides are rather legendary in their ability to hold a grudge.
And when the now equally desperate Palestinians resort to the same measures, for the same reasons, it's somehow less justified than the actions of the Irgun were ?
No, I do not think so.
Desperation drives folk, any folk, to do some downright awful things, and maybe if anyone involved had an ounce of sense, they'd try to avoid backin people into corners where they feel those measures are necessary.
Awful hard to grow food for your family if you ain't got no useable LAND to do it on, mere population pressure, combined with an ever-expanding border crushing them into the sea, is a substantive root cause of the problem.
It's like two starving men fighting over a loaf of bread and mostly tearing it to shreds, but that discounts the fact that we're there stuffing MREs into the back pocket of the one, and they're STILL wrestling for that damn loaf of bread on top of it.
How they behave, in the end, is up to them, MY problem is with us financing it, and everyone who knows that hating us as a direct result.
-Frem
It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it
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Quote:That’s not very accurate. Jews did immigrate to Britain, as they did to the US and other allied nations, but these countries are all part of a similiar culture, and I’m sure it was hard to avoid viewing it as just moving the problem from one country to another. I’m sure a lot of Jews immigrated to Germany to avoid the Pogroms in Russia, for instance - a lot of good that did. And the Palestinian Mandate was part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire - it had no government - and much of it was unoccupied waste lands. It was never the British intent to displace the native population in the Palestinian Mandate. That was stated even in the Balfour Declaration. The British limited Jewish immigration to only the Eastern fifth of the Palestinian Mandate and placed many restrictions on how and what land they could purchase or even where they could go.
Originally posted by SignyM:
So OOC, since the Brits were so generous with other people's land, why didn't they open up their own borders? They didn't they want to give up their own precious land, jobs, and cultural/ religious homogeneity perhaps, so they decided to shuffle the problem off on someone else? Someone who wasn't "worth" as much as the Brits or the Jews? With their relative generosity towards the Jews and disregard for Arab Palestinians it sure comes across that way.
So, the Palestine Mandate was a big cock-up which resulted in the lot of dispossessed and pissed-off natives. And all because the so-called Xtian nations didn't want to put up with Jews in their own borders, and it still goes on that way. (But come to think of it, persecuting natives is something American colonialists did to ensure their own "freedom from persecution", so I guess its a comforting and familiar story to us.)
The situation is not nearly as black and white as you insist on viewing it, but if the only way you can understand this situation is to hate one group of people or another, then hating the Jews is definitely the least accurate way to go, since they were just looking for some kind of security and nationality. But the British really aren’t the bad guys either.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerPage.jhtml
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