Israel, Palestine and the Arab/Israel Conflict

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What do Palestinians want?

I have been following the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the first war in either 1947 or 1948.

I hope this thread does not deteriorate into an argument about who is right, who is wrong, who is evil, et cetera. There are already many such Threads that have exhausted all the reasonable & unreasonable arguments on this issue.

I would be interested in knowing what pro-Palestinians want as a solution. For example: A list including one or more of the following. Of course, there are other options and details which might be mentioned (EG: In a partitioned Palestine, who controls what territory; What to do with Jewish settlements in the West Bank).
  • Annihilation of the Jews.
  • Deportation of all Jews to Europe, the US, Australia, where ever.
  • A Palestinian controlled state under Sharia (correct spelling?) laws with Jewish residents.
  • A Palestinian controlled state with Jews living there, but with no voting rights.
  • A Palestinian controlled state with Jews & Palestinians having equal rights.
  • A partitioned Palestine.
  • Return of all property to those Palestinians who left during the 1947-1948 war.
  • No return of property, but compensation for it.
I am hoping for simple lists without any attempt to justify any of the items.

BTW: I was in the Tel Aviv area in 1960-1961 due to a contract with an American computer company. I was friendly with an Arab business man who became owner of a property abandoned by a Palestinian who left during the 1947-1948 conflict. If right of return is mentioned, how would this property be treated? This Palestinian stayed during the 1947-1948 conflict.
 
I hope this thread does not deteriorate into an argument about who is right, who is wrong, who is evil, et cetera.

Likewise.

There are already many such Threads that have exhausted all the reasonable & unreasonable arguments on this issue.

I don't think that we've nearly exhausted all reasonable arguments at all. I welcome a fresh start here with your question What do Palestinians Want? (I am responsible for merging your new thread here) because it is obviously a key question.

I would be interested in knowing what pro-Palestinians want as a solution.

I consider myself a pro-Palestinian, and an often lonely proponent of the One-State formula: This means Israel must come to fully respect human rights in word and deed; restitute stolen property; allow unfettered return of those in the Palestinian diaspora that will wish to return; establish a secular and democratic government that does not descriminate on the basis of ethnicity. Basically, One State means Arabs of Jewish, Muslim, Christian, other faiths, no faiths immigrants, residents for generations, Levantines and others all committed constitutionally to the establishment of a free and open society for all in Israel.

The clock cannot be turned back on history, but I believe that Israel can become a country that moves forward in a process of integration and coexistence both internally and with her neighbors- something similar to US Reconstruction and our Civil Rights reforms all rolled into one.
 
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Clearly, a large majority of Palestinians will support any change for the better- that is, toward autonomy and the benefits of living in a functional society. But there will be no equal footing for Palestinians until the Israeli government is either reformed or abolished. Whether or not Palestinians have a state, the unwavering Zionist agenda is to strictly limit Palestinian ascendency.

For as long as the imbalance of inheritance, access, representation, and power persists between Jews and non-Jews, there will be a state of conflict. Animosity would remain, and I suspect even intensify between a true Palestinian state along 1967 lines and an apartheid Israel-for-Jews. Every advancement of basic characteristics of nationhood- the Palestinian economy, politics, and military would always be considered a much-too-proximate existential threat to Zionists, who would persist in exploiting every opportunity to undermine the success of a Palestinian state, just as they have always done ever since the establishment of apartheid Israel.

Ethnicities do not require, and cannot each command fortress enclaves or homelands in our modern world. The future of humanity is irreversibly multiethnic and multicultural. So it ultimately must and shall be in Jerusalem/al-Quds and Israel/Palestine. This is not a futuristic or radical concept- The Levant has always been multicultural while the names on the maps have changed. Neither Israel's privileged nor her oppressed are living with the sense of security that is the product of a viable state. Dividing along ethnic lines is disastrously obsolete, unworkable, untenable and conflict-perpetuating, especially where so many cultural treasures of various religions and ethnicities overlap. At the real center of the impasse, Zionism must be discredited and abolished, along with any other echos of Lebensraum from or for any ethnicity. The cycle of ethnic warfare, theft, and butchery belongs in our primitive past, and not in the city and land that so many call Holy.
 
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Is Israel trying to undermine the success of Egypt? If not, then the issue isn't having a state next door that is prosperous.
 
Egypt does not have Jerusalem as its capital, and does not have its army positioned along the '67 skirmish-lines. But if somehow Egypt's borders moved into such intimate proximity, we should expect that the present Israeli mentality would be more than a little bit nervous, antagonistic, and belligerent. Ethnic cleansing and Lebensraum are not defensible in narrow slices.
 
I hope this thread does not deteriorate into an argument about who is right, who is wrong, who is evil, et cetera.
Accusations of ethnic cleansing definitely fall under the category of declaring who is evil and who is not.
 
Ethnic cleansing is a crime- it is not a person, and it is not a nation. Israelis are not unanimous in support of it. Nations evolve. The observation that ethnic cleansing is wrong is not equivalent to making a claim that all Israelis, Germans, Serbians, USis, etc are evil.
 
I'm a pro-Palestinian and also a one stater. I come from a country of myriad differences in religion, "race". caste, colour, ethnicity and languages. What we all have is one vote and equal opportunity. Its the best social system there is, even with its capacity for corruption. For evey Phoolan Devi there is a Dhirubhai Ambani.

To my mind, anyone who puts caste/race/religion before human rights needs to live in a country where his caste/race/religion are not accorded equal rights before promoting it as a social system. Or justify why they do not promote such a system in their own countries.

The proposals put forward by the Arab League in 1948, to my mind, are still the best.

The Governments of the Arab States emphasize, on this occasion, what they have already declared before the London Conference and the United Nations, that the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, (and whereby) minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognized in democratic constitutional countries and (whereby) the holy places will be preserved and the rights of access thereto guaranteed.

http://www.mideastweb.org/arableague1948.htm
 
Do you have any statistics on how many Israelis and Palestinians support a one-state solution?

This one shows that a two-state solution is far more popular among Palestinians.
 
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Somehow, it got to be that suddenly I can be labelled a "racist" because I used the term "jungle bunny" to try to wake people up. You creeps are so hopelessly retarded these days that you don't know what real racism is.

Real racism is refusing to give a guy a ride somewhere because he is a black guy. I'm so dense and unobservant, it takes me fifteen minutes to notice if someone I have in the car is a black guy if he has an oversized t-shirt with images of Snoop Dogg on it and baseball cap on his head turned off to the side like he was too stoned to figure out how to put it on right. To me, that is superficial. I don't believe in judging people based on their appearances. I am the least racist person that you will ever meet, so I will have my sphincter ripped out through a hole in my trachea before I will take you blithering fools trying to label ME a "racist." Take your labels, and choke on them until you froth at the mouth and die. "Racist" is just another useless label, and calling someone a "racist" isn't even remotely better than trying to label a black person over the color of his epidermis or the style of his clothing, you useless, pathetic waste of skin.

I know what is going on here. You don't like my political views, and you don't like hearing what I have to say. So you have to find some way to smear my name and make me out to be some kind of ogre whom you somehow have a right to abuse, so you can just dismiss anything I have to say and not have to feel guilty about treating me like dirt. That's why you create labels for people, so you can excuse yourself for not treating them like human beings or being the least bit fair. Do you even realize how dishonest that is, or are your priorities really that fail? Put my name on ignore or something if you don't like hearing me trying my best to give a fair assessment of the affairs of the Middle East, which is more than anyone else around here is bent on doing. Putting some kind of vicious label on me, though, makes you look like a miserable, dishonest piece of worthless, self-righteous crap that crawled out a garbage can and grew up thinking itself to be human.

I am a minority here in that I at least try to investigate my opinions, beyond some hopeless propaganda, before spouting my views about it. Oh, and I'm not like those pretentious idiots who are trying to play the middle or something. They are arrogant fools who think they are the voices of stoical wisdom, even though they are just as lost and screwed-up as anyone else who doesn't bother to do a minute's research before spouting on about something. The last time I met one of those guys on here, he turned out to be hopelessly ignorant. He lacked the slightest inclination to do five minutes of research. He was just an arrogant cock.

You know, I am uniformly against any party involved who is a religious extremist BECAUSE THEY'RE CRAZY!!!! What am I supposed to think of a person who kneels there and talks to thin air, and he thinks that the invisible person he is talking to orders him to do things? Usually, when people do that, we lock them up to protect other people! Somehow, if you call being a lunatic a "religion," for some reason then we are still obligated to treat you like you are an intelligent person. Call it whatever you want to, but religion is a mental illness!!! I don't trust religious people not to eviscerate my internal organs when I am not looking! Do you understand me?? It's hard to make any mistake about what my views on this are. It's not like I'm being unclear. As far as I'm concerned, if this point of view is applicable anywhere, it's in the Middle East, where religious fundamentalists are building bomb belts and blowing themselves up on school buses. When religion makes people blow themselves into a million globs of idiot spray, it is a mental illness, even if you can't say it's a mental illness anywhere else.

If religion even enters the discussion, then, to start with, I think that the hardcore Zionists in Israel are just continuing the BS that was started in Deuteronomy. If you go by the events that happened in the Bible, the Jews deserve to be blown off the face of the Earth and for all of their children's rotting corpses to be used to feed the rats under Jerusalem, you fools. Jerusalem was FOUNDED on ethnic cleansing. We should have the whole city bulldozed and replaced by a bunch of memorials for every innocent human being who has been murdered over it, whether they were Hebrew or any other freaking ethnicity.

Now, what are you going to say? "Well, now you sound just like Ahmadinejad. You must be building a nuclear bomb! OMG!" It just proves how much people have lost touch with the fact that actions and the language that comes out of a person's face are two different things. Ahmadinejad can run his XXL mouth about Israel until he turns blue in the face, but you don't have evidence that he is building a bomb because he stood up in front of a crowd of people who hate Israel and Jewish people who live in Israel and talked crap about them. When did your mind turn into complete mush? Believe it or not, but they have elections in Iran. If the people in Iran who were not complete idiots didn't say things to appeal to base voters who are complete idiots, to try to win their votes, we just might have a problem. Ahmadinejad is not a threat. He is just an arrogant fool. He could be something a thousand times worse because at least he's somewhat educated. A lot of his constituents don't even know how to read.

I don't go by the events in the Bible, though. Modern Israel has a flourishing, hi-tech economy. If you people are talking about replacing that with a bunch of miserable, starving religious zealots, scratching their arses with one hand and holding a copy of the Quran in the other, consider yourself marked for destruction. Your blood will be used to feed the maggots that colonize the garbage cans that line the streets of Bethlehem, you failures. At least you can use a maggot's secretions as a natural antiseptic. A human being who thinks that a bunch of Palestinian rednecks are going to make a better government than the Jews have created in Israel is only good for maggot fertilizer. The heebs who live in Irael have no more obligation to make West Bank a part of their country than the US has to take in Mexico, and we actually did steal a bunch of their land! We robbed them BLIND.

But then we took a lot of that land and gave it back to the Indians. The government of Mexico treats their Indian population like complete dirt. The brown-colored people who come across the border into the US are running TOWARD a bunch of people who are holding up signs that say, "Go back to Mexico," in three different languages, because the people holding up the signs look relatively friendly. I would take a cross burning in my front yard over a bullet in my head any day. By the same token, I would bet that the Israelis probably give the non-Jews who live in Israel a better quality of life than they would ever have in West Bank. Israel stays. When Fatah has actually created a real system of government, which it is THEIR responsibility to do, I might change my mind. They seem fairly inclined to work on doing that, but you punks here seem to be a bunch of Hamas partisans. Hamas are a bunch of violent criminals who ought to be rounded up, not a government.

Suddenly, it's okay to be a complete antisemite, though. The only people I see standing up for the Jews are complete retards who think that Jewish people are some kind of supreme race that is predestined to form a world government. AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! It's more freaking religion, and I find it so revolting I am remembering that time that I was on my father's john boat in the middle of the ocean after eating a bunch of twinkies! I can't begin to tell you how much I want religion to just go away. Religion, go sit in a corner somewhere because religion is the ONE thing in this discussion that is most guaranteed to make things a thousand times worse. Read a newspaper or a magazine or something while the adults are discussing how not to screw the world up more than it already is!

I know the government of Israel isn't perfect, and I don't think they are always in the right. However, I see the people out there who want us all to swoon over the "plight of the Palestinians" trying to make them out to be complete ogres without even bothering to take into account people in Israel who want to make things better. Way to go, ingrates. Wake up, you idiots: Gaza is controlled by Hamas, okay? Hamas is a bunch of lunatics who are so retarded that they agree to a ceasefire, and they are still launching freaking rockets! I have seen people in Bladenboro, NC, who have a better sense of priorities, and half of them are either on probation or have outstanding warrents for their arrest in other states! Hamas is a bunch of uncoordinated, violent and dangerous criminal lunatics. Gaza deserves everything that happens to it as long as Hamas is running things there, kay?

I don't have anything against Fatah because they seem to be at least halfway inclined to run a REAL government. And yet somehow I am still a "racist" if I support Fatah instead of Hamas? You sound just like those Jewish people who think that I am an antisemite because I favor Kadima and think that the Likud party and Yisrael Beiteinu are a bunch of parasitic slimebuckets. Sorry, fool, but you don't have a right to label someone a racist if they don't agree with your crap pile politics. You may think you do, but this is because you are worthless bottom-feeders.

I don't see any discussion here between sensible, logical people. I see one giant disagreement between Hamas and Benjamin Netanyahu, both of which are among the worst things that ever happened in the region. I think that Benjamin Netanyahu ranks up there with Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush for being among the worst leaders that any country has ever had.

As far as I am concerned, the Likud party and Hamas should all be chained together and thrown into the deepest pit in the ocean. They deserve each other. They are blithering idiots.
 
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I'm a pro-Palestinian and also a one stater. I come from a country of myriad differences in religion, "race". caste, colour, ethnicity and languages. What we all have is one vote and equal opportunity. Its the best social system there is...

To my mind, anyone who puts caste/race/religion before human rights needs to live in a country where his caste/race/religion are not accorded equal rights before promoting it as a social system. Or justify why they do not promote such a system in their own countries.

The proposals put forward by the Arab League in 1948, to my mind, are still the best.

Then maybe you would support:
The Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which operates in Lebanon and Syria, works for the unification of most modern states of the Levant and beyond in a single state... The proposed Syrian country includes Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait; and southern Turkey, northern Egypt, and southwestern Iran.

Saadeh
rejected both language and religion as defining characteristics of a nation, and instead argued that nations develop through the common development of a people inhabiting a specific geographical region.​

SadheeSYRIA.jpg

Proposed unified national Syria.
 
I'm all for a borderless world actually. I've never seen the point of nationalism. It only empowers politicians and military adventures.
 
I'm all for a borderless world actually.
Whereas I have always thought that we should try to work toward that in a coordinated, cooperative manner. Look what the Europeans have been doing, and you get an idea of where I'm going. Real states are built and developed, not declared. They accumulate credibility by dint of being run responsibly and stably for a very long period of time. Centuries. But it can be done.

I've never seen the point of nationalism. It only empowers politicians and military adventures.
Nationalism was a response to imperialism. Would you like to go back to imperialism?

To tell you the truth, I think that you Muslims pushing for this "One State" ideal is just an imperialistic initiative to try to ram Sharia law down the throats of hapless Jews who might like living in a secular state.

That's what it's really all about. You're just like the Christians some hundred years ago who were trying to "civilize" cultures like India by forcefeeding them religion, taxes, education and aqueducts. There was never anything wrong with either the education or the aqueducts, but they were pretty much crushing the soul of someone else's culture, on purpose and without remorse.

Have you ever thought about how perhaps the Muslims could be guilty of the same crap? Seriously, you have forcefully taken over other people's cultures, and you thought it was all okay because you built some fountains and planted some gardens around them. Big, hairy whoop. It was just another form of imperialism.

Are you even the least bit concerned about what the government of Sudan has done in Darfur in the name of Islam?

What about the fact that you punks held Greece under your thumb for several centuries? That wasn't very nice. It doesn't stop being imperialism when your culture is doing it. And yeah, I know that India didn't have anything to do with it, but Islam and Christiandom have been a match for each other, over the centuries, for the imperialistic BS that made people think nationalism was necessary.
 
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Seriously, am I the only person here who thinks it is relevant that the Muslims seem to be as intent on ramming Islam down people's throats as the Christians are on forcing Christianity on others?

I think it's a relevant issue that the Jews are willing to run a secular government where people can practice whatever religion they please. The Muslims are not. Unlike the Jews, the Muslims believe that they have a god-given right to force their religion down other people's throats, whether they like it or not, in the name of Allah.

Do you think that's one of the reasons that the Jews are still clinging to revisionist Zionism? It's obviously not something for their culture to be proud of, but the Muslims are not going to change. No matter what happens, they will still be living under the mentality that it's okay to force people into their religion. They are in the middle of a dark age right now.

Someday, maybe people like Abbas will be able to bring them into the 21st Century. Maybe Mousavi's Green movement will succeed in moving Iran toward a brighter future. That's not the world we're living in right now.

As it is, this is about the Jewish people's right to live indepedent and free of the oppressive, iron rule of Islamic culture. They have a right to choose a different way of life. Yeah, I disagree with the Israeli right-wing's handling of the situation in Gaza. I think it's oppressive and counter-productive. They are creating more problems for their own people than they are solving. But I stand with Israel's right to have a culture that is unique in the region. They are not obligated to take orders from an Islamist regime.

Revisionist Zionism is about independence. Expansionism is dead, and so may it remain.
 
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Seriously, am I the only person here who thinks it is relevant that the Muslims seem to be as intent on ramming Islam down people's throats as the Christians are on forcing Christianity on others?

I think it's a relevant issue that the Jews are willing to run a secular government where people can practice whatever religion they please. The Muslims are not. Unlike the Jews, the Muslims believe that they have a god-given right to force their religion down other people's throats, whether they like it or not, in the name of Allah.

Do you think that's one of the reasons that the Jews are still clinging to revisionist Zionism? It's obviously not something for their culture to be proud of, but the Muslims are not going to change. No matter what happens, they will still be living under the mentality that it's okay to force people into their religion. They are in the middle of a dark age right now.

Someday, maybe people like Abbas will be able to bring them into the 21st Century. Maybe Mousavi's Green movement will succeed in moving Iran toward a brighter future. That's not the world we're living in right now.

As it is, this is about the Jewish people's right to live indepedent and free of the oppressive, iron rule of Islamic culture. They have a right to choose a different way of life. Yeah, I disagree with the Israeli right-wing's handling of the situation in Gaza. I think it's oppressive and counter-productive. They are creating more problems for their own people than they are solving. But I stand with Israel's right to have a culture that is unique in the region. They are not obligated to take orders from an Islamist regime.

Revisionist Zionism is about independence. Expansionism is dead, and so may it remain.

Israeli expansionism isn't dead just dormant. So the jewish people have the right to live free of Islam on land they stole from islam people? no they don't. they have the right to live free lives as everyone does but they do not have the right to keep that which was taken through force and denied to its rightful owners.
 
Israeli expansionism isn't dead just dormant. So the jewish people have the right to live free of Islam on land they stole from islam people? no they don't. they have the right to live free lives as everyone does but they do not have the right to keep that which was taken through force and denied to its rightful owners.
Which land in particular? There are individual parcels of land involved here that are being hotly debated.

For example, there is an ongoing dispute over what the real status of Shebaa Farms is. Israel seems to consider Shebaa Farms to belong to Syria. Syria has at times agreed with this, at times not. Hezbollah have been mad as hornets over Israel's occupation of the territory, and it's hard to really understand what is really going on there from over here.

Or are you referring to East Jerusalem? In that case, if I understand correctly, I think that the Israeli government as unwisely allowed certain building projects. I'm not really sure in any given case about who has rightful ownership over what in those particular cases, and it strikes me as a confusing muddle where two different cultures are attempting to cohabitate in the same city at once without agreeing to live under the same government.

I know what you are getting at, here, but the easiest way to say this is that Israel is not just one person. There are various parties involved, and those are divided into factions. The individuals involved are not just unique unto themselves, but they evolve and change over time. They act differently under different circumstances. Their ideals may be ONE way in a political debate between Livni and Netanyahu, ANOTHER way when Netanyahu is at the peace table with Abbas. The individual is a puzzle even unto himself.

I see the situation as complex, and I don't see there being a simple, one-sentence answer to the whole mess. So...do specify a particular dispute, please.
 
Let me clarify, here, just in hopes of preventing a misunderstanding that could lead us into more unnecessary nastiness. I agree with you pretty unequivocally on it being improper and unfair for Israel to take over land that it doesn't really have a clear-cut claim to. Fine.

However, there are some hardliners on the Palestinian side that won't recognize any land claim at all by the Israeli government. If you just say, "Israel, move off of any land that the Palestians are claiming," the Israelies will say, "Uhh, some of us can't swim very well, dude." Let's take some random part of Tel Aviv that some Palestinian family has some highly tenuous, historical claim to from like 1567 but never really did anything to establish their ownership over it, never hired a cartographer/surveyor to figure out how far it extended...

Again, it is messy. It's one of the many problems with a culture that doesn't have any real, overarching system of law. The only means they have of settling who has rightful ownership over what is to march phalanxes of soldiers at each other until one of them says, "Okay, you jerk, if you really feel that strongly about it, then take it, and a pox and locusts on you." The Ancient Greeks even developed a civilized, systematic means of going about this. That's why we HAD the concept of honorable warfare.

The only fair means of going about it is to break it down into all of its pieces, and try to confer as great an advantage as possible to those who choose to approach their claims, whatever they may be, peaceably and lawfully.
 
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