What really happened between Israel and Palestine?

Question

How did the US and other countries get involved?

Answer 1

By Lawrence Auster, There is a myth hanging over all discussion of the Palestinian problem: the myth that this land was "Arab" land taken from its native inhabitants by invading Jews. Whatever may be the correct solution to the problems of the Middle East, let's get a few things straight: 1. As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn't take Palestine from the Arabs; they took it from the British, who exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don't want it back.2. If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don't want it back.3. If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mamluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mamluks don't even exist any more, so they can't want it back. So, going back 800 years, there's no particularly clear chain of title that makes Israel's title to the land inferior to that of any of the previous owners. Who were, continuing backward:-- The Mamluks, already mentioned, who in 1250 took Palestine over from:-- The Ayyubi dynasty, the descendants of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim leader who in 1187 took Jerusalem and most of Palestine from:-- The European Christian Crusaders, who in 1099 conquered Palestine from:-- The Seljuk Turks, who ruled Palestine in the name of:-- The Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, which in 750 took over the sovereignty of the entire Near East from:-- The Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which in 661 inherited control of the Islamic lands from:-- The Arabs of Arabia, who in the first flush of Islamic expansion conquered Palestine in 638 from:-- The Byzantines, who (nice people—perhaps it should go to them?) didn't conquer the Levant, but, upon the division of the Roman Empire in 395, inherited Palestine from:-- The Romans, who in 63 B.C. took it over from:-- The last Jewish kingdom, which during the Maccabean rebellion from 168 to 140 B.C. won control of the land from:-- The Hellenistic Greeks, who under Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. conquered the Near East from:-- The Persian empire, which under Cyrus the Great in 639 B.C. freed Jerusalem and Judah from:-- The Babylonian empire, which under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C. took Jerusalem and Judah from:-- The Jews, meaning the people of the Kingdom of Judah, who, in their earlier incarnation as the Israelites, seized the land in the 12th and 13th centuries B.C. from:-- The Canaanites, who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before they were dispossessed by the Israelites.
As the foregoing suggests, any Arab claim to sovereignty based on inherited historical control will not stand up. Arabs are not native to Palestine, but are native to Arabia, which is called Arab-ia for the breathtakingly simple reason that it is the historic home of the Arabs. The territories comprising all other "Arab" states outside the Arabian peninsula—including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria, as well as the entity now formally under the Palestinian Authority—were originally non-Arab nations that were conquered by the Muslim Arabs when they spread out from the Arabian peninsula in the first great wave of jihad in the 7th century, defeating, mass-murdering, enslaving, dispossessing, converting, or reducing to the lowly status of dhimmitude millions of Christians and Jews and destroying their ancient and flourishing civilizations. Prior to being Christian, of course, these lands had even more ancient histories. Pharaonic Egypt, for example, was not an Arab country through its 3,000 year history. The recent assertion by the Palestinian Arabs that they are descended from the ancient Canaanites whom the ancient Hebrews displaced is absurd in light of the archeological evidence.

There is no record of the Canaanites surviving their destruction in ancient times. History records literally hundreds of ancient peoples that no longer exist. The Arab claim to be descended from Canaanites is an invention that came after the 1964 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the same crew who today deny that there was ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

Prior to 1964 there was no "Palestinian" people and no "Palestinian" claim to Palestine; the Arab nations who sought to overrun and destroy Israel in 1948 planned to divide up the territory amongst themselves. Let us also remember that prior to the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, the name "Palestinian" referred to the Jews of Palestine.

In any case, today's "Palestine," meaning the West Bank and Gaza, is, like most of the world, inhabited by people who are not descendants of the first human society to inhabit that territory. This is true not only of recently settled countries like the United States and Argentina, where European settlers took the land from the indigenous inhabitants several hundred years ago, but also of ancient nations like Japan, whose current Mongoloid inhabitants displaced a primitive people, the Ainu, eons ago. Major "native" tribes of South Africa, like the Zulu, are actually invaders from the north who arrived in the 17th century. India's caste system reflects waves of fair- skinned Aryan invaders who arrived in that country in the second millennium B.C. One could go on and on.

The only nations that have perfect continuity between their earliest known human inhabitants and their populations of the present day are Iceland, parts of China, and a few Pacific islands. The Chinese case is complicated by the fact that the great antiquity of Chinese civilization has largely erased the traces of whatever societies preceded it, making it difficult to reconstruct to what extent the expanding proto-Chinese displaced (or absorbed) the prehistoric peoples of that region. History is very sketchy in regard to the genealogies of ancient peoples. The upshot is that "aboriginalism"—the proposition that the closest descendants of the original inhabitants of a territory are the rightful owners—is not tenable in the real world. It is not clear that it would be a desirable idea even if it were tenable. Would human civilization really be better off if there had been no China, no Japan, no Greece, no Rome, no France, no England, no Ireland, no United States?

Back to the Arabs: I have no problem recognizing the legitimacy of the Arabs' tenure in Palestine when they had it, from 638 to 1099, a period of 461 years out of a history lasting 5,000 years. They took Palestine by military conquest, and they lost it by conquest, to the Christian Crusaders in 1099. Of course, military occupation by itself does not determine which party rightly has sovereignty in a given territory. Can it not be said that the Arabs have sovereign rights, if not to all of Israel, then at least to the West Bank, by virtue of their majority residency in that region from the early Middle Ages to the present?

To answer that question, let's look again at the historical record. Prior to 1947, as we've discussed, Palestine was administered by the British under the Palestine Mandate, the ultimate purpose of which, according to the Balfour Declaration, was the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. In 1924 the British divided the Palestine Mandate into an Arabs-only territory east of the Jordan, which became the Kingdom of Trans-Jordan, and a greatly reduced Palestine Mandate territory west of the Jordan, which was inhabited by both Arabs and Jews.

Given the fact that the Jews and Arabs were unable to coexist in one state, there had to be two states. At the same time, there were no natural borders separating the two peoples, in the way that, for example, the Brenner Pass has historically marked the division between Latin and Germanic Europe. Since the Jewish population was concentrated near the coast, the Jewish state had to start at the coast and go some distance inland. Exactly where it should have stopped, and where the Arab state should have begun, was a practical question that could have been settled in any number of peaceful ways, almost all of which the Jews would have accepted.

The Jews' willingness to compromise on territory was demonstrated not only by their acquiescence in the UN's 1947 partition plan, which gave them a state with squiggly, indefensible borders, but even by their earlier acceptance of the 1937 Peel Commission partition plan, which gave them nothing more than a part of the Galilee and a tiny strip along the coast. Yet the Arab nations, refusing to accept any Jewish sovereignty in Palestine even if it was the size of a postage stamp, unanimously rejected the 1937 Peel plan, and nine years later they violently rejected the UN's partition plan as well. When the Arabs resorted to arms in order to wipe out the Jews and destroy the Jewish state, they accepted the verdict of arms. They lost that verdict in 1948, and they lost it again in 1967, when Jordan, which had annexed the West Bank in 1948 (without any objections from Palestinian Arabs that their sovereign nationhood was being violated), attacked Israel from the West Bank during the Six Day War despite Israel's urgent pleas that it stay out of the conflict. Israel in self-defense then captured the West Bank. The Arabs thus have no grounds to complain either about Israel's existence (achieved in '48) or about its expanded sovereignty from the river to the sea (achieved in '67).

The Arabs have roiled the world for decades with their furious protest that their land has been "stolen" from them. One might take seriously such a statement if it came from a pacifist people such as the Tibetans, who had quietly inhabited their land for ages before it was seized by the Communist Chinese in 1950. The claim is laughable coming from the Arabs, who in the early Middle Ages conquered and reduced to slavery and penury ancient peoples and civilizations stretching from the borders of Persia to the Atlantic; who in 1947 rejected an Arab state in Palestine alongside a Jewish state and sought to obliterate the nascent Jewish state; who never called for a distinct Palestinian Arab state until the creation of the terrorist PLO in 1964—sixteen years after the founding of the state of Israel; and who to this moment continue to seek Israel's destruction, an object that would be enormously advanced by the creation of the Arab state they demand. The Arab claim to sovereign rights west of the Jordan is only humored today because of a fatal combination of world need for Arab oil, leftist Political Correctness that has cast the Israelis as "oppressors," and, of course, good old Jew-hatred.

Lawrence Auster is the author of Erasing America: The Politics of the Borderless Nation.
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Answer 2

First, it's important to note that there has never been a country of "Palestine" and the territory called that originally included Jordan, Israel, the "Palestinian territories" and parts of Egypt.

Arabs refused the creation of Palestine because they thought genociding infidels would be more fun. It really boils down to that..

Arabs have started 3 wars against Israel, each time bragging how they were going to slaughter all the Jews in Israel. And each time they were defeated.

The US really didn't support Israel until the 1960s when Soviet aid really began fueling Arab aggression. And it's continued because the US and Israel have many mutual enemies.

Answer 3

The US and UK set up Isreal in 1948.they were Jewish survivors from the German killing machine. It seems some of them were so pissd at the Nazis they swore it would never happen again so they formed thier own hard line government. There are zionists and there are Jews. The Jews live by the torah, the zionists do not. In 1968 Israel attacked Palestine and took control of a lot of land. The Palestinians have been fighting to get that land back ever since. The US is almost owned by the zionist bankers, finance houses, corporate media, CFR and other sectors. Israel basically has the US by the short and curlies, they have the strongest lobby groups in the USA.

Answer 4

there was no real problems between the Jew's and the Muslims as they wanted to live and let live , until after WW11 when the U,S, and Britain were conned into giving the so called Jew's from Russia who were actually never Jewish what they called a home land, so they gave Israel to the so called Jew's 10 years later the Zionist started their death squads and Mencken Begin was the leader of the death squads they were killing the Palestinians and stealing their homes land and businesses and the Arabs got organized and started fighting back, then the U,S parachuted marines into Lebanon to protect the Jew's it was soon clear to me the Jew's were not the ones to be protected, they killed the Arabs like they were rats,women children all, I couldn't understand why we were not fighting against the Jew;s as we should have been in any other place with such atrocities being committed, I didn't know then that the Jew;s owned America, then the U,S, arming Israel with the best and most sophisticated weapons on earth to kill the Arabs who only had rocks and a few old WW1 single shot rifles, rocks or
sticks. it has been fighting ever since, and the whole world is against us because of the unfairness of this scheme, and will continue until every Arab in Palestine is dead, how will America explain this to our grand children?

how_ would_ I_ know, you are either Zionist or loco , please read your true history and go to web sites not owned by the Zionist nor the new's media who is also owned by the Zionist,

Answer 5

First thing to understand is that Palestine is currently divided among the states of Jordan, Israel, parts of Lebanon and Syria, and the disputed territories (Judea/Samaria, Gaza).

Get familiar with the map of the area, and take it from there. Good luck.

Answer 6

Religion.

Answer 7

Which time?

Answer 8

We voted it into existence, established it, supported it.

Answer 9

Right before Israel was founded, over 50% of the land was privately owned by Palestinians. Between 6% and and 7% was legally owned by Zionist Jews whose goal was the creation of Israel. The rest was communally owned or public lands, including land communally owned by Palestinians and Muslim and Christian religious institutions.

The total population of Mandate Palestine immediately before 1948 was about 2/3 Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and about 1/3 Zionist Jews. In fact, Palestinians formed the majority within the armistice boundary that became known as the "green line" borders of Israel.

Zionism was founded in the 1890s by Theodore Herzl, an Austrian Jew. Britain was involved in this since the break-up of the Ottoman empire - Zionist Jews who were members of the British elite lobbied for the support for the project of creating a "national home for Jews" in Palestine, and got that support along with military protection.

The Palestinians were virtually all against the idea of having their homeland taken over, but they didn't have political or economic connections like the Zionists and so didn't have any say in British policy. In 1930 a delegation of Palestinians met with British colonial secretary Lord Passfield and demanded that the mandate set up a parliament "elected by the people in proportion to their numbers, irrespective of race or creed". Passfield turned down the request because it conflicted with the terms of the British Mandate (to set up a Jewish national home). Jews were the minority, so democracy and equal rights for all was out of the question!

In 1947, the British handed the issue of what to do about the conflicting claims to Palestine over to the U.N., which formed a committee to study the issue, composed entirely of Europeans. They recommended a partition which gave over half the land area to the Jews, the minority people. There were demonstrations and some riots by Arabs over this in major cities, but for the most part, the Arab inhabitants of the villages prepared to go on with their lives.

While Zionists publically accepted the partition plan, starting in 1947 or 1948, their forces conducted a military campaign to eject the Palestinians, an idea which had been premeditated by some Zionists for years. Over half the military activity in the war that followed was attacks by Zionist forces outside the area allotted to the Jewish state, for example, the first major massacre at Deir Yassein (a month before the neighboring Arab states entered the fray). The term "ethnic cleansing" was not in use at the time, but the Zionists certainly refered to their operations in Arab villages and cities as "the cleaning up of the Arab settlement."

Techniques used by the Zionists to get the Arabs to leave such as massacres and threat of massacres (the massacre at Al-Dawayma makes interesting reading), might fall under the definition of genocide which includes killing members of a group with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Historical records released by the Israeli government in the 1980s, 30 years after the fact, make it clear that the ethnic cleansing was intentional.

The Israelis razed well over 400 villages to help keep the people from returning, and passed laws to confiscate the land, turning much if over to Zionist organizations for Jewish-only development and settlement, using some for public use such as parks, and a lot for military reserves.

Britain was involved in this since the break-up of the Ottoman empire - Zionist Jews who were members of the British elite lobbied for the support for the project of creating a "national home for Jews" in Palestine, and got that support along with military protection. The vast majority of inhabitants of Palestine objected, but didn't have such political or economic connections and so didn't have any say in British policy.

The U.S. got involved partly because of the cold war, Israel presented itself as a reliable ally and a western democracy with which we should have simpathy, opposing the nationalist Arab states, who were heavily courted by the USSR - although Israel wasn't adverse to spying on us and the information turned over to Israeli agents by Jonathan Pollack is said to been given to the USSR with severe consequences for our intelligence operations. The Zionists seem to be able to play to our racism against Arabs, presenting themselves as defenders of western civilization, a "plucky little nation" fighting off vast armies of scimiter-waving turban-wearing savages - a little twisting of the truth in light of the systematic destruction of Palestinian and Arab villages and the emptying of cities of their non-Jewish inhabitants in 1948 and 1967.

Of course Israel gets a lot of sympathy because of the European genocide against Jews in WWII, although Zionism was started well before Hitler was born.

Another major factor in our involvement is the very strong pro-Israel lobbies who are active in both major political parties (for example, Dennis Ross worked for AIPAC), also Christian Zionists who believe that the "ingathering" of Jews foreshadows the apocalypse (destruction of the world) and the second coming of Jesus Christ.