There’s something I don’t understand at all. With all of the bad stuff that happened to the jews in the second world war, why is Israel practically doing the same thing to the palestinians? Invading lands, destroying properties, army shooting innocent people as colateral damage? I thought that if one nation knew better than this it would be Israel. Instead, israelis are marching in the streets of Israel to protest against giving palestinians their land back. Anyway, I really don’t get it.
Edited:
After a comment from Bloomy and insults from Philo, I realize that this sentence is wrong:
why is Israel practically doing the same thing to the palestinians?
That’s not really what I think anyway. A better sentence would be:
why is there some similarities between what jews had to go through in the past and what palestinians are going through right now?
Yeah, I’m not sure why so many Israelis are so AGAINST pulling out of the disputed areas.
What I really don’t get is why the home countries of the “Palestinians” don’t alleviate their pain and suffering by letting them back in their own countries. Unless…they’re using those poor people as proxies to fight Israel.
That’s Azalin but yeah, we seem to agree! I’d be curious to hear the version of some native israelis, I wonder what they’re being taught and if they’re really aware of the palestinian status, or their own past.
Two reasons principally. First, a minority of Jews, the settlers and their supporters, believe in ‘Greater Isreal.’ This involves expanding until Israel reoccupies all of the areas that at one time or another were part of Isreal and Judea which is considerably more land than Israel currently occupies. Governments in Israel seem inevitably to be coalitions so, even though the majority of Israelis probably regard the settlers as unhelpful and provocative pests, it is often necessary to pander to tehm to form a government.
The second reason is security. I guess an occupied territory acts as a buffer zone between Israel proper and fully autonomous Arab countries.
The ‘home’ country is mainly Israel iself. Israel is the old Palestine with the Palestinians largely displaced. So the home countries of which you speak were simply hosts to Palestinian refugee camps. Very few countries want permanent refugee camps. Another complication is that some areas of the old Palestine—eg, the West Bank—were incorporated into modern Jordan. But the residents of the West bank don’t regard themselves as Jordanian. They regard themselves as Palestinian.
OK, I don’t pretend that this clears up all the puzzles.
My guess is that they are very well aware of their own past and of the status of the Palestinians. I also think that the two aren’t comparable by any stretch of the imagination.
Religious belief gets mixed up in this, as well. A lot of Israelis believe the land truly belongs to them because it is their belief that their God gave it to them.
You have one group that claims to have some claim on the area going back 3000 years or so. You have another group with the same claim going back 2000 years or so. You also have another 2000 year old group that has interest in the area partaining to holy places in their religion.
Then you have different factions of each of the above groups, some of which tend to be violent, some of which refuse to acknowledge the various differences in their own groups, much less the entirely different other groups.
And somehow or another - everyone is supposed to live peacefully side by side.
I have no idea HOW anyone decides who has the “right” to the area. I do feel that no matter what, there will be a group that doesn’t agree with any of the conclusions and will fight against it - either diplomatically or violently or both.
Azalin,
If you really want to understand the situation you are going to have to do a bit of reading. These issues have been decades, if not centuries, in the making. A paragraph on C&F will not clarify them. If you enjoy historical fiction I suggest you read James Michener’s book The Source. It’s a nice introduction to the amazing complexities of the lands we call Israel and/or Palestine today.
This is correct of course. For a (well, one) Jewish perspective on the situation, see Bernard Lewis’ Semites and Anti-Semites. For a Palestinian perspective, see Edward Said’s The Politics of Dispossession.
The only way I can understand it, is the observation that abused children often grow up to be abusers. It seems that a similar psychology could be at work here. Part of the problem seems to be de-humanizing the other party, which has always been a very effective way of allowing people to do nasty things to someone else, either as individuals or as a group.
When I’m feeling cynical, I explain it as follows:
After the Holocaust, knowing that their own countries and cultures had their own strong anti-Semitic currents, and feeling guilty as a result, the victorious European countries, who still had political control over much of the Near East, decided, “We’ll give the Jews what the Zionists have been calling for. That’ll make us feel better, and all we have to do is to throw out a bunch of Arabs that no one cares about anyhow.”
The Palestinians were very much in the position of the Native Americans from 1492 on. A bunch of Europeans (which is what the Zionists were, for the most part) sporting high-tech weapons, sophisticated military tactics, and sense of manifest destiny (combined with the trauma of near extermination for a little extra boost) came in and took their land, rarely seeing the original inhabitants as human beings with rights of their own.
It should come as no surprise that people don’t always apply the lessons of their own mistreatment to others. In the US we’ve seen anti-Semitic Blacks, anti-Black Japanese-Americans, and so on. We’ve seen people who came to America to escape religious persecution attempt to persecute those of other faiths.
I’m afraid that it will take something really horrible to change things in the Near East, because self-righteousness is very hard to give up, and it exists on both sides. There are all sorts of rational approaches that could provide a solution, but people are not nearly as rational as they think they are.
Interesting connection. If the argument is about who owns the land, and there’s a clear connection to US history, maybe we should be asking the question, “Does the United States own the United States?” They conquered it, colonized it, and held it. Besides the fringe element that says you can’t own anything in this world, would anyone seriously suggest that Americans do not own the United States?
That’s the real question here, not who lived there FIRST, but what does it take to establish ownership. Define ownership and you’ll solve this problem.
I wish they’d just fight and be done with it. It’s like two kids in the school cafeteria who are pushing each other around. They won’t actually FIGHT, but they’ll scream and yell and disrupt everyone’s lunch. If they would just fight already, it would be over very quickly and everything would calm down. Hmm…maybe it’s in everyone’s best interests to keep the shoving match going..?
What it takes to establish ownership, based on the US model, is to wipe out as many of the current inhabitants as possible, restrict the remainder to some undesirable area, and just move in.
So, you’re right. A little genocide on either side might tidy things up a bit.
Unfortunately, wiping out the Palestinians probably wouldn’t go down that well with a lot of Arabs (the same ones, of course, who don’t care enough about them to accept them as citizens in their own countries). Even Muslims in general might take offense–or at least their national leaders might take the opportunity to distract attention from their own shorcomings. This is a problem that Europeans didn’t have with the Native Americans. They didn’t have a bunch of closely related people sitting around the perimeter threatening the colonists.
I suppose the destruction of Israel would have fewer international side effects–except for its effect on those Christians who are depending on the restoration of Israel to bring us up to the End Time. Lots of non-Israeli Jews might take it badly, though.
But, since neither side seems to have a controlling majority that sincerely desires peace, I figure there’s a good chance that we’re going to see something close to genocide again at some point. If both sides get wiped out, maybe the Northern Irish Protestants, the Tutsi, and the Tamil of Sri Lanka could be moved into the area. Or, perhaps some Native Americans–those who got stuck with reservations that don’t have good oil and mineral resources, and that aren’t in good areas for casinos–would like to have it in exchange for what their ancestors lost?
One way to global peace would be to destroy all but one small, highly-cohesive group of people, and let them spread out to repopulate the world. On second thought, though, that’s what happened with Noah’s family after the Flood, and look how that’s turned out.
I believe it has something to do with the fact that Israel as a government is the only democracy in the Middle East.
“Democracy” is Israel is like the “democracy” in apartheidt South Africa–a privilege limited to a small group determined by race.
This may have been acceptable in the age of classical Athens, but it is not a true democracy today.
Israel's conception as a jewish state has placed it fundamentally counter to democratic principles since inception, given that the population was and remains non-homogenous.
Gee, back in 1948, the Palestinians could have had their half of the land now called Israel, but turned it down. In almost 57 years their great contribution seems to be suicide bombing. They don’t really want that though; they want the destruction of Israel - read their charter; I don’t believe it’s ever changed.
What a moronic pathetic over simplfied comparison - Nazi Germany and Israel. Yeah Az, keep up the deep thinking amid memory loss; I love it.
I’d be curious to hear the version of some native israelis, I wonder what they’re being taught and if they’re really aware of the palestinian status, or their own past.