British Mandate Palestine included the area east of the Jordan River, which was 77% of the land. That area was made Judenrein in the 1920’s by the British to quell the angry Muslims who didn’t want the Jews to have sovereignty at all. Finally, Jordan became a country in 1946, just two years prior to Israel’s reestablishment. The two-state solution was resolved long ago with the creation of Jordan. Islamic supremacy is the reason any issue still exists. I have a paper I developed with the assistance of Dr. Steve Carol and David Meir-Levi to prepare for a debate I did – I’ll send you a copy.

I am interested in your sources. If you could please share them with me.

It was nice speaking with you today. I stumbled on your name as a guest speaker on another website and found your story here. Though I understand where you’re coming from and you’re probably being more of a realist in allowing the use of the term Palestinian, I have to agree with the other responses that the entire “plight” of the Palestinians has been manufactured, beginning with the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1963 by the KGB (they were big into creating liberation organizations back then – Bolivia was another one they handpicked members).

British Mandate Palestine included the area east of the Jordan River, which was 77% of the land. That area was made Judenrein in the 1920′s by the British to quell the angry Muslims who didn’t want the Jews to have sovereignty at all. Finally, Jordan became a country in 1946, just two years prior to Israel’s reestablishment. The two-state solution was resolved long ago with the creation of Jordan. Islamic supremacy is the reason any issue still exists. I have a paper I developed with the assistance of Dr. Steve Carol and David Meir-Levi to prepare for a debate I did – I’ll send you a copy.

And where were the police ?

The 1948 war saw the destruction of scores of Arab villages, and the creation of 711,000 Palestinian refugees. The ideas advanced by Joan Peters and others that most of these Arabs were “new immigrants” has been largely discredited. The land was sparsely populated (as Mark Twain described on his 1867 trip) and certainly allowed for increased Jewish immigration. But it was not desolate. Ottoman census data places Palestinian population in the 1890′s at about 500,000, overwhelmingly Arab. Arabs concentrated in the mountainous highlands (i.e. West Bank) or Gaza, while new Jewish immigration concentrated on the marshy or desert coastline around Tel Aviv, or Jerusalem. So while the Jews did make the “desert bloom,” this did not mean Palestine was barren.

So if Israel compensated the Palestinian refugees for their losses, would this satisfy them? No.

If the Jews permitted a Palestinian state to be established next to theirs, would this satisfy the Palestinians? No.

Why? Because though loss of land, lack of self-determination, and desire for a homeland are all valid Palestinian grievances, they belie the real goal: governance by Arabs over ALL of Palestine. The issue is not land ownership, it’s land SOVEREIGNTY. Hamas will never stop fighting Israel, as Israeli sovereignty over part of Palestine is incompatible with this goal.

The irony is that Palestinians vehemently claim sovereignty over a piece of land which they have never governed. The Ottomans ruled over the land for centuries, until they transferred sovereignty to the British. Why did the British transfer partial sovereignty to the Jews? As far back as 1917, Lord Balfour declared the British intent of helping the Jews establish a homeland, long before the Holocaust. Jewish immigration was already in full swing in the 1920′s and 30′s, helped by European anti-Semitism, from the Russian pogroms in the 1880s to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that that stripped over 300,000 Jews of their German citizenship. Even before WWII it became obvious that the growing Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine would be ungovernable under one state. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended the British partition their Palestine Mandate to create a homeland for each. The Arabs rejected the offer of partial sovereignty, as they still do to this day. The Jews accepted it, as their agenda has always been simply to have a homeland, as do the Armenians, the Turks, and many other ethnic groups. It is curious to see how Muslims vociferously rejected the British partitioning of Palestine, but none opposed the British partitioning of India -to create Muslim Pakistan.

So while the West may rightly pressure Israel to compensate the Palestinian refugees and to accept a Palestinian state, it is questionable whether this will stop the conflict. The main issue has never been the refugees, or the creation of A Palestinian state. The issue is the existence of Israel, and how it blocks the creation of THE Palestinian State.

“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it…”

“… the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. ”

“There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.”

” The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”

Let me go on and quote Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television, where last year cleric Yunis Al Astal stated, “Today, Rome is the capital of the Catholics, or the Crusader capital, which has declared its hostility to Islam, and has planted the brothers of apes and pigs in Palestine in order to prevent the reawakening of Islam…. I believe that our children, or our grandchildren, will inherit our jihad and our sacrifices, and, Allah willing, the commanders of the conquest will come from among them… [Rome will become] an advanced post for the Islamic conquests, which will spread though Europe in its entirety, and then will turn to the two Americas, even Eastern Europe.”

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2009/03/where-are-police.html

Hamas is, yes, part of the Muslim Brotherhood. The MB is an older organization than most terrorist groups like Fatah or pseudo-government political parties like the Baath. It dates back to the ’20s, if my memory is correct. Most of the extremist Muslim organizations, like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs, and Osama’s crowd, seek the rule of Islam throughout the world. It’s important to understand, however, that all of these organizations aren’t united in seeking this: each seeks to rule the world itself, through its leadership and according to its tenets. Osama, a Sunni Muslim, would be horrified if the Iranians manage to establish *their* Islamic state worldwide, because they’re Shi’ites, and he and his crowd doesn’t consider them real Muslims.

Another discussion centers around the Israeli/Palestinian question. Many, in recent years, have decided that there were few or no Muslims, Arabs, whatever you wish to call them, in what’s now Israel, until the Jews showed up and “made the desert bloom”. Who lived in Jerusalem, then? Jaffa? Nazareth, Bethlehem, Haifa? Perhaps some of the Arabs who are currently refugees in camps had families who had moved from somewhere else in the 20s and 30s, but do Israel’s partisans really want to establish the precedent that recent immigrants to an area don’t have any territorial rights there? The comedian Larry Miller, in more serious moments, is fond of noting that the term Palestinian is a very new designation for what were Arabs who lived in between Egypt and Syria. He’s right, but he fails to note that the term Israeli is of about the same vintage. Prior to that, such people were known as Jews, or perhaps Hebrews.

You can go on and on about this or that point in the debate. To my mind, whether Israel has a “right” to exist is irrelevant. It’s whether Israel has the “might” to continue to exist on the map that matters. If they ever lose that, the Arabs surrounding them won’t worry about their rights.