Israel's wholesale attack on Gaza was a horrible overreaction to the years of on & off attacks on civilian populations in southern Israel, which immediately followed Israel's total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. Not to mention this basic history is like writing and photographing the devastation of Germany and Japan without acknowledging that these two countries were the criminal aggressors in World War II. A negotiated peace agreement must end this conflict, but both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are splintered politically (the Palestinians more so than the Israelis) and led by parties that seem to …
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rseliger
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It's really important for both Arabs and Jews (especially in Israel, but throughout the world as well) to understand what happened in 1947-48. There was a catastrophe for the Palestinian Arabs and there was a hard-fought and costly victory for Palestinian Jews, resulting in Israel's independence. The usual Jewish (or "Zionist") narrative negates the Nakba, the Arab catastrophe. And the usual Arab narrative ignores the fact that their people could have had an independent state alongside a lesser Israel, and with a sizable minority population in the new "Jewish state" that the United Nations General Assembly endorsed in November 1947. Instead, …
Posted to Independence and ‘Catastrophe’?
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It isn't that "Zionists" never "consulted" with Palestinian Arabs about Jewish needs for a secure homeland to escape persecution and eventually genocide, it's that Palestinian Arabs (understandably perhaps) saw no need to accommodate these hounded people in any way. If they had, they would have at least made common cause with the bi-nationalist elements of the Zionist movement. Being awarded with nearly half a loaf by the United Nations, plus nearly half of the other half with 40% of the initial population of the state awarded by the UN to the Jews, wasn't enough for them. Not to mention that Arab …
Posted to Independence and ‘Catastrophe’?
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Look, the UN decision to partition the land was perfectly legal. Zionists like myself have long struggled to fulfill the second part of the UN resolution, to allow for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. I take it that Imran approved of the efforts in '47 and '48 to destroy the Palestinian Jewish community?! Since he doesn't even see the bi-nationalist Zionists elements as having a leg to stand on (which is the meaning of this reductionist notion that "Zionism is the problem")--- all so-called Zionists are the same and that whatever Arab forces have done over the decades to defeat "Zionism" …
Posted to Independence and ‘Catastrophe’?
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The violent reaction to Jewish immigration to Palestine may have assumed a "land grab," but the violence began decades in advance of anything like that---with the worst pre-1947 events being the riots and pogroms of 1920, '21 and '29, followed by the full-scale uprising of 1936-39. We will never know what might have happened if the majority Arab reaction to the Jewish immigrants had been welcoming, or at least tolerant. It is logical and likely that the bi-national minority within the Zionist movement would have been much larger, and perhaps the majority. But even if not, there is no real likelihood …
Posted to Independence and ‘Catastrophe’?
- Joined March 15, 2007
- Last Visit February 20, 2010
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