origins of Modern Israel

Rue · November 12, 2006

It never fails that whenever there is a discussion of the current conflicts in the Middle East, I read the same

misrepresentations over and over as to the origins of Israel in 1949 and specifically that there was a Palestinian state prior to 1949 and that Jews stole land from Arabs to create Israel.

The usual version we see repeated on these posts over and is the version of Arab refugees fleeing from the Palestine Mandate before and during the 1948 war as Jews stole land. This version has been repeated so many times it is for some of you considered the starting point and absolute fact.

The fact is The State of Israel was created by the United Nations and it was NOT created out of Palestinian lands. It was in fact created out of the Ottoman Empire. There were no "Palestinians". This is a term created in 1963 by the Palestinian Liberation Organization an umbrella group of factions organized by Egypt and Syria.

Prior to 1949, there were Arabs, Christians and Jews living in the REGION of Palestine.Many of those Arabs considered themselves in fact Syrians.

The fact is, it was not until only after the first World War I what we now call Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were created by the British and French as puppet colonies. These nations like the nations in Africa and many other places in the world were artificially created and in this case from the Turkish Empire by the British and French because they defeated Turket in WW1.

Jordan was created on about 85 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland. Britain lied to the League of Nations when it misappropriated the land and turned it into Transjordan. This is a fact that those who spew the usual anti-Israel bias simply ignore.

When Britain took 85% of Palestine away, on a deliberate misrepresentation, there was no out-cry and the British simply lied to the world and got away with it. No Jew was allowed in Jordan or allowed any rights in Jordan. But again, this is simply ignored by the anti-Israel revisionists.

The fact is and remains that two-thirds of Jordanian citizens are Palestinian Arabs but they are ruled by a monarchy that the British installed and in fact a minority of Hashemite followers run the country.

Jordan has been just as much an enemy of Palestinian Arabs as Israel, unlike Israel which was created by the UN, Jordan was created by the British.

In 1947, once the British lied, and seized 85% of Palestine leaving very little land left and far less then what the League of Nations proposed for Jews, the UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 15 percent of the Palestine Mandate. So it is absolute b.s. to continue the lie that Israel stole land from Palestinians. In fact if anybody did it was the British and by creating Jordan not Israel.

In fact the UN mandate proposed a State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. Jews were willing to accept that. It was the Arab League NOT Israel that rejected this. If you look at the original state proposed for Israel it was tiny. In fact it completely ignored many areas of land that historically Jews had a legal claim to. However the typical anti-Israeli revision of History suggests Jews stole land from Palestinian Arabs. This is b.s. if one actually takes a look at the land we are talking about. The fact is Israel from 1949 to 1967 is less then 20% of all Palestine.

The fact is, the Arab League chose to reject the UN proposal and launch a war that had one purpose, get rid of all Jews. The intention by the Arab League was to rid the Middle East of Jews and send them back to Europe and then have Syria and Lebanon carve up the region. This was and will always be the starting point of the Arab refugee problem despite attempts to pretend otherwise.

The Arab refugees at the time which numbered around 725,000 people fled not because a bunch of Jews shot at them or chased them. That is a ridiculous, idiotic, simplistic explanation and insulting to anyone who nows what happened. The fact is the vast majority of Arabs vacated what was 1949-1967 Israel without ever having seen a Jew or engaging in any disputes. They fled because they were told to. They were advised to leave by the Arab League who told them the war would be over very quickly and then they could return. Had these Arabs stayed, and not fled because of listening to the Arab League, history would have taken a far different course. Instead, we constantly have to listen to the lie that they left because Jews chased them out.

If the Arab League and to be precise, Gamal Nasser the dictator of Egypt, and the dictators of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and the monarchy in Saudia Arabia did not reject the concept of a non-Arab state in the Middle East, Israel would have simply been a tiny country, and Palestinians would have either created their own nation or the Gaza and West Bank or would have joined Syria or Jordan or Lebanon.

The fact is rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Morrocco and Kuwait started by invading Israel once it declared itself a tiny nation pursuant to the legal mandate given it under international law by the UN. Israel was created legally. The attack against it, to wipe it out was clearly

illegal.

In fact prior to and during the beginning of the war Israel repeatedly asked the Arab League for peace and history is what it is - led by Nasser, one Arab leader after the other called for the anhilitation of Israel, and in their speeches engaged in the same anti-semetic references the Nazis engaged in. The head of Egypt's secret police was the former head of the secret police in Poland responsible for killing thousands of Jews.

Former Nazi SS and Gestapo officers openly lived in Damascus and ran its secret police. The Arab League allowed themselves after World War Two to be influenced and controlled by first the Nazis and then the Soviet Union also blatantly anti-semetic. The fact is they lost in 1949 and have been revising history ever since.

History is what it is depsite some of you trying to pretend otherwise. Had there been no war to destroy Israel and no invasion by Arab armies there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.

Now you want to accuse Israel of stealing and expropriating land -its b.s. During this war, Israel acquired additional land which is called de facto possession under international law, precisely because when the Arabs refused to enter a peace treaty, Israel had to fight and defend itself and in the process the international law allows a country tannexation an aggressor's land during and after a conflict.

You can pretend all you want this does not exist in international law as a concept but it does. In this case the land Israel ended up with in 1949 in fact was legally taken from Turkey. Israel in fact offered to return land the land it had acquired during the war in exchange for a formal peace treaty and the Arab League told Israel to stuff it. This offer was made during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in 1949. The Arab League made it clear they preferred to maintain a state of war in order so they could wipe out Israel.

What the anti-Israel revisionists also ignore is that after the 1949 war, Israel passed laws allowing Arab refugees to re-settle in Israel if they signed a form in which they renounced violence, swore allegiance to the state of Israel. Had they done that, the irony is, they would have become Israeli citizens with full equal rights and within 10 years have constituted the majority in the country and the State of Israel as we know it today may have taken another direction.

In fact, 150,000 Arab refugees chose Israeli citizenship. None died. None were persecuted. All had the right to own land, vote, go to school, and receive medical care UNLIKE how Jews were treated in Muslim countries where they were forced to live under an apartheid system known as dhimmitude.

Jews were never offered a similar option to become citizens of Arab states after 1949 which makes the Arab League complete and absolute liars when they say they simply wanted to leave in peace with Jews and their only problem was a Jewish state not with Jews living in the Middle East. In fact between 1948 and 1949 the Muslim world expelled 900,000 Jews, seizing their property. 700,000 of these Jews had no choice but to move to Israel making the accommodation of other Arabs a moot point.

The Arab League not only deliberately created Arab refugees as a tool to keep fighting Israel, but it compounded the situation bt creating 900,000 Jewish refugees. If you read the speeches of Nasser and the Leaders of the Arab League you will see that they could have cared less about Palestinians. KIng Hussein of Jordan was in open civil war with them trying to prevent them from taking over Jordan. Speeches by all the Arab League members made it clear none of them would take in Palestinians. They deliberately left them homeless as a tool and a pawn to pressure the world into ending Israel.

The dialogue from the Arab League after 1949 called for the destruction of Israel not peaceful coexistence. Nasser's speeches, the speeches from the regimes in Iraq abd Syria, called for the murder of Jews world-wide and the complete detsruction of Israel. In 1963, the PLO was created and its 1964 congress called for the destruction of Israel and killing Jews world-wide until this was achieved.

It was not Israel that caused the Arab refugee problem, nor Israel that obstructed its solution. Pretend all you want the Arab world were victimized by Israel but the fact is it was the decision of the Arab League to refuse citizenship of Palestinians and using them as a pawn to fight Israel, that caused the problem.

Nasser's open hatred of Palestinians as well as Jews and Israelis is there for anyone to read in his speeches. It is there in the speeches of then Defence MInister of Syria Assad and King Hussein. In fact when the PLO was formed, it split into numerous factions precisely because the majority of these factions were not interested in following Fatah and Arafat and creating a Palestinian nation. All they were interested in was destroying Israel. Most wanted to join with Syria. Syria controlled most of the splinter groups. Fatah the largest, run by Arafat was in fact never accepted by Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or Tunisia and he was expelled from Lebanon, Tunisia, and Jordan precisely because they considered him as much of an enemy as Israel.

What I would for once want the anti-Israeli revisionists to explain is why when they accuse Israel of misappropriating land they ignore the Jewish refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Let me once hear Myata or Figleaf in their one sided comments, state that these Jews were in fact peaceful citizens and forced at gun-point to flee with nothing. Let me hear them once be honest and discuss how their property was stolen and never given back.

Myata wants to lecture on Jews stealing Arab land, what about the property and belongings of the Jewish refugees, confiscated by the Arab governments, which has been estimated at about $2.5 billion to 4 billion in 1948 dollars which was far more money in value then any land Jews took from Arabs for Israel.

This is the part of the story revisionists deliberately ignore and I am sick of the double standard from people who do not bother to take the time to acknowledge history and the fact that this was NOT a one sided conflict.

Finally let us get something straight. Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced there in 1948 by Nasser and his Egyptian troops under order to shoot to kill if they tried to leave. Nasser ordered that they were not allowed Egyptian citizenship or passports. Arafat until he died wrote about what the Egyptians did in his biography and never forgave the Egyptians.

Finally it is absolute b.s. to argue as the revisionist anti-Israelis do, that those displaced by Israel now total over 5 million and have the right to return to Israel. Under international law , if you are born into a refugee population that has been resettled and living in exile YOU DO NOT HAVE legal status as refugees. The Arab League has created this noightmare by refusing to allow these people citizenship or in the alternative denouncing terrorism, accepting Israel's existence, and calling for a Palestinian state.

Refugee status under international law, only applies to those surviving Arabs who fled in 1948.

What also ticks me off is the fact that sixty years ago it is a fact there were almost one million Jews in the Arab states of the Middle East but revisionists ignore these people and what happened to them. They are the part of this equation people like Myata and Figleaf deliberately ignore when they trot out the usual antri-Israel revisionism.

As for evil Israel, it has 12 Arab Israeli representatives in the Israeli Parliament, Arab Israeli judges sitting on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court, and and many Arab Israelis have obtained Ph.D's and teach in Israeli colleges and universities. In the Arab world this does NOT exist in reverse.

More to the point, instead of misrepresenting Jews as having misappropriated Arab property-let us be frank and honest- the vast majority of Palestinian property has been stolen by fellow Palestinians or Arabs- Palestinians such as Arafat have misappropriated billions of dollars from the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and others.

jbg · November 13, 2006

History is what it is depsite some of you trying to pretend otherwise. Had there been no war to destroy Israel and no invasion by Arab armies there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.

The only comment I have for this excellent summary (did you write it?) is that those areas likely would have been part of Jordan or Egypt. There was never a suggestion, until the early 1970's, that any independent entity would be formed on those lands.

scribblet · November 13, 2006

Good one.

Remiel · November 13, 2006

Assuming that the what you say is true, to the best of your knowledge, Rue, it would seem that if the Hashemites in Jordan were to fall from power, that Jordan should absorb (forced, if necessary) the West Bank, and everyone in Gaza should be resettled to the newly enlarged Jordan. Were it possible, it would most likely be extremely difficult, but of course the alternative hasn't proven to be very attractive. If Jordan were to be ruled by Palestinians, there would likely still be problems, but problems that could be hoped to be solved.

White Doors · November 13, 2006

excellent post!

jbg · November 14, 2006

Rather than start my own thread, I thought I'd point out this somewhat similar article (link) to show that this poster is every bit as good as the pros:

Publication: The New York Sun; Date:2006 Aug 29; Section:Editorial & Opinion; Page 9
Pan-Muslim Fiction

Efraim Karsh

In discussions of the contemporary Middle East, few arguments have resonated more widely, or among a more diverse set of observers, than the claim that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict constitutes the source of all evil and that its resolution will lead to regional peace and stability. No sooner had the guns fallen silent on the Israel-Lebanon border than Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, fresh from his summer vacation in the Caribbean island of Barbados, announced his intention to embark on a mission to the Middle East next month in an attempt to both stabilize the situation in Lebanon and to resuscitate the stalled peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.This sense of urgency was echoed by the American former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who claimed that “Today, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other.” And the Jordanian commentator Rami Khouri put it in even stronger terms: “Every major tough issue in the Middle East is somehow linked to the consequences of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict… Its bitterness kept seeping out from its Palestine-Israel core to corrode many other dimensions of the region.”

While there is no denying the argument’s widespread appeal, there is also no way around the fact that, in almost every particular, it is demonstratively, even invidiously, wrong. For one thing, violence was an integral part of Middle Eastern political culture long before the advent of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and physical force remains today the main if not the sole instrument of regional political discourse. At the domestic level, these circumstances have resulted in the world’s most illiberal polities. Political dissent is dealt with by repression, and ethnic and religious differences are settled by internecine strife and murder. One need only mention, among many instances, Syria’s massacre of 20,000 of its Muslim activists in the early 1980s, or the brutal treatment of Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish communities until the 2003 war, or the genocidal campaign now being conducted in Darfur by the government of Sudan and its allied militias, not to mention the ongoing bloodbath in Iraq.As for foreign policy in the Middle East, it too has been pursued by means of crude force, ranging from terrorism and subversion to outright aggression. In the Yemenite, Lebanese, and Algerian civil wars, hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians perished; the Iran-Iraq war claimed nearly a million lives.

Nor have the Arab states have ever had any real stake in the “liberation of Palestine.”Though anti-Zionism has been the core principle of pan-Arab solidarity since the mid-1930s — it is easier, after all, to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty — pan-Arabism has almost always served as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaim it.

Consider, for example, the pan-Arab invasion of the newly proclaimed state of Israel in 1948.This, on its face, was a shining demonstration of solidarity with the Palestinian people. But the invasion had far less to do with winning independence for the indigenous population than with the desire of the Arab regimes for territorial aggrandizement. Transjordan’s King Abdullah wanted to incorporate substantial parts of mandatory Palestine into the greater Syrian empire he coveted; Egypt wanted to prevent that eventuality by laying its hands on southern Palestine. Syria and Lebanon sought to annex the Galilee, while Iraq viewed the 1948 war as a stepping stone in its long-standing ambition to bring the entire Fertile Crescent under its rule. Had the Jewish state lost the war, its territory would not have fallen to the Palestinians but would have been divided among the invading Arab forces.

During the decades following the 1948 war, the Arab states manipulated the Palestinian national cause to their own ends. Neither Egypt nor Jordan allowed Palestinian self-determination in the parts of Palestine they had occupied during the 1948 war (respectively, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip). Palestinian refugees were kept in squalid camps for decades as a means of whipping Israel and stirring pan-Arab sentiments. “The Palestinians are useful to the Arab states as they are,” Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser candidly responded to an inquiring Western reporter in 1956. “We will always see that they do not become too powerful.” As late as 1974, Syria’s Hafez al-Assad referred to Palestine as being “not only a part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria.”

*snip*

If the Arab states have shown little empathy for the plight of ordinary Palestinians, the Islamic connection to the Palestinian problem is even more tenuous. It is not out of concern for a Palestinian right to national self-determination but as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the “House of Islam” that Islamists inveigh against the Jewish state of Israel. In the words of the covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known by its Arabic acronym Hamas: “The land of Palestine has been an Islamic trust (waqf) throughout the generations and until the day of resurrection.... When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims.”

In this respect, there is no difference between Palestine and other parts of the world conquered by the forces of Islam throughout history.To this very day, for example, Arabs and many Muslims unabashedly pine for the restoration of Spain, and look upon their expulsion from that country in 1492 as a grave historical injustice, as if they were Spain’s rightful owners and not former colonial occupiers of a remote foreign land, thousands of miles from their ancestral homeland. Edward Said applauded Andalusia’s colonialist legacy as “the ideal that should be moving our efforts now,” while Osama bin Laden noted “the tragedy of Andalusia” after the 9/11 attacks, and the perpetrators of the March 2004 Madrid bombings, in which hundreds of people were murdered, mentioned revenge for the loss of Spain as one of the atrocity’s “root causes.”Within this grand scheme, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is but a single element, and one whose supposed centrality looms far greater in Western than in Islamic eyes.

This is not to deny that resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a pressing issue. But the regional ramifications of any settlement will be far narrower than is widely assumed. Quite to the contrary, the best hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in the rejection of the spurious “link” between this dispute and other regional and global problems.

The pretense of pan-Arab or pan-Islamic solidarity has long served as a dangerous elixir in Palestinian political circles, stirring unrealistic hopes and expectations and, at key junctures, inciting widespread and horrifically destructive violence. Self-serving interventionism under these false pretenses had the effect of transforming the bilateral Palestinian-Israeli dispute into a multilateral Arab-Israeli conflict, thereby prolonging its duration, increasing its intensity, and making its resolution far more complex and tortuous. Only when the local political elites reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism and forswear the false notions of pan-Arab and pan-Muslim solidarity, let alone the imperialist chimera of a unified “Arab nation” or a worldwide Islamic umma, will the long overdue regional stability will be finally attained and the Arab-Israeli conflict resolved. Not the other way round.

Professor Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and author most recently of “Islamic Imperialism: A History,” available from Yale University Press.

Borg · November 14, 2006

Well posted.

Unfortunately, the media and various political factions would never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

This truth will never be promulgated.

Borg

jbg · November 14, 2006

Well posted.
Unfortunately, the media and various political factions would never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

This truth will never be promulgated.

Borg

Both Rue's excellent original piece and the New York Sun article I posted hint about the real motives of "the media and various political factions"; that peole are, by and large, afraid of the Muslims and are willing to give in in the hopes of avoiding a fight. Ultimately, this will prove futile and, as we learned on September 11, tragic.

Unfortunately, sometimes, paying protection money to the Mob is easier than involving the RCMP or the US FBI. In the case of Israel, the violent propensities of its opponents are well known; the cerebral and peaceful propensities of Israel's citizens and the few countries supporting Israel are also well known, to the enemy as well as to ourselves. We prefer peace. Sometimes that's the peace of the grave.

Black Dog · November 14, 2006

So, er...what's the point here? That the motives of Syria, Egypt et al WRT the Palestinian issue may have been self-serving? Is that really news?

What I want to know is: how does any of this bring us any closer to a resolution? So there was no Palestinan nationalist movement befor ethe '70s. There is now. Maybe it would have been better if Jordan and Egypt had taken the post 1949 refugees in. They didn't and they won't now. History is valuable in providing the context, sure, but it doesn't really offer any solutions, while many of the tidbits discussed are little more than red herrings (if not outright lies).

jbg · November 15, 2006

So, er...what's the point here? That the motives of Syria, Egypt et al WRT the Palestinian issue may have been self-serving? Is that really news?
What I want to know is: how does any of this bring us any closer to a resolution? So there was no Palestinan nationalist movement befor ethe '70s. There is now. Maybe it would have been better if Jordan and Egypt had taken the post 1949 refugees in. They didn't and they won't now. History is valuable in providing the context, sure, but it doesn't really offer any solutions, while many of the tidbits discussed are little more than red herrings (if not outright lies).

Still, can you answer, if Israel abided the Arabs' wishes and somehow fell into the sea, would there be an independent "Palestine" as a result?

I don't think so.

Black Dog · November 15, 2006

Still, can you answer, if Israel abided the Arabs' wishes and somehow fell into the sea, would there be an independent "Palestine" as a result?
I don't think so.

Irrelevant. The debate should be about solutions, not fantasy scenarios. Strip away the self-serving bullshit from either side and what's left is a very narrow set of options. The Palestinians aren't going to be taken in by their Arab bretheren as some here have suggested they should. Nor is Israel going anywhere. The idea of Israel as a single, binational, secular state is a non-starter for both sides. Public opinion on both sides is overwhelmingly in favour of a two state solution, so it would make sense to focus the discussion on that. All the rest- the competing histories, the emotionally charged rhetoric yadda yadda-is all meaningless distraction.

Figleaf · November 16, 2006

The fact is The State of Israel was created by the United Nations ...

Flat wrong. Israel declared itself a state prior to UN recognition.

...and it was NOT created out of Palestinian lands. It was in fact created out of the Ottoman Empire. There were no "Palestinians".

Sure there were Palestinians ... the people living in the region called 'Palestine'. If they didn't happen to call themselves "Palestinians" it makes no never mind.

Prior to 1949, there were Arabs, Christians and Jews living in the REGION of Palestine.Many of those Arabs considered themselves in fact Syrians.

So what?

Jordan was created on about 85 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland.

That's news to me. Do you have a source?

In 1947, once the British lied, and seized 85% of Palestine leaving very little land left and far less then what the League of Nations proposed for Jews,

"proposed"??? In what document?

... the UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 15 percent of the Palestine Mandate. So it is absolute b.s. to continue the lie that Israel stole land from Palestinians.

Since no-one had any business imposing a colonial entity on the region in the first place, it is clear enough to see that for the UN to partition the land for any use whatsoever was sort of a 'theft'.

... it completely ignored many areas of land that historically Jews had a legal claim to.

On what 'historical' 'legal' basis?

Now you want to accuse Israel of stealing and expropriating land -its b.s. During this war, Israel acquired additional land which is called de facto possession under international law, ...

De facto means not 'de jure'. 'De jure' means legally. Israel's creeping annexation of the West Bank, and its interdiction of the Gaza strip are both illegal under international law.

What I would for once want the anti-Israeli revisionists to explain is why when they accuse Israel of misappropriating land they ignore the Jewish refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Well, I'm not a anti-Israel, but perhaps the reason some people appear to 'ignore' the Jewish refugees is that they're not relevant to the essential issues of the Palestine/Israel dispute as it exists today.

Let me once hear Myata or Figleaf ..., state that these Jews were in fact peaceful citizens and forced at gun-point to flee with nothing.

I'm sure many of them were. It changes nothing about my policy position on this issue.

Finally let us get something straight. Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced there in 1948 by Nasser and his Egyptian troops under order to shoot to kill if they tried to leave. Nasser ordered that they were not allowed Egyptian citizenship or passports. Arafat until he died wrote about what the Egyptians did in his biography and never forgave the Egyptians. ... The Arab League has created this noightmare by refusing to allow these people citizenship

Nasser may not have been nice, but then neither was driving them out of Israel. You need to understand that solving the crisis of Palestinian refugees from Israel was not Egypt's or the Arab League's responsibility.

Black Dog · November 16, 2006

Flat wrong. Israel declared itself a state prior to UN recognition.

Wrong yerself.

The UN General Assembly approved the 1947 UN Partition Plan dividing the territory into two states, with the Jewish area consisting of roughly 55% of the land, and the Arab area roughly 45%. Jerusalem was planned to be an international region administered by the UN to avoid conflict over its status.
Immediately following the adoption of the Partition Plan by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, David Ben-Gurion tentatively accepted the partition, while the Arab League rejected it. The Arab Higher Committee immediately ordered a violent three-day strike on Jewish civilians, attacking buildings, shops, and neighborhoods, and prompting counter-attacks organized by underground Jewish militias like the Lehi and Irgun. These attacks soon turned into widespread fighting between Arabs and Jews, this civil war being the first "phase" of the 1948 War of Independence.

The State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, one day before the expiry of the Palestine Mandate.

So UN recognition is irrelevant, as the UN essentially created Israel out of the old British Mandate.

Higgly · November 17, 2006

It never fails that whenever there is a discussion of the current conflicts in the Middle East, I read the same

misrepresentations over and over ...

Oh I so know how you feel...

The usual version we see repeated on these posts over and is the version of Arab refugees fleeing from the Palestine Mandate before and during the 1948 war as Jews stole land. This version has been repeated so many times it is for some of you considered the starting point and absolute fact.

Maybe because it is true.

The fact is The State of Israel was created by the United Nations and it was NOT created out of Palestinian lands. It was in fact created out of the Ottoman Empire.

The ottoman empire disappeared when the British conquered Palestine. However, the Ottoman land registry did not, meaning that those who held valid land titles under the Turks, had their ownership honoured by teh British.

There were no "Palestinians". This is a term created in 1963 by the Palestinian Liberation Organization an umbrella group of factions organized by Egypt and Syria.

Yawn.

Prior to 1949, there were Arabs, Christians and Jews living in the REGION of Palestine.Many of those Arabs considered themselves in fact Syrians.

And the Jews living there considered themselves...?

The fact is, it was not until only after the first World War I what we now call Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were created by the British and French as puppet colonies. These nations like the nations in Africa and many other places in the world were artificially created and in this case from the Turkish Empire by the British and French because they defeated Turket in WW1.

And so to your point about the Ottoman Empire!

Jordan was created on about 85 percent of the Palestine Mandate, which was originally designated by the League of Nations as part of the Jewish homeland.

You have it backwards here actually. The Jewish homeland was to be in Palestine, which is why both he British and the UN drew up partition boundaries giving only part of it to the Jews. The Paris conference enshrined the Balfour declaration which said that the Jews shall have a homeland in Palestine, not that all of Palestine shall become the homeland of the Jews.

Britain lied to the League of Nations when it misappropriated the land and turned it into Transjordan. This is a fact that those who spew the usual anti-Israel bias simply ignore.

In what way?

When Britain took 85% of Palestine away, on a deliberate misrepresentation, there was no out-cry and the British simply lied to the world and got away with it. No Jew was allowed in Jordan or allowed any rights in Jordan. But again, this is simply ignored by the anti-Israel revisionists.

Again, you are going to have to elaborate on this mis-representation.

The fact is and remains that two-thirds of Jordanian citizens are Palestinian Arabs but they are ruled by a monarchy that the British installed and in fact a minority of Hashemite followers run the country.

Interesting you should say this since one thing I have read over and over in these forums is that the Arabs don't care a fig for the Palestinians and have refused to take them in. What you are doing here is following the 'facts on the ground' approach so popular with Israelites. For example, by creating illegal settlements, Israel assumes ownership by virtue of 'facts on the ground' even thought he whol enterprise is entirely illegal, not to mention immoral.

Jordan has been just as much an enemy of Palestinian Arabs as Israel, unlike Israel which was created by the UN, Jordan was created by the British.

So Jordan has taken many of them in as citizens but it is their enemy. Interesting.

In 1947, once the British lied, and seized 85% of Palestine leaving very little land left and far less then what the League of Nations proposed for Jews, the UN partition plan mandated the creation of two states on the remaining 15 percent of the Palestine Mandate. So it is absolute b.s. to continue the lie that Israel stole land from Palestinians. In fact if anybody did it was the British and by creating Jordan not Israel.

Again with this lie. Explain please. The League of Nations had no such plans. The 1919 Paris conference merely enshrined the Balfour declaration. Israel did in fact steal land from Palestinian Arabs and continues to do so to this day.

In fact the UN mandate proposed a State of Israel for the Jews, and another state for the Arabs. Jews were willing to accept that. It was the Arab League NOT Israel that rejected this. If you look at the original state proposed for Israel it was tiny. In fact it completely ignored many areas of land that historically Jews had a legal claim to. However the typical anti-Israeli revision of History suggests Jews stole land from Palestinian Arabs. This is b.s. if one actually takes a look at the land we are talking about. The fact is Israel from 1949 to 1967 is less then 20% of all Palestine.

Well let's see. The partition required Arabs to abandon land assigned to the Jews - land they had lived on for centuries. The Jews on the other hand had just arrived in the previous 20 years. A pretty rum deal if you ask me. No wonder they turned it down.

The Arab refugees at the time which numbered around 725,000 people fled not because a bunch of Jews shot at them or chased them. That is a ridiculous, idiotic, simplistic explanation and insulting to anyone who nows what happened. The fact is the vast majority of Arabs vacated what was 1949-1967 Israel without ever having seen a Jew or engaging in any disputes. They fled because they were told to. They were advised to leave by the Arab League who told them the war would be over very quickly and then they could return. Had these Arabs stayed, and not fled because of listening to the Arab League, history would have taken a far different course. Instead, we constantly have to listen to the lie that they left because Jews chased them out.

Most were driven out by shelling, mortar and sniper fire from Jewish forces. Ben Gurion famously gave the order himself that drove over 50,000 Arabs from their homes. Others fled for fear of massacre - there are a number of documented cases of massacre. In any case, this is immaterial. Just leaving a war zone does not present a de facto case for giving up your land. The key ingredient here was that once the Arabs left, Israel closed the borders and refused to allow them back. It then passed the abandonment laws in 1950 which was basically a smoke and mirrors justification for land theft

If the Arab League and to be precise, Gamal Nasser the dictator of Egypt, and the dictators of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and the monarchy in Saudia Arabia did not reject the concept of a non-Arab state in the Middle East, Israel would have simply been a tiny country, and Palestinians would have either created their own nation or the Gaza and West Bank or would have joined Syria or Jordan or Lebanon.

All of the Arab leaders tried to negotiate a peace with Israel but Ben Gurion was completely intractable. Nasser gave up after Israel sent terrorist agents into Cairo to blow up mailboxes and theatres in an attempt to destabilise his government. The others eventually gave up as well after a number of vicious and murderous attacks by the likes of Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan.

The fact is rulers of eight Arab countries whose populations vastly outnumbered the Jewish settlers in the Turkish Empire, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Morrocco and Kuwait started by invading Israel once it declared itself a tiny nation pursuant to the legal mandate given it under international law by the UN. Israel was created legally. The attack against it, to wipe it out was clearly illegal.

The fact is that the Jewish forces greatly outnumbered the Arabs.

In fact prior to and during the beginning of the war Israel repeatedly asked the Arab League for peace and history is what it is - led by Nasser, one Arab leader after the other called for the anhilitation of Israel, and in their speeches engaged in the same anti-semetic references the Nazis engaged in.

Nonsense. Ben Gurion did everyhting he could to make a peace treaty impossible. Peace with the Arabs was a low priority for him because he believed in dealing with the Arabs by military might. Israel made little effort at peace and in fact plotted to overthrow Nasser as well as to conquer Lebanon.

Former Nazi SS and Gestapo officers openly lived in Damascus and ran its secret police. The Arab League allowed themselves after World War Two to be influenced and controlled by first the Nazis and then the Soviet Union also blatantly anti-semetic. The fact is they lost in 1949 and have been revising history ever since.

Hey, Werner von Braun went to work in the US Space program. If the Russians were so anti-semitic, why were they the second nation (after the US) to recognize Israel in the UN?

History is what it is depsite some of you trying to pretend otherwise. Had there been no war to destroy Israel and no invasion by Arab armies there would have been a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza since 1948.

I doubt it. The Zionists were plotting to take all of Palestine by military might from the earliest days. This wsa the Iron Wall strategy of Jabotinsky et al..

Now you want to accuse Israel of stealing and expropriating land -its b.s. During this war, Israel acquired additional land which is called de facto possession under international law, precisely because when the Arabs refused to enter a peace treaty, Israel had to fight and defend itself and in the process the international law allows a country tannexation an aggressor's land during and after a conflict.

Unfortunately just calling it bs will not make the ugly stain go away Rue.

You can pretend all you want this does not exist in international law as a concept but it does. In this case the land Israel ended up with in 1949 in fact was legally taken from Turkey. Israel in fact offered to return land the land it had acquired during the war in exchange for a formal peace treaty and the Arab League told Israel to stuff it. This offer was made during the Rhodes Armistice talks and Lausanne conference in 1949. The Arab League made it clear they preferred to maintain a state of war in order so they could wipe out Israel.

You want to be careful about quoting international law because it calls for conquering parties to respect the land registry of the people who live on the land. This is what Israel did not do and this is why Israel has stolen the land. In any case, Israel has been trying to wipe out Lebanon for years.

What the anti-Israel revisionists also ignore is that after the 1949 war, Israel passed laws allowing Arab refugees to re-settle in Israel if they signed a form in which they renounced violence, swore allegiance to the state of Israel. Had they done that, the irony is, they would have become Israeli citizens with full equal rights and within 10 years have constituted the majority in the country and the State of Israel as we know it today may have taken another direction.

What kind of citizen can you be in a country that it run by and for the benefit of a group to which you do not belong? Arab-Israeli citizenship is a sham. Nobody builds housing for Arabs in Israel. All of Israel's domestic policy is geared towards ensuring a Jewish majority. That is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy.

In fact, 150,000 Arab refugees chose Israeli citizenship. None died. None were persecuted. All had the right to own land, vote, go to school, and receive medical care UNLIKE how Jews were treated in Muslim countries where they were forced to live under an apartheid system known as dhimmitude.

This is why it is so fruitless to discuss these things with you Rue. As I have pointed out a number of times, the dhimmi laws have not been enforced since the early 1800s, and yet you keep grabbing at this like some sort of comfort blanket as though you think that if you say it over and over often enough, it will becom etrue.

Jews were never offered a similar option to become citizens of Arab states after 1949 which makes the Arab League complete and absolute liars when they say they simply wanted to leave in peace with Jews and their only problem was a Jewish state not with Jews living in the Middle East. In fact between 1948 and 1949 the Muslim world expelled 900,000 Jews, seizing their property. 700,000 of these Jews had no choice but to move to Israel making the accommodation of other Arabs a moot point.

First of all, the numbers you quote are self-serving and compiled by Israel as a poker chip against the day when it will be held responsible for what id did to the Palestinian Arabs. Secondly, many Jews were not driven out, but chose to go and live in Israel. The discriminatory behaviour which directed at others was a direct result of what the Arabs saw going on in Palestine and was a tit-for-tat response by Arab society.

The Arab League not only deliberately created Arab refugees as a tool to keep fighting Israel, but it compounded the situation bt creating 900,000 Jewish refugees. If you read the speeches of Nasser and the Leaders of the Arab League you will see that they could have cared less about Palestinians. KIng Hussein of Jordan was in open civil war with them trying to prevent them from taking over Jordan. Speeches by all the Arab League members made it clear none of them would take in Palestinians. They deliberately left them homeless as a tool and a pawn to pressure the world into ending Israel.

An extraordinary bit of fact manipulation here. The Arab league did not create he Palestinian refugees. Israel did. Are you saying that Hussein should have just given up Jordan to th PLO? How about Ariel Sharon trying to drive the PLO out of Lebanon - he tried to talk Arafat into going back to Jordan because he (Sharon) wanted to destabilize Hussein. Even Arafat wasn't dumb enough to fall for that stunt.

The dialogue from the Arab League after 1949 called for the destruction of Israel not peaceful coexistence. Nasser's speeches, the speeches from the regimes in Iraq abd Syria, called for the murder of Jews world-wide and the complete detsruction of Israel. In 1963, the PLO was created and its 1964 congress called for the destruction of Israel and killing Jews world-wide until this was achieved.

Sort of like some of the things the Zionists were saying about the Palestinian Arabs, don't you think?

It was not Israel that caused the Arab refugee problem, nor Israel that obstructed its solution. Pretend all you want the Arab world were victimized by Israel but the fact is it was the decision of the Arab League to refuse citizenship of Palestinians and using them as a pawn to fight Israel, that caused the problem.

Wrong.

Nasser's open hatred of Palestinians as well as Jews and Israelis is there for anyone to read in his speeches. It is there in the speeches of then Defence MInister of Syria Assad and King Hussein. In fact when the PLO was formed, it split into numerous factions precisely because the majority of these factions were not interested in following Fatah and Arafat and creating a Palestinian nation. All they were interested in was destroying Israel. Most wanted to join with Syria. Syria controlled most of the splinter groups. Fatah the largest, run by Arafat was in fact never accepted by Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, or Tunisia and he was expelled from Lebanon, Tunisia, and Jordan precisely because they considered him as much of an enemy as Israel.

Amazing. Simply amazing.

What I would for once want the anti-Israeli revisionists to explain is why when they accuse Israel of misappropriating land they ignore the Jewish refugees from the Arab-Israeli conflict. Let me once hear Myata or Figleaf in their one sided comments, state that these Jews were in fact peaceful citizens and forced at gun-point to flee with nothing. Let me hear them once be honest and discuss how their property was stolen and never given back.

Well, Rue, it's funny that those Jews lived peacefully for so long in those countries and then all of a sudden, in 1949, attitudes towards them suddenyl changed. Why do you think that might have been?

This is the part of the story revisionists deliberately ignore and I am sick of the double standard from people who do not bother to take the time to acknowledge history and the fact that this was NOT a one sided conflict.

Actually, Rue, the ones you should be worried about are the ones who have taken the time, because it is not a pretty picture.

Finally let us get something straight. Palestinian refugees in Gaza were forced there in 1948 by Nasser and his Egyptian troops under order to shoot to kill if they tried to leave. Nasser ordered that they were not allowed Egyptian citizenship or passports. Arafat until he died wrote about what the Egyptians did in his biography and never forgave the Egyptians.

OK Rue. Let's say an economic disaster were to befall some country. Let's pick Mexico. Would you expect another country - say the US, to start handing out American passwports to everyone who started walking north? Good luck with that.

Finally it is absolute b.s. to argue as the revisionist anti-Israelis do, that those displaced by Israel now total over 5 million and have the right to return to Israel. Under international law , if you are born into a refugee population that has been resettled and living in exile YOU DO NOT HAVE legal status as refugees. The Arab League has created this noightmare by refusing to allow these people citizenship or in the alternative denouncing terrorism, accepting Israel's existence, and calling for a Palestinian state.

Again with the international law. That same law obliges Israel to honour the land registry Rue. Strike three.

As for evil Israel, it has 12 Arab Israeli representatives in the Israeli Parliament, Arab Israeli judges sitting on the Israeli courts and on the Israeli Supreme Court, and and many Arab Israelis have obtained Ph.D's and teach in Israeli colleges and universities. In the Arab world this does NOT exist in reverse.

Gee a whole twelve.

More to the point, instead of misrepresenting Jews as having misappropriated Arab property-let us be frank and honest- the vast majority of Palestinian property has been stolen by fellow Palestinians or Arabs

O brother.

myata · November 17, 2006

For once, I agree with Rue that the interests of original Jewish population in the lands should be taken into account. The question is how it was done.

If it can be proven that peaceful coexistence wasn't possible any longer in the certain parts of the region, separation would have been the only natural choice. BTW the above it means persistent state policies directed against the minority and not isolated incidents.

A fair approach to such separation, in my view would (have been):

1. Draw the area of conflict (in which peaceful coexistence wasn't any longer possible);

2. Estimate the fair land allocation based on the proportion of the original minority population. That would of course and obviously exclude massive immigration that has occurred during British rule of the region. By all laws and principles they should not have allowed significant change in the ethnic balance of the territories under their control.

3. Negotiate the territory and bouindaries to be given to the new states based on fair principles such as: size (as per 2.), areas of concentration of ethnic population; continuity; access to water and other resources;

4. Formalize separation by a formal treaty between all newly created states.

The above would have been a better and more sustainable approach. Especially, it would be much harder to promote the claims against Israel's right to exist if that right was formally declared and accepted in the treaty.

That however, as someone pointed out, has little to do with the reality. As many many other imperial decisions it has created long term problems which even the almighty may not know when will solve themselves. Just another illustration and reminder that decisions based on arrogance and superiority are probably wrong.

Higgly · November 17, 2006

The central issue is the land registry. Everything else is politics.

Rue · November 18, 2006

Well once again Higgly raises a subject he obviously does not understand, namely the Ottoman Registry system for land.

In fact the registry system Higgly refers to defined the soverign landowner to be the Sultan, similiar to us calling it crown lands in Canada. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan's tax and land agents enforced tax collection for rent of the land. In fact, The Land Registration Law of 1858, passed by the Turks was created to identify land so it could be taxed and to identify people so they could be forced into the Sultan's army.

As usual Higgly puts his foot in his mouth due to his ignorance of history because anyone who understands this law also understands that only a very small proportion of land transactions/titles were ever recorded, and they came about from old people, foreigners or rich people who avoided military service by paying rent on land.

The actual index of land owners or this great registry Higgly refers to never existed! Higgly hasn't a clue what he is talking about because if he did he would realize this is the last way you would want to prove Palestines owned land! It was completely inaccurate.

The way it really worked, was that if a person wanted to avoid paying taxes, i.e., say you owed 1000's of dollars (dunums)..you would under-report your actual amount of land to avoid paying the actual amount.

More to the point, people who did register land abused the process by using the names of dead people or fake names that were made up.

Because of this wide spread abuse, the elite upper class figured out how to dominate and control the registry. This elite upper class would then filed whole villages in their names, pass down title to the property to their families maintaining unfair ownership and control.

What Higgly has not a clue about is that the Beduin of Palestine lived in tents and roamed through-out the deserts as they still do today. They would not show up in any registry.

The Fellahheen, or closest things to farmer peasants or serfs, who did live in villages would have been the equivalent of freehold owners of the soil which they cultivated and their title or ownership would not have been fairly or properly registered, let alone registered at all.

The Belladeen, would have been the other category of people who livedin cities in what can best be described as freehold homes.

The fact is the land registry system Higgly has referred to was a legal joke and completely inaccurate and if anything was a corupted, inaccurate system that allowed a few rich people to corupt the system and keep the vast majority of people in servitude.

So to conclude Higgly is full of b.s. The registry he refers to could not prove what Palestinians really owned and from a legal point of view has no legal authority precisely because of its lack of accuracy. It is NOT considered binding under any international or domestic laws in Israel or Jordan.

Once again Higgly shoots off about something he knows nothing about.

I will finish my response in another post.

Figleaf · November 18, 2006

Flat wrong. Israel declared itself a state prior to UN recognition.

Wrong yerself.

The UN General Assembly approved the 1947 UN Partition Plan dividing the territory into two states, with the Jewish area consisting of roughly 55% of the land, and the Arab area roughly 45%. Jerusalem was planned to be an international region administered by the UN to avoid conflict over its status.
Immediately following the adoption of the Partition Plan by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, David Ben-Gurion tentatively accepted the partition, while the Arab League rejected it. The Arab Higher Committee immediately ordered a violent three-day strike on Jewish civilians, attacking buildings, shops, and neighborhoods, and prompting counter-attacks organized by underground Jewish militias like the Lehi and Irgun. These attacks soon turned into widespread fighting between Arabs and Jews, this civil war being the first "phase" of the 1948 War of Independence.

The State of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948, one day before the expiry of the Palestine Mandate.

Wrong YOURself. In two respects:

1) Resolution 181 was a General Assembly resolution which required Security Counsel ratification to give it the force of international law.

2) Even if Resolution 181 is taken as binding, it specified that the mandate would end on August 1, three months after Israel's unilateral declaration.

In fact, some believe that Israel jumped the gun specifically to avoid the possibility of China or another Permanent Member vetoing the resolution in the Security Council.

Rue · November 18, 2006

Not that anyone cares but if you really want to know accurately how land ownership came into Jewish hands all you have to do is go and read about it.

What you would find is that by the end of the 19th century, land really belonging to Arab peasants was being misappropriated to greedy Arab and Turkish landlords most of whom were absentee land-lords.

At this same time the Zionist movement would have started its activities of helping Jews return to Israel or what was then still called Palestine. Most history books guess that the population of Palestine at the end of the 19th century was around 500,00. Probably 80% would have been Muslim, 10% Christian, and 5 % Jewish .

Historic land records indicate that in 1882 Jewish land owners had 22,500 dunums of land out of the 26,323,000 dunums of land that was defined as Palestine, or .09% of the land.

By 1900, 50,000 Jews then lived in Palestine, concentrated in Jerusalem and Jaffa. In 1990, records show twenty-two Jewish settlements consisting of 218,000 dunums, or .8% of the land

Now keep in mind under Ottoman laws, they defined "miri" lands as the land which could be used for agricutlure.. Under this legal systrem to secure ownership to thismiri or farmland you would have to pessiss it, and work it for ten consecutive years.

If a farmer with this kind of claim to land didn't farm it for 3 consecutive years (unless it was because the farmer had been drafted into the army or was resting the land for fallow) the land would then be referred to as makhlul which ment the Sultan would take back possession of the land and then usually transfer the rights to a friend of the Sultan or in theory another farmer. This law was intended to pressure farmers into continually using their land and lot letting it go to waste because if it was not being used, it couldn't generate taxes.

It is this Ottaman legal system that then became corupted and saw large-landowning friends of the Sultan grab all the land at the expense of the peasants or fellaheen.

It was also during this time Jews started buying the land. They came into a world where rich Muslims were exploiting poor Muslims. Jews following the law bought their land legally from who-ever owned it.

Land records show that from the end of the 19th century to the year 1948, Jews LEGALLY purchased roughly 2 million of the 26 million dunams that made up Palestine outside Jordan.

Jordan which consisted of 85% of Palestine was simply seized by the British and turned into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The land the British seized after breaking the Belfour Declaration and their promise to the League of Nations, simply was taken by the King of Jordan who owned all of it and Jordan did not allow either Jews or Christians to own land.

Also keep in mind that prior to the Ottoman Empire, dhimmitude or apartheid was enforced by the Muslims who would not allow either Jews or Christians to own land.

What the Jews immigrating to Palestine did was make sure they purchased land that was cultivable. In fact most of Palestine was a big swamp full of malaria and mosquitoes and abandoned. Jews farmed the land. Of course many of the Arab farmers were not even farmers but goat herders. Goat herders drift and the goats eat anything they can get their mouths on leaving the land barren.

The land records show that Jewish land acquisition was focused in the valley and coastal regions between 1920 to 1936. Land was also purchased in the Galilee and in a small area between Beersheba and Gaza.

In 1948, Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip (320,000 dunams) and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan illegally seized the West Bank/Judea-Samaria (6 million dunams) with Britain's full approval.

Up to 1939, the records show that 75% of the land bought by Jews and probably even more, was done by private individuals or companies and not contraray to the myths spread to this day, purchased by not insthe Jewish Agency or any zionist agencues.

Whay you should also know and someone should tell Higgly if he actually cares, is that these land transfers were NEVER recorded in sub-district land registry offices, from official registered transfers by their Arab vendors.

Between 1932 and 1948, at least 65% of the land by Jews in Palestine, all done legally, was purchased from resident Palestinian Arabs and NOT from the corupt absentee landlords who would have lived in Beirut, Cairo, Damascus or Alexandria.

What happened was that rich corupt absentee landlords exploited the masses. Jews came into this environment and bought land from people who needed the money.

Then what happens is people who do not understand the history of the purchase of the land, revise history through their ignorance and simplify it as simply Jews stealing land from Palestinians.

On May 1948, when Israel became a foreign nation, Jewish land ownership would rise from 8% of Palestine to 79%, simply because of a cruel act of history by the Arab League which Higgly and Fig Leaf can pretend does not exist but the rest of the world now knows as history.

When the Arab League told Arabs in Israel in 1948 to leave, they stated there would be a short war, and when they returned all Jews would be killed or thrown out of Israel and all Jewish land would be given to Arabs.

This of course did not happen and the Arabs who left now found themselves homeless. It is a fact that the vast majority of Arabs who left never spoke to Jews or were involved in any kind of violence. They left as a result of false rumours planted by their fellow Arabs many of whom were looking to steal the land once the Jews were thrown out, hoping to take advantage of the confusion.

The rest is history. Israel offered in 1948 to give back the land to the Arabs who left but it is a legal and historic fact that the Arab League told Israel to stuff it forcing Israel to war.

By the time the war was over, the Arab League nations then decided to expel 900,000 Jews from the Muslim world and seize their property illegally forcing 200,000 of them to move homeless to the US and Europe while the remaining 700,000 fled to Israel penniless. They had to be housed somewhere.

The State of Israel's 1949 borders came about through war and under international law this is called de facto borders.

What then happened was that in 1950, Israel past a law called the Law of Absentees’ Property. Under this law, the rights to all real and personal property of Arabs who left Israel were given to Israelis, who of course would either be those 700,000 refugees from the Muslim world, or survivors of the holocaust.

It is this law that in fact causes many to say it was unfair to Arabs outside Israel and it probably was but you must also keep in mind before this land was seized, the Arabs who left were offered the land back but refused it thinking it would be unthinkable going back to a country of Jews who they considered the enemy.

The Arabs that did choose to return or remain in Israel were given FULL land ownership.

This leads me back to my original hypothesis which Higgly was not able to debate and could only revert to name calling and that is- that historically this series of events was both unfair to Arabs who felt they could not return to Israel once it became a Jewish nation, and Jews who had their property stolen by Muslim countries and found themselves expelled without passports and no place to go but Israel although some did follow relatives in Europe and the U.S. (Canada did not allow Jews in as refugees or immigrantsin the 40's as McKenzie King was an open anti-semite who compared Jews to vermin)

For those of us who appreciate the cruelty of history we realize in this case it dispossessed two sets of people.

To this day some prefer to revise history and make idiot comments when it is pointed out to them it is not one sided or feign ignorance as to the role Britain and the Arab League played in this fiasco.

While I debate Myata and Blackdog on this, I agree with them both that, it is pointless trying to revise the past.

The obvious practical reality is that a homeland out of the Gaza and West Bank needs to be created for Palestinians and the Arab League which has used Palestinians as pawns for the last 60 years and turned their backs on the Palestinians should be the first to fund this nation.

The millions in aid that could have gone to the building of this nation but was stolen by the PLO's corupt officials should be confiscated from its Swiss and French bank accounts.

The French who looked the other way while billions of aid were funnelled into their banks by the PLO should return it to the Palestinian Authority to use it to build its nation.

An economic free trade zone between Jordan, Israel and Palestine needs to be created.

The solution is to let Palestinians go back to work in the West Bank, Israel and in Jordan.

Right now Jordan does not allow Palestinians in to work. As a result of Hamas and the terrorist activities of 30 other splinter organizations, military security makes it impossible for Israel to assist Palestinians work in Israel and until Hamas and these splinter terrorist groups put down their guns no peace can come about.

The problem is Hamas and Fatah and the many other splinter groups live in the Past. They still believe they can seize all of Israel and throw out all the Israelis.

In the interim, millions of Palestinians who know terrorism gets them nothing, sit and rot in unemployment, many either leaving for the US, Canada or Europe or turning to smuggling guns or drugs the only two kinds of employment left to them.

Higgly · November 18, 2006

Well once again Higgly raises a subject he obviously does not understand, namely the Ottoman Registry system for land.
In fact the registry system Higgly refers to defined the soverign landowner to be the Sultan, similiar to us calling it crown lands in Canada. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan's tax and land agents enforced tax collection for rent of the land. In fact, The Land Registration Law of 1858, passed by the Turks was created to identify land so it could be taxed and to identify people so they could be forced into the Sultan's army.

Come, come Rue. Can we not all have our lands expropriated for the greater good? Wasn't the Sultan's land registry a de facto statement of ownership? Why else would his subjects submit to it?

And didn't the British re-write land deeds based on the Turkish registry?

Admit defeat Rue. Israel is built on stolen land.

Figleaf · November 19, 2006

The State of Israel's 1949 borders came about through war and under international law this is called de facto borders.

I wonder what you are thinking to convey with this 'de facto' stuff. It simply means 'of fact' as contrasted against 'of law'. In other words "de facto" means 'outside the law'.

This can't be unexpected, since as we all know, conquest is illegal under modern international law.

Rue · November 19, 2006

Well once again Higgly raises a subject he obviously does not understand, namely the Ottoman Registry system for land.

In fact the registry system Higgly refers to defined the soverign landowner to be the Sultan, similiar to us calling it crown lands in Canada. In the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan's tax and land agents enforced tax collection for rent of the land. In fact, The Land Registration Law of 1858, passed by the Turks was created to identify land so it could be taxed and to identify people so they could be forced into the Sultan's army.

Come, come Rue. Can we not all have our lands expropriated for the greater good? Wasn't the Sultan's land registry a de facto statement of ownership? Why else would his subjects submit to it?

And didn't the British re-write land deeds based on the Turkish registry?

Admit defeat Rue. Israel is built on stolen land.

There you go again Higgly. I actually take the time to try explain something to you and you completely ignore it and then make a comment without any legal basis, i.e., that Israel stole land.

As explained Israel bought land legally. Then as a result of the Arab League invading Israel to wipe it out, the Arab League decision to try force a one sided unilateral extermination of Jews, back-fired.

The reason Israel ended up as it is today, ironically is precisely because the Arab League's decision to unilaterally invade, back-fired on it. You can try ignore historyand engage in b.s. Higgly but you have been called on it. The next time you try use a corupted inaccurate registry to suggest a legal basis for ownership smarten up and read about what it is you are passing off as a legal precedent.

As for your comment that the British re-wrote land deeds based on Turkish registry, they did a lot of illegal things Higgly that are not recognized by international or domestic law. If you care to read how the British corupted the registry and used it to protect and consolidate power for its puppets read and educate yourself.

The point Higgly which seems to fly over that head of yours is that the registry you claimed was the legal basis to prove Israel stole land, does not and can not and when this was clearly explained to you, you as usual play the fool.

Rue · November 19, 2006

The State of Israel's 1949 borders came about through war and under international law this is called de facto borders.

I wonder what you are thinking to convey with this 'de facto' stuff. It simply means 'of fact' as contrasted against 'of law'. In other words "de facto" means 'outside the law'.

This can't be unexpected, since as we all know, conquest is illegal under modern international law.

With due respect Figleaf this as you call it "de facto stuff" is not what you stated it means nor is your comment that conquest is illegal under modern international law. I will be pleased to explain why that is not so legally in a second response.

In this response FigLeaf I want to challenge you to do something Higgly will not do, and that is to

look back at what you keep repeating and take me up and go find out if what I am telling you in my past posts on the origins of Israel or what I am about to explain to you now is not true. Also please read what I write because at no time have I ever denied Palestinians have a right to a country or land nor have I presented what I have said in a manner that is against Palestinians.

What I have tried to explain to you Figleaf is that the origins of modern day Israel came about as a result of twists and turns in history that are as a result of many questionable developments.

It is an historic fact Fig Leaf that in a 1917 letter from British foreign secretary Lord Balfour, written to Lord Rothschild, the British government stated that they were commited to the creation of a a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is a fact not fiction.

History now shows that while Lord Balfour indicated Britains committment to startingn a Jewish state fortunately, the British government ALSO at the same time was promising Arabs their "freedom" from Turkeythen called the Ottoman Empire, if the Arabs helped the British defeat the Turks in World War One.

The Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East, i.e., what we today call Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, as well as a large chunk of today's Saudi Arabia as well as North Africa.

While the British told Jews one thing, they also told the Arabs that they would limit Jewish settlement in Palestine. History shows barely 6 weeks after Lord Belfour wrote to Rothchild and stated the British supported a Jewish state they were making all kinds of promises to Arabs.

This is not the first time the British played games and manipulated people for its own needs. That is what the British and French did. They would play tribes and ethnic groups off of one another.

After the first world war ended, it is a fact that the League of Nations "assigned" Palestine or the area we now call Israel to the United Kingdom as what was called a "mandated" territory. The Palestinian Mandate initially included the lands that are now Israel and Jordan as I stated and you can find that out for yourself if you take the time to read about the mandate rather then ask me to prove it. It is there in the mandate.

If you take the time to read what the League of Nations mandated as Palestine you will see it included all of what is Israel and Jordan and then what happened was that Britain on its own, contrary to and in direct contradiction of its promise to fullfill that mandate, on its own, unilaterally, ignored the mandate, ignored what it promised to do, and simply seized thel land East of the Jordan Riverand created Transjordan.

Your friend Higgly is absolutely and utterly wrong when he says Israel stole land. The fact is if anyone stole land, it was the British. They told the League of Nations they would administer Palestine for the League, then broke their promise and took 85% of that land and created a country called Jordan.

Ironically, you and Higgly completely ignore this to the point where you ask for proof of it. The proof is called Jordan Figleaf. It still exists. Where do you think it came from and how do you think it came about?

The document creating the Palestinian mandate that the British completely breached, incorporated the terms of the Balfour Declaration, and in fact promised the creation of Jewish and Arab countries within Palestine.

History shows many Arab leaders were initially willing to give Palestine to the Jews if the rest of the Arab lands in the Middle East would be placed under Arab control.

It is also a fact that of course the Arabs living in Palestine were of course opposed to Jewish immigration into the territory and the idea of a Jewish homeland. To them this idea that Jews were coming back from Europe was ridiculous. In Muslim culture of dhimmitude, Jews were not considered able to own land or considered on the same level of legal standing as Muslims. The notion that Jews would own land, let alone

run their own country in a Muslim world would be seen as a travesty. In dhimmitude, Islam and the state are not seperated and only Muslims could enjoy the right to own land..at best a Jew or Christian could rent the land.

Surely you have seen the movie Laurence of Arabia. That should give you a good idea of where Arab nationalism arose from. The British created it to fight the Turks.

It was at the same time Arab nationalism was incited by the British, in the 1900's that Palestinian nationality also started to take shape just as the Jewish national movement took shape. The only religion in the Middle East without national aspirations were the Christians because they were already the primary influence in hundreds of countries including Britain and France.

Surely you understand there were a never ending series of riots in Palestine, and the British after World War One and then heading into World War Two had lost control of the situation pretty much like the US in Iraq today and just like Iraw today is caught in a civil war between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, Palestine was

caught up between Jews and Arabs, but ironically, 85% of Palestine was already seized by the British and given to the Arabs to start TransJordan and what was left, the remaining 15% which is the 1949-1967 Israel,

was actually only a small portion of what was supposed to have been divided in the first place. So when your friend Higgly says the Jews stole the land, he is completely wrong not only legally but historically since the League of Nations mandated what and how the land should be divided.

As Hitler became a major source of concern to Britain, in 1937, the British recommended partition of the territory. The partition as you should know would have consisted of two small enclaves, one Muslim and one Jewish. Had the Arab League simply recognized this partition, Israel would have been a tiny nation but the notion of any Jewish country or enclave was completely rejected.

Then the Nazis add to the mix because the holocaust they would create and could not have been implemented without the assistance of millions of Christians in many nations, left Jews after World War Two with a bloody and desperate need for a Jewish homeland. Yes the Arab world did not feel it should be responsible for these Jews displaced from Europe, but that is history. Once the holocaust happened, it was a fait accompli and Jews of course would return where they originally came from.

Its all ironic Figleaf because ifJews who had tried to escapoeNazi Germany were NOT turned back from every European country and the United States, Canada Britain, thousands would not have been forced back to Germany to die along with the other Jews totalling 6 million.

The British as you are well aware after World War Two did not want any Jews going to Palestine and yet like all of the nations of Europe had ZERO suggestion as to what to do with the homeless, countryless Jews. Jews could not return to France, Belgium, Holland, Eastern Europe, etc., because all their property had been stolen, and all their relatives wiped out and their houses of worship burned down.

Not only that, no country was offering any restitution or replacement of these Jews. The Catholic Church and all the Christian Churches were completely silent as to the plight of the Jews. So you can cry over spilled milk but the fact is Europe allowed a holocaust to come about as a culmination of 4,000 years of killing and persecuting Jews, and then it merely added to the problem refusing to take in Jews after the second war.

To this day, stolen money from Jews remains in Swiss Bank accounts while legal actions to try regain this stolen money continue.

Read your history Figleaf. In 1947, the British threw their hands up and gave back the problem of Palestine to the newly-founded United Nations, which developed a partition plan dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab portions. That plan was ratified in November, 1947, Figleaf. Just go read up and look up the date will you instead of denying it.

This plan or mandate in fact expired on May 14, 1948 and that is when the British troops pulled out of Palestine for good.

This is when the Jews of Palestine then declared the creation of the State of Israel, which was recognized by the United States and Russia. The declaration of the State was done completely legally, pursuant to the UN mandate and pursuant to the UN's declaration, not before. Read your time lines.

What you are mixing up is that the Arab League of Nations then refused to recognize the validity of Israel and invaded. They challenged the right of the United Nations and argued that as a result of the mandate ending they felt they could unilaterally impose legal authority over ALL of Palestine.

This is why there was in fact a year-long war that culminated in the 1949 borders of Israel and what you call "defacto stuff". By initiating war to seize all of Palestine, under international law, Israel had the right to defend itself and now occupy land to protect itself from being killed by the invading Arab nations.

That is the legal irony. Had the Arab League said, fine, keep your little enclave, Israel would have never ended up with the land it had. Because the Arab League decided to go all for nothing and gambled that it could easily push out and kill the Jews, it lost.

The 1949 norders of Israel were legally obtained through war something I will explain in another post since you do not understand international law.

So stop trying to hem and haw and ignore history.

The fact is 1949 Israel came about because the Arab League gambled and lost. It is that simple even if you and Higgly will not accept history.

Figleaf · November 20, 2006

The State of Israel's 1949 borders came about through war and under international law this is called de facto borders.

I wonder what you are thinking to convey with this 'de facto' stuff. It simply means 'of fact' as contrasted against 'of law'. In other words "de facto" means 'outside the law'.

This can't be unexpected, since as we all know, conquest is illegal under modern international law.

With due respect Figleaf this as you call it "de facto stuff" is not what you stated it means nor is your comment that conquest is illegal under modern international law.

Well, Rue, until/unless you can show different, I think I'll just stick with the facts.

...FigLeaf I want to challenge you to do something Higgly will not do, and that is to
look back at what you keep repeating and take me up and go find out if what I am telling you in my past posts on the origins of Israel or what I am about to explain to you now is not true.

Sorry, Rue but I don't even understand how your challenge here differs from what I already do.

Also please read what I write because at no time have I ever denied Palestinians have a right to a country or land nor have I presented what I have said in a manner that is against Palestinians.

I am happy to acknowledge that you're not a total extremist. But still, many of your comments seem to not apply to the essential relevant facts and appeal to chauvinistic Israeli positions. For example, your reference to 'historical claims' is irrelevant to modern international law, and so, when your raise that point, one must wonder what you think it's supposed to show.

What I have tried to explain to you Figleaf is that the origins of modern day Israel came about as a result of twists and turns in history that are as a result of many questionable developments.

Entirely true. But there are core facts which no interpretation will change, two in particular -- (1) Israel was created against the interest and wishes of the bulk of people in the affected territory. (2) Israel is holding territory against the rights and interests of the Palestinians.

It is an historic fact Fig Leaf that in a 1917 letter from British foreign secretary Lord Balfour, written to Lord Rothschild, the British government stated that they were commited to the creation of a a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration is a fact not fiction.

I'm unaware of having disputed that. The remainder of your post is a recitation of historical points (some disputed) which, in themselves, don't add up to anything. What do you suggest I should take from your comments on the Balfour declaration.

Your friend Higgly is absolutely and utterly wrong when he says Israel stole land.

Israel decidedly did 'steal' land from the Paletinian refugees who fled in 1948. The state of Israel is arguably created on 'stolen' land, though it is open to interpretation as to who stole it. Israel's settlements on occupied land post 1967 are also unquestionably illegal.

Ironically, you and Higgly completely ignore this to the point where you ask for proof of it. The proof is called Jordan Figleaf. It still exists. Where do you think it came from and how do you think it came about?

I have no idea what you think the existence of Jordan is supposed to tell me about the rights and wrongs of Israel.

Rue · November 20, 2006

Under international law a state can be reognized one of two ways; de facto or de jure.

Obviously Figleaf found what I was saying too confusing so I can explain it in EASY TO UNDERSTAND words.

De facto recognition is when something exists because of facts, de jure, is when it is recognized legally.

Whay Higgly and Figleaf are either ignorant of or just do not want to adsmit is that on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a Resolution for the establishment of an independent Jewish State in Palestine, and in its resolution called on the inhabitants of the country, " to take such steps as may be necessary on their part to put the plan into effect."

The declaration went on to state, " This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their independent State may not be revoked. It is, moreover, the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own sovereign State. "

What then happened was on May 14, 1948 at 11.59 p.m., when the British Mandate in Palestine ended, pursuant to this declaration, Israel legally declared itself a strate pursuant to the Nov. 20, 1947 declaration at 12.00 a.m. on May 15, 1948. There was NOTHING illegal and NO LAND WAS STOLEN as Higgly deliberately misrepresented as having happened.

When Israel declared itself a sovereign state, it did NOT steal or take ANY land by theft or crime and for Higgly to suggest this is absolute b.s.

In fact on May 15, 1948,The United States recognized the provisional Jewish government as what is called de facto authority of the Jewish state within minutes.

The Soviet Union then granted nto de facto but de jure (legal) recognition almost immediately in 1948 along with seven other states within the next five days (Guatemala, Byelorussia, the Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia).

It is a fact that after League of Nations ened in April 1946, s a specific UN resolution was passed to preserved the rights of Jewish people in Palestine (and in Jerusalem particularly).

The United Nations, as the succesor to the League of Nations, adopted Article 80 of the UN Charter.

Article 80 stated the United Nations forbid any actions taken to try "to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples (emphasis added) or the terms of existing international instruments" at the time of the UN's creation."

So under international law, this Article guaranteed that the original British Mandate granted by the League of Nations, including its committments to a homeland for the Jewish people, continued and was transferred into international law at the United Nations.

Israel simply declared itself a nation which it was allowed to do pursuant to the UN declaration. It was the Arab League that then said, it would ignore international law, and try take over all of Palestine using unilateral military force to seize all of Palestine (namely the land other then TransJordan already illegally seized by the British and turned into a seperate Arab nation which technically already violated the Leage of Nations mandate and fueled and incited the Arab League into believing the British sided with them).

Israel's 1949 border came about from a war. Under international law, it can and it did create de facto borders based on self-defense, something Figleaf seems oblivious to.

When you defend yourself legally, you are allowed to do what is necessary to protect yourself.

Had the Arab League not attacked, Israel would not have taken over the land it did.

After the 1948-49 war, Israel attempted to return the land it won in war, and the Arab League refused it and then exasperated matters by then deciding to throw out 900,000 Jews from its countries and stealing all their property forcing these Jews to head to Israel and now having to live somewhere.

In 1950, faced with all these Jews, and the reality that Arabs who left Israel were not returning, Israel then took the land within 1949 Israel and redistributed it to the new Israelis.

So technically you had Arab countries stealing property from Jews and Jews then taking over land Arabs had abandon.

The land Israel ended up with, had far less value then the property seized by the Arab nations after throwing the 900,000 Jews out.

So when Higgly talks about Israel stealing land, he is dead wrong. They did not steal it. They first won it in war started by the Arab League and then took it as a practical response because it had no other choice, onlu after the 900,000 were thrown out and 700,000 ended up in Israel.

So for Higgly to tell me to pretend this did not happen and selectively ignore history and try depict this as a one sided event is b.s.

It is also a fact that Israel's first eneral elections were held on January 25, 1949: and this is when the provisional State Council was legally replaced by elected Parliament (Knesset) and the Provisional Government was then legally replaed by a regular parliamentary Government.

Once this happened, de jure or legal recognition by the United States as opposed to simply de facto recognition was then implemented on January 31, 1949, once the permanent government was sworn in.

It is also a fact that it was on January 29, 1949, Britain, then recognized the state of Israel.

It is also a fact that in the fall of 1948, Israel applied for membership in the United Nations but failed to win the necessary majority in the Security Council and had to wait until February 1949, to renew its application for membership in the United Nations and Israel was admitted on May 11, 1949.

It is a fact during the period of January 1, 1949 to May 11. 1949, 32 States moved to recognize Israel, on top of 20 that had already granted recognition before December 31, 1948.

To try revise history and pretend none of this happened is idiocy.

To say Israel was created illegally from stolen property is absolute crap.

I stand by all my posts and challenge Higgly and Figleaf instead of playing the fools to take one ounce of historic information I have indicated and prove it is wrong.

All I have done is go back and read the Belfour Declaration, the United Nations Articles I referred to, and

read the historic records anyone can read.

I also insist Higgly specify what land was stolen. What Higgly has done are what a lot of intellectually dishonest people do. Because they feel they side with Palestinians and feel Israel should not exist, they then simply state that since Israel should not exist, anything it has is illegal. That is absolute intellectual dishonesty and fabrication. The fact that they feel Palestine should only be for Palestinians does not change history no matter how many times they repeat the same 3 misrepresentations over and over.

It is also ironic that what the Arab League now talks about as a peace solution, and represents as land for peace, is simply recognizing the 1949 Israel borders in return for a state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Duh it only took them how many years to accept reality?

All that is holding things up are one thing and one thing only-the coming about of Arab terrorism-an evolution of history that can not simply be blamed on the exsistence of Israel but has roots in Palestinian nationalism that was reignited by Nazis who left Germany after World War Two and dominated Syrian and Egyptian secret police forces and political systems through-out the 1950's culminating in the creation of the PLO in 1963 by Nasser's secret political police as an attempt not only to eradicate Israel but Jordan as well.

Ironically the same Muslim extremists Egypt and Syria created now threaten to topple both countries current regimes.

For anyone who points out that Israel is responsible for the creation of Hamas in the past to destabalize the PLO (which is true) they should also keep in mind how many groups supported by Egypt and Syria and Lebanon and Iraq, etc., have also come back to haunt them.

In the Middle East the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears to be the only one but it is not and never was.

The small powerful elites who control property in all the corupted Muslim countries and keep their countries wealth tied up in so very few hands, create the very economic climate causing terrorism. The terrorists are as much a creation of Arab v.s. Arab exploitation as anything Fig or Higgly would like to blame on Israel.

One only need look at Pakistan to see one example of how Muslim countries exist as regimes where a few wealthy families own it all. The same is repeated in Tunisia, Morrocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, on and on. The seizure of property and monopoly of property in these countries preventing the typical Muslim from working and living are not the result of Israel's existence.