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An intriguing quote
The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single one – Eric Hoffer
Offered without comment.
Published in General
As a religious Jew I am happy to be held to a higher standard than Non-Jews. God does & therefore we see it manifest in the world.
However, the State of Israel should be held to the same standards that all other nations are.
Pretty sure you can’t be a second, third, fourth generation refugee
I think you can when the host country doesn’t want you there and finds it advantageous use you as a means to generate political clout (at the UN, for example).
Maybe Israelis should take it as a compliment. Out of all those countries, Israel is the only one that is governed so well that the “refugees” actually want to “go back”.
;-)
On might wager that there’s a non-zero amount of chatter about it when long-term strategy is discussed in the back rooms of the Great Hall Of The People.
Good quote. Thank you Miz Barkha.
The original article, reprinted
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/113618/israels-peculiar-position-eric-hoffer
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I think he missed the point that people don’t accept being occupied or colonised. India was colonised in some places for four hundred years before Independence, but Indians didn’t accept it in the long run. Neither did Algerians. Why would Palestinians?
Who has colonized Gaza?
Arguably there are no overt Israel boots on the ground in Gaza (any more) but Israel does control (directly or by proxy) who enters Gaza, who leaves Gaza, who flies over Gaza, how far into the Mediterranean Gazans can fish and even the population register for the territory – which looks a lot like occupation. (How is this different from the rest of Palestine? I don’t know, seems similar. And in fact Gaza is a part of Palestine, not something separate.)
Perhaps one consideration left out of your question…the organized “Palestinians” in their written organizational documents, declare their intention of eliminating Israel and its Jewish people. Why would the Israeli’s allow Statehood to the Palestinians? Most people don’t accept their own genocide either.
I think, in order to claim they were there first, the Palestinians would have to rename themselves Canaanites. Just sayin’.
I suspect most Israelis would accept statehood for Palestinians… as long as that state is not Israel. However, I think that is, de facto, the only condition under which Palestinians will accept it (even if they merely call it “right of return”).
I can’t believe you are defending the Palestinians in Gaza. They are a barbaric people who have been in an undeclared state of war by firing tens of thousands of rockets into Israel consistently for the last 18 years. And this in response to letting them have their own territory. It is no wonder that Israel tries to control the space around this malignant territory. There is not a single country in the World that would put up with an eighteen-year barrage of rocket fire without going in and destroying the place.
I don’t have a lot a background on the topic, but here is my current thinking on the two-state topic. Please correct me if I am wrong-headed. After WWI, a chunk of land was given to the Jewish and Palestinian people. For 100 years, the Jewish folks were willing to accept a two-state solution, while the Palestinian folks were holding out for a “river-to-the-sea” single state (no Israel). After 100 years of a failing to work things out, it is time to scrap the old effort and go with Israel from “river-to-the-sea” and let any Palestinians go to Jordan or wherever. It is only 4M people. If Jordan won’t take them, send them to the USA where we have open borders anyway.
Not so sure @henryracette. I suspect, as time and intransigence continue, there are fewer and fewer Israelis willing to accept Palestinian statehood at all…at least yet another Palestinian state. However, I should not be surprised by the ability of Jews to act against their own best interests.
Ouch! You were doing great @dong, until that very last sentence.
I took it as dark humor.
That looks like a pretty good reading of the situation as I see it. To add to that, no Arab State is willing to take in Palestinians. They don’t even let them travel freely between the different Arab Countries like all other Arabs are allowed to do. The Press never mentions this because it would reveal that the other Arab Countries really do not like the Palestinians.
Second generation kids of refugees born in another Nation are not designated as refugees by the UN or any organization other than Palestinians. Palestinians are the only one where you can be a third or fourth generation born in another land and still be called a refugee. Secondly since when is a refugee somebody who voluntarily decides to leave a nation because a war is about to happen and you don’t want to be caught in the middle. You actually have to leave after the war starts and because you are suffering serious consequences where you’re living because of the violence from the war.
Lastly the refuges family and friends who decided not to leave. Them their kids and grandkids are all Israelis and have full voting rights and and serving the military.
Here you go:
https://ifamericaknew.org/history/
There was no such thing as a Palestinian before 1964. It’s a label that’s nothing more than a propaganda ploy by those who hate Jews. It’s clever because if you acknowledge a Palestinian identity, then you are acknowledging that there must a place called Palestine, which never existed unless you define it as the British Mandate for Palestine, which includes all of Israel and Jordan.
The Palestinian narrative is a fraud from beginning to end.
q=british+mandate+for+palestine&rlz=2C5CHFA_enUS0538US0540&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=mtPHtfLQihskrM%253A%252Cg2KK-9D_WuaCgM%252C%252Fm%252F0j3g2_g&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kQmC00ctcK64eC8sD33o_i0sXLZ9Q&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwij_PLog8vhAhVHoZ4KHQeJD70Q_B0wH3oECAoQEA#imgrc=4pn1i_F3jippTM:&vet=1
You are right about the Palestinians being the only people on Earth who get to have their descendants qualify as refugees. The U.N. and others claim that there are something like 7 million Palestinian refugees because they simply count any Palestinians born after 1948. The real number of actual Arabs who left Israel in 1948 and are still alive today is around 30,000.
https://unitedwithisrael.org/classified-us-report-palestinian-refugees-number-only-30000/
http://www.thetower.org/article/the-real-palestinian-refugee-crisis/
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
I almost noted that earlier, but for the purposes of keeping things simple, I am referring to them as Palestinians. You, being an Israeli, are of course completely correct! Jews in Israel used to be called Palestinians before the Arabs decided to take the name in the 1960’s. And nobody on the Left has chastised them for cultural appropriation!
Well, IIRC, “Palestinian” is a derivation of “Philistine,” which I wouldn’t think would sit favorably with most Jews anyway.
Don’t laugh, y’all. This is accepted as factual history by a significant slice of humanity. If you’ve not encountered this kind of thing before, spend an hour or two with it. The divide between world views is so deep that some people seem to think all we have to do is have a discussion and be tolerant, and others think all we need to do is point out what’s manifest in reality. Both sides talk past each other because neither can recognize how far away the left really is.
That said, this kind of thing does make it hard to keep up the pretense that right and left are ends of a spectrum, doesn’t it?
[I edited the linked URL in the quoted comment.]
Thanks, Barfly! I originally tried the link and it led nowhere. I had no idea what an absurd article it would be.
In explaining the 20th Century conflicts it says that “Eventually, fighting broke out, with escalating waves of violence.” It completely overlooks the fact that the Arabs started the massacres of Jews in the early 1920’s and it was nearly 20 years before the Jews got the gumption to fight back.
It mentions that the tension was caused by more and more Zionists immigrating without telling the reader that the British actually let many more Arabs into the territory than Jews.
Then it makes a couple of silly points about of the ratio of forces fighting and where the battles were fought in the 1948 war, as if that has any significance at all on the justness of the cause.
The author has the audacity to claim that Israel is “trying to maintain an ethnically preferential state…”
Israel is one of the most racially and ethnically diverse countries in the World. It is in fact the Palestinian territories that maintain an ethnically pure population, allowing absolutely no Jews. And the lies just go on and on and on……
As a classical liberal. I think that everybody should be held to the same standard. Israel should be decent to Muslims and Christians like how Muslim countries should be decent to Christians and Jews.
It would be racist to judge Muslim countries in a different way than Israel.
Can you please provide a link that says that different Arab countries do not allow migrations between them. I know that Arab countries treat Palestinians terribly but do Arab countries let free travel between them? If so, why don’t Syrian Arabs flee to Arab countries.
Building Palestinian state capacity was part of the Oslo Accords. The problem is that Palestinians don’t want any part of a two state solution; this is why the PA failed and why Hamas exists.
The problem has always been that Palestinian leaders are too weak to credibly make a peace deal work. Palestinians complain they are occupied but sabotage building the capacity they need to run their own state.