With all the ongoing controversy going on between the jews and the palestinians, who do you think the land belongs to?
Jews
Palestinians
I just can't see this thread ending well.





^^^I agree. And I have no answer to the question. That should've been an option.
LOl, I wss surprised to see that no one else voted. I agree though that this could end badly.




If I was Israel, I'd let Sophia inside me.
People are not ruled by their memories.
question....why dont they just make it a united holy land? like, make it its own country?
or is that what they are fighting over anyways?
meh, so long as theres religion,there will be wars![]()
Israel belongs to god. he lets his people (the jews) live there.





a good time for some historical excavation ...
(snip)"The Balfour Declaration promises a Jewish Homeland in Palestine.
"The Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917 by the British Government...was made a) by a European power, b) about a non-European territory, c) in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory...[As Balfour himself wrote in 1919], 'The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant (the Anglo French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of the former Ottoman colonies that as a reward for supporting the Allies they could have their independence) is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country...The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land,'" Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine."
Wasn't Palestine a wasteland before the Jews started immigrating there?
"Britain's high commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor, recommended total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchase to protect Arab agriculture. He said 'all cultivable land was occupied; that no cultivable land now in possession of the indigenous population could be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators'...The Colonial Office rejected the recommendation." John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Were the early Zionists planning on living side by side with Arabs?
In 1919, the American King-Crane Commission spent six weeks in Syria and Palestine, interviewing delegations and reading petitions. Their report stated, "The commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor...The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase...
"If [the] principle [of self-determination] is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine's population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine - nearly nine-tenths of the whole - are emphatically against the entire Zionist program.. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted...No British officers, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program...The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a 'right' to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered." Quoted in "The Israel-Arab Reader" ed. Laquer and Rubin."(snip)
(snip)" Gandhi on the Palestine conflict - 1938
"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French...What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct...If they [the Jews] must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs... As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds." Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in "A Land of Two Peoples" ed. Mendes-Flohr.
Didn't the Zionists legally buy much of the land before Israel was established?
"In 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine...After 1940, when the mandatory authority restricted Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside Palestine, there continued to be illegal buying (and selling) within the 65 percent of the total area restricted to Arabs.
Thus when the partition plan was announced in 1947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was incorporated as a fait accompli inside the borders of the Jewish state. And after Israel announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws legally assimilated huge tracts of Arab land (whose proprietors had become refugees, and were pronounced 'absentee landlords' in order to expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any circumstances)." Edward Said, "The Question of Palestine."
Why did the UN recommend the plan partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state?
"By this time [November 1947] the United States had emerged as the most aggressive proponent of partition...The United States got the General Assembly to delay a vote 'to gain time to bring certain Latin American republics into line with its own views.'...Some delegates charged U.S. officials with 'diplomatic intimidation.' Without 'terrific pressure' from the United States on 'governments which cannot afford to risk American reprisals,' said an anonymous editorial writer, the resolution 'would never have passed.'" John Quigley, "Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice."
Why was this Truman's position?
"I am sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents." President Harry Truman, quoted in "Anti Zionism", ed. by Teikener, Abed-Rabbo & Mezvinsky."(snip)
from
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Last edited by Melonie; 11-27-2007 at 10:20 PM.





That's why we are the "chosen" people.
Israelis are allowed freedom of religion. Arabs are denied no rights by the Israeli government, despite the majority being Jewish.
What is it really? A big ol' mess. I don't have much faith that a resolution will ever come to pass, but hopefully the violence will subside.
Because there ain't no tits on the radio










^^^ my only reason for referencing that website was that they had conveniently collated all of the pertinent quotes and actual literary / historical sources on a single page. The fact that a website is not objective does not mean that cited information isn't accurate. Of course you are welcome to go directly to the sources ... with a major one being
There are other ethnicities and religions living in Israel. Certainly they are the minority, but they live there. I won't vote on this topic.
"Have you ever been to American wedding? Where is the vodka, where's marinated herring?" - GB
"And do the cats give a shit? No, they do not. Why? Because they're cats."-from The Onion
Originally Posted by Mia M





^^^ again, going back to historical documentation, as assessed by the King-Crane commission in 1919, Arabs constituted 90% of the population of Palestine at that time. As of last year, Arabs constituted somewhere around 20% of the population of Israel. Thus some would make the case that any discussion of majorities and minorities within Israel must be tempered by the following history ...
(snip)"The 1948 Expulsion and Flight
The 1948 expulsion and flight of Palestinians were, by proportion of the population affected, among the largest forced migrations in modern Middle Eastern history. It affected approximately 53 percent of the Arab population of Palestine, 82 percent of the Arabs who resided in the portion of Palestine that became Israel.
Because no count of the refugees could have been taken during their exodus, analysts necessarily must look at the populations before and after the events to arrive at the numbers of refugees.
Subtracting the numbers who remained within the armistice borders of Israel from the number who were in the same area before the war would yield approximately the number who emigrated or died in the war. The numbers of Arabs in Palestine at the end of the Mandate and inside and out of Israel after the war are known (Table 1), but ascertaining the numbers who lived within and without the 1948 armistice borders is difficult. It has proved impossible to trace exactly the population of Palestine by district in 1947-48, which would be essential to a complete accurate analysis. Therefore, this study has taken the best analysis of the division of population numbers inside and out of the 1948 borders before the war, that of Janet Abu-Lughod (Abu-Lughod, 1971), as abase. (It is not possible to accept all of the Abu-Lughod thesis, because she assumes that the official Mandate statistics were accurate, when in fact they were undercounts of population and erroneous on fertility and mortality [see McCarthy, 1990]. She also counts all those not listed as Jews as Palestinian Arabs, whereas all non-citizens, as well as non-Druze listed along with the Druze under the category "Other" in the British data, should be excluded. For example, a Syrian Arab in Palestine in 1948 may have been forced to flee, but he was a Syrian expelled from Palestine, not a Palestinian. )
Of the 1,358,000 Palestinian Arab 9itizens of Palestine in 1948, approximately 873;600 resided within what. would become the Israeli borders, 485,000 without. The Israelis recorded 156,000 non-Jews in 1948, a number that included perhaps 1,000 non-Arabs, leaving 155,000 Palestinians in Israel. This means that 718,000 Palestinians either were refugees or died during the war. Note that this number depends on the somewhat imprecise estimation of the numbers who lived on both sides of the border before the war, and so should be taken as a mean estimate. However, statistically it cannot be wrong by more than 5 to 10 percent (for other analyses, see Khalidi, 1992; Bachi, 1977)."(snip)
from




Well, if this is a factual question, it's currently in Jewish hands. As to who it should belong to, I have no idea, nor do I care to venture a guess. I'm fairly uninformed about Middle Eastern politics and hence have no opinion.










^^^ I agree totally. Asking this question leads to all sorts of similar questions being asked as well ... as in who does American land belong to ?
Well said. It is Jewish land, but non-Jews are certainly free to live there as well provided they are not on a mission to slaughter countless innocents. Non-Jewish Israelis are certainly a lot better off than non-Muslims in neighboring countries, that's for damn sure!
This summit is ridiculous. "Land for peace"... yeah, THAT's never been tried before.![]()





America. We paid for it, it's ours.





^^^ well that's not an absolute certainty. In upstate NY the local Indian tribe still has land claims cases before the federal courts that puts the title to a few hundred thousand homes in potential jeopardy. However, they did agree to a stipulation that they will not attempt to collect rent from homeowners located within the land claim territory, and will not attempt to evict homeowners located within the land claim territory.
I guess this means that if the Indian land claims cases are eventually successful, that when the existing homeowners die or move their property will revert to the Indian nation. While I suppose this is a reasonably fair approach, it certainly could have a huge impact on family farms and businesses located within the land claim area. Of course the Indians have enough gambling revenue from their casino that they could easily afford to pay the would-be heirs a ton of money to go away happy.
Ironically, this land claim case is based on exactly the same issues as historically apply to the acquisition of land in Israel ... that the land was initially purchased illegally, that the land was transferred under duress, that indigenous residents were forced to move off this land to a distant new location etc.
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