The Brink of Madness

[scandium]

Originally Posted by August

Well you're the one claiming statehood for these people, i thought you'd welcome the opportunity to explain just what Israel "conquered, occupied and controlled".

Are these questions too hard to answer?

I didn't claim they already had statehood, in fact what I did claim earlier was that the only way there will ever be peace in the region is if they are granted legitimate statehood with all of the rights that go along with that.

If you were familiar with the history of the region you would understand what I said regarding Israel, but here is the condensed crash course on the region's history (and this is partly from memory, partly from Wiki, so I might be off or a little vague on the dates and details);

The region that is now Israel was at one time, back before the birth of Christ, the Kingdom of Judea/Judah and was a client state of the Persian empire (or client kingdom, more accurately, since the "concept of a state" is a modern notion that didn't exist back then) until it briefly gained its independence, which it then lost in around 100 B.C. to the expanding Roman empire (during the march of Julius Caesar through Syria and Judea), at first becoming a client-kingdom to it and later a province. What does this have to do with Palestinia? I'm getting to that.

Despite Judea coming under the Roman sphere, Roman laws and customs never took hold there like they did elsewhere in the Roman Empire, and around 70 AD there was a Jewish revolt that ended when Titus captured Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. In the aftermath, Jewish lands were confiscated by the Romans and in the 2nd century AD there was another rebellion. Again it was crushed, this time by Hadrian, and again the Jewish temple was destroyed (a fragment that survives to this day, called the "Wailing Wall", is one of the sacred landmarks in the region). Hadrian also expelled most Jews, as punishment, from Judea and once again in their history they became a landless/stateless people ("state" in this sense meaning homeland), and as further punishment the province of Judea was renamed Syria Palestinia, which was later shortened to Palestine.

Byzantium administration ended briefly when the Persians occupied the land during the 7th century, and then permanently when it was conquered by the Arabs and then later administered by the Ottomans as part of their empire (in the 16th century) who referred to these lands as well as "the Land of Palestine).

So for millenia the land, though never an independent state but always a region that changed hands many times, retained its name Palestinia that was given to it by Hadrian, and the generations of people who were born and lived there were known as Palestinians. In the 19th century the jews began to immigrate to Palestinia in numbers as they fled the various parts of Europe where they had become increasingly unwelcome, in search of a homeland of their own. By the end of the 19th century they still only numbered some 60,000 people, at the most, out of the region's 500,000 population and were thus a small minority.

In 1909 they founded their first city, Tel Aviv, and under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 Palestine was to become, once freed from Ottoman control, an international zone; however the Balfour Declaration of 1917 envisioned the creation of a Jewish homeland within Palestine.

From 1920-1948 Palestine, as it was officially referred to, fell under the British Mandate, the British having taken control of the area by defeating the Ottomans. During this period there was considerable turmoil in the region as the British fought WWII while having to deal with attacks from Jewish paramilitary organizations that had formed; these were considered terrorist organizations by the British (and would later be folded into the newly created IDF), and when the Mandate ended in 1948 the British proposed to hand responsibility for the administration of Palestine to the U.N.

The U.N. sought to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and states, but the Palestinians rejected the partition plan while the Jews accepted it. Thus, the day after the BM ended the state of Israel was proclaimed by the Jrews anyway and the Arabs, who did not recognize its legitimacy, attacked it and there followed the Arab-Israeli war. This put an end to Palestine completely, as the 1949 Armistice carved up what remained of it to Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, though the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinians" remain today, as do their claims (whether recognized or not) to an independent Palestinian state and to the corresponding autonomy and self-determination that go along with that.

Thus the usage of the terms "conquered, occupied and controlled" are accurate, for that is what these lands are (and I use these words as descriptives), and for much of their history what they've always been - although it was only in modern times, since the 1949 Armistice, that they've been stripped completely from the Palestinians and that the term "Palestine" has come to describe more of an ideal (a Palestinian homeland) than the name of a distinctive region and its people that it was prior to 1949, even though its boundaries had shifted in those earlier days as had the various empires that administered it.

[Gorduz]

Nice going scandium, It's good to hear a voice whitch recognizes the fact that islamic terrorism, or any kind of terrorism can not be fought by guns and grenades ONLY. You need to slowy biuld trust, nomatter how difficult it is. How do you remove states/countries you don't like? How did the US remove USSR of the map, not by the use of nukes. Whats happening in China? slowly slowy its begining to liberize.

This is the way to go, after WW1 the allies made a major mistake by punishing germany, it had many of the same syndromes that libanon has to day, do we really WANT a clach of civilizations, or could we try a different approach as scandium suggested. There is a saying that no war has ever been fought by to countries with a McDonald resturant. Simply becuse once you earn more mony on trading with your neightboor that fighting with him, you just don't bother. In order to solve this conflict you need to find a way to make trading and peace more profitable than war. How? i don't know, im no economist.

[Dan D]

-Woo away Syria from Iran (that will have to go the path to self-destruction alone) and Hezbollah by offering ecomomic incentives to Syria as part of a broader diplomatic solution for the ME?

-Make Israel a Nato member?

source:
http://atlanticreview.org/archives/3....html#comments