Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events

A long-winded reply to Bowser's post on borders

<His map link, and his explanation.

I don't buy it. Here's my take on it, and anyone else feel free to jump in with additions or corrections:

The line in Bowser's map shows the demarcation line from 1949. Not 1967. Any agreement made then was torn up and burned when the Arabs launched the 1967 genocide war against Israel. Israel took some more land, and kept it. There was no 1967 "peace agreement" giving Palestinians anything new, or reaffirming any old deals. Never was, and it's silly to keep bringing it up.

Below are the original borders proposed by the UN in 1947 by UN Resolution 181. Please note the amount of territory the Arabs (or perhaps eventually "Palestinians") would have held if they had not decided that what they really wanted more than anything else was every Jew in the Middle East dead, dead, dead. Agreements made then, and later, have been pretty much rendered null and void by no less than three sequential wars of extermination instigated by the Arabs (which seem to be ignored by everyone screaming about "occupation.")

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/mideast/stories/history.maps/maps/map.un.partition.plan.gif


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The map you referred to, similar to the one below, indicated the new borders after the Armistice of 1949, and until the 1967 Arab attack. This armistice had nothing to do with the original UN agreement, and nothing to do with the situation after the 1967 war. Please note that the West Bank belongs to Jordan here, not "Palestine."

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/mideast/stories/history.maps/maps/map.post.independence.plan.gif


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In 1967, the Arabs launched another war of extermination. Israel beat them yet again, and took additional territory from the losers. There is some small historical precedent for this practice, which has been engaged in by pretty much every nation on the planet. The map at this point:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/mideast/stories/history.maps/maps/map.six.day.war.and.after.gif


Israel would have had every right as a sovereign nation to annex and keep this conquered land (Israel later returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt). Only politics keeps people referring to it as "occupied," much in the same way as MEChA refers to California as "occupied Aztlan."

It is only at this point, and one cannot stress this too highly, after the West Bank had been conquered in battle by Israel, that settlements in the West Bank begin in earnest, and not beforehand. Note the founding dates on this chart.

To make a long story a little less long, Israel is breaking no agreements or treaties that could be considered by any reasonable person to still be in force after three wars. This is like bitching about the nations currently occupying the former Ottoman Empire, or Prussia, or the Austrian Empire (odd that no one is bitching about Occupied Lebanon).

http://www.fsmitha.com/h3/map21-ot.JPG

Borders of "Occupied Ottoman Empire"

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If anything, Israel has a moral, and by right of conquest, legal right to the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and if they wanted to annex it tomorrow, they could. Only political expedience, and a desire to please the U.S., has probably kept them from doing it before now. The Palestinians, from a historical standpoint, don't have a leg to stand on.

If the Palestinians really want a state, maybe they had better start acting like people who are asking, not demanding. And maybe they should stop murdering Israelis.

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