Has it escaped your attention that one of the longest-lasting of all the grievances against Israel that the Palestinians have is that the new Israeli state expropriated Palestinian property? The Arabs refused to give up what they already owned, and it was taken from them.
By 1947 Jews had acquired about half a million acres in the Middle East. Of this, over three-quarters had been purchased from Arabs or Arab landlords.
Almost on the day the U.N. created Israel to the borders shown in the map below, the Arabs began the first of three wars of extermination.
Study the map carefully. Note the borders of the Arab state (Palestine) and Israel. Note Jerusalem as an international zone. This would be the status quo today if the Arabs had not decided Israel needed to be pushed into the sea.
The region of "Palestine" didn't even exist until after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate. Before that, the region was considered part of Syria.
Interesting that around this same time Jordan and some other modern Middle Eastern nations were created out of whole cloth by the same process as Israel, yet I have never heard of them referred to as illegitimate states.
How many people are aware that Jordan owned the West Bank from 1949 to 1967, and could have created a "Palestinian State" at any time with the stroke of a pen?
Israel's tolerance of other peoples and religions is orders of magnitude above that of surrounding Arab nations, and no amount of rationalization can get around that simple fact.
Flame » in reply to By 1948, the Arabs, who had welcomed the Jews as immigrants in the decades between the world wars, were at war with Israel.
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- What if Israel had never existed?
- re: What if Israel had never existed?
- Then there would be full-blown war with North Korea or the USSR most likely.
- A related point with domestic implications.
- Similar post on Daily Kos