Unit2Sucks said:
sycasey said:
Unit2Sucks said:
Your position may be based on US aid, but I doubt that's a factor in London, Paris and Madrid.
Actually I think it probably is. Or at least, broad Western support for Israel is a factor there too.
I don't doubt that antisemitism exists too (much more virulently in non-Western nations). I just dislike the kind of simplistic argument that says: "Well, you didn't complain about these OTHER Muslims being oppressed! You must ONLY care about Israel because you're antisemitic." Such arguments allow Netanyahu's government to sidestep criticism of the bad stuff they do.
Hamas' brand of terrorism would exist anyway, but there's a decent argument that they were able to gain power at least in part because of Netanyahu's government supporting them as a way of delegitimizing the PLO. None of this s*** happens in a vacuum.
I've not making the argument that opposition to Israel is entirely anti-semitism. I've said the opposite numerous times.
I have yet to hear a good reason why people in the west generally ignore all ethnic cleansing or persecution by muslims of muslims. Or why Jordan and Egypt (along with other nations in the Middle East) get a pass for their treatment of Palestinians but 100% of the blame for the plight of the Palestinian people has always been put on Israel.
The answer is not because of right wing Israelis and it's not because of anti-semitism in the West. The plight of the Palestinians has from the beginning been an intentional ploy by Middle Eastern nations to drive Israel from the region and what we are seeing now is evidence of how successful they have been in pinning everything on Israel (while intentionally creating a permanent refugee class in Palestinians when none need exist).
If you think I'm wrong, tell me: why is it that no country in the Middle East is willing to take care of any Palestinian people? My Palestinian friends were given refuge in Canada and became citizens there while their parents and other relatives are still stateless refugees without any rights in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries.
Jordan was willing to 'take care' of the Palestinian people. Jordan annexed the West Bank following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. They held the 1948 Jericho Conference and hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank accepted Jordanian rule - obviously not all, but enough that it recognized as regionally and internationally legitimate and Jordan was admitted to the UN without objection in 1955. Jordan transferred full Jordanian citizenship rights to 900,000 Palestinian people living in the West Bank, and representation in the Jordanian parliament. This expanded Jordan's population from 400,000 to 1,300,000 - a risky move considering their population was now majority non-Jordanian, but mostly Palestinian. Egypt continued to occupy Gaza prior to the War of 1967 where Palestinians did not enjoy full rights of Egyptian citizenship as they did in Jordan, and Egypt mostly used the Palestinians for political football. Egypt encouraged the creation of the PLO prior to the War on 1967 in part to de-legitimize Jordanian rule of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Regardless, Israel then annexed the West Bank and Gaza following the War of 1967, and it now 53 years later, the longest military occupation in modern history, partly why it attracts so much attention.
Following and acknowledging the various military defeats by Arab armies, the PLO in the 1970s moderated itself, established international legitimacy, and admission to the UN as Observer Status in 1974. The PLO worked then to create a secular democratic single state with Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestine. Israel had no interest in this, and preferred a religious state on the land of Mandatory Palestine, but without the Palestinians. This is the precarious status quo of a Jewish state with military occupation of lands with millions of citizens that have unequal rights, that has continued for the last 53 years. Israel up until 1993 refused to negotiate with the PLO regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state - 26 years of military occupation at that point.
To say the Oslo Accords were a great deal would be an overstatement. The Palestinians were led to believe that for accepting independent rule of 22% of Mandatory Palestine territory, they'd have a capital city in Jerusalem. That has not come close to fruition. Israeli PM Rabin was vilified by much of the Zionist right for signing the accords, and was assassinated in 1995. Three short years after the Oslo Accords, in 1996, Netanyahu came to power for the first time, and he immediately and publicly renounced the Oslo Accords as incompatible with Israel's right to security and with the historic right of the Jewish people, who were entitled to the whole land of Israel but without equal rights for the Palestinian population. Israel immediately expanded settlements beyond the Green Line, violence erupted, and Israel since has declared that there can be no negotiation until there is peace, while the actions of Palestinians can be interpreted as until there is justice there can be no peace.
Netanyahu himself said of the Oslo Accords: "The accords which were ratified by parliament, I was asked before the 1996 elections "Will you fulfil them?". I said "Yes, subject to reciprocity and minimizing pullouts". I gave my own interpretation to the agreements, in such a way that will allow me to stop the race back towards the 1967 borders. How did we manage to do this? Nobody defined what 'military facilities' are. So I also defined them as being security zones. The entire Jordan Valley, for me, is a 'military facility'. Like the Beit Shean Valley, you see, go figure. But then there was the question of who will define these military facilities? I received a letter from US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, to me and to Arafat at the same time, saying that Israel, and Israel alone will define the 'military facilities' their location and their size. Now, they didn't want to give me this letter so I refused to ratify the Hebron Accords of 1997, I stopped the government meeting, and I said "I wont sign" and only when the letter has arrived, during that meeting, to me and to Arafat, I signed the Hebron Accords. It's better to give 2% than 100% and this is the choice we faced. You gave 2%, but you stopped the withdrawal, rather than 100%,
In 1993 there was 115,700 illegal Israeli settlers enjoying full rights of Israeli citizenship in the military occupied West Bank. There were over 230,000 by the 2000s, 350,000 by 2012, and now over 750,000 by 2023. Israel by the words of their leaders and by the actions of their government is clearly committing ethnic cleansing with the goal of eradicating the millions of Palestinians from the West Bank by force, to take the land without taking the people, to preserve their religious ethnostate while expanding the land, sans the native people.
You don't need to be an international relations expert to understand that since 1996, Israel's leaders have had no desire to hold up their end of the bargain, and that through their actions their clear goal is to seize control of Palestinian land justified by their historic religious claim on the land.
Palestinian West Bank residents can't vote in Israeli elections, don't have Israeli passports, and don't have equal rights as Israeli settlers, and there is no path forward towards establishing any of those rights, rights are only further eroding as time goes on, including freedom of movement, freedom of commerce, and freedom to farm their own land. Israelis living in West Bank illegal settlements are able to participate in elections for the Knesset, have full Israeli citizenship, and have the full backing and protection of Israeli police and the Israeli military as they expand their illegal settlements.
There's a lot of blame to go around, surely, and I've documented a lot of the Arab world's complete failing of the Palestinian cause in prior pages, but at the end of the day, some things aren't that complicated. A 53 year military occupation with eroding rights as the years go on, eroding land, and unequal rights enforced along ethno-religious lines isn't complicated, it's apartheid with the stated intention of ethnically cleansing the land. To say that other Arab countries aren't taking care of the Palestinian refugees created by the ethnic cleansing being done by one country seems to burying the lede of concerns. To say that Palestinians should've taken a deal when they had the chance assumes that Israeli leaders weren't also operating in bad faith, and that no deal existed that would ever lead to Palestinian sovereign self-rule over Palestinian West Bank land.
