The Palestinian Genocide, Antisemitism and Denial of the Holocaust

[Phoebe]

I'm at a loss for where all this comes from. What is this place of which the proto state of Israel was given some percent, and of which Jews owned some percent? The Negev? The 1967 borders? No idea what you mean. The Jews did not march into a clearly marked territory called Palestine, seize the land by force, and then set up a country after their terrorism against the British succeeded. I realize that is what you wish to believe, but that is not how it went. Somewhere in there, a few minor facts about developing uninhabited desert, thereby also increasing the Arab population in the area, and purchasing land for high prices per acre, as well as including Arab citizens and landowners in Israel, will have to appear. Of course there have been Arab residents and nomads in this place for centuries. Again, stop with the straw men. Nobody's disputing that. The point is only that you said Israel had NO claim, and that's just not true.

[Bonefish]

The geographical region known as Palestine has been recognized, historically, for almost 2000 years. But even if we DIDN'T want to use what could be a debatable point, there's a much simpler place to start. Mandatory Palestine. Mandatory Palestine itself was formed from several ottoman territories, though mostly the Bairut Vilayet and the Mutasarrifa of Jerusalem. Much of what would be Transjordan came from the Syria Vilayet.

Landownership in the region dates back to the creation of the first registers of land deeds, where the Ottomans granted vast tracts to small, aristocratic families, who in turn rented that land out to the fellahin(Arabic peasants). However, "wasteland", or land not deemed suitable for agriculture was owned colelctively by the tribes, and was used by Bedouin. There has been a longstanding rivalry between the Fellah and the Bedouin over landownership and property rights in general(the Bedouin were rather... "raidy", I believe we could say?), and the Bedouin were often considered enemies of the Ottoman state. The Ottomans, for their part, tried to settle various subject people in the region and drive away the Bedouin. The Tanzimat reforms that lead to the first registers of landownership, were very corrupt, with many fellahin having their land sold without their consent, due to the widespread illiteracy and the manipulation of powerful families and individuals.

These trends continued under Mandatory Palestine. By the 30s, several british commisions(such as the Shaw and Peel commissions) commissions had come to the conclusion that there was not enough land available to continue Immigration. The only way to increase cultivatable land, would be to employee modern methods, to which was said: "the Arab peasant has at present neither the capital nor the education necessary for intensive cultivation. The Jew has. But the lack of these two essential requisites does not justify the expropriation of the Arab to make way for the richer and more enterprising colonist, even though the Arab's conservative methods, and in some cases his system of land tenure, may delay development."

Yes, the jews bought land. They bought it at high prices, and they bought it from absentee landlords and they bought land that the seller had no right to sell. And even then, all of that land, amounted to less than 17% of Palestine. And yet, more than 55% of palestine was to be partitioned off to form a Jewish land. How then, really, do we get the extra 40 something percent of the land? Well, it's inhabitants would have to be driven off.

I mean, if the majority of the Desert is in the Beersheba and Hebron regions, why then was Jewish ownership there so low(1% in Beersheba, 4% in Hebron), but in the northern parts of Palestine, was much higher. Where were they getting this desert land, when they were not settling in lands with lots of desert? That's weird. It's... it's almost like the "making the deserts bloom" thing is a sort of propaganda, intended to justify the ensuing illegal seizure of land that happened after the dissolution of the Mandate.

Yes, I will say it again: Israel has no valid claim, other than that of naked violence, to the land that it currently occupies. And it shows no intent of returning that land to the original inhabitants, but rather, to force them off any desirable land and crowd them into refugee camps in the desert(that's actually something their government's said, ya know). It's too late to stop the formation of Israel, and the alternative is unappealing. Therefore, we have to now accept that Israel exists, and has a right to exist.

But that doesn't mean we have to now accept their claims to the land, as a valid reason for their continued injustices.

[Phoebe]

But you just said that Jewish immigrants purchased and legitimately owned land, and you seem to agree that big tracts supposedly granted to Israel were desert, and that there were still Arab landowners in Israel. So what percent of its claim is supposedly illegitimate? Definitely not 100! Is it 15? 25? 50? 80? How is this judged? And assuming we could settle such a question, how does that get us to the further claim that the Jewish people had no right to self governance there?

[Bonefish]

Lady, can you not read? The sections of Palestine that are "desert" are found in the Negev, and the Jordan valley mountainshadow. And these were the areas with the least ownership by Jews? In fact, the majority of land ownership was in the regions along the coastal ranges, the lands that were always agricultural land, accepting the contraction of the later 18 and early 19th century when breakdowns in imperial authority lead to rampant raiding by Bedouin. Said land was also commonly acquired from magnates, who had seized the land from Fellahin through fraudulent practices. And even then, the total amount of land owned was less than 17% of the land in Palestine, while the land granted to them by UNSCOP was closer to 55% of the land. Where's the extra 40% of the land come from? Magicland?

Even where the Jews bought land(the coastal plains) that was describe as "swampy" or "desert", what it ignores is that much of that land was "wasteland" as a result of a century of endemic raiding by Bedouin who refused to accept imperial rule, and who drove many of the fellahin from their traditional homesteads and villages, to the shelter of the cities, where establish guards could fight off the Bedouin. Wthout people to clear them, streams blocked up and formed wetlands, plains without irrigation withered into grazeland, and small, scraggly woods began to form. A veritable "wasteland", that in truth was arable land that had fallen into disuse through conflict. I think it's extremely one-sided to see cultivated land broke back under cultivation as "causing the deserts to bloom". Again, where the jews owned land, was not in the Negev desert, but in the agricultural lands of the coast and the highlands.

Again, I don't really have a problem with self-determination and self-governance. That's actually a fundamental right I believe in. What I, and many others, have a problem with is the use of myth to rationalize the appropriation of the majority of palestinian land(again from 17% to 55%), , the subsequent expulsion of the Palestinian people, and the refusal to accept their right to return. I have a problem with a constant state of war that is caused by a biased and myopic "history" that denies any wrong doing and asserts victim hood. I have a big problem with the organization responsible for these crimes is not only well subsidized by our taxes, but that that same organization uses it's money to influence our political process, for the express purpose of advancing Israel.

You CANNOT drive people off their land, take it over, then claim it's yours and you are justified to use any force to defend it. There's a word for that. And it's a word that is entwined with genocide.

[Bonefish]

While we are on the Subject of the Bedouin, there is one good observation of the growth of the Wahhabi sect. The Wahhabis, as fundamentalists, strongly curtailed the raiding of Caravans, which may have made travel and trade in the middle-east much safer. On the other hand, they replaced this with the practice of Takfir, or excommunication. Six of one, a half a dozen of the other, I guess. But it did reduce the violence of intermittent bedouin raids, with that of a war of conquest of the Arabian pennisula. And lots of bad stuff happened there.

[Phoebe]

Right, this is my point: land where nobody was living, whether desert or uncultivated swamp, is primarily what Israel got out of the deal. Was it a fair deal? I doubt it, but that's a far cry from saying they should not have formed an independent nation (i.e. Zionism), that to do so was inherently fascist, that they had no claim to the land (they did!), and that all of it is genocidal. The evidence you're trying to use in support of these very extreme claims is that, for instance, Arab landowners shouldn't have sold off the land other Arab tenant farmers were living on. But how do we get from complaining about that to concluding the Jewish immigrants committed a genocidal, violent land seizure? It's like one planet to another in terms of the moral and practical differences. You're trying to argue that one group of non-Jewish farmers couldn't live in a place because another group of non-Jewish nomads were attacking them periodically, and somehow this turns out to be the fault of the Jews, later?

There are all sorts of problems with establishing land ownership in this situation; the main point I'm trying to make is that Jews had rightful claims to own and control land in this area. I don't know why anyone would deny that. From the limited amount I know about it, many of the people there did not recognize British-style private property apportionment to begin with! So how exactly do you go about carving up a territory and selling off pieces of it, when you have nomadic peoples who wouldn't begin to grasp or agree with this way of doing things, and others who assume that their abilities to farm and reside in a place aren't going to be affected if someone else far away transfers the property rights?

Anyway, I don't know where you're getting this whole "make the deserts bloom" thing - if that claim is being exaggerated by others, that's unfortunate but nothing to do with me. Meanwhile, it's factually true that Arab populations tended to gather and increase in areas where Jewish immigrants introduced modern agricultural developments and made economic advancement and increased immigration possible, so trying to base arguments on who lived where and how many people there were is pretty difficult. Who caused whom to live where, you know? That also goes for immigration, since partisans want to insist that every Arab who left Israel did so because of Israel, when the reality is that many of them fled due to either invasion by the surrounding Arab nations or because they thought it would be a temporary departure until the new state of Israel was destroyed and the Arabs could have the whole place back! For some reason you want to blame Jewish violence for all the problems that happened before and after the founding of Israel, yet ignore the decades of violence from Arabs who didn't want any Jewish immigration, and even the restrictions on Jewish immigration in the Ottoman empire. Why are those injustices meaningless, but any conflict the fault of Jewish settlers? Why was it genocidal when Arabs left Israel, but not genocidal when Jews fled TO Israel after they were expelled from other surrounding nations? Isn't that a case of "drive people off their land, take it over, then claim it's yours and you are justified to use any force to defend it"? How is this only a problem caused by Jews?

I actually don't think we are that far apart on some of the facts. I have problems with a lot of the same things you do; I just don't think they're UNIQUE to the Jewish immigrants, or the primary causal factor in what transpired. I wouldn't put claims about genocide in the same category; that's just a non-starter on every level.

[Bonefish]

[Phoebe]

Well, we may disagree about some of these details but this is a long distance from the disagreement we were having before, so ok, fine. I'm happy to acknowledge legitimate grievances about how things were done when Israel was founded. At the same time, they were the subjects of totally unjustified violent aggression. And it's true that Jews were driven from their homes elsewhere after that. I'm not saying they should be treated in exactly the same way as Palestinian Arabs, because the circumstances differ, but it does little good to press one case without acknowledging the reality of the other.

[Bonefish]

I can't agree that the aggression was unjustified. Generally speaking, wouldn't you agree that appropriating other people's land without their consent is wrong? And that's what happened when Israel was formed via the UNSCOP. The seeds of future conflict were planted when the Balfour agreement was signed. They were fertilized by the sykes-Picot agreement. And they were watered liberally by the British mismanagement of Mandatory Palestine. They sprouted most profusely shortly before UNSCOP, and instead of handling it right, the international community turned it's back to what was essentially an armed robbery.

There' a lot to be admired about some of the early zionists. They did work some great feats, especially for people who were largely urban and from privileged classes, who when they immigrated, used the large of their backs to pull produce from the ground. They were disciplined, and they had an early code of honor that is admirable and just. Unfortunately, they were not the ones who came to dominate the political scene.

You know, one of the weird things about traumatic abuse is that it often establishes abusive tendencies in it's victims. It's a vicious and predatory mental disease, that perpetrates itself through trauma. We recognize this every day for the individual, but we don't recognize it as much for the nation as a whole, because, hey, everyone is different, right? But if "everyone" has that traumatic past, then you have to generally suppose that they're going to all show signs of it, right? They may react differently, but a statistically signifigant portion are going to act in similar ways.

That a significant proportion of the population didn't agree, and didn't want to commit the acts of violence that were now necessary, was besides the point. By increasing the violence, the right wing was able to force the entire nation(as an ethnic grouping, rather than a De Jure nation) into what Sun Tzu would call "deadly ground". Suddenly, it didn't matter if you were a liberal jew who wanted to try to co-exist with the Fellahin, you all had to stand united or you would all surely perish. It's a common nationalistic ploy, and it's exploited time and time again. After 9/11, we fell for it and were sold two horribly managed wars, and probably purchased a third one on the layaway program. Well, after 1948, the Jews fell for it too.

This isn't to say that all Jews are fascists, but I think it's safe to say that most Likud ministers are... questionable. Particular the four I have quoted at length in this thread. Equally, not all German were Nazis, and even some Nazis were not bad(There's one notable and famous member of the Nazi party who has a memorial that is visited by Jews to this day, in Jerusalem. You know who it is.). But once that national fervor is whipped up, it's consuming. It places all other concerns as secondary to the natonal survival and expansion. And the worse the situation gets, the more extreme the Nationalist becomes.

There has to be a solution, because when I say we have a potential Genocide on our hands? Oh, we do. The problem is, at this stage in it's development: I'm not sure who it's going to kill, the Jews or the Palestinians. Time is not on the Jewish nation's side. Politically, their rivals are waxing in strength, their patron is waning. The demographics are not good: if the palestinians were accepted as citizens, they would be close to a majority, if not a majority. Which is obviously not a good thing when the palestinian nation is dominated by Salafi extremists. Turkey has grown more and more extreme in it's Islam.

Dammit, why, oh why couldn't they have just picked Uganda? Like, let the really religious ones still go to the Holy Land and eke out a living there. But for the rest, who want to live in peace and not get killed? Uganda offered sooo much better options.

[Bonefish]

My ideal solution, I guess, would be to suspend the use of force by the IDF, Hamas and Palestinian Authority, institute international(and multi-ethnic and national) peacekeepers, swamp the region with human rights observers, and force all sides to sit down and figure out how they can peacefully live in the region. If we gotta convict some folks on both sides of war crimes, so be it, let's end this thing.

Or build a wall around them, and periodically toss over crates of food and guns until the gunfire settles down. That's the less ideal solution.

But back to the ideal solution: It has to be international. Neither side has proven capable of providing security in the region. And it has to be one-state. They have to get along with each other, because a two-state solution has two many potential vectors of conflict: water rights, land rights, voting rights, etc.

[Phoebe]

Well, all I can say is, we really disagree about who has caused what violence and whether violence against Jews in Israel was justified. I don't have much heart for the conversation when Assad is chlorine gassing children, and I know we can in discourse care and think about multiple things at once, but I have a hard time poring over this when the news is about Syria and South Sudan and the contrast here is so great.

[Bonefish]

Dude, I would love to see us fix the problems in South Sudan and Syria, and in Kashmir, and in Yemen, and in Crimea, and the list goes on and on.

The problem is, we really need a new system for international peacekeeping. And we're *really* bad, as a nation, at doing peacekeeping. We're miles ahead of anyone else, and frankly, we still suck at it.

Also, we don't disagree about whether violence against jews was justified. I abhor violence. Deeply.

[Phoebe]

Well look, we have reached some kind of peace between us, not sure if it's because I'm suffering from anemia-induced brain addling or if I'm just weary of disagreeing with anyone, or both, or other reasons. So you know, hope springs eternal. Seriously, even though some 25% of people appear to have taken full leave of their senses and reason, or perhaps their entire moral fibre has crumbled to the point that they literally do not give a crap about other humans, it seems like MOST people are really concerned about the US upholding the highest standards and remaining an example of what democracy can do at its best. So maybe that doesn't always mean intervention in other global conflicts, but it does mean encouraging peace, freedom, democracy, all those good things we were supposed to love once upon a time. Even Trump is up there saying he feels different about Assad and that lines were crossed, all the lines, much crossing! It's so disorienting. No idea what that means policy-wise, but at least there's some indication that common humanity remains important and we shouldn't permit the most heinous of sufferings to be inflicted on innocent people.

[Bonefish]

But look how much effort it took, and where we started from. Insults were hurled on both sides, and it's taken... what, three pages, to come to the agreement that yes, the middle east is fucked up.

I fear intervention efforts, because... well, we haven't been very good at them, historically. Remember Saddam? Boy, ain't we glad he's gone? And now Iraq has peace.... oh. Damn. Ok. But what about the Taliban? We got rid of them, and Afghanistan is... ahhhh...shit. I see where this is going. Well, Assad will be different this time, guys! We're really gonna do the Syrian intervention different! And hell, it's even easier. I mean, we don't have to worry about... crap...foriegn involvement. The Russians are everywhere there. Dammit. Iranians too. Shit, shit guys. Maybe we can get out Saudi buddies to help us...ah. Crap. They're supporting a different side, too?!

I would place Syria on a higher priority that palestine, if only because Syria has the very real possibility of metastizing into a nightmare of world ending proportions. But. We don't have a way to fix syria. And no one wants to move towards that.

[Phoebe]

Well we don't really agree all THAT much. But I was wrong before because I thought that it wasn't going to be worth talking about, and I think I actually learned something from talking about it and hopefully it wasn't an all bad experience for you either. I really have no clue what anyone should do about Syria. But more on that later.

[Bonefish]

Something like Yugolsavia. An internationally mandated peacekeeping force, punishment of war criminals. Of course, that would require a level of co-operation between us and the Russians that isn't forthcoming.

[Phoebe]

Now that is very interesting. I had not considered Yugoslavia in this context before.

[Bonefish]

It's not a perfect solution, but Yugoslavia is one of the best examples of international co-operation to prevent genocide and secretarian violence. There were some bad things: the KLA was and is a terrorist organization, the Checnyans used it as an excuse to ride around on technicals and thumb their noses at the russians, hillary clinton didn't catch that sniper bullet on the tarmac(:D. Sorry. I kid. I kid.), US airpower was startling less effective than we thought.

But when you consider that secretarian warfare in the balkans has usually been pretty bad, and it's usually started massive brawls? I'm gonna chalk it as a win.