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Posted by Romanov Promoted 61 days 17 hours ago 3014 views
editorial
Politics / World
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36 comments
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Sometimes when one looks back through the ages, the ingredients for a major conflict are apparent. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of these conflicts. Here we have two sides that have land claims that go back two or three millennia. Israel’s claim goes back to when they first created a kingdom in what is known today as Israel and the West Bank. To make a conservative estimate one could say the Jews were around in the first millennia B.C.E.; some estimate around 1500 B.C.E. Palestinian claims go back to at least the 600’s C.E. around the time of the Arab Conquest. Some say that Palestinians have ties to those people living on the land before the Israelis but that claim is unstable at best. All in all, some form of this conflict has been around for 3000 years.
It seems that there has been a strong push for a two state solution. In fact, the whole world is pushing for it: the U.S., the U.N., the E.U., and Russia. But is that really the right solution? Israel claims that if there will be a Palestinian State, they will eventually go to war with each other and naturally, that would be dangerous to Israel. I happen to not really mind having a cage match to see who gets the land for the next hundred years; it will be good entertainment on CNN. I do agree that anyone who thinks that the Palestinian State will be stable is a lunatic but at this point, is Israel stable? From a neutral’s point of view the answer is no.
To the Israelis, this strip of land is more than just a holy place. This tiny territory is a symbol of endurance for a people whose whole existence is marked by being hunted, shamed, and butchered. Jerusalem has come to embody the hope of Jewish survival until God returns for his chosen people. If anyone cannot realize Israel’s religious importance to the Jews, they should be able to see that this claim has a measure of legitimacy in its secularist survival value at the very least.
It just so happens that people like to have the same holy places so the second caliph, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab declared that Jerusalem was the place of Muhammad’s night journey. He did so right after the conquest of Jerusalem when he found that it was also the sight of Solomon’s temple among other things. Both groups of people believe this land is significant and it is impossible to measure to whom the land is more significant so it is a useless point.
At the end of World War Two Jews were finally given a state of their own, taking land from Palestine. In a totally “unpredictable” state of affairs, anti-Jewish riots flared up in Syria and Yemen. Jews in Libya had their citizenship stripped from them. Jews had their property taken away from them in Iraq. A couple years later when Israel invaded Sinai, Egypt declared Jews as enemies of the state. In 1948 there were 856,000 Jews in the Arab countries. There were only 7,800 Jews in Arab nations because the Jews have fled (and with good cause). It is estimated that 600,000 went to Israel.
This is not to say that the Diaspora of the Palestinians was small in comparison. In 1949 there were an estimated 726,000 Arabs inside the boundaries of newly founded Israel. Of these, 70% were Palestinian but the full figure is truly unknown because nobody knows the number of illegal Palestinians at the time. You can bet that it was higher than 70% and somewhere in the range of 600,000 to 700,000. Benny Morris, in his study of Palestinian refugees, estimated that in 1949, 320,000 moved to or were already in the eastern region of Palestine and the Transjordan. About 210,000 were stuck in camps in the Gaza region, 100,000 migrated to Lebanon, and 75,000 to Syria. Of course there were a few went to Egypt and still others went to Iraq. It is believed that 150,000 stayed in Israel.
Does the Pro-Israel group have a right to demand that Israel be a continually Jewish-majority state? Does this issue interfere with the Palestinians right to return to their homeland? Here is another divide: if the Palestinians return, will it demolish the Jews majority and thus destroy Israel by creating a Muslim majority? The Pro-Israel camp says that if they allow Palestinians to have a right to return that they will then be eradicated because Israel would become a fundamentally Islamic state in which the Jews would be an ethnic minority. On the other hand, nobody knows if the return of the Palestinians would cause such a shift in the population. The consequences of granting their right to return are pure speculation because the return of the Palestinians to their homeland may not necessarily overturn the Jewish majority.
The last issue discussed today will not be terrorism, or the Israeli Wall. It will not be the surrounding Arab countries relations with Israel. It won’t be over Hamas and the peace process. Shit, it won’t even be on the U.S. claiming to be the honest broker between the two sides (that’s a laugh). The main issue left to discuss is the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. On one hand we have the Pro-Israel people saying that Israel has the legal right to the West Bank in order to secure its boundaries (some would laugh at that).
On the flip side we have the U.N. saying that they, “have no legal validity and that Israel's policy and practices … are a flagrant violation … to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.” This is a major point because there is a huge difference in the fate of Israel if Israel is seen in the world’s eye as a foreign occupier with no land rights as opposed to a country that has strong historical rights.
These five issues are the largest blockades to peace and justice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If any of you are able to take a strong stand on one side please enlighten me because all I see is a hodgepodge of support for both sides. I admit that I do not know what would be best to solve this problem; nobody does. Only the ones who are so near-sighted to see one side of the claims can be confident in their stance on this conflict. If this major disagreement is solved, I believe that various problems in and with the Middle East will begin to be solved as well. This conflict is a major player in creating resentment towards the west and the U.S. as well as it fuels radical Islamic terrorism. It is a big domino to fall but until we do so, the Middle East fire will be as high as ever.
