Do tell the history behind the Holy Land
- Thread starter Ouchgeddon
- Start date
I think you were too hard on the Romans, The typical fate of
ANYONE conquered back then by ANYBODY was Death or Slavery or pay a big bribe. Unsuccessful rebellions results always were
worse than being conquered. Repeated rebellions ending in
failure were just national suicide. The Jews knew the price
of failure, and paid it in full.
Otherwise it is concise, well written, and unbasied. Excellent.
The reason i wanted the early years exposed was to show
there are no white hats and black hats here. Both sides have
practiced terroristism at one time or another.
G-Man
A One Man's War
Adebisi - I don't think there's one paragraph you posted that got all the facts right.
"
About two thousand years ago a certain Roman emperor had been having a lot of trouble with an irritating group of people called the Jews. They refused to simply assimilate, or at least lie down quietly, like so many others who had been conquered by the vast and mighty Roman Empire. No, instead they insisted on constantly creating trouble: assembling unlawfully, protesting, filing petitions and other such annoying actions.
>>> The jews were very quiet untill the beggining of the century. Some of the Roman rules got along very well but some, especially Pontius Pilate, thought the jews weren't as good as Romans and treated them so by forcing them to choose between breaking the laws of their religion and death. The governers that treated jews as equals didn't have any riots.
A few years earlier, they had even started a minor uprising when they had followed some young upstart who had had the affrontery to call himself the "King of the Jews". Pontius Pilate had put a quick stop to that when he'd had the whelp nailed up to a crucifix, but these Jews continued to be a source of irritation.
>>> No. Bar Kokva, who some called the king of the jews (although he didn't) started a rebelioun in 126 AD. Pontius Pilate started riots against jews in Israel. He made him army of non jews Israelis (who were a minority) and so gave them control over the jews. The rebelioun started after he tried to put statues in the great temple, and when jews came to ask him not to do so he gathered them up in the umphithatre in Ceasaria and then massacred them with his troops.
Although it was by no means a serious problem, the emperor could no longer simply ignore the situation because the conquered area was tying up more legions than it should have been, and he needed those troops elsewhere. History does not tell us whether the emperor was too superstitious to utterly obliterate the offending race in a bloody pogrom.
>>> The jews took over the entire country. In the first 3 years the Romans were unable to retake it. Eventually they sent 12 legions under the command of the Syrian governer. He took over the country and 3 years later Mesada, the last jewish fortress, fell.
It certainly does not seem likely, since his predecessors --and indeed, his successors-- did not and would not hesitate to use such tactics in other venues, and with chilling success. He had the both the available manpower and the authority, and the Jews were not numerous enough to survive such an assault. Perhaps he suspected that no campaign of genocide, no matter how thorough, could ever completely succeed... that the dead would be martyrs and that the few survivors would become even greater thorns in the empire's side than ever before.
>>> The Romans massacred over 30,000 jews before the rebelion and over 500,000 after they retook the country. They feared killing even more would spark another rebelion.
Whatever his reasons, the emperor decided on a new and unusual course of action: he ordered that the Jews be forcibly removed from their homes by Roman legionnaires and forcibly relocated to the far-flung corners of the empire. This was done, and the long, sad journey went down in Jewish history as the diaspora. In their absence their former homeland, a now-empty patch of prime beachfront real estate on the Eastern Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, began to slowly fill up with their former Arab neighbours.
>>> New? Jews were taken out of Israel 2 times before. Even after such a thing there are always jews left. Even after the Bar Kokva rebelion there were still jews in Israel.
The arabs came to Israel 500 years later and found a small jewish community and another small byzantyne christians community. They didn't come here slowly but as part of the armies of Muhamad and his successors.
----time elapse, a few hundred years + 1000-----
No matter where they'd settled, Jews had been seen as just a little bit on the outside by virtue of their religion, their "secret" language of Hebrew and even their ethnicity, so they'd been prevented from holding public office, becoming military leaders or even entering institutions of higher learning. As a result, they'd entered the only field left open to them: business.
>>> Jews were allowed to have military jobs as long as they don't get too powerfull (Dryfus).
As it turned out, they'd seemed to have a knack for it, too: by the late nineteenth century Jews in Europe were widely perceived as being rich, or at least a little bit richer on average than everybody else, by virtue of the fact that many of them had entered jewelry and banking and had done rather well for themselves.
>>> And because of the Rotchild family that controled many buisnesses and was therefore thought to be a cover up of the world wide jewish conspiracy.
People in power began to assume that a sort of conspiracy existed; they believed that the Jews were quietly manoeuvreing around behind the scenes, using their money and the influence it could get them to help put people into power who would be most sympathetic to their interests. At about this time a pro-Jewish political movement called Zionism arose in Europe. Its purpose was "to return the Jews to their rightful historical homeland".
>>> Zionism didn't "Rose up". It started in 1881 when the Russian tzar alexander the second was murdered. His son blamed the jews in the act and so started a wave of prosecutions throughout Russia (or more correctly southern Russia as jews were only allowed to live there). The pupose of Zionism was to find a solution to the antisemitism. The most popular wing of Zionism was the one that supported getting a jewish state. Many areas were though about but it turned out that wherever the jews will go they'll be rejected. It was decided that the best place would be Israel. Almost empty Israel had a very small arab community that lived in a small part of the country. In 1882 many jews ran away from Russia and some of them, 40,000 people, joined the 15,000 jews that already lived in Israel in their ancinet community.
No one bothered to mention that during the intervening two millenia over 75 generations of Arabs had lived and died on that Eastern Mediterranean soil, now called Palestine. These Arabs figured that they had a bit more right to determine who was going to live on what was now THEIR homeland than a bunch of European nations which had still been a bunch of wild barbarian tribes when the Romans had booted the Jews out in the first place.
>>> The jews came to Israel as it was an empty piece of land. The arabs lived in Several cities and in the mountains in the center of the country. The rest of the country was empty.
One of those wild barbarian tribes, now calling itself the British, was perhaps a bit influenced in its thinking by Zionist arguments and by the idea that European Jewry was a rich and influential group one would do well to have one one's side. Besides, the British Empire was at the height of its power and glory: India was the jewel in its crown about which books by Rudyard Kipling were being written, Sherlock Holmes was stalking the streets of London, Stanley and Livingston were making their way around Africa and Queen Victoria was on the throne.
>>>The British supported zionism only during WWI when they realized it would get them support from the jewish community (ie NILI)
The sun never set upon the British Empire, she had the largest and most powerful navy in the world and by George, she'd do whatever the heck she bloody wanted to -- and without any guff from any bleeding Arab beggars! Besides, the whole point was academic: Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish Muslims) for centuries, so the Arabs living along the Eastern Mediterranean had no say about anything anyway.
>>>The British never said the arabs shouldn't have a country but that the jews should. It doesn't mean there can't be two countries at the same time.
What harm would it do, then, to issue a meaningless policy statement in order to win the favour, support and financial attention of the European Jews? So it was that British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued the appropriately-named Balfour Declaration in support of an independent Jewish homeland to be located in Palestine.
>>>European jews didn't support the British. They did in order to get support from the jews in Israel. Balfour said jews should have a country but he never said arabs shouldn't.
The Jews loved it, of course, but it remained just that -- a meaningless policy statement. It was certainly forgotten a couple of decades later in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by an anarchist in the city of Sarajevo. The French, Germans and Russians mobilised their troops and, before anyone knew what had happened, a million mothers' sons were charging out of their trenches only to cough their lungs up from the mustard gas or be mown down by machine-gun fire. The Great War, the War to End All Wars, had begun.
>>>Ofcource jews loved it. What people wouldn't be happy to have the support of an empire in his struggle for freedom? Even though, the declaration was never reallt followed. The British gave jews a country because they had no better choice and not because of idealism.
Trench warfare held the war at a stalemate in Europe for the better part of four years. British General George Allenby, in charge of the "Southern Front", was under pressure from his superiours at the War Office in London for some progress against the Ottoman Empire, a British enemy in the war and the power that controlled the Middle East as it had for centuries. By manipulating Arab tribesmen into fighting the Turks in exchange for tentative implications of Arab independence, Allenby ensured that by the end of the war the Middle East was British-held territory.
>>>The ottoman empire was dead before the war started. Many nations rose from it's areas in europe while in the middle east people fought against them for years before the war.
Immediately after the war, the newly-created League of Nations, really just an old-boys' club of the same old European colonialist powers, legitimised continued occupation of territory captured by the victors in the war by ceding areas to their occupying victorious forces as "mandates". The idea was that the "big brother" nation would prepare the mandated area for eventual independence, but in practise it was colonialism by any other name... which still smelled just as bad.
>>>I don't think anyone expected the British or the French to leave the area. They took over. It was theirs. The idea of illigal occupation was started after WWII by the UN.
Britain got the League of Nations mandate for the Middle East, which included Palestine. Zionist groups and Jews worldwide immediately began pressuring the British to live up to the promises they'd made decades earlier in the Balfour Declaration. If they did nothing the Jews would accuse them of going back on their word, but if they started airlifting massive numbers of Jews into Palestine the local Arabs would riot. They tried to go the middle ground and brought in a slow trickle by sea.
>>>Very wrong. Not only that the British didn't airlift jews to Israel (something I doubt was even possible at the time), they banned them from getting in by any means. Jews got to Israel illigaly. The arabs were anfry because the British wouldn't kick all jews from their country.
This went on for nearly thirty years while the British controlled the area, and the Arabs certainly did riot, more than a few times. The population of Jewish immigrants slowly swelled, living in an uneasy peace with the Arabs. Then one day a man with a severe little moustache started raving about how the Jews had ruined his country, the rest of Europe and the world besides. The joke was on him, of course; Adolf didn't realise that he himself had Jewish blood, but his countrymen bought it hook, line and sinker, and the Second World War was on.
>>>He said the jews were sub humans that anything they do must cause damage to the other humans.
During the war Palestine remained under British control, never seriously threatened by the massive tank battles in the North African desert between British General Bernard Montgomery and German Field Marshal Erwin 'The Desert Fox' Rommel. At war's end, though, the world was a very different place. All the 'great powers' of Europe were totally tapped out, shattered and economically devastated. Even England, which had resisted invasion, had taken a beating from German bombs.
>>>Israel was under great danger. There were even plans to rebuild Mesada in order to resist the Nazis if they'll take over Israel.
"
About two thousand years ago a certain Roman emperor had been having a lot of trouble with an irritating group of people called the Jews. They refused to simply assimilate, or at least lie down quietly, like so many others who had been conquered by the vast and mighty Roman Empire. No, instead they insisted on constantly creating trouble: assembling unlawfully, protesting, filing petitions and other such annoying actions.
>>> The jews were very quiet untill the beggining of the century. Some of the Roman rules got along very well but some, especially Pontius Pilate, thought the jews weren't as good as Romans and treated them so by forcing them to choose between breaking the laws of their religion and death. The governers that treated jews as equals didn't have any riots.
A few years earlier, they had even started a minor uprising when they had followed some young upstart who had had the affrontery to call himself the "King of the Jews". Pontius Pilate had put a quick stop to that when he'd had the whelp nailed up to a crucifix, but these Jews continued to be a source of irritation.
>>> No. Bar Kokva, who some called the king of the jews (although he didn't) started a rebelioun in 126 AD. Pontius Pilate started riots against jews in Israel. He made him army of non jews Israelis (who were a minority) and so gave them control over the jews. The rebelioun started after he tried to put statues in the great temple, and when jews came to ask him not to do so he gathered them up in the umphithatre in Ceasaria and then massacred them with his troops.
Although it was by no means a serious problem, the emperor could no longer simply ignore the situation because the conquered area was tying up more legions than it should have been, and he needed those troops elsewhere. History does not tell us whether the emperor was too superstitious to utterly obliterate the offending race in a bloody pogrom.
>>> The jews took over the entire country. In the first 3 years the Romans were unable to retake it. Eventually they sent 12 legions under the command of the Syrian governer. He took over the country and 3 years later Mesada, the last jewish fortress, fell.
It certainly does not seem likely, since his predecessors --and indeed, his successors-- did not and would not hesitate to use such tactics in other venues, and with chilling success. He had the both the available manpower and the authority, and the Jews were not numerous enough to survive such an assault. Perhaps he suspected that no campaign of genocide, no matter how thorough, could ever completely succeed... that the dead would be martyrs and that the few survivors would become even greater thorns in the empire's side than ever before.
>>> The Romans massacred over 30,000 jews before the rebelion and over 500,000 after they retook the country. They feared killing even more would spark another rebelion.
Whatever his reasons, the emperor decided on a new and unusual course of action: he ordered that the Jews be forcibly removed from their homes by Roman legionnaires and forcibly relocated to the far-flung corners of the empire. This was done, and the long, sad journey went down in Jewish history as the diaspora. In their absence their former homeland, a now-empty patch of prime beachfront real estate on the Eastern Coast of the Mediterranean Sea, began to slowly fill up with their former Arab neighbours.
>>> New? Jews were taken out of Israel 2 times before. Even after such a thing there are always jews left. Even after the Bar Kokva rebelion there were still jews in Israel.
The arabs came to Israel 500 years later and found a small jewish community and another small byzantyne christians community. They didn't come here slowly but as part of the armies of Muhamad and his successors.
----time elapse, a few hundred years + 1000-----
No matter where they'd settled, Jews had been seen as just a little bit on the outside by virtue of their religion, their "secret" language of Hebrew and even their ethnicity, so they'd been prevented from holding public office, becoming military leaders or even entering institutions of higher learning. As a result, they'd entered the only field left open to them: business.
>>> Jews were allowed to have military jobs as long as they don't get too powerfull (Dryfus).
As it turned out, they'd seemed to have a knack for it, too: by the late nineteenth century Jews in Europe were widely perceived as being rich, or at least a little bit richer on average than everybody else, by virtue of the fact that many of them had entered jewelry and banking and had done rather well for themselves.
>>> And because of the Rotchild family that controled many buisnesses and was therefore thought to be a cover up of the world wide jewish conspiracy.
People in power began to assume that a sort of conspiracy existed; they believed that the Jews were quietly manoeuvreing around behind the scenes, using their money and the influence it could get them to help put people into power who would be most sympathetic to their interests. At about this time a pro-Jewish political movement called Zionism arose in Europe. Its purpose was "to return the Jews to their rightful historical homeland".
>>> Zionism didn't "Rose up". It started in 1881 when the Russian tzar alexander the second was murdered. His son blamed the jews in the act and so started a wave of prosecutions throughout Russia (or more correctly southern Russia as jews were only allowed to live there). The pupose of Zionism was to find a solution to the antisemitism. The most popular wing of Zionism was the one that supported getting a jewish state. Many areas were though about but it turned out that wherever the jews will go they'll be rejected. It was decided that the best place would be Israel. Almost empty Israel had a very small arab community that lived in a small part of the country. In 1882 many jews ran away from Russia and some of them, 40,000 people, joined the 15,000 jews that already lived in Israel in their ancinet community.
No one bothered to mention that during the intervening two millenia over 75 generations of Arabs had lived and died on that Eastern Mediterranean soil, now called Palestine. These Arabs figured that they had a bit more right to determine who was going to live on what was now THEIR homeland than a bunch of European nations which had still been a bunch of wild barbarian tribes when the Romans had booted the Jews out in the first place.
>>> The jews came to Israel as it was an empty piece of land. The arabs lived in Several cities and in the mountains in the center of the country. The rest of the country was empty.
One of those wild barbarian tribes, now calling itself the British, was perhaps a bit influenced in its thinking by Zionist arguments and by the idea that European Jewry was a rich and influential group one would do well to have one one's side. Besides, the British Empire was at the height of its power and glory: India was the jewel in its crown about which books by Rudyard Kipling were being written, Sherlock Holmes was stalking the streets of London, Stanley and Livingston were making their way around Africa and Queen Victoria was on the throne.
>>>The British supported zionism only during WWI when they realized it would get them support from the jewish community (ie NILI)
The sun never set upon the British Empire, she had the largest and most powerful navy in the world and by George, she'd do whatever the heck she bloody wanted to -- and without any guff from any bleeding Arab beggars! Besides, the whole point was academic: Palestine had been under the control of the Ottoman Empire (Turkish Muslims) for centuries, so the Arabs living along the Eastern Mediterranean had no say about anything anyway.
>>>The British never said the arabs shouldn't have a country but that the jews should. It doesn't mean there can't be two countries at the same time.
What harm would it do, then, to issue a meaningless policy statement in order to win the favour, support and financial attention of the European Jews? So it was that British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour issued the appropriately-named Balfour Declaration in support of an independent Jewish homeland to be located in Palestine.
>>>European jews didn't support the British. They did in order to get support from the jews in Israel. Balfour said jews should have a country but he never said arabs shouldn't.
The Jews loved it, of course, but it remained just that -- a meaningless policy statement. It was certainly forgotten a couple of decades later in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by an anarchist in the city of Sarajevo. The French, Germans and Russians mobilised their troops and, before anyone knew what had happened, a million mothers' sons were charging out of their trenches only to cough their lungs up from the mustard gas or be mown down by machine-gun fire. The Great War, the War to End All Wars, had begun.
>>>Ofcource jews loved it. What people wouldn't be happy to have the support of an empire in his struggle for freedom? Even though, the declaration was never reallt followed. The British gave jews a country because they had no better choice and not because of idealism.
Trench warfare held the war at a stalemate in Europe for the better part of four years. British General George Allenby, in charge of the "Southern Front", was under pressure from his superiours at the War Office in London for some progress against the Ottoman Empire, a British enemy in the war and the power that controlled the Middle East as it had for centuries. By manipulating Arab tribesmen into fighting the Turks in exchange for tentative implications of Arab independence, Allenby ensured that by the end of the war the Middle East was British-held territory.
>>>The ottoman empire was dead before the war started. Many nations rose from it's areas in europe while in the middle east people fought against them for years before the war.
Immediately after the war, the newly-created League of Nations, really just an old-boys' club of the same old European colonialist powers, legitimised continued occupation of territory captured by the victors in the war by ceding areas to their occupying victorious forces as "mandates". The idea was that the "big brother" nation would prepare the mandated area for eventual independence, but in practise it was colonialism by any other name... which still smelled just as bad.
>>>I don't think anyone expected the British or the French to leave the area. They took over. It was theirs. The idea of illigal occupation was started after WWII by the UN.
Britain got the League of Nations mandate for the Middle East, which included Palestine. Zionist groups and Jews worldwide immediately began pressuring the British to live up to the promises they'd made decades earlier in the Balfour Declaration. If they did nothing the Jews would accuse them of going back on their word, but if they started airlifting massive numbers of Jews into Palestine the local Arabs would riot. They tried to go the middle ground and brought in a slow trickle by sea.
>>>Very wrong. Not only that the British didn't airlift jews to Israel (something I doubt was even possible at the time), they banned them from getting in by any means. Jews got to Israel illigaly. The arabs were anfry because the British wouldn't kick all jews from their country.
This went on for nearly thirty years while the British controlled the area, and the Arabs certainly did riot, more than a few times. The population of Jewish immigrants slowly swelled, living in an uneasy peace with the Arabs. Then one day a man with a severe little moustache started raving about how the Jews had ruined his country, the rest of Europe and the world besides. The joke was on him, of course; Adolf didn't realise that he himself had Jewish blood, but his countrymen bought it hook, line and sinker, and the Second World War was on.
>>>He said the jews were sub humans that anything they do must cause damage to the other humans.
During the war Palestine remained under British control, never seriously threatened by the massive tank battles in the North African desert between British General Bernard Montgomery and German Field Marshal Erwin 'The Desert Fox' Rommel. At war's end, though, the world was a very different place. All the 'great powers' of Europe were totally tapped out, shattered and economically devastated. Even England, which had resisted invasion, had taken a beating from German bombs.
>>>Israel was under great danger. There were even plans to rebuild Mesada in order to resist the Nazis if they'll take over Israel.
G-Man
A One Man's War
Suddenly only one country had a healthy economy. Suddenly only one country had no domestic damage at all from the war. Suddenly only one country had the largest and most powerful navy in the world, and it wasn't England any more. Suddenly only one country had the atomic bomb. Suddenly only one country had the undivided attention of every other country in the world, was calling the shots, could do whatever it wanted to and had the force to back up its foreign policy initiatives.
>>>I wouldn't say the US didn't have any damage from the war. Buildings were no destroyed but they supported the building and keeping of a very large army and now supported the rebulding of europe, all that with many casualties and many men that didn't work for a long time.
The United States started pressuring all former colonial powers to grant independence to their colonies. Her moral high ground for doing this was that she herself had been a colony and had had to fight for her independence, so she sympathised with other colonies that wanted independence. A more likely reason for doing this is that since colonies trade exclusively with their host countries, excluding other nations, the U.S. wanted to get those host countries out of those colonies as quickly as possible so that she could get access and start selling Coca-Cola and other fine American products.
>>>I don't think the US supported a lot of independence wars and even so it wouldn't necessarily be due to financial reasons.
They grumbled, but Britain and the other former colonial powers of Europe started vacating their colonies rapidly, not only because the United States was pressuring them to but also because they could no longer spare the troops, funds or resources to maintain those colonies when so much reconstruction needed to take place back in their home countries. Amongst others, Britain was making plans to vacate its League of Nations mandates in the Middle East -- including Palestine.
>>>Only Palestine. Jordan and Egypt were already given away and already started becoming true nations.
The world had been shocked, sickened and horrified beyond description when it had seen photographs and newsreels of the ghastly 'final solution' of the Nazis. Concentration camps liberated by the Americans had yielded mass graves, poison-gas showers, non-stop crematoria and living skeletons with haunted eyes. The carnage was so far beyond anything ever seen before that even conventional language did not have a word for it. A new word was created to describe it: genocide.
>>>It's not a new word. No one call tell the horrors of the holocaust with words. Nor can it be done with any other means.
No one could conceive of anything that anyone could ever have done to deserve such a fate. The hearts of everyone on Earth went out to the Jews. Everyone felt guilty for not having stopped Hitler sooner, before six million Jews had gone to their deaths. Filled with shock, compassion, guilt, shame, remorse and regret, the world of 1945 could deny the Jews nothing.
>>>Except access to Israel which the British continued to deny or humanatarian relief to the millins of jews that were left homeless and penyless.
The British were rapidly vacating the land of Palestine, the Jewish homeland of two thousand years ago. Many Jews had emigrated there during the last thirty years. Many European Jews were wandering around the continent as "Displaced Persons", sole survivors of their families or villages with nowhere to go. The world felt shamed and wanted to "do something for the Jews" to "make up" for what had happened. Some Jews themselves and other Zionists were clamouring about the Balfour Declaration, made by the British in a very different world over fifty years and two world wars ago.
>>>No one gave the jews any support in getting their own country. They forced the British out by themselves and then stopped the arabs by themselves.
Almost before the British were out of Palestine, the United States stepped in and declared that the area would once again be the Jewish homeland. The Americans were trying not only to make up for the Second World War, but to correct an ancient historical wrong. Huge waves of Jewish immigrants flocked to their ancient ancestral homeland.
>>> Waves of jews escaping europe never to return and hoping to start a new lives as equal humans. The Americans didn't declare anything. Untill 1967 the US was not involved at all in the conflict.
As these European "displaced persons" found a home once again, they created a whole new flood of "displaced persons" -- Arabs whose umpteenth great-grandfather had farmed the same land 75 generatons ago, forced to leave because a newly-arrived European Jew had become the new owner. These Arabs, today called the Palestinians, left in droves.
>>> No one forced anyone out. Palestinians who left did it of their own free will and without being forced out or their homes taken over. By the way I have roots in Israel going back to the ancinet communities so I have a strong basis to believe my familiy is here for over 500 generations.
It took two years from wars' end for the British to finish vacating and for the brief period of American assistance with Jewish immigration to conclude. Jews all over the world had been delighted with the idea; those who didn't emigrate to live there were quite generous financially. The United States gave much financial and military assistance so that in 1947 the area which had been known as Palestine for two thousand years declared itself the state of Israel.
>>>In 1947 they turned to the UN. Then they were instracted to leave and they did so in 1948. The US didn't give any financial support, and certainly not a military one. In 1948 the areas of Palestine that were given to the jews were declared as the state of Israel. Most of the country was in Palestinian hands and they chose to unite with the arab countries and therefore chose not to declare independence.
The brand-new state was promptly attacked at the same time by several of its outraged Arab neighbours. They themselves had been under the boot of the Ottomans for centuries, then had had to endure the British, but now that the entire Middle East had looked as though it were finally going to be free and self-determining, here had come the meddling Americans to eject the Palestinians --brother Arabs-- and move Jews in in their place!
>>>Again, the Americans had nothing to do with the middle east. The arabs weren't about to give the jews a state and so they wanted to do what the British didn't agree to do - to throw all jews to the sea.
Aside from this strange, offensive new outpost there were no Jews for thousands of miles around -- only Arabs. For the Arabs it was like surgically transplanting a tuft of blond hair onto a head full of black. They saw these Jews sitting proudly on land that had been Arab land for two thousand years, while the 'rightful' Palestinian-Arab owners sat shivering in refugee camps just outside the borders of the new state. Outraged and offended, they attacked with their combined military force.
>>> There were large jewish communities in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Palestinians got to the refugee camps only after 1948 after they ran away to the arab countries that promised to give them back all of Palestine.
Unfortunately for the Arab states that attacked in 1947, U.S. weapons and training that had been provided to the Israeli military allowed Israel to trounce them. In other Arab-Israeli conflicts (1956, 1967 and 1973), almost always started by the Arabs, the same has been the result: one was called the Six-Day War because that's all the time it took the Israelis to win, while another was called the Yom Kippur War because the Arabs tried to win by surprise-attacking on the holiest Jewish day.
>>>The US didn't supply Israel with any weapons, and infact it even banned selling weapons to Israel. The Israelis didn't have a trained army (Except Vingate's Palmah) and the IDF was made by combining all the jewish resistances. The IAF was built in a dampster near Tel Aviv from remainings of WWII British airplanes. The only armored vehicle the IDF had were civilian trucks the the Hagana wrapped with steel plates.
The previous Palestinian inhabitants haven't been sitting idly in their refugee camps on Israel's borders for fifty years while fellow Arabs from other Arab countries have been fighting and dying in attempts to win back their land for them. The Palestinians formed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a terrorist group that has been bombing Israel and conducting other terrorist raids on her for decades.
>>>The PLO is a later generation terror group. The Egyptians and Jordanians used other groups before in order to weaken Israel.
For many years now Yasser Arafat has been the leader of the PLO, and thus Public Enemy Number One of the Israeli state. He was controversial in the 1980s for once wearing his customary pistol on a visit to the Pope and because the United States didn't want to grant him a visa to enter the U.S. so he could speak at the United Nations.
>>> Not so many years. The PLO was established in the 1970s by Arafat in his home city of Cairo. He has been a very good leader appearantly as I can't think of any other terrorist that was welcomed by the pope and the UN.
The first real progress in the Arab-Israeli situation was made by President Carter, who got Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace treaty. We later found out what ordinary Arabs thought of that when some of Sadat's own people assassinated him as he stood on the reviewing stand during a parade.
>>>I doubt you can say what the ordinary people think by the acts of an extrimist.
The fact that Israel recently allowed the Gaza Strip to become an 'autonomous Arab zone' with its own police force and Yasser Arafat (Israel's Public Enemy Number One), of all people, as its leader, is probably the most encouraging move towards peace since the Americans started the whole mess in the 1940s. Of course, we found out what ordinary Israelis thought of that when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the guy who made the Gaza Strip thing possible, as he moved through a crowded public square a few years ago.
>>>Yigal Amir was not a member of any security force. And just to show what ordinary people really think: The public square was crowded because of a huge left wing demonstration of support. The Americans are the negotiators as they're the only country both sides agree will be neutral.
Since historic agreements signed in Oslo, Norway in September of 1993 between the Israelis and the PLO set the Gaza Strip aside for the Palestinians, the PLO and its leader have been kept busy with the headaches of self-rule. Those Palestinians and other Arabs who felt that this arrangement was not good enough and that there was still more for which Israel must answer felt that the PLO had gone soft and sold out; they became dissatisfied with the PLO as the representative of their interests.
>>>They were disatisfied from the beggining. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad have a goal of conquering all of Israel and anything less will mean failure.
These extreme anti-Israelis formed a group called Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Islamic force composed of Palestinians and other sympathetic Arabs. Backed by the sympathetic Islamic countries of Iran and Syria, since the 1993 Oslo accords Hezbollah has set up shop in Israel's chaotic bordering neighbour to the North, Lebanon, which has been paralysed for decades by civil war.
>>>The Hizzbalah had nothing to do with the PA. It's in Lebanon. They fought the IDF and since the Israeli withdrawl from Lebano were "fighting" the Israeli civilians who happened to live near the border.
The situation in Lebanon is so fractious and its government so weak that Hezbollah has actually taken over the running of schools and hospitals in some areas, gaining it popular support amongst some Lebanese. Its primary purpose for existence being to inflict harm upon Israel, however, in April 1996 Hezbollah began raining fire down upon its hated enemy in the form of Rockets.
>>> And in the last week they shot over 1000 rockets into Israel.
Surrounded as it is by hostile neighbours who would prefer to see the blood of all its citizens running through the sands, Israel has perhaps understandably developed a 'massive retaliation' policy over the years. To guerrilla attacks by the Egyptian-backed Palestinian terrorist group fedayeen ("self-sacrificers", the predecessor of the PLO and Hezbollah) in the 1950s, Israel invaded Egyptian army posts in the dead of night, shooting hundreds of Egyptian troops as they slept, and on 29 October 1956 actually invaded Egypt herself, taking the entire Sinai Peninsula from her.
>>>Israel never shot soldiers in their sleep. In 1956 the Israel-British-French attack came as a result of the nationalising of the Suez cananl by the Egyptians. The fedayun weren't the PLO nor the Hizzbalah. They were Palestinians orgenizaed by Egypt and Jordan into small combat units. They invaded jewish towns and attacked the civilians there.
In Israel's belief that she must show a tough face in order to deter aggression, she has not hesitated even to operate far outside her home region. On 3 July 1976 she reacted to the hijacking of an airplane containing her Olympic team by storming the plane with a massive assault force as it sat on an airport runway in Entebbe, Uganda, a country well into Africa and decidedly not in Israel's home region, the Middle East. Israel had refused to negotiate or even talk to the hijackers, it attacked without regard to casualties and it took no prisoners. The message was clear: don't mess with us.
>>> I find it hard to believe the Israeli olympic team was flying with air france, especailly if you consider the fact they were murdered 4 years earlier. The flight was kidnapped and flown to Entebbe. The kidnaper demanded the release of all terrorists held in Israeli jails. Israel had no choice but to fight back. When you make an attack so far away you don't take prisoners. Whoever attacked the soldiers was killed. Whoever didn't was left there. There wan't much danger in it as the airport was paralyzed for teh time of the negotiations and there were no civlians there except those who were kidnapped.
>>>I wouldn't say the US didn't have any damage from the war. Buildings were no destroyed but they supported the building and keeping of a very large army and now supported the rebulding of europe, all that with many casualties and many men that didn't work for a long time.
The United States started pressuring all former colonial powers to grant independence to their colonies. Her moral high ground for doing this was that she herself had been a colony and had had to fight for her independence, so she sympathised with other colonies that wanted independence. A more likely reason for doing this is that since colonies trade exclusively with their host countries, excluding other nations, the U.S. wanted to get those host countries out of those colonies as quickly as possible so that she could get access and start selling Coca-Cola and other fine American products.
>>>I don't think the US supported a lot of independence wars and even so it wouldn't necessarily be due to financial reasons.
They grumbled, but Britain and the other former colonial powers of Europe started vacating their colonies rapidly, not only because the United States was pressuring them to but also because they could no longer spare the troops, funds or resources to maintain those colonies when so much reconstruction needed to take place back in their home countries. Amongst others, Britain was making plans to vacate its League of Nations mandates in the Middle East -- including Palestine.
>>>Only Palestine. Jordan and Egypt were already given away and already started becoming true nations.
The world had been shocked, sickened and horrified beyond description when it had seen photographs and newsreels of the ghastly 'final solution' of the Nazis. Concentration camps liberated by the Americans had yielded mass graves, poison-gas showers, non-stop crematoria and living skeletons with haunted eyes. The carnage was so far beyond anything ever seen before that even conventional language did not have a word for it. A new word was created to describe it: genocide.
>>>It's not a new word. No one call tell the horrors of the holocaust with words. Nor can it be done with any other means.
No one could conceive of anything that anyone could ever have done to deserve such a fate. The hearts of everyone on Earth went out to the Jews. Everyone felt guilty for not having stopped Hitler sooner, before six million Jews had gone to their deaths. Filled with shock, compassion, guilt, shame, remorse and regret, the world of 1945 could deny the Jews nothing.
>>>Except access to Israel which the British continued to deny or humanatarian relief to the millins of jews that were left homeless and penyless.
The British were rapidly vacating the land of Palestine, the Jewish homeland of two thousand years ago. Many Jews had emigrated there during the last thirty years. Many European Jews were wandering around the continent as "Displaced Persons", sole survivors of their families or villages with nowhere to go. The world felt shamed and wanted to "do something for the Jews" to "make up" for what had happened. Some Jews themselves and other Zionists were clamouring about the Balfour Declaration, made by the British in a very different world over fifty years and two world wars ago.
>>>No one gave the jews any support in getting their own country. They forced the British out by themselves and then stopped the arabs by themselves.
Almost before the British were out of Palestine, the United States stepped in and declared that the area would once again be the Jewish homeland. The Americans were trying not only to make up for the Second World War, but to correct an ancient historical wrong. Huge waves of Jewish immigrants flocked to their ancient ancestral homeland.
>>> Waves of jews escaping europe never to return and hoping to start a new lives as equal humans. The Americans didn't declare anything. Untill 1967 the US was not involved at all in the conflict.
As these European "displaced persons" found a home once again, they created a whole new flood of "displaced persons" -- Arabs whose umpteenth great-grandfather had farmed the same land 75 generatons ago, forced to leave because a newly-arrived European Jew had become the new owner. These Arabs, today called the Palestinians, left in droves.
>>> No one forced anyone out. Palestinians who left did it of their own free will and without being forced out or their homes taken over. By the way I have roots in Israel going back to the ancinet communities so I have a strong basis to believe my familiy is here for over 500 generations.
It took two years from wars' end for the British to finish vacating and for the brief period of American assistance with Jewish immigration to conclude. Jews all over the world had been delighted with the idea; those who didn't emigrate to live there were quite generous financially. The United States gave much financial and military assistance so that in 1947 the area which had been known as Palestine for two thousand years declared itself the state of Israel.
>>>In 1947 they turned to the UN. Then they were instracted to leave and they did so in 1948. The US didn't give any financial support, and certainly not a military one. In 1948 the areas of Palestine that were given to the jews were declared as the state of Israel. Most of the country was in Palestinian hands and they chose to unite with the arab countries and therefore chose not to declare independence.
The brand-new state was promptly attacked at the same time by several of its outraged Arab neighbours. They themselves had been under the boot of the Ottomans for centuries, then had had to endure the British, but now that the entire Middle East had looked as though it were finally going to be free and self-determining, here had come the meddling Americans to eject the Palestinians --brother Arabs-- and move Jews in in their place!
>>>Again, the Americans had nothing to do with the middle east. The arabs weren't about to give the jews a state and so they wanted to do what the British didn't agree to do - to throw all jews to the sea.
Aside from this strange, offensive new outpost there were no Jews for thousands of miles around -- only Arabs. For the Arabs it was like surgically transplanting a tuft of blond hair onto a head full of black. They saw these Jews sitting proudly on land that had been Arab land for two thousand years, while the 'rightful' Palestinian-Arab owners sat shivering in refugee camps just outside the borders of the new state. Outraged and offended, they attacked with their combined military force.
>>> There were large jewish communities in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and Iran. The Palestinians got to the refugee camps only after 1948 after they ran away to the arab countries that promised to give them back all of Palestine.
Unfortunately for the Arab states that attacked in 1947, U.S. weapons and training that had been provided to the Israeli military allowed Israel to trounce them. In other Arab-Israeli conflicts (1956, 1967 and 1973), almost always started by the Arabs, the same has been the result: one was called the Six-Day War because that's all the time it took the Israelis to win, while another was called the Yom Kippur War because the Arabs tried to win by surprise-attacking on the holiest Jewish day.
>>>The US didn't supply Israel with any weapons, and infact it even banned selling weapons to Israel. The Israelis didn't have a trained army (Except Vingate's Palmah) and the IDF was made by combining all the jewish resistances. The IAF was built in a dampster near Tel Aviv from remainings of WWII British airplanes. The only armored vehicle the IDF had were civilian trucks the the Hagana wrapped with steel plates.
The previous Palestinian inhabitants haven't been sitting idly in their refugee camps on Israel's borders for fifty years while fellow Arabs from other Arab countries have been fighting and dying in attempts to win back their land for them. The Palestinians formed the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), a terrorist group that has been bombing Israel and conducting other terrorist raids on her for decades.
>>>The PLO is a later generation terror group. The Egyptians and Jordanians used other groups before in order to weaken Israel.
For many years now Yasser Arafat has been the leader of the PLO, and thus Public Enemy Number One of the Israeli state. He was controversial in the 1980s for once wearing his customary pistol on a visit to the Pope and because the United States didn't want to grant him a visa to enter the U.S. so he could speak at the United Nations.
>>> Not so many years. The PLO was established in the 1970s by Arafat in his home city of Cairo. He has been a very good leader appearantly as I can't think of any other terrorist that was welcomed by the pope and the UN.
The first real progress in the Arab-Israeli situation was made by President Carter, who got Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace treaty. We later found out what ordinary Arabs thought of that when some of Sadat's own people assassinated him as he stood on the reviewing stand during a parade.
>>>I doubt you can say what the ordinary people think by the acts of an extrimist.
The fact that Israel recently allowed the Gaza Strip to become an 'autonomous Arab zone' with its own police force and Yasser Arafat (Israel's Public Enemy Number One), of all people, as its leader, is probably the most encouraging move towards peace since the Americans started the whole mess in the 1940s. Of course, we found out what ordinary Israelis thought of that when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the guy who made the Gaza Strip thing possible, as he moved through a crowded public square a few years ago.
>>>Yigal Amir was not a member of any security force. And just to show what ordinary people really think: The public square was crowded because of a huge left wing demonstration of support. The Americans are the negotiators as they're the only country both sides agree will be neutral.
Since historic agreements signed in Oslo, Norway in September of 1993 between the Israelis and the PLO set the Gaza Strip aside for the Palestinians, the PLO and its leader have been kept busy with the headaches of self-rule. Those Palestinians and other Arabs who felt that this arrangement was not good enough and that there was still more for which Israel must answer felt that the PLO had gone soft and sold out; they became dissatisfied with the PLO as the representative of their interests.
>>>They were disatisfied from the beggining. The Hamas and Islamic Jihad have a goal of conquering all of Israel and anything less will mean failure.
These extreme anti-Israelis formed a group called Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Islamic force composed of Palestinians and other sympathetic Arabs. Backed by the sympathetic Islamic countries of Iran and Syria, since the 1993 Oslo accords Hezbollah has set up shop in Israel's chaotic bordering neighbour to the North, Lebanon, which has been paralysed for decades by civil war.
>>>The Hizzbalah had nothing to do with the PA. It's in Lebanon. They fought the IDF and since the Israeli withdrawl from Lebano were "fighting" the Israeli civilians who happened to live near the border.
The situation in Lebanon is so fractious and its government so weak that Hezbollah has actually taken over the running of schools and hospitals in some areas, gaining it popular support amongst some Lebanese. Its primary purpose for existence being to inflict harm upon Israel, however, in April 1996 Hezbollah began raining fire down upon its hated enemy in the form of Rockets.
>>> And in the last week they shot over 1000 rockets into Israel.
Surrounded as it is by hostile neighbours who would prefer to see the blood of all its citizens running through the sands, Israel has perhaps understandably developed a 'massive retaliation' policy over the years. To guerrilla attacks by the Egyptian-backed Palestinian terrorist group fedayeen ("self-sacrificers", the predecessor of the PLO and Hezbollah) in the 1950s, Israel invaded Egyptian army posts in the dead of night, shooting hundreds of Egyptian troops as they slept, and on 29 October 1956 actually invaded Egypt herself, taking the entire Sinai Peninsula from her.
>>>Israel never shot soldiers in their sleep. In 1956 the Israel-British-French attack came as a result of the nationalising of the Suez cananl by the Egyptians. The fedayun weren't the PLO nor the Hizzbalah. They were Palestinians orgenizaed by Egypt and Jordan into small combat units. They invaded jewish towns and attacked the civilians there.
In Israel's belief that she must show a tough face in order to deter aggression, she has not hesitated even to operate far outside her home region. On 3 July 1976 she reacted to the hijacking of an airplane containing her Olympic team by storming the plane with a massive assault force as it sat on an airport runway in Entebbe, Uganda, a country well into Africa and decidedly not in Israel's home region, the Middle East. Israel had refused to negotiate or even talk to the hijackers, it attacked without regard to casualties and it took no prisoners. The message was clear: don't mess with us.
>>> I find it hard to believe the Israeli olympic team was flying with air france, especailly if you consider the fact they were murdered 4 years earlier. The flight was kidnapped and flown to Entebbe. The kidnaper demanded the release of all terrorists held in Israeli jails. Israel had no choice but to fight back. When you make an attack so far away you don't take prisoners. Whoever attacked the soldiers was killed. Whoever didn't was left there. There wan't much danger in it as the airport was paralyzed for teh time of the negotiations and there were no civlians there except those who were kidnapped.
G-Man
A One Man's War
When terrorists attacked Israel from bases in Southern Lebanon in March of 1978, Israel responded by invading Lebanon. When Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence service, learned in 1981 that its neighbouring country of Iraq (with its new leader Saddam Hussein) had an atomic reactor near its capital city of Baghdad that would enable it to manufacture nuclear weapons, Israeli jets invaded Iraqi airspace, flew on over to Baghdad one fine day and blew the atomic reactor to Kingdom Come.
>>>Israel withdraw from Lebanon in 1978. The Iraqi reactor wasn't in Bagdad. It was destroyed before any matterials were brough and in a day the French workers had a day off. The only casualties were Iraqi guards.
When Israel's ambassador to Great Britain was wounded in a PLO terrorist attack on the streets of London --just one man, mind you-- Israel responded by launching a massive, all- out, coordinated land, sea and air attack against PLO bases in Lebanon on 6 June 1982. By 14 June they had the PLO trapped and surrounded in Lebanon's capital city of Beirut and were pummeling them into oblivion with round-the-clock bombing.
>>>The attack came after a series of attacks, including the attack on the ambassador but also the blood bus, rocket shootings, sniping at farmers, etc.. The IAF only bombed military buildings.
If Ronald Regain hadn't yanked on the leash of his Israeli pit bull and forced him to wait while the United States Navy evacuated what was left of the PLO from Beirut, the Israelis almost certainly would've done there and then to the Palestinians what the Romans hadn't done to the Jews almost two thousand years earlier. In any case, the message "don't mess with us" was once again clear.
>>>Now Israel is blamed for something the writer thought we were gonna do? Anyweay Israel wanted the destruction of the PLO in Lebanon. The American pressure played a role, but not such a big role.
With the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli prime minister in 1992 on a campaign of peace and reconciliation with Israel's Arab neighbours, it looked as though perhaps such stiff reprisals might no longer be necessary. In the historic Oslo accords of 1993 the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel acknowledged the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip and the West bank of the Jordan river were designated as Palestinian homelands, and Israel and Jordan (the country) signed a treaty ending their 46-year state of war in 1994. Things were really looking up.
>>>Israel said it would negotiate with the Palestinians about the west bank and Gaza. It never said it would give them all.
A few months ago, however, we found out what at least some ordinary Israelis thought of all this 'peace with the Arabs' stuff when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Rabin as he moved through a crowded public square. Shimon Peres became Israel's new prime minister and tried to continue as best he could his predecessor's policies of peace and reconciliation with Arabs.
>>>Again, Yigal Amir was never a member of any security force. He was some fanatic. Only an idiot would take the acts of an extrimist as the thoughts of the people.
When the extreme Palestinian-Arab Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group Hezbollah started firing salvos of deadly rockets at Israel from its guerrilla bases in Lebanon in April of 1996, frightened, disappointed Israelis began to cry loudly to their government that perhaps those ingrate Arabs would only take advantage of peace and reconciliation, would only understand the language of force. Perhaps, some said, the only sure policy for security was the old 'massive retaliation'.
>>> The hizzbala was shooting at Israeli civilians for years. There wasn't anything new about it and so there wasn't any new response.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, facing an upcoming election and terrorist rockets raining fire down on those who would be deciding whether or not to vote him into office again, didn't take long to decide. On Thursday, 11 April 1996, Israeli ground-based planes and helicopter gunships operating from navy vessels in the Mediterranean launched a massive, non-stop bombing assault on Lebanon.
>>>Only against Hizbala targets.
On Monday, 15 April 1996 the United Nations Security Council in New York spent the entire day debating the situation but in the end could reach no decisions. United States Ambassador to the United Nations Madeline Albright made it clear that the U.S. position was that Israel's actions were appropriate and justifiable, and implied rather obviously that the U.S. would use its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council to block any punitive measures the council might attempt.
>>> Wasn't she the secritry of state?
The reactions of Syria and Iran, the two Islamic Arab countries which helped establish Hezbollah in the first place and continue to fund and supply her, have been no surprise: they have loudly decried that Israel is committing a monstrous crime against humanity and must be stopped. Israel, for its part, has pointed out that both Hitler and Hezbollah launched attacks trying to kill Jews, and reminds the international community what the countries of the world felt was necessary to do about Hitler. With all this rhetoric, the average confused bystander surely must be wondering what to believe.
>>>Israel NEVER said that.
Two thousand years ago the Romans committed a great wrong against the Jewish people. One hundred years ago the British made a promise that that wrong would be made right. Fifty years ago, after the Germans committed another great wrong against the Jewish people, the Americans tried to make up for it by honouring England's promise. In the process, they committed a great wrong against the Palestinians, who even today still sit shivering in their refugee camps.
>>>The Palestinians are in their refugee camps because the arab countries putted them there and not because of anything else.
The Palestinian Arabs hate the Jews for taking away their homes. The rest of the Arabs hate the Jews for taking away the homes of their brethren. All the Arabs hate the Americans for what they did to the Palestinians. So now today, in a region consisting of dozens of Muslim countries twice as wide as the United States, stretching from Morocco on the West coast of North Africa to Pakistan on the Indian Subcontinent, everyone speaks a form of Arabic, obeys Islamic law and worships a single god most recently revealed to him by Muhammad the last Prophet...
>>>Jews didn't take anyone's home unless they lived in a swamp.
...everyone, that is, except for those living on one tiny little strip of land, forty-seven miles long. For two thousand years the people there also spoke Arabic, obeyed Islamic law and worshipped the god most recently revealed by Muhammad. Now, however, those people are shivering in camps on the borders of what used to be their land. Today the people on that strip of land speak Hebrew, follow Talmudic law and worship the god of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca and Sarah.
>>>Except the 1.2 million Israeli arabs.
It has been suggested that there are historical parallels between the Arab-Israeli situation and the plight of the native inhabitants of North America (Native Americans / American Indians). Very few people are suggesting today that everyone whose ancestors came to North America after A.D. 1500 should go back where they came from so that the Native Americans can have their lands back. Why, then, was Palestine "returned" to the Jews? We were all taught as children that two wrongs don't make a right, so why did the U.S. try to right a two-thousand-year-old historical wrong by wronging the Palestinians?
>>>Israel deserve it's country because it won all the wars on it. Palestine wasn't returned to the jews but taken over by jews and non-muslim inhabitants (druzs) after the arabs wanted everyone else out. Why do the Palestinians deserve their own country if not due to historical reasons?
Such speculation, however, is merely crying over historically spilt milk: wouldn't removing the Israelis yet again, or blasting them out of existence as the Arabs tried so many times to do, simply be more of the same? Viewing the Middle East as it is today, should we not seek to learn from the mistakes of the past? Shouldn't we seek to learn not only from the mistakes of the Romans and the Nazis, but also from the mistakes we ourselves as Americans made a mere half-century ago when we sought to offer a quick fix to someone else's problems? Good intentions are not enough; surely only listening to and understanding the problems of those who must LIVE there, and then giving help IF it is requested, will finally bring peace.
>>>The US didn't do anything in the middle east untill 1967.
>>>Israel withdraw from Lebanon in 1978. The Iraqi reactor wasn't in Bagdad. It was destroyed before any matterials were brough and in a day the French workers had a day off. The only casualties were Iraqi guards.
When Israel's ambassador to Great Britain was wounded in a PLO terrorist attack on the streets of London --just one man, mind you-- Israel responded by launching a massive, all- out, coordinated land, sea and air attack against PLO bases in Lebanon on 6 June 1982. By 14 June they had the PLO trapped and surrounded in Lebanon's capital city of Beirut and were pummeling them into oblivion with round-the-clock bombing.
>>>The attack came after a series of attacks, including the attack on the ambassador but also the blood bus, rocket shootings, sniping at farmers, etc.. The IAF only bombed military buildings.
If Ronald Regain hadn't yanked on the leash of his Israeli pit bull and forced him to wait while the United States Navy evacuated what was left of the PLO from Beirut, the Israelis almost certainly would've done there and then to the Palestinians what the Romans hadn't done to the Jews almost two thousand years earlier. In any case, the message "don't mess with us" was once again clear.
>>>Now Israel is blamed for something the writer thought we were gonna do? Anyweay Israel wanted the destruction of the PLO in Lebanon. The American pressure played a role, but not such a big role.
With the election of Yitzhak Rabin as Israeli prime minister in 1992 on a campaign of peace and reconciliation with Israel's Arab neighbours, it looked as though perhaps such stiff reprisals might no longer be necessary. In the historic Oslo accords of 1993 the PLO recognised Israel's right to exist and Israel acknowledged the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians. The Gaza Strip and the West bank of the Jordan river were designated as Palestinian homelands, and Israel and Jordan (the country) signed a treaty ending their 46-year state of war in 1994. Things were really looking up.
>>>Israel said it would negotiate with the Palestinians about the west bank and Gaza. It never said it would give them all.
A few months ago, however, we found out what at least some ordinary Israelis thought of all this 'peace with the Arabs' stuff when a former member of his own security forces assassinated Rabin as he moved through a crowded public square. Shimon Peres became Israel's new prime minister and tried to continue as best he could his predecessor's policies of peace and reconciliation with Arabs.
>>>Again, Yigal Amir was never a member of any security force. He was some fanatic. Only an idiot would take the acts of an extrimist as the thoughts of the people.
When the extreme Palestinian-Arab Islamic fundamentalist terrorist group Hezbollah started firing salvos of deadly rockets at Israel from its guerrilla bases in Lebanon in April of 1996, frightened, disappointed Israelis began to cry loudly to their government that perhaps those ingrate Arabs would only take advantage of peace and reconciliation, would only understand the language of force. Perhaps, some said, the only sure policy for security was the old 'massive retaliation'.
>>> The hizzbala was shooting at Israeli civilians for years. There wasn't anything new about it and so there wasn't any new response.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, facing an upcoming election and terrorist rockets raining fire down on those who would be deciding whether or not to vote him into office again, didn't take long to decide. On Thursday, 11 April 1996, Israeli ground-based planes and helicopter gunships operating from navy vessels in the Mediterranean launched a massive, non-stop bombing assault on Lebanon.
>>>Only against Hizbala targets.
On Monday, 15 April 1996 the United Nations Security Council in New York spent the entire day debating the situation but in the end could reach no decisions. United States Ambassador to the United Nations Madeline Albright made it clear that the U.S. position was that Israel's actions were appropriate and justifiable, and implied rather obviously that the U.S. would use its veto power as a permanent member of the Security Council to block any punitive measures the council might attempt.
>>> Wasn't she the secritry of state?
The reactions of Syria and Iran, the two Islamic Arab countries which helped establish Hezbollah in the first place and continue to fund and supply her, have been no surprise: they have loudly decried that Israel is committing a monstrous crime against humanity and must be stopped. Israel, for its part, has pointed out that both Hitler and Hezbollah launched attacks trying to kill Jews, and reminds the international community what the countries of the world felt was necessary to do about Hitler. With all this rhetoric, the average confused bystander surely must be wondering what to believe.
>>>Israel NEVER said that.
Two thousand years ago the Romans committed a great wrong against the Jewish people. One hundred years ago the British made a promise that that wrong would be made right. Fifty years ago, after the Germans committed another great wrong against the Jewish people, the Americans tried to make up for it by honouring England's promise. In the process, they committed a great wrong against the Palestinians, who even today still sit shivering in their refugee camps.
>>>The Palestinians are in their refugee camps because the arab countries putted them there and not because of anything else.
The Palestinian Arabs hate the Jews for taking away their homes. The rest of the Arabs hate the Jews for taking away the homes of their brethren. All the Arabs hate the Americans for what they did to the Palestinians. So now today, in a region consisting of dozens of Muslim countries twice as wide as the United States, stretching from Morocco on the West coast of North Africa to Pakistan on the Indian Subcontinent, everyone speaks a form of Arabic, obeys Islamic law and worships a single god most recently revealed to him by Muhammad the last Prophet...
>>>Jews didn't take anyone's home unless they lived in a swamp.
...everyone, that is, except for those living on one tiny little strip of land, forty-seven miles long. For two thousand years the people there also spoke Arabic, obeyed Islamic law and worshipped the god most recently revealed by Muhammad. Now, however, those people are shivering in camps on the borders of what used to be their land. Today the people on that strip of land speak Hebrew, follow Talmudic law and worship the god of Abraham, Isaac, Rebecca and Sarah.
>>>Except the 1.2 million Israeli arabs.
It has been suggested that there are historical parallels between the Arab-Israeli situation and the plight of the native inhabitants of North America (Native Americans / American Indians). Very few people are suggesting today that everyone whose ancestors came to North America after A.D. 1500 should go back where they came from so that the Native Americans can have their lands back. Why, then, was Palestine "returned" to the Jews? We were all taught as children that two wrongs don't make a right, so why did the U.S. try to right a two-thousand-year-old historical wrong by wronging the Palestinians?
>>>Israel deserve it's country because it won all the wars on it. Palestine wasn't returned to the jews but taken over by jews and non-muslim inhabitants (druzs) after the arabs wanted everyone else out. Why do the Palestinians deserve their own country if not due to historical reasons?
Such speculation, however, is merely crying over historically spilt milk: wouldn't removing the Israelis yet again, or blasting them out of existence as the Arabs tried so many times to do, simply be more of the same? Viewing the Middle East as it is today, should we not seek to learn from the mistakes of the past? Shouldn't we seek to learn not only from the mistakes of the Romans and the Nazis, but also from the mistakes we ourselves as Americans made a mere half-century ago when we sought to offer a quick fix to someone else's problems? Good intentions are not enough; surely only listening to and understanding the problems of those who must LIVE there, and then giving help IF it is requested, will finally bring peace.
>>>The US didn't do anything in the middle east untill 1967.
PinkyGen
Paper copying intern
A decent overview, I like how it takes into affect time since the Romans. I do have a few problems, the first couple factual, the next more ideological.
Factual Errors:
1. US did not signifigantly aid Israel in 1947. They were one of the first countries to recognize them (The USSR actually doing it earlier). Aid until 1967 was very minor, a few missile batteries, and aid from American Jews. US actually opposed Israel in the 1956 attack (as well as opposing UK and France in that operation.)
Until 1967, France was actually the main supporter of Israel. Israel had French AMX tanks, and it was Mirage Fighters that destroyed the Arab Air Forces in the six-day war. French aid ended after 1967, for a couple of reasons I won't go into.
However, after 1967, the US took France's place as Israel's arms supllier(due to Soviet support for the Arab countries).
2. The Entebbe Raid wasn't after Olympic teams kidnapped, it was just an air France flight. The rescue is considered one of the most well-executed rescue missions ever.
3. Hizbullah is not PLO, rather a Lebanese organization.
Now a more ideological argument:
Until the 1947 war, Jews were not kicking Arabs off the land. They were not squatters (Britain only found a few). Either Jews lived in land not owned by anyone, or they bought and paid for the lands from the Arabs.
Second, Arabs were not forced to leave until the 47-48 war. There are two reasons why they left.
1. The Arab governments told them to leave, saying they could come back when the Jews were defeated. These were the majority
2. IDF did evict a sizeable number from their homes for security, a regrettable action.
Arab countries refused to resettle the Palestinians, and for some reason, the number of "refugees" has grown, not shrunken.
Factual Errors:
1. US did not signifigantly aid Israel in 1947. They were one of the first countries to recognize them (The USSR actually doing it earlier). Aid until 1967 was very minor, a few missile batteries, and aid from American Jews. US actually opposed Israel in the 1956 attack (as well as opposing UK and France in that operation.)
Until 1967, France was actually the main supporter of Israel. Israel had French AMX tanks, and it was Mirage Fighters that destroyed the Arab Air Forces in the six-day war. French aid ended after 1967, for a couple of reasons I won't go into.
However, after 1967, the US took France's place as Israel's arms supllier(due to Soviet support for the Arab countries).
2. The Entebbe Raid wasn't after Olympic teams kidnapped, it was just an air France flight. The rescue is considered one of the most well-executed rescue missions ever.
3. Hizbullah is not PLO, rather a Lebanese organization.
Now a more ideological argument:
Until the 1947 war, Jews were not kicking Arabs off the land. They were not squatters (Britain only found a few). Either Jews lived in land not owned by anyone, or they bought and paid for the lands from the Arabs.
Second, Arabs were not forced to leave until the 47-48 war. There are two reasons why they left.
1. The Arab governments told them to leave, saying they could come back when the Jews were defeated. These were the majority
2. IDF did evict a sizeable number from their homes for security, a regrettable action.
Arab countries refused to resettle the Palestinians, and for some reason, the number of "refugees" has grown, not shrunken.
Pellaken
The one and only.
I thought Germany was the #1 supporter for a while
Yep, its concise (with lies), well written (you could have won the amateur fiction writer for this one!), and truly unbased. horrifying review if you want it to be used for teaching/informing based on reality.
But if you want to add it to 'Mine Kampf' or palestinien school books, yup, excellent!
G-Man
A One Man's War
No. Untill 1967 the IDF was armed with French and Israeli weapons. After the war the French started an embargo on Israel and Israel turned to the US. At first the US was unhappy about supporting Israel but when they understood it would be a way to beat the soviets without loosing any soldiers they gave Israel a lot of support. Today the IDF is using American and Israeli weapons. Israel is building it's own tanks (The merkava series) and some of the infantry weapons (Galil, Tavor). Israel also tried to make fighter jets but the Lavi/Arie project was stopped under US pressure. I don't see any German here...
G-Man
A One Man's War
Germany makes (or at least made) the gear box for the tank. The engine is British.
Biased?
I don't think anything I said is biased...
The fact that you give me a very biased counter-sum up doesn't mean mine was biased.
If you can quote things that I said and prove that they are biased, I might think differently.
But currently you didn't prove one bit of what I said is biased.
Thank you, those were the big errors. I did not write the Article (I'm not American). I found it well-written though and agree with its general message. It was not written by a professional journalist and has a fair share of errors.
Must hurt when you get a does of truth?
Now onto G-Man's nit picking.
Never seen something so far from the truth.
Maybe I have been misinformed but your 'history review' is completely different from any history review I was taught or from any I saw on history books (Both Israeli and Internetional).
I'm never afraid from the truth, but I am pissed when you write false reviews and dignify them as true and well written, and say the 'give the message'.
They are false, period.
EDIT:
I found where this review was taken from:
http://www.angelfire.com/al2/lux/mainpag.html
Homepage of a nice arab guy, who lives in ... palestine???
No way!
Also, the review you, ahem, copied from the 'misinformed yet objective' palestinien is called 'Why the arabs are furious at the jews'. No comment
At least someone will have a unbiased account. You keep
trying to put a white hat on the Israeli cause. Israeli isn't
innocent, ANY country that practices torture as a state
policy is a pariah. Frankly Israeli is an invader to the Arabs. Whatever the British, the UN or anyone else says.
It's funny you mentioned 'Mine Kampf', your country seems
to copying alot of the most odious traits of the nazi regime
(torture, secret police, assassins, Living space in the east)
Good luck with your propaganda campaign, if you can find
anyone who agrees with you. Frankly I was undecided about
the cause until you enlightened me.
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