I'm not arguing that there's any overwhelming shift going on, just pointing out another change in the status quo. In theory there is no distinction between East and West Jerusalem in terms of its international status, the original 47 partition plan had it (and Bethlehem) undivided under international rule, and the future of the entire city is supposed to be settled through negotiations, so recognising West Jerusalem as Israel's capital is completely novel and doesn't really make much sense in terms of anybody's wishes (there's no indication either Israelis or Palestinians want the city to be divided again).
Middle East Politics
- Thread starter Raoul
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I'm not arguing that there's any overwhelming shift going on, just pointing out another change in the status quo. In theory there is no distinction between East and West Jerusalem in terms of its international status, the original 47 partition plan had it (and Bethlehem) undivided under international rule, and the future of the entire city is supposed to be settled through negotiations, so recognising West Jerusalem as Israel's capital is completely novel and doesn't really make much sense in terms of anybody's wishes (there's no indication either Israelis or Palestinians want the city to be divided again).
You could make an argument that fundamentalist Christianity is just as dangerous as fundamentalist Islam.
And from a link mentioned in that same tweet thread, this is a good analysis of the political benefits of this 'move:'
What image do I try to present? Read again:
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All right, as I said, I don't follow that very much.
They are concerned with birth rates of Palestinians. Even if they accept a one-state solution it would likely be an apartheid state. Israel is following the trend of Europe of having fewer kids. The upsurge of population over the last few decades in Israel especially the illegal settlements have come about mostly from economic migrants professing to be faux Jews.
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Actually, the opposite is the case:
Jewish, Arab fertility rates in Israel on par for first time
Arab rate drops, Jewish rate rises, and women in both groups now give birth to an average of 3.13 children, highest in OECD
Is this the immigrant population mostly from Africa? I remember certain posters from Israel being concerned about Israeli birth rates.
No, among Jews it's primarily due to really high birth rates among the ultra-orthodox population. If you visit Mea Shearim in Jerusalem you have a hard time walking down the street without stepping on kids. Many secular Israelis are concerned by this since the ultra-orthodox receive all kinds of benefits and exemptions from the state that they don't.
Thanks. It obviously suits the state to benefit families with a bigger pool of children.
Not really since they contribute very little in return in terms of work or military service. The secular parties would like to change the laws on this, but the nature of the Israeli political system often leaves the ultra-orthodox elements holding the balance of power.
Given that Jordan is 80% of Palestine, 80% of it's people are Palestinian so the solution is ready made.
The current 4 state solution - Arab Jordan, Arab West Bank, Arab Gaza and Jew Israel just confuses matters for those who can't count .
So wait, are you proposing Jordan absorb the West Bank and Gaza?
Re-absorb some of it. (remember Jordan illegally occupied it until 67). Creative land swaps are the only way forward and that includes Egypt putting some skin in the game with Gaza.
Fair enough, not sure it's feasible in this day and age especially as its just some of the land. In the same way ROI will be a tad hesitant in absorb all the weight of NI, no one wants to take on more dependents. Can't blame Jordan for not wanting to do so.
If Israel wants the land, it has to have the people as well. Can't see anything beyond one state solution.
Perhaps they can call it New Palestine
A1 state democracy where everybody can vote could be interesting though - what is there about 6.5 Million Jews in Israel, 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 3 Million in the west bank and 2 million in the Gaza strip... Its actually pretty balanced in theory
The bloodshed would be off the scale. Lets not be naive here, Arabs can barely live with themselves let alone Jews.
Pre Israel, pre-settlements.....
Perhaps they can call it New Palestine
A1 state democracy where everybody can vote could be interesting though - what is there about 6.5 Million Jews in Israel, 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 3 Million in the west bank and 2 million in the Gaza strip... Its actually pretty balanced in theory
Careful...you're denying ethnic cleansing by admitting that there's twice as many Israeli Arabs as there were in '48.
Rotherham Red's gonna be mighty pissed off with you.
Perhaps they can call it New Palestine
A1 state democracy where everybody can vote could be interesting though - what is there about 6.5 Million Jews in Israel, 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 3 Million in the west bank and 2 million in the Gaza strip... Its actually pretty balanced in theory
I think it's a nice idea providing everybody's on board with it and understands what it would actually involve in order to make it work - basically Israeli Jews would have to be de-Zionized in some way, and the Palestinians would need to be de-Arabized and de-Islamised (I mean these terms in the political sense) somehow. That's quite a bit of social engineering required.
Even then I still think it would collapse into violence. We live in a world where Kurds are deciding they'd rather not share a state with Arabs, where many Catalans want a break from the Spanish, and where the Scots may soon go independent. Given the history between Jews and Arabs in the region, the current ideological trends, the mutual hatred and conflicting narratives and claims, it seems doubtful that a genuine one-state democracy will ever work or even come to fruition. As it stands, no major political force, Israeli or Palestinian, has ever campaigned for a single binational or de-nationalised state.
There has been bloodshed for years everywhere in fairness. Europe was a hellhole with constant conflict for centuries pre-EU.
And yeah unfortunately it will likely to continue, regardless of a one, or a two or a four state solution.
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The Palestinian cause needs to make up it's mind whether it wants a viable state more than the destruction of another one.
Unfortunately, this has mutated into a holy war far more than a territorial dispute, so new approaches need to be explored.
And that's the other problem. The more power that accumulates with the ultra-Orthodox side, the less chance of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
Yeah I agree that this has mutated into a holy war or rather has been for a while. Both sides need to focus on new approaches, a more secular one would be ideal.
I don't think he was denying anything of the sort. Perhaps you're confusing ethnic cleansing with genocide as many people do. The ethnic cleansing over the last half century (and in fact this happened to Palestinian subsistence farmers before and at the early part of the mandate) has involved clearing Palestinians out of the parts of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and interestingly even certain parts inside Israel proper) that Israel covets and leaving the people with the option of either leaving altogether or moving to the urban areas. So they have essentially concentrated the growing Palestinian population in a large number of tiny enclaves to provide more land for Jewish settlement.
What was that a rebuttal to? I'll hazard a guess that it was my mention of Palestinian subsistence farmers in the pre-state period.
1. Abbas is referring to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian arabs. Israeli historians are in overwhelming agreement that the Palestinians suffered an ethnic cleansing in 1948. Even right-wing bigots like Benny Morris agrees (although he has stated that Ben Gurion didn't go far enough and should have gotten rid of ALL of the Palestinians). Morris listed the reasons for why Palestinians left in 1948. Number one and two on the list were direct expulsion (or massacre) by zionist/Israeli forces and fleeing before the zionist forces actually got there (presumably to avoid being massacred). Clearly Abbas is referring to the second one. I don't understand the nuances of Arabic but it read like he was using the word 'emigrated' sarcastically. But yeah, his family fled for their lives. The zionists would actually brag and exaggerate their massacres in order to encourage the Arabs to flee before the zionist forces arrived. Is that not ethnic cleansing?
2. What I was actually referring to was something quite different. Before there was even violence between Arabs and Jews, what was happening was that the JNF would use its massive wealth to buy up farmland from absentee landlords and then evict the Arab subsistence farmers because they only wanted Jewish labor (wait, I thought they always wanted to share the land peacefully with the arabs?). Often the land would lie unoccupied for years. The subsistence farmers would be forced to live in shantytowns outside places like Haifa, begging their new overlords for a day's work to feed their families.
1.Love it how you conveniently omit that the combined Arab Armies attacked first, promising to slaughter the Jews. And that 800,000 Arab Jews were ethnically cleansed from Yemen, Iraq.
2.Yes, the JNF paid exorbitant prices for tracts of land, though I need a proper source to verify your eviction claim. Please provide.
1. No no, hang on a second. The Arab armies intervened on May 15th AFTER months of expulsions and massacres by the zionists. It is estimated that about 300,000 (out of the total of 750,000) were expelled and hundreds of villages destroyed during this period. How does that fit in with your narrative?
Also, the 800,000 Jews you refer to leaving Arab countries is completely different. This happened in waves over a 25 year period! Certainly after the appalling behaviour of the zionists in 1948 hostility towards Jews in some Arab countries increased leading to many leaving for various reasons. But in the years after 1948 the Israeli government were actively encouraging Jews to leave the Arab countries to boost the Israeli jewish population.
2. My source for that particular fact is actually the Martyrmade podcast on the origins of the conflict but I can't remember what source it provided. I highly recommend it. It's about 25 hours long mind you but I believe this would have come up around episode 1 or 2.
Yep, the Mizrachi Jews left their homes for lots of different reasons, depending on the time and place. They probably had it worst in Iraq and Yemen, and to a lesser degree Egypt (where their plight wasn't helped by the Lavon Affair). Elsewhere things were often a bit different, many moved for economic or even ideological reasons, many moved to escape the general oppressive state of affairs which came to characterize the Arab states after WW2 which affected everyone in those countries. The Algerian Jews largely fled to France in the context of the war of independence there. And of course the backdrop was the growing hostility caused in large part by the conflict in Palestine. While Jews had traditionally suffered discrimination in the Arab countries, actual cases of outright persecution were rare until the middle of the 20th century.
Morris in Revisited: "In examining the causes of the Arab exodus from Palestine over 1947–1949, accurate quantification is impossible. I have tried to show that the exodus occurred in stages and that causation was multi-layered...What happened in Palestine/Israel over 1947–1949 was so complex and varied, the situation radically changing from date to date and place to place, that a single-cause explanation of the exodus from most sites is untenable...At most, one can say that certain causes were important in certain areas at certain times, with a general shift in the spring of 1948 from precedence of cumulative internal Arab factors – lack of leadership, economic problems, breakdown of law and order – to a primacy of external, compulsive causes: Haganah/IDF attacks and expulsions, fear of Jewish attacks and atrocities, lack of help from the Arab world and the AHC and a feeling of impotence and abandonment, and orders from Arab officials and commanders to leave. In general, throughout the war, the final and decisive precipitant to flight in most places was Haganah, IZL, LHI or IDF attack or the inhabitants’ fear of imminent attack."
According to Morris, up until April there were very few cases of coerced expulsion or destruction of villages - "in the war’s first four months, between the end of November 1947 and the end of March 1948, there were no preparations for mass expulsion and there were almost no cases of expulsion or the leveling of villages". He then argues that "as a result of Arab belligerence and the Yishuv’s sense of siege, fragility and isolation", a harsher policy of transfer came into play from April onwards.
This will go down as one of Trump's greatest hits. Visiting Israel and telling leaders he "just got back from the Middle East". (You can see Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. on the right next to Bibi, struggling to hold back his laughter).
Recent narrative suggests Muslims invented terrorism.
Ironically, most scholars attribute the first terrorists to the Jewish Zealots against Roman collaborators in Judea. Anyway, ever heard of Guy Fawkes?
I’m mean it was you who did state the rediculous notion that there was no terrorism prior to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, as many Irish posters might correct you on, etc etc etc etc
Pretty sure WWI and many other wars were not around 1,000's for years ago
It was before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan mind
I was talking about ISIS, Al Qaida within the context of this thread. Of course terrorism has been around for ever.Ironically, most scholars attribute the first terrorists to the Jewish Zealots against Roman collaborators in Judea. Anyway, ever heard of Guy Fawkes?
I’m mean it was you who did state the rediculous notion that there was no terrorism prior to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, as many Irish posters might correct you on, etc etc etc etc
It was before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan mind
I agree?
Well, say that rather than trying to make yourself look good on the back of me. I still don’t agree with you mind, it’s far more complexed. But I do now sort of get which angle you are coming from I suppose.
Don't waste your time that one and his mate. They have no shame.
The 1 state solution would be the ideal solution and most fair. Equal rights for all. But could you imagine that ever happening with all these intolerant religious lunitacs around on both sides?! With all the hatred around??? Seems all too utopian to me to ever happen.
Apologies if this has been brought up already in this thread, and maybe I'm being naive to think international law should still mean something in the Israeli context, but still, there's UNSC Resolution 478, among others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_478
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_478