Originally Posted by
billygoat
The first two sentences in your post have two errors. One is definitional and the other is historical. The following is a non-political and non-religious reply.
There is nothing apolitical about your reply. It's deeply political and completely bizarre that you assert otherwise. You're making demonstrably false historical claims to justify the colonization of Palestine, claims no remotely accepted historical (no matter their political leanings) would accept. Meaning it's propaganda, not scholarship.
Originally Posted by
billygoat
Definitional problem
Originally Posted by
billygoat
1) Zionism means the movement for the return of the Jewish people to their homeland and for Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel.
This doesn't make sense. Eretz Israel is a new idea not an old one. Also, my religion includes a very diverse group of people. We are Ethiopians, Arabs, Kurds, Iberians, Turks, Slavs and more. To say we all stem from the same "homeland" only makes sense if you say all Christians too are from Palestine because that's the source of Christian theology as well. The idea of Jews as a national or ethnic grouping (which as anyone who knows the history knows the early Zionists used to exclude all non-European Jews from the colonizing project) comes from anti-semitism and eugenics.
Originally Posted by
billygoat
2) Palestine has never been the name of a nation or state. It is a geographical term that derives from the Greek translation of Israel, which means wrestle or struggle in English. (It was Yasser Arafat who came up with the idea of claiming the term Palestine as the name of a nation, shortly after the formation of the PLO in 1964 in Egypt.)
No historian agrees with you about the Arafat malarkey. None. Not a single one. Not from any political spectrum. It's nonsense propaganda that started during the Meir years. David Ben Gurion himself referred to Palestinians as a national grouping decades before the date you bring up. Palestine does come from a Greek root, Παλαιστίνη which sounded out is....Palestine. Which has nothing to do with the Greek term for Israel which is...Israel [Ἰσρᾱήλ]. Dunno what being or not being a state has to do with anything. No state is a state before it's a state.
Originally Posted by
billygoat
Historical problem
Originally Posted by
billygoat
Prior to the conquest by the Israelites in the land, there were in existence several (what we would now call) city-states. After the Rehoboam-Jeroboam problem, the nation split in two: Judah and Israel. Eventually both were conquered, with only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin returning to the land and resuming their nation, while the other ten tribes remained in exodus. Israel eventually fell under the rule of the Roman Empire. Then came along several Islamic caliphates, and ultimately the Ottoman Empire for about four centuries. Right around when World War II ended, the British (with a little help) pushed the Ottoman Empire out of the land and eventually ceded the land to the Jewish peoples. That led to the 1948 declaration of the nation of Israel, and the Arab-Israeli War followed shortly after. Israel was successful in defending herself, but lost what is commonly called the West Bank to Jordan (then called the Emirate of Transjordan), who annexed the territory to its state, and the Gaza Strip to Egypt. (If you ever wondered why the West Bank is on the eastern side of Israel, now you know -- it's a Jordanian term.) Along came the 1967 Six Day War in which Israel regained control of what it calls Judea and Samaria but everyone else sticks to the term West Bank. it also regained the Gaza Strip and took control of the Golan Heights.
The ancient history is flawed but unimportant for your points and it was at the end of WWI, not WWII that the British took Palestine from the Ottomans (the Ottoman Empire hadn't existed for two decades by the time WWII started). The British occupied Palestine from the end of WWI until 1948 and, allowed varying degrees of European Jewish colonization of the land and displacement of the native population (if you don't want to call them "Palestinians" fine, dunno how that would make it ok to carry out ethnic cleansing). Israel didn't "lose" the West Bank because it never had the West Bank. There were virtually no Zionist colonies in that area despite the West Bank being the actual locations of ancient Israelite and Judean settlements. Meaning if this was some "return" like you mentioned, the Zionists went to the wrong place and the Israelites and Judeans never lived by the sea which is where the overwhelming majority of colonizers lived both in 1948 and now. And in 1967 Israel didn't regain control of anything because it didn't have control in the first place. Ever. Not once.
Originally Posted by
billygoat
So there was never a nation or people called Palestine in the Middle East. Never, ever. There were groups of Judaists, Muslims, and Christians living in the land prior to 1948 but there was never a state called Palestine.
There was never a state called Tsennacommacah either but that doesn't make it ethical that the British invaded the area and established Virginia in its place, driving out the Powhatan people.
Originally Posted by
billygoat
But since 1948, Israel had agreed to cede land to the folks who call themselves Palestinians no less than five times and all five times the PLO said no. What's peculiar is that from 1948 to 1967, Israel did not control the West Bank. The Palestinians could have demanded an independent state from the Jordanians. On the contrary, while Jordan was in control Arafat said there was no longer a claim since it was no longer part of "Palestine". Once it was back in Israeli hands it miraculously became disputed land again. That sums up the historical problem.
Most of this this is ahistorical and the rest dishonest. It's a deviation from msmoorad's anti-semitic posts about Zionism and has nothing to do with the historical period previously discussed. If you want to spout these falsehoods start a new thread in off-topic and will sort you out point by point.
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