Originally posted by sonhouse
And it seems, will be that way till the last Arab, Jordanian, Palestinian, whatever, and the last Jew there dies.
How can Israel have peace with the Palestinians when it is in their constitution they want to destroy the state of Israel?
The Jordanians were already given their land. Below is important points in the history:
The original problem goes back to 1922. Palestine had been a small part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. But in World War I the British and French defeated Germany and the Ottoman Empire and stripped them of their colonies. Thus the League of Nations had to decide what nations should become sovereign in Palestine and the rest of the vast lands lost by the Turks. The League awarded more than 90% of these lands to Arab states, with Britain and France as temporary trustees.
The British government, following the policy it had announced 5 years earlier in the Balfour Declaration, urged that Palestine be set aside as the site for a homeland for the Jewish people. They added that while the Arabs had a number of countries, with millions of square miles, the Jews suffered from having no homeland at all. Also the small numbers of Jews who had come to Palestine in previous decades had begun to build up the country – attracting many Arabs from neighboring countries – and that the Jews could be expected to provide economic development and a lawful society which would help the development of the whole region.
The League of Nations ruled that Great Britain should become the Mandatory government of Palestine to provide for Jewish settlement of the land so that it could again become the site of a Jewish homeland.
The Arab countries and the local Arab residents did not accept the decision of the League of Nations – although they did not deny the authority of the League from which they had received so much benefit. Concerning Palestine the Arabs have never accepted any international decision. Nor have they been willing to negotiate or to accept any division or compromise. From the beginning their position has been that this is all “Arab land” or “Palestinian land” and they have refused to negotiate or to recognize any ruling to the contrary. (As part of the Oslo process they said that they were willing to make a compromise, but when negotiations came to a head at Camp David in 2000 they refused to make any counter-offers and instead began the current terror offensive three months later.)
Whether or not the League of Nations was wrong to decide that Palestine should become a Jewish homeland, the effect of that decision is that the hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Palestine from the creation of the Mandate in 1922 until the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 came pursuant to the international law that existed at the time. They came not as colonials, and not to take land away from another people, but to fulfill the decision of the League of Nations that Jews should be encouraged to settle in Palestine.
And they bought the land on which they settled. The Arabs who fought against the Jewish settlers and refugees may have thought of themselves as protecting their own country from invaders, but according to international law it wasn’t their country (and it never had been in the past) and they were fighting against the existing law.
In 1945 after the end of World War II great pressure was put on Britain to allow the Jewish survivors of the holocaust to come to Palestine, but because of their political interests the British continued to obey the Arab demand to exclude the Jews despite the provisions of the Mandate. The Palestinian Jews began a guerrilla war against the British government and by 1947 the British decided that they would give up their Mandate and go home. To deal with the potential vacuum of authority the UN General Assembly recommended that Western Palestine be divided into two new states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem to be an international territory for ten years.
(Eastern Palestine had earlier been separated and given to King Abdullah to become Jordan.)
Palestine had been established as a Jewish homeland by the League of Nations a generation earlier. After the Holocaust the UN suggested a smaller territory for the survivors of the Holocaust and for the Jewish people than had been set by the League. And Israel actually got only the land its forces succeeded in holding in the fighting against the Arab armies.
The Jewish community in Palestine accepted the UN recommendation to divide Palestine and declared the State of Israel and its willingness to give its Arab inhabitants equal rights and to live in peace with its Arab neighbors. But from its first day Israel had to fight to exist. It was under attack by Arab armies who took whatever land they could, regardless of the UN partition recommendation, and killed or removed all Jews from whatever land they occupied.
The fighting continued, off and on, for over a year until the UN finally succeeded in negotiating an armistice along the lines the forces held when the fighting stopped. These borders lasted from 1949 until 1967 and are called the ’67 borders. The Armistice left Western Palestine divided into three pieces: Israel, the Gaza strip, which is a small piece of land along the Mediterranean shore which was occupied by the Egyptian army but not incorporated into Egypt, and “the West Bank,” the part of the Mandate territory between Israel and the West of the Jordan River, which was occupied by Jordan. Jordan tried to incorporate the West Bank into Jordan – changing its own name from Transjordan, but none of the Arab countries recognized the area as part of Jordan. The only countries which recognized Jordan’s claim were Britain and Pakistan, and later Jordan gave up its claim.
During the 1948-9 war, between Israel and the Arab states which attacked Israel, about 600,000 Arabs who had been living in the area which became Israel left their homes for neighboring Arab countries. Some were forced to leave by the Israeli army, but the majority left to avoid the fighting and because they were urged or even forced to do so by the Arab governments and their own leaders, despite the fact that many were urged by their Jewish neighbors to remain and live in peace in Israel. These 600,000 were the start of “the Arab refugee problem.”
The Arab countries, with a population of over 50 million and an area bigger than the U.S., refused to accept any Arab refugees, even though they spoke the same language, shared the same culture, and practiced the same religion.
In the Spring of 1967 the Arab countries, led by Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt, prepared to attack Israel and, in their own words, “throw the Jews into the sea.” The UN forces stationed between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai desert obeyed Nasser’s demand to get out of his way, and the Egyptian military moved into the Sinai toward Israel. Egypt closed the Tiran Straits to ships going to or from Israel, refusing all diplomatic efforts by the US to fulfill the US commitment to Israel to keep its sea lanes open.
Before the Egyptian attack was launched Israel preempted with air attacks that destroyed most of the Egyptian air force, and with armored attacks into the Sinai. At the same time Israel notified the King of Jordan that Israel would not attack the territory he occupied and urged him to maintain peace with Israel. Jordan, however, yielded to Arab pressure and joined the attack against Israel sending its army against Jewish Jerusalem.
The result was that in six days Israel’s armies threw Egypt out of Gaza and the Sinai, threw Jordan out of Jerusalem and the West Bank, and threw Syria out of the Golan Heights, from which they had been shooting at Israel from time to time since 1949, and very heavily during the six-day war, thus the area controlled by Israel was more than tripled.
The UN Security Council effort to resolve the war resulted in UNSC Resolution 242. To this day the Palestinians and all the Arab countries insist that UNSC Res. 242 requires that Israel get out of all the territories acquired in 1967, just as they continue to insist that the League of Nations Mandate to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine was invalid. But Lord Caradon of England, and Eugene Rostow of the U.S., two of the principal diplomats responsible for negotiating the Resolution, and most independent international legal experts, have written that Res 242 was not intended to, and does not, require Israel to return to the ’67 borders. Such a requirement would be inconsistent with the phrase “secure and recognized” borders, both because those borders are not secure and because no description of the borders would be needed if the Resolution were referring to the preexisting borders.
After the Security Council passed Res. 242 the Arab countries met at Khartoum and issued their famous “three noes:” no negotiations, no recognition, and no peace. But ten years later, in 1977, President Sadat of Egypt, after being secretly assured by Israel that it was willing to return the Sinai to Egypt, came to Israel and proposed that Egypt and Israel make peace with each other. The following year in negotiations at Camp David a peace treaty was negotiated and Israel returned the entire Sinai to Egypt, and Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel and to comply with Res. 242.
The Palestinian demand that Israel restore the ’67 borders would require that more than half a million people give up their homes and the neighborhoods and schools and synagogues they have built and lived in, on formerly empty land, most of them for more than 20 years, including more than half the Jewish population of Jerusalem.
At the end of September 2000 after rejecting the proposal by Israel and the US to create a Palestinian state on more than 95% of the West Bank and Gaza plus the part of Jerusalem where Arabs now live, the Palestinians started a campaign of murder and terror against Israel.
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