Israel or Palestine?

Submitted by Bill Cunningham (United Kingdom), Jan 6, 2009 at 21:18

Firstly, let me make it perfectly clear that I have no axe to grind for Israel or Palestine, Arab or Jew, neither am I anti-Semitic or anti Muslim. For the record I'm a white, middle aged nominally Christian male.

That said, as an impartial outside observer, I fail to see the right of the Israelis, who are after all not a natural nation, but Jewish immigrants from all over the world, to occupy the area they were given in 1948, let alone the areas they took and still occupy after the war in the sixties, forty odd years ago.

It seems to me that sympathy for the Jewish race after the holocaust, which incidentally I also feel and find as atrocious and horrific as anyone, led to large numbers of survivors and refugees which the Allies frankly didn't know what to do with being ‘given back' their homeland according to the bible.

The occupants of this land who had lived there for generations, thousands of years, were suddenly told ‘This place is no longer yours, it's ours, get out' and they were made to leave at gunpoint. These people, understandably in my view did not then, and still do not now, recognise the rights of foreign immigrants to take over their homeland, neither do they believe in the bible.

If things had been left at that who knows what may have transpired, but the weaponry supplied to Israel from the west made any hope of the Arabs regaining their homeland impossible. This inevitably led to the Arabs employing guerrilla tactics as they had no chance in normal combat against the Israeli militia, just have they have no chance in normal combat now with crude rockets and AK47's against modern battle tanks and American F16's.

I've researched a lot of factual accounts of how the land was desert when the Palestinians lived there before Israel was created and how the desert bloomed when the Israelis transformed it, (with the help of large sums of American money which was never offered to the Palestinians). This in my humble opinion is totally irrelevant. Whatever the people of Palestine did with their land was their business and no one else's. I'd be interested to hear what the people of Phoenix would have to say if a Muslim country the size of Wales were imposed on them in the Arizona desert and they were railroaded out of their homes, never to be allowed to return.

The actions of Israel in Gaza are creating a suicide bomber factory. The support of the Americans just adds to the ‘Great Satan' feeling and will unfortunately, but inevitably lead to more terror attacks on the west by people who carry out terror attacks, but in reality have no other way of fighting back at what they see as a terrible injustice.

This problem is neither the fault of the Palestinians or Israelis, Muslim or Jew. It has been caused by the monumental arrogance of the Western Allies at the end of WW2 in carving up the Middle East as they saw fit with absolutely no regard for the rightful owners of the lands. What the solution is God knows. The Israelis have nuclear weapons and will without doubt use them if faced with defeat. God help us all.

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