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I love how he thinks that Israel bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods and killing civilians doesn't count as oppression because there's more Arabs than Israelis

I love how he thinks that Israel bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods and killing civilians doesn't count as oppression because there's more Arabs than Israelis in the general area.

shawndumas 9y ago
"Arabs like to say that there are two conflicting narratives of the conflict. The facts are far simpler. It starts in the end of the 19th century. At the time millions of Jews were fleeing Russia and flooding Europe with refugees because of Czar Alexander III "Russia for Russians" program which sanctioned pogroms in order to evict the Jews from the country. This was only the latest in a long history of expulsions of Jews. The Jews, at the time were just beginning to be emancipated in a handful of countries, and both the Jews themselves and the affected countries had an interest in solving the Jewish Problem. What everyone recognized at the time was that the Jewish People started out in the "Holyland", from which they were expelled in the first century CE. A group of influential Jews organized a movement with the intention of solving the Jewish Problem by restoring the Jewish Homeland. That movement was called the Zionist Movement. However the Holyland was at the time a province of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottomans had no intention of allowing a Jewish autonomous entity to be established in their land. Then came World War I. The Ottomans joined the war on the losing side and the British saw the opportunity to conquer the Ottomans and insert themselves as the influential power in the area. Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary and ex-Prime Minister was intrigued by the idea of creating a Jewish Home in Palestine and expressed in a letter to the British Zionist Organization that the British government would support the establishment of such an entity if Britain gained control of Palestine. In 1922 (5 years later) the League of Nations divided the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East into "Mandates" and instructed the British to execute the creation of a "Jewish National Home in Palestine". It also instructed the British to do so in a way that did not infringe upon the rights of the Arab population of Palestine. How that was to be achieved was unclear, and as it turned out, not possible. From an objective point of view the League of Nations and the British created an untenable situation, with Jews, on the one hand, having been given the internationally sanctioned green light to rebuild their home and thereby resolve the humanitarian disaster that defined the Jewish People in the diaspora, and with Arabs, on the other hand, looking forward to independence (whether as part of a greater Arab union or as individual States), with no interest whatsoever in the Jewish Problem or Jewish History or commitments made by other countries to people who don't even live there. 25 years and another World War later the problem had snowballed to the point where the British were unable and unwilling to continue to deal with it. A new international organization, the United Nations had been formed, and as its first project it took upon itself the task of resolving the Palestine problem. It sent a team called UNSCOP to present a solution to the UN members and UNSCOP returned with a carefully balanced plan to allow a small predominantly Jewish State to be formed, with the remainder of the country to become a predominantly Arab State, with the exception of Jerusalem which would be administered by the UN with access to both Jews and Arabs equally. This plan was voted on and ratified by the UN members on November 29, 1947. It was a compromise that the Jews were willing to accept. The Arabs however saw no reason they should have to compromise, and instead initiated a civil war. The Jews proceeded to put the Partition plan into effect despite the Arab rejection of the recommendation and the war that was being waged against them. Five months later the British withdrew and Israel was proclaimed. The combined forces of five neighboring countries invaded Palestine with the intention of conquering all of Palestine and establishing an Arab State in the entirety of what was the British Mandate for Palestine. Reportedly around 700,000 Arabs who were in the war zone created by the invading Arab armies fled. Israeli forces succeeded not only in defending the territory allocated to it in the Partition Plan but to push the invaders deep into the territories that would have been part of the Arab State had the Arabs accepted resolution 181. The UN negotiated a cease-fire and subsequently armistice treaties between Israel and the invading countries, and admitted Israel as a full member. The Armistice agreements put the area to the East of the Armistice demarkation line, including East Jerusalem (known as the West Bank) into Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip into Egyptian control. From 1948 through 1974 the "Palestinians" were not considered a party in the conflict. The conflict was between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries who did not recognize Israel's proclamation of independence, and continued to proclaim their own intention to conquer Palestine and establish an Arab State in the entirety of Palestine. In 1967 the Arab States mobilized their forces and advanced towards their border with Israel, threatening to push Israel into the sea. Israel reacted with a preemptive strike that resulted not only in defending Israel's territory but in the withdrawal of the Syrians from the Golan Heights, Egypt from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and Jordan from the West Bank. The UN passed resolution 242 which called for the return of these territories to the countries that had withdrawn from them. Israel was willing to do so in exchange for Peace treaties and modifications to ensure Israel's defensibility. The members of the Arab League met in Khartoum to discuss their response and declared that no Arab nation would recognize, negotiate with, or make peace with Israel. As a result Israel had no alternative but to administer the territories, as their former occupiers were unwilling to reoccupy them. Seven years later the Arab League marched Yasser Arafat into the UN General Assembly and the UN proclaimed the "inalienable right of the Palestinian People to self-determination" and that the PLO is the Palestinians' sole legitimate representative. At that point the conflict ceased to be between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries, and the "Palestinians" became once again a party in the conflict. The UN supported the idea of a Palestinian State to be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The PLO, who they considered the Palestinians' representative, rejected the idea and insisted upon the dismantling of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian State in the enitre area of Palestine, and the return of all Palestinian refugees, resulting in a single predominantly Arab country. The Israeli public saw no prospect of a resolution and a group of Israelis began to insist upon being allowed to begin settle within the occupied territories. After a heated internal conflict the Israeli government relented and allowed settlements to be established. In 1978 Egypt's president Anwar Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords returning the Sinai to Egypt and committing Israel to an Interim arrangement with the Palestinians granting them autonomy in the Occupied Territories. In 1993 Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles (Oslo Accords) accepting the principle of a two-State solution and interim Autonomy arrangement. In 1995 the PLO took control of the Palestinian Autonomy which governs 97% of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories and 40% of the West Bank. In 2005 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and expelled all Israeli settlers, rendering the Gaza Strip entirely independent. The Hamas offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood, an Islamic Jihadist organization, took control of the Gaza Strip and proclaimed itself not bound by any agreement signed between Israel and the PLO, and proclaimed its commitment to the destruction of Israel. Hamas proceeded to attempt to smuggle arms into the West Bank and to develop and manufacture rockets with which to attack Israel. Israel reacted by cutting off the routes by which arms and materials for their manufacture could be brought into the Gaza Strip. On at least three occasions Hamas initiated hostilities against Israel firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities. Meanwhile at least two attempts were made to negotiate a Final Status agreement between Israel and the PLO. Both attempts failed to reach a settlement acceptable to both parties. This is the whole story in a nutshell. Every word is objective fact. Undoubtedly there will be a long stream of objections about omissions and recriminations meant to invoke sympathy for one side and to vilify the other. But moving forward will require focusing on the facts and not continuing to justify resistance to reconciliation." -------------------------------------- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-neutral-explanation-of-the-Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian-conflict-How-can-the-conflict-be-described-without-trying-to-be-on-one-of-the-sides/answer/Chaim-Handler https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-neutral-explanation-o...
- kakalukia 9y ago
  I don't see how this can be called the most neutral explanation when it mentions nothing about how the UN considers Israel's occupation illegal or mentions anything about illegal settlements. This is also not even the highest ranked answer from the question you linked from Quora.
  - shawndumas 9y ago
    Welcome to HN. I love seeing new members expressing passionate views. Couple of quick questions: Do you always agree with every dictate of the UN? Does objectivity always garner the most votes?
    - gech 9y ago
      Do you get paid by Israel to make posts? Because I've heard that people do get paid to make favorable posts.
      - dang 9y ago
        Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Another thing that will get you banned here is using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it turns out you've broken the guidelines so often and we've given you so many warnings that I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
    - totalZero 9y ago
      You don't gain any ground by pointing out how long or how short the other user's account has been around. > Do you always agree with every dictate of the UN? This is irrelevant, unless you are trying to say that one either agrees with everything the UN says, or nothing. Clearly that is not the case; plenty of UN member nations consent on some issues, and dissent from others. The same can thus obviously be said of individual people. They don't have to agree with every dictate to agree with some of the conclusions of the body. Like it or not, the UN reflects opinions from a substantial number of member nations, and it's hard to applaud any explanation that ignores the UN on an issue where they are, and have been, a centrally relevant party. > Does objectivity always garner the most votes? No, but you probably have to say more to justify a lower-approval response as the right answer to a question specifically seeking the most neutral explanation, than to simply say "this is the most objective one".
nl 9y ago
This was written in 1989. Settlements were much less of an issue then, and the demographics were dramatically different.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights#De_facto_annexation_by_Israel_and_civil_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights#De_facto_annexat...
  - nl 9y ago
    Indeed. You'd be aware the the Palestinian state doesn't claim the Golan Heights? I think that Israel has lost a lot of moral authority in the years since the 1980s. But I think in 1981 annexing the Golan was a defensible choice: the Syrians had constantly used them as place to launch artillery barrages against Israeli towns like Tiberius. The 1980s (especially the early 80s) really were different: there were Arab states around Israel who would use their own armed forces to attack, and the PLO hadn't disavowed terrorism. Now of course times have changes, and Israel no longer can claim that those threats, and settlements have made their problems worse. But Hamas and Hezbollah have capitalized on that, so.. there is plenty of blame to go around.

I love how he thinks that Israel bulldozing Palestinian neighborhoods and killing civilians doesn't count as oppression because there's more Arabs than Israelis in the general area.

shawndumas 9y ago

"Arabs like to say that there are two conflicting narratives of the conflict. The facts are far simpler. It starts in the end of the 19th century. At the time millions of Jews were fleeing Russia and flooding Europe with refugees because of Czar Alexander III "Russia for Russians" program which sanctioned pogroms in order to evict the Jews from the country. This was only the latest in a long history of expulsions of Jews. The Jews, at the time were just beginning to be emancipated in a handful of countries, and both the Jews themselves and the affected countries had an interest in solving the Jewish Problem. What everyone recognized at the time was that the Jewish People started out in the "Holyland", from which they were expelled in the first century CE. A group of influential Jews organized a movement with the intention of solving the Jewish Problem by restoring the Jewish Homeland. That movement was called the Zionist Movement. However the Holyland was at the time a province of the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottomans had no intention of allowing a Jewish autonomous entity to be established in their land. Then came World War I. The Ottomans joined the war on the losing side and the British saw the opportunity to conquer the Ottomans and insert themselves as the influential power in the area. Lord Balfour, British foreign secretary and ex-Prime Minister was intrigued by the idea of creating a Jewish Home in Palestine and expressed in a letter to the British Zionist Organization that the British government would support the establishment of such an entity if Britain gained control of Palestine. In 1922 (5 years later) the League of Nations divided the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East into "Mandates" and instructed the British to execute the creation of a "Jewish National Home in Palestine". It also instructed the British to do so in a way that did not infringe upon the rights of the Arab population of Palestine. How that was to be achieved was unclear, and as it turned out, not possible. From an objective point of view the League of Nations and the British created an untenable situation, with Jews, on the one hand, having been given the internationally sanctioned green light to rebuild their home and thereby resolve the humanitarian disaster that defined the Jewish People in the diaspora, and with Arabs, on the other hand, looking forward to independence (whether as part of a greater Arab union or as individual States), with no interest whatsoever in the Jewish Problem or Jewish History or commitments made by other countries to people who don't even live there. 25 years and another World War later the problem had snowballed to the point where the British were unable and unwilling to continue to deal with it. A new international organization, the United Nations had been formed, and as its first project it took upon itself the task of resolving the Palestine problem. It sent a team called UNSCOP to present a solution to the UN members and UNSCOP returned with a carefully balanced plan to allow a small predominantly Jewish State to be formed, with the remainder of the country to become a predominantly Arab State, with the exception of Jerusalem which would be administered by the UN with access to both Jews and Arabs equally. This plan was voted on and ratified by the UN members on November 29, 1947. It was a compromise that the Jews were willing to accept. The Arabs however saw no reason they should have to compromise, and instead initiated a civil war. The Jews proceeded to put the Partition plan into effect despite the Arab rejection of the recommendation and the war that was being waged against them. Five months later the British withdrew and Israel was proclaimed. The combined forces of five neighboring countries invaded Palestine with the intention of conquering all of Palestine and establishing an Arab State in the entirety of what was the British Mandate for Palestine. Reportedly around 700,000 Arabs who were in the war zone created by the invading Arab armies fled. Israeli forces succeeded not only in defending the territory allocated to it in the Partition Plan but to push the invaders deep into the territories that would have been part of the Arab State had the Arabs accepted resolution 181. The UN negotiated a cease-fire and subsequently armistice treaties between Israel and the invading countries, and admitted Israel as a full member. The Armistice agreements put the area to the East of the Armistice demarkation line, including East Jerusalem (known as the West Bank) into Jordanian control, and the Gaza Strip into Egyptian control. From 1948 through 1974 the "Palestinians" were not considered a party in the conflict. The conflict was between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries who did not recognize Israel's proclamation of independence, and continued to proclaim their own intention to conquer Palestine and establish an Arab State in the entirety of Palestine. In 1967 the Arab States mobilized their forces and advanced towards their border with Israel, threatening to push Israel into the sea. Israel reacted with a preemptive strike that resulted not only in defending Israel's territory but in the withdrawal of the Syrians from the Golan Heights, Egypt from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, and Jordan from the West Bank. The UN passed resolution 242 which called for the return of these territories to the countries that had withdrawn from them. Israel was willing to do so in exchange for Peace treaties and modifications to ensure Israel's defensibility. The members of the Arab League met in Khartoum to discuss their response and declared that no Arab nation would recognize, negotiate with, or make peace with Israel. As a result Israel had no alternative but to administer the territories, as their former occupiers were unwilling to reoccupy them. Seven years later the Arab League marched Yasser Arafat into the UN General Assembly and the UN proclaimed the "inalienable right of the Palestinian People to self-determination" and that the PLO is the Palestinians' sole legitimate representative. At that point the conflict ceased to be between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries, and the "Palestinians" became once again a party in the conflict. The UN supported the idea of a Palestinian State to be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The PLO, who they considered the Palestinians' representative, rejected the idea and insisted upon the dismantling of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian State in the enitre area of Palestine, and the return of all Palestinian refugees, resulting in a single predominantly Arab country. The Israeli public saw no prospect of a resolution and a group of Israelis began to insist upon being allowed to begin settle within the occupied territories. After a heated internal conflict the Israeli government relented and allowed settlements to be established. In 1978 Egypt's president Anwar Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords returning the Sinai to Egypt and committing Israel to an Interim arrangement with the Palestinians granting them autonomy in the Occupied Territories. In 1993 Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles (Oslo Accords) accepting the principle of a two-State solution and interim Autonomy arrangement. In 1995 the PLO took control of the Palestinian Autonomy which governs 97% of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories and 40% of the West Bank. In 2005 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew all Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and expelled all Israeli settlers, rendering the Gaza Strip entirely independent. The Hamas offshoot of the Moslem Brotherhood, an Islamic Jihadist organization, took control of the Gaza Strip and proclaimed itself not bound by any agreement signed between Israel and the PLO, and proclaimed its commitment to the destruction of Israel. Hamas proceeded to attempt to smuggle arms into the West Bank and to develop and manufacture rockets with which to attack Israel. Israel reacted by cutting off the routes by which arms and materials for their manufacture could be brought into the Gaza Strip. On at least three occasions Hamas initiated hostilities against Israel firing thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israeli cities. Meanwhile at least two attempts were made to negotiate a Final Status agreement between Israel and the PLO. Both attempts failed to reach a settlement acceptable to both parties. This is the whole story in a nutshell. Every word is objective fact. Undoubtedly there will be a long stream of objections about omissions and recriminations meant to invoke sympathy for one side and to vilify the other. But moving forward will require focusing on the facts and not continuing to justify resistance to reconciliation." -------------------------------------- https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-neutral-explanation-of-the-Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian-conflict-How-can-the-conflict-be-described-without-trying-to-be-on-one-of-the-sides/answer/Chaim-Handler https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-neutral-explanation-o...

kakalukia 9y ago
I don't see how this can be called the most neutral explanation when it mentions nothing about how the UN considers Israel's occupation illegal or mentions anything about illegal settlements. This is also not even the highest ranked answer from the question you linked from Quora.
- shawndumas 9y ago
  Welcome to HN. I love seeing new members expressing passionate views. Couple of quick questions: Do you always agree with every dictate of the UN? Does objectivity always garner the most votes?
  - gech 9y ago
    Do you get paid by Israel to make posts? Because I've heard that people do get paid to make favorable posts.
    - dang 9y ago
      Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Another thing that will get you banned here is using HN primarily for political or ideological battle. That's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it turns out you've broken the guidelines so often and we've given you so many warnings that I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
  - totalZero 9y ago
    You don't gain any ground by pointing out how long or how short the other user's account has been around. > Do you always agree with every dictate of the UN? This is irrelevant, unless you are trying to say that one either agrees with everything the UN says, or nothing. Clearly that is not the case; plenty of UN member nations consent on some issues, and dissent from others. The same can thus obviously be said of individual people. They don't have to agree with every dictate to agree with some of the conclusions of the body. Like it or not, the UN reflects opinions from a substantial number of member nations, and it's hard to applaud any explanation that ignores the UN on an issue where they are, and have been, a centrally relevant party. > Does objectivity always garner the most votes? No, but you probably have to say more to justify a lower-approval response as the right answer to a question specifically seeking the most neutral explanation, than to simply say "this is the most objective one".

nl 9y ago

This was written in 1989. Settlements were much less of an issue then, and the demographics were dramatically different.

Avshalom 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights#De_facto_annexation_by_Israel_and_civil_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights#De_facto_annexat...
- nl 9y ago
  Indeed. You'd be aware the the Palestinian state doesn't claim the Golan Heights? I think that Israel has lost a lot of moral authority in the years since the 1980s. But I think in 1981 annexing the Golan was a defensible choice: the Syrians had constantly used them as place to launch artillery barrages against Israeli towns like Tiberius. The 1980s (especially the early 80s) really were different: there were Arab states around Israel who would use their own armed forces to attack, and the PLO hadn't disavowed terrorism. Now of course times have changes, and Israel no longer can claim that those threats, and settlements have made their problems worse. But Hamas and Hezbollah have capitalized on that, so.. there is plenty of blame to go around.