On June 30, AP had a story quoting unnamed Israeli security officials saying that, “Israel plans to establish a three-mile-deep ‘security zone’ in the northern Gaza Strip, with hundreds of troops patrolling the area in coming months to prevent Palestinian rocket fire on Israeli border towns.”
Oh boy, how tragic–for the Palestinians and for the Israelis.
You think the Israeli “security officials” have learned nothing from their country’s history over the past 20 years?
1985 was the year that, with their economy and society hit hard by the huge costs of maintaining an already 3-year-old occupation of one-third of Lebanon, the Israelis decided to withdraw the IDF from much–but notably not all of the land they occupied there. The portion they stayed in, they called the “security zone”.
Well, they could call it what they liked. For the poor bloody Lebanese who lived inside it–who included many relatives of my ex-husband–and for even more hundreds of thousands of Lebanese citizens and Palestinian refugees who lived in the area to the north of the “SZ”, its presence brought anything but security.
I don’t have to hand the figures for the literally thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian people who lost their lives because of continued fighting across the SZ’s northern front-line over the 15 years that followed that decision. Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Lebanese fixed-capital goods were destroyed in that fighting, too.
(Reparations from Israel, anyone?)
But we could just recall a few “high points” in the conflagrations that flared over that front-line: 1993, 1996, etc.
Oh, and along the way, the Israelis and their proxy forces in the SZ ran one of the Middle East’s worst torture centers there, in the prison in Khiam. And they kidnaped random Lebanese clerics and held them for more than a dozen years as hostages. Etc., etc.
Yes, some scores of Israelis died in those events, too. Overwhelmingly, though, they were soldiers: members of an armed force maintaining a military occupation over a portion of someone else’s country…
It was those casualties that–especially after the excellent pro-withdrawal work of the Israeli “Four Mothers” movement–persuaded PM Barak to undertake a speedy, unilateral, and blessedly near-complete withdrawal from the SZ in May 2000.
And guess what? The losses the Israelis have suffered due to cross-border skirmishes with Lebanon plunged almost immediately to near zero.
Duh!
Hizbollah, a force that came into being only because of Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, refocused most its attention back onto domestic political issues… Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese farmers and town-dwellers were finally able to return to the south to rebuild their lives there.
Once the Shebaa Farms issue gets resolved–oh, and once there’s peace between Israel and Syria– Lebanese-Israeli relations will be just fine.
So now, they’re proposing a “security zone” (read “insecurity zone”) for the northern part of Gaza, in turn?
Gimme a break. The fact that they’re even thinking of trying to implement a “concept” like that seems like a fair indication that my suspicions that the whole “Gaza disengagement plan” is just a thinly-veiled scheme to turn the whole of Gaza into a free-fire zone for the IDF are more strongly founded than I thought.
In this article, in the April/May issue of Boston Review, I wrote:
- I–unlike many of the Palestinians with whom I talked in February–believe there is a real chance that Sharon may actually be serious about his proposal to undertake a wide withdrawal from Gaza. I fear he may relish the prospect of seeing the final erosion of the PA’s “authority” in Gaza and the emergence there of an Islamist-led administration: one that he would feel able to hit at hard while risking even fewer meaningful restraints from Washington than the small number he has incurred in response to his threats against Arafat. (The Bush administration’s notable failure to express any criticism of the outright murder of Ahmed Yassin seemed to prove this point.) Sharon might hope to achieve all this, moreover, while appearing like a “courageous peacemaker” in front of many of his own people and supporters in the west?and all this, because he has shown his willingness to pull some 7,500 settlers out of Gaza…
I fear, moreover, that the plans Sharon is presently pursuing in Gaza may be just a precursor of what his plans for each of the increasingly separated Palestinian communities of the West Bank might be: total encirclement; the undermining of PA power; territorial and political/diplomatic isolation; and the constant threat of punitive raids or provocative patrols from the Israeli forces still poised on the border of each of these enclaves.
Here’s some more of what AP wrote about the latest Israeli security ‘concept’ for Gaza:
- [Sharon] asked the military to come up with the plan after an Israeli man and a toddler were killed earlier this week in a Palestinian rocket attack on the Israeli town of Sderot, near Gaza.
In a first response, Israeli forces encircled the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, the main rocket launching area, to prevent more attacks. Security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday that Israeli troops will remain in northern Gaza for an unspecified period.
Structures would be built to serve the Israeli forces, including fortified troop positions and ramps for tanks and other armored vehicles, the officials said. New roads would also be built.
More than 1,000 soldiers will be deployed in the zone, which would extend from Gaza’s northern border for about three miles and would encompass Beit Hanoun, home to 21,000 Palestinians.
The town’s residents would have to pass through an Israeli checkpoint to reach other areas of Gaza, the officials said. Beit Hanoun’s industrial zone in the outskirts of town has been temporarily closed, and farmers are not able to reach their fields while soldiers are deployed in the area.
The military hopes the “security zone” will move Sderot beyond the five-mile rocket range.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said the plan appeared to conflict with plans for a withdrawal.
“I don’t understand the Israeli government’s behavior,” Shaath said. “Either it’s not serious about the withdrawal from Gaza, or it wants to destroy Palestinian land before withdrawing.”
Or maybe both of those, Nabil?
For the geographically challenged, I could note here that Gaza is a tiny slip of land, some five miles by 25 miles, pushed up against the bottom-right corner of the Mediterranean. It’s home to some 1.3 million Palestinians.
The ‘security concept’ the Israelis have already been talking about for Gaza after the “withdrawal” is for the IDF to continue to surround it from all sides– perhaps including digging an 80-foot-deep “moat” along the Strip’s shortish, southwesternborder ewith Egypt. (!) They also propose continuing to control the Strip’s access to the sea, and to have close overflight rights over it from the air. At ground-level inside the Strip, they’ve been trying to entice Egypt to send in military “trainers”.
Ah, but even all of that is now not enough. Now, they want to take a three-mile bite out of the north of the Strip, too…
Hullo? How about the radically better concept of getting back to negotiating a peace with the Palestinians?
Don’t you think, over the long haul and the short one, that that would be better for Israel’s security–and of course for the lives of those other fully human people, the Palestinians–than all this nonsense about reviving that failed old concept, a “security zone”?
Hmmm, I had some Israeli friends put their lives on hold when called to serve in the 1982 war. I don’t recall neither the individuals nor the country look forward to waste their lives and resources for some Lebanese land Israel had no claims on. (One of them died there). It was the constant Katyusha’s rockets lobbed into Galilee and terrorist penetrations (remember the massacre in an elementary school in Maalot?). It was the fact the after King Hussein evicted the PLO from Jordan they relocated to Lebanon and brought disgrace with them. It was the fact that Lebanon, like every Arab country, talks about refugees and brethren solidarity but has kept them refugees for almost 60 years! 1948 is not far from the end of the second World War, imagine having in the West unsettled refugees from that war! Unthinkable. In the US refugees get their permanent residency and full rights in about 4 years. In the Arab world the paperwork moves slower, but 60 years…The mother of all shames.
At the same time that Israel occupied a sliver of Lebanese land, Syria occupied (and still does) the rest. No complaints about the ongoing Syrian occupation, why?
Opinions about the future in Gaza are best served without biased revisionism of past events, even if one has relatives of an ex-husband on one side of the border.
David
David,
If I read correctly, the point of the original post was that a security zone is likely to raise the level of bloodshed within it.
Your redirection (and your ad hominem kicker) suggests that you disagree with that assessment – but all you offer is redirection (with an ad hominem kicker). So speak, please. Do you disagree, and if so, what is your affirmative basis for that conclusion?
No, there’s nothing ad hominem about David’s post — he’s simply pointing out the obvious: it’s hypocritical to complain about Israel’s treatment of Lebanon when you say nothing at all about Syria’s rape of that country.
In any event, Cobban only dimly seems to get the point. She suggests — cynically or naively, it’s impossible to tell — that Israel “get[] back to negotiating a peace with the Palestinians.” Well, that is precisely what Sharon isn’t going to do — like it or not, agree with him or not, he has plainly determined that the Palestinians can’t be trusted to negotiate a peace.
You can whine about Israeli perfidy, aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, threats to world peace; and Cobban tends strongly in that direction. Or you can try to figue out where Sharon is headed, a difficult task because he has made a career of being opaque, and that is something Cobban won’t, indeed can’t do.
Helena’s post was accurate. David’s was a mish-mash of propaganda. The Maalot massacre took place in 1974, eight years before the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. How many Israeli civilians were killed by those “constant Katyusha rockets” fired from Lebanon? I would bet ten or fewer over the ten years prior to the Israeli invasion. The Israelis killed hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians prior to the invasion, and thousands during it.
Many Israeli observers have concluded that what the Likud government (which included Ari Sharon) was afraid of in 1982 was not the fact that the border with Lebanon was violent, but that it was peaceful. The PLO had observed a truce there for a year during which almost no cross-border violence occurred. Israel was afraid that this was enhancing the PLO’s credibility. So when a Palestinian terrorist with no connection to Lebanon or the PLO attacked the Israeli ambassador in London, Israel used this as a pretext to launch a war. The goal of the invasion was primarily to destroy the Palestinian nationalist political movement, not to save northern Israel from attack.
I vividly recall watching the news during Israel’s 1996 “Grapes of Wrath” operation in southern Lebanon – Lebanese ambulances blown up; headless Lebanese babies at Qana; hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians fleeing from the IDF in terror. Then, for “balance”, there were repeated interviews with Israeli civilians waiting in safety in bomb shelters in Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel. The interviews emphasised how difficult and anxiety-promoting it was to wait underground in the bomb-shelters. The worst damage inflicted aboveground on Kiryat Shmona appeared to be the destruction of a large plate glass window – I distinctly recall a reporter mentioning that. The contrast between the fire and death raining down on the Lebanese and the repeated showing of the somber faces of the same group of Israeli civilians waiting safely in the bunker would have been funny were it not so outrageous. David’s post is in that tradition.
As Jassalasca points out, David doesn’t address the main point of Helena’s post, which is that Israel’s “Security Zone” in Southern Lebanon made Israel less secure, and that the same thing could well happen in Gaza.
wm. tyroler,
With respect, if I grant you that David’s post is not ad hominem, it nonetheless consists entirely of indirection. It does provide information, but it does not a single statement that responds directly to the original argument.
In your own post, the conclusions of the second and the third paragraphs flatly contradict one another.
like it or not, agree with him or not, [Sharon] has plainly determined that “the Palestinians” can’t be trusted to negotiate a peace.
And just what kind of a racist judgment is that?
You can whine about Israeli perfidy, aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, threats to world peace; and Cobban “tends” (h’mmm… interesting insertion of a weasel-word there, since I plainly was NOT doing any such “whining”) strongly in that direction. Or you can try to figue out where Sharon is headed…
Oh, so this is how the public debate works now, is it? Whenever His Excellency, the august omnipotence Mr. Ariel Sharon, makes a “determination” of any sort, it is not for the rest of us to voice any criticism, but simply to “figure out where he is headed” so the rest of us can all make our adjustments?
What a strange idea.
Well, “doverai no proverai” is what I say– Ronald Reagan’s great attitude toward on dealing with the Soviets. (Trust, but verify.) Sharon has had his good faith as a negotiator tested a little, with the Road Map etc– and he’s failed all those tests miserably. How many illegal “outposts” was he supposed to have dismantled by now? Etc., etc…
I for one do not intend simply to go along adoringly and uncritically in his wake. Sorry if that offends anyone.
Also, No Pref made some of the historical-correction points I would have made. I was actually working in Lebanon in the ’70s and through 1981 so I’m pretty familiar with all that material. David, you might like to refresh your memory by reading one of the books I wrote about those years?
“And just what kind of a racist judgment is that?”
The issue is in the first instance whether Sharon is moving toward a unilateral solution. I say he is. I suppose you agree (though I’m not sure you come right out and say so). Next question would be why. I say that Sharon has determined that Israel doesn’t have a trustworthy negotiating partner. It is here, it seems, that you hurl the accusation of racism (at Sharon, I imagine, rather than me, though it hardly matters). And further discussion on that particular point breaks down, because a discussion of who is or isn’t racist isn’t going to be terribly productive. But I gather you agree (though again you aren’t explicit) that Sharon has indeed to come such a conclusion. I suppose you want to argue the point ad infinitum whether he’s right in reaching that point, but that isn’t presently the issue.
The next, critical question would be, just what does Sharon have in mind? And this leads to but another fulmination:
“Oh, so this is how the public debate works now, is it? Whenever His Excellency, the august omnipotence Mr. Ariel Sharon, makes a ‘determination’ of any sort, it is not for the rest of us to voice any criticism, but simply to ‘figure out where he is headed’ so the rest of us can all make our adjustments?”
Well, not quite. Don’t you, a foreign policy expert, have the slightest curiosity as to where Sharon’s headed? Not so that everyone can make necessary adjustments, but simply because it’s better to know? Better for your readers, who can then make informed decisions about — among other things — your own astuteness. And better for the Palestinians themselves, so they can make their own adjustments, perhaps to block his moves. Could be he intends to withdraw from portions of the West Bank as well as Gaza, so that Israel will have (behind a fortified fence) relatively secure boundaries, and leave Palestinians to their own fate (which could include a viable state). Or he might have something else in mind. The details, as always, matter, and it would be nice to have the informed judgment of someone professing expertise in the area. Of course, this assumes that you really do have some insight to bear; but rest easy: if you don’t, you can always scream “racist” instead.
I stayed out of the Gaza issue because I cannot predict the future, and all the pundits that claim to know whether the present course of action is optimal, or suboptimal, are just speculating. I am not even sure we can even agree on what metric to use to judge the merits of a particular approach.
I concentrated on Helena’s abuse of a biased analogy. Reasoning by analogy is slippery even in the absence of bias. Maalot was just one example of the fact that there was violence initiated from Lebanon over multiple decades without there being any border disagreements per se. If you need later examples there is Nahariya, kibutz Hanita, and plenty more. Any rational observer would agree that Israel did not initiate violence on its northern border. Israelis had much productive things to do than waste their lives and resources in Lebanon.
Would any of the responders care to address the treatement of refugees in today’s Lebanon, why are they still refugees? Or Syria’s presence? Or Lebanon’s refusal to exercise its sovereignity in Southern Lebanon leaving it as Hizbolla land? (The UN determined that Israel has indeed withdrawn from ALL Lebanese territory and is in full compliance.) Let’s talk about all that is wrong and known to be broken in the area, or not even bring up at all the subject along with the pseudo-personal touch of the ex-husband relatives. We all have relatives, so what.
David
I am not even sure we can even agree on what metric to use to judge the merits of a particular approach.
International law would be a novel approach, but of course that’s not in the picture when we talk about actions taken by Israel.
Any rational observer would agree that Israel did not initiate violence on its northern border.
Nonsense. The 1982 war itself started with an Israeli bombardment of the PLO in Beirut. This followed the assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to Britain with which the PLO had nothing to do.
Israelis had much productive things to do than waste their lives and resources in Lebanon.
More nonsense. Israeli leaders throughout history have had designs on southern Lebanon including annexation and/or the establishment of a client state. By leaders I don’t mean not fringe characters but David Ben Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, Ariel Sharon and others.
Would any of the responders care to address the treatement of refugees in today’s Lebanon
Palestinian refugees get worse treatment in Lebanon than in any other state largely because of Lebanese fears that the integration of a large group of Palestinians would upset Lebanon’s delicate religious/ethnic balance. At least the Lebanese allow the Palestinians to live there, which is more than the Israelis would do. The Israelis evicted the Palestinians from their original homes and did not allow them to return despite UN resolutions. That’s how the problem started.
Or Syria’s presence?
Syria was invited into Lebanon during the civil war in 1976 by the Arab League. I think it has stayed partly out of hegemonic imperative, and partly because of its continuing dispute with Israel, which occupies Syrian land in the Golan Heights.
Or Lebanon’s refusal to exercise its sovereignity in Southern Lebanon leaving it as Hizbolla land?
That’s probably happening at the behest of Syria. However, the accounts I have seen suggest that Hezbollah’s fight against Israel in southern Lebanon has been popular throughout Lebanon.
1) International law might provide an answer for the desired end state, but it does not proide guidance as to how to get there. Helena’s opinions had to do with the approach to the withdrawal, not with the end goal.
2) The 1982 campaign culminated years of mini-incursions and tit-for-tat exchanges. Just do a mental exercise if you will, if there were no attacks from Lebanon to Israel would you have seen Israel attacking Lebanon? If your mind is not strained yet try to answer why was Israel being attacked from Lebanon given that Israel had not taken anything from Lebanon. Might have to with the fact that the PLO was founded in 1964, before the 1967 occupied territories were occupied.
3) I’ve never seen any evidence for that claim. Lebanon was not part of the British mandate areas, and I don’t think there was an historical or religious affinity backing that up. Early on there was such an affinity with TransJordan but was pragmatically abandoned later on.
When I said “productive” I meant that, left to their own devices, Israelis tend to focus on improving their own lives and build their country, and the results confirm that. Just for curiosity check GDP (absolute and per capita), literacy, and life expectancy rates for Israel vs. its surroundings.
4) I didn’t know that Lebanese treated refugees worse, thanks for enlightening us on that. What I object is keeping refugees for 60 years. I know that acommodating uninvited cousins can be stressful for the family, but we all do it. You’d be amazed at the things one can do in 60 years to absorb people, just like Einstein said, the strongest force in the world is compound interest. You absorb 1000 a month and before you know you have a strong and prosperous country.
Nice try but yours is no excuse, not for Lebanon, and not for the larger Arab world. Refugees for 60 years is a shame that has no credible defense.
5) I don’t get it, did Lebanon invite Syria? What kind of authority does the Arab League have over Lebanon? Did they get UN security council guidance? The war ended long ago, why didn’t they leave? Don’t Lebanese prefer that they leave?
It’s been almost 30 years. You say they stay because Syria has a beef with Israel. That ain’t the poor Lebanese’s fault. Have them go home and deal with Israel from there.
6) Ahhh, now we are talking. So you say there are people in Lebanon, that even in the absence of a territorial dispute, are still bent on fighting Israel. Maybe that is the vein that we should explore, and whether there is anything in heaven or hell that Israel can do, short of harakiri, to please them.
David
Re Palestinian refugees, in lebanon or elsewhere, I’d just like to ask you, David, whether you think these are human people like the rest of us, or something else?
If they are non-human, then I suppose other people could dispose of them, resettle them, or whatever, against their will. Like bundles of old used clothing.
If they are humans, however–is this a radical notion?–then they share with all the rest of us the protections of documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
Or, we could look at General Assembly resolution 194, which stated that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid… ” That was in 1948. How many eirenic refugees has Israel allowed to return since then?
I think one issue here is the frequent assumption by ardent Zionists, as of all other colonizing powers, that they can effect massive social engineering–move large numbers of people around the world and “settle” or “resettle” them wherever they want, without regard to the interests, voice, or rights of those people… Obviously, colonizers in the US did that. So, too, in more recent days, did the apartheid regime in South Africa. But please, please let us not simply accept a situation where such trampling of peole’s rights is taken as a given. That strikes me as an incredibly 19-century approach to the world.
The Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are a very, very hard-pressed lot. The Lebanese have not treated them well, but they have offered them a ‘temporary’ home. Most Lebanese do not want any more of the refugees to resettle there. (Some of them–mainly Christians, have already been given citizenship and more or less assimilated.) Okay, this is perhaps not a ‘generous’ approach. On the other hand, Lebanon is under no international obligation whatsoever to resettle them permanently. If refugee-hosting states were under such an obligation, refugees would soon find no place to go at all.
Similarly, most of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon do not wish to be resettled there. Where would they prefer to go if given a free choice? Who knows? They’ve never been properly asked. Some might insist on going back to their ancestral homeplaces in Galilee, etc. Some might be happy with resettlement elsewhere. All have 56-year-old property claims outstanding against Israel that cannot simply be “ignored”, or liquidated without a hearing. If Israel were to even start addressing the refugees’ claims in good faith, that could be an excellent confidence-building move.
By the way, some 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees, too. Stabilizing Gaza in any real way will certainly require addressing the claims of the roughly one million refugees there.
Thanks for asking my opinion Helena. All humans are human, refugees or not. I am not sure there is much entropy in my answer, but I suspect there isn’t much in the question either.
This is true for refugees from the 70’s military dictatorships in South America, through refugees from honor killing and genital mutilation risk populations in Asia and Africa, through refugees of the Arab Israeli conflict (Jews, Arab, and Christian), and to economic refugees risking their lives across treacherous transcontinental journeys. If we could solve all their problems with one pass of a magic wand, great. I don’t have that wand, but the societies I am familiar with, that is the US and Northern Europe, have taken the approach of trying to help these populations while recognizing that they cannot single handledly solve every single refugee’s problem, nor necessarily fix the problem at the source by turning back time and undoing historical wrongs. Scandinavian countries, Germany, France and Spain have generously received South American refugees, the US has absorbed African, South American, and Middle Eastern refugees, Israel has absorbed the Jewish populations evicted from Asian and African countries, and the US absorbs a large number of Mexican and Central American economic refugees. You can argue about the details and the internal tensions within each of those societies, but the overall impact is undeniable.
From what I see, mostly the Arab world has not done much to absorb the Palestinian refugees. Lebanon might be small, but the Arab world is immense and collectively wealthy. In many cases the rich Gulf kingdoms had to import workforces from places like India, Phillipines, etc, so it seems pretty natural to absorb displaced people before resorting to imports.
I know from many Indian friends that being an imported worker (I forget the word Saudis use for them) n Kuwait and Saudi Arabia is not particularly fun, and that one can reside there for many generations and never receive their citizenship nor the rights that come with it, so Palestinians might suffer the same xenophobic treatement, but at least one would expect a similar effort from the Arab world as we see in the West.
The salient elements in the Palestinian case are the length of time elapsed (60 years), the lack of absorbption from the Arab world, the fact that they are the only refugees group with its own UN support organization (UNWRA), the fact they have lashed out their terrorism at most of the West and not just Israel, and the fact that even though they came from an area without well defined borders a priori, for some reason they focus all their claims on one state, Israel. One would think that whatever Palestine is,it would consist of some geographical overlap including Israel, Jordan and Egypt areas, for God’s sake the Israel-Egyptian border even divides some Gaza cities in two! How come the population on the Egyptian side has no national identity nor aspirations? What is wrong with a picture of the Sinai peninsula being virtually empty and Gaza superpopulated? Shouldn’t a rational solution include using some of the Sinai land to solve this urgent humanitarian problem. Why the whole burden falls on Israel is beyond me.
Hope I have answered your question and welcome any opinions on my questions.
David
even though they came from an area without well defined borders a priori, for some reason they focus all their claims on one state, Israel. One would think that whatever Palestine is,it would consist of some geographical overlap including Israel, Jordan and Egypt areas…
David, I’m really not sure what your intention in trying to suggest that Palestine is a geographically fuzzy concept. In modern times, post WW1, it has always been very clear. It was the area that the powers at the 1919 San Remo conference said should be called Palestine (though of course the term is ways older than that). That same area was the area of “Palestine” over which britain was in 1920 given a League of Nations Mandate. Britain then proceeded to run a mandatory administration there, doing all the things that government administrations do like issuing money, postage stamps, etc., collecting taxes; doing censuses, etc etc. It was always perfectly clear where the boundaries were; and the people inside there were Palestinians.
When the refugees left in 1947-48, they registered their property and other claims with the UN, and those who needed relief services registered for those, too. The vast majority of those refugees had not been transhumant herders, but had been settled people, either farmers or townsfolk. Palestine wasn’t a fuzzy concept for them, and certainly, neither was their attachment to their ancestral properties inside what had overnight become Israel.
If you want to get into concepts of some broader regional entity than the Palestine everyone recognizes to have been such prior to 1948, then you’d have to go to the concept of a Greater Syria, which encompasses (roughly) present-day Syria, Jordan, Israel. Palestine, and a chunk of Turkey… There are still some adherents of that concept in the Middle East today… Is that the concept you want to explore?
How many Palestinians have you talked to in your life, David? You might enjoy meeting some and learning more about their lives. Most (but not all) of them simply want to return to what they have always considered to be–and international law has recognized to be–their homes. I wonder why that would be so difficult for anyone to understand. And what, after all, is a 60-year separation from home compared with the 2,000-year span over which Jewish people still continued to claim what they considered to be their rights?
Where I was going was that by removing the constraint that all land must come exclusively from Israel, the solution space is expanded. The British mandate Palestine did include TransJordan for sure, and the use of the term Palestine to designate the administrative boundaries does not indicate that the only residents were the Arab populations presently self-identified as Palestinians, nor that the Arab Palestinian populations were fully contained there.
I have indeed talked and corresponded with many Palestinians and I think I understand their point of view. That dialogue bluntly clarified a big misconception that I had, and I suspect many still do: Against common wisdom, the Palestinian problem and struggle is not about the 1967 occupied territories, the issue is 1948. It still is, and that makes the problem even less tractable.
Finally, the 60 year shame is the failure to absorb refugees within the immense Arab world, which is completely orthogonal to the span of their rights and aspirations. It is an indefensible shame.
And just to document the claims I made before in this thread, regarding Saudi Arabia’s treatement of foreign workers, here is the latest BBC report:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3895357.stm
What a sad joke on the world that these characters are swimming in oil, cash, and political influence.
David
David, Thanks for sharing that info from the BBC. Since I’ve been on the Human Rights watch Middle East Advisory Committee for 12-plus years, I’m very familiar with the whole range of h.r. abuses that go on in all Middle East countries, and I’ve done what I can to work to end them.
However, all your diverting attention in that direction hasn’t spoken to the fact that the Palestinian refugees have these very longstanding and very solid claims against Israel, that need to be addressed and can’t simply be swept under the carpet or directed elsewhere.
It’s a homeland thing. How hard is that to understand?