POLITICS: Israel/Palestine
Dec. 7th, 2002 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI was visiting Israpundit when I noticed this post. I replied to it as follows:
The critical paragraph in the linked document, I think, is here:
"As a result of the construction of railroad lines that led to the sea, the population of Haifa tripled and that of Jaffa more than doubled from 1880 to 1910. But while the population shifted toward these areas, the overall growth rates for the country stayed low. According to British investigations, there were 689,275 persons in Palestine in 1915, about 590,000 of whom were Arabs. Given a population in 1890 of 532,000 (473,000 Arab), this still represents only a 0.8% per year growth rate."
So, this produces an Arab majority of more than 80% in the space of Israel/Palestine, about as strong an Arab majority as the French majority in Québec.
The whole argument of "who's first" strikes me as ridiculous. The Jewish majority in the modern-day territory of Israel was--we can agree--a product of massive immigration from outside the region. Many ancestors of modern-day Palestinians may have come from Egypt or Transjordan or Syria; but proportionally and absolutely far more ancestors of modern-day Israelis have come from Europe and Russia and the Americas and even Australia.
Does this mean that Israel is a colonial state? No more than Canada, or Argentina, or New Zealand. Regardless of the circumstances of how one-third of the world's Jews arrived in Israel, they live there now, they aren't going anywhere, and no one's expecting them to go anyway (at least not legitimately). The fact that a Jewish nation-state exists in the Levant is a fact that every party--even every party hostile to Israel--is going to have to accept.
But similarly, every party supportive of Israel is going to have to accept the fact that in the course of Israel's creation, a very large number of Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians were displaced. It isn't particularly relevant how they were displaced, though I agree with Jonathan Edelstein (headheeb.blogspot.com) that there were sins commited by both sides. What matters is that they have just as legitimate a claim to their portion of Israel/Palestine as Jews do to their portion. Trying to discredit the existence of the other major party in a dispute hardly bodes well for said dispute's peaceful resolution.
The critical paragraph in the linked document, I think, is here:
"As a result of the construction of railroad lines that led to the sea, the population of Haifa tripled and that of Jaffa more than doubled from 1880 to 1910. But while the population shifted toward these areas, the overall growth rates for the country stayed low. According to British investigations, there were 689,275 persons in Palestine in 1915, about 590,000 of whom were Arabs. Given a population in 1890 of 532,000 (473,000 Arab), this still represents only a 0.8% per year growth rate."
So, this produces an Arab majority of more than 80% in the space of Israel/Palestine, about as strong an Arab majority as the French majority in Québec.
The whole argument of "who's first" strikes me as ridiculous. The Jewish majority in the modern-day territory of Israel was--we can agree--a product of massive immigration from outside the region. Many ancestors of modern-day Palestinians may have come from Egypt or Transjordan or Syria; but proportionally and absolutely far more ancestors of modern-day Israelis have come from Europe and Russia and the Americas and even Australia.
Does this mean that Israel is a colonial state? No more than Canada, or Argentina, or New Zealand. Regardless of the circumstances of how one-third of the world's Jews arrived in Israel, they live there now, they aren't going anywhere, and no one's expecting them to go anyway (at least not legitimately). The fact that a Jewish nation-state exists in the Levant is a fact that every party--even every party hostile to Israel--is going to have to accept.
But similarly, every party supportive of Israel is going to have to accept the fact that in the course of Israel's creation, a very large number of Arabs who now call themselves Palestinians were displaced. It isn't particularly relevant how they were displaced, though I agree with Jonathan Edelstein (headheeb.blogspot.com) that there were sins commited by both sides. What matters is that they have just as legitimate a claim to their portion of Israel/Palestine as Jews do to their portion. Trying to discredit the existence of the other major party in a dispute hardly bodes well for said dispute's peaceful resolution.
