Leo Caesius
Banned
I'd rather get away from this idea of nationhood being a primarily territorial expression. I never had much time for it myself.
Logical Middle East Borders
- Thread starter rowmaster
- Start date
Leo Caesius
Banned
If this keeps up, VoCSe and Magnum are going to have to form a Romanian Secret Army for the Liberation of Romania.
Well thank God Vocse isn't around! The Roma are otherwise known as Gypsies or Travelling People or many other names. As far as I'm aware, they have no connection with Romania, which is populated by Romanians, not Roma (although there may be some Roma too).
Leo Caesius
Banned
Believe it or not, the Borat film was shot on location in Romania in a Roma village (not in Kazakhstan).
Ah so there are Roma in Romania - I thought there might be. They aren't connected to the name of Romania are they?
Anyway, I don't much like Borat (or SB Cohen) so I haven't seen the film...
Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy
Banned
I don't like the guy. He can keep his RSALR, me and Andrei are founding the Romanian Not-Secret-Because-We're-Not-Pussies Army for the Liberation of Romania (RNSBWNPALR).
Your god didn't listen. But don't worry, I'll take it as a challenge not to scream my brains out at you guys.
7% of the population or something. You try counting them, see how easy it is.
Not one bit.
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Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
I didn't say they came to avenge the Holocaust... I'm not sure where you get that.
I was saying that if the British had not allowed and encouraged alienation of the Palestinians from their lands by Zionist settlers, it would have been possible to not create Israel, or at least not there. I think the Holocaust was what finally screwed the Palestinians, because a huge flood of refugees entered Palestine an permanently shifted the balance.
I don't really think it's fair to call the deterioration of relations between the Muslims and Jews "two-sided". Zionist settlers began showing up in large nubmers and seizing all the land. Who wouldn't get antsy about that?
As far as Kenya goes, the area I was referring to was already alienated from the natives in favor or white settlers, and had been pretty empty before that. In any case, you're right, kind of dismissive, but in a big place with a teeny nomadic population as opposed to a teeny place with a relatively thick established population...
I was saying that if the British had not allowed and encouraged alienation of the Palestinians from their lands by Zionist settlers, it would have been possible to not create Israel, or at least not there. I think the Holocaust was what finally screwed the Palestinians, because a huge flood of refugees entered Palestine an permanently shifted the balance.
I don't really think it's fair to call the deterioration of relations between the Muslims and Jews "two-sided". Zionist settlers began showing up in large nubmers and seizing all the land. Who wouldn't get antsy about that?
As far as Kenya goes, the area I was referring to was already alienated from the natives in favor or white settlers, and had been pretty empty before that. In any case, you're right, kind of dismissive, but in a big place with a teeny nomadic population as opposed to a teeny place with a relatively thick established population...
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
Grimm, given the Jewish poluation of Palestine was 5% in 1918, it isn't surprising that a sudden rise to 35% in 20 years is going to be bitterly resisted by the existing population.
In Ottoman land law, there is a concept of community land, usually pasturage, that is shared by a community. The British simply declared all this "vacant" and sold it to Zionists. The Palestinians were really badly dispossessed. And also, the exising, mainly Sephardic, Jews of Palestine were not at all thrilled with Zionist settlement....
In Ottoman land law, there is a concept of community land, usually pasturage, that is shared by a community. The British simply declared all this "vacant" and sold it to Zionists. The Palestinians were really badly dispossessed. And also, the exising, mainly Sephardic, Jews of Palestine were not at all thrilled with Zionist settlement....
Abdul, to the extent that the Mufti was Hitler's ally and a wanted war criminal by several Balkan nations post-WWII, they did. Plus the Arab Revolt(1936-39) and pressure from Arab governments is what forced the British to block Jewish immigration in 1939.
So direct and deliberate action on the part of the Arabs caused hundreds of thousands to die who would otherwise have escaped as 300-400K did prior to 1939.
Yes, I know that other locations could have taken the Jews in and did not but this location actively was until the Arabs deliberately halted it.
Also there are more like 20 million Kurds(more like 70 million Turks in Turkey) and the way things are going it probably won't be long before it isn't gaining X Kurds while losing YxX Turks, it will be gaining X Kurds while losing no one who is still seen as a friend in the first place.
Well good. Glad I wasn't making a mistake on it. Anyway, my point was that the Roma are spread over many countries and are persecuted in some of them, but no one seriously advocates a Roma homeland (not even in Romania!)
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
So then Israel should have been created on European territory, preferably German, not at the expense of people who had never done anything to the Jews.
Part of the problem is that the Europeans viewed the Arabs in the same way they viewed Africans - as lesser human beings who needed civilised. The Zionists, who gained the Israeli settlements mainly through the agency of the British, also picked up some of that condescension towards the Arabs, considering themselves civilised, and the Arabs uncivilised people who did not use their land properly and needed Jewish (ie. European) help to 'make the desert bloom'. Indeed Chaim Weizmann referred to the Palestinians in private as 'darkies', an attitude that his British hosts no doubt passed on to him.
Romanian Unit for the Brave Beating of Invading Sneaky Hungarians...
Why is it "obvious" that creating Israel "was a huge mistake "?
The only thing wrong with Israel is that it was"nt created 10 years earlier!
A Jewish State comprising of say 2 million citizens in 1939 would have been of considerable assistance to the Allies
In all fairness, not all of the problems there are to do with Israel.
Ibn Warraq
Banned
You're recycling long discredited myths.
For starters, while anti-Semitism would seem to imply one hates all Semites, it has always been used to describe anti-Jewish feeling and has almost always been exclusively directed at Jews. Wilhelm Marr, the man who popularized the term proudly called himself an anti-semite and, to the best of my knowldedge, never attacked Arabs. Hitler was very close to Amin Al-Husayni, an Arab, but I'm sure you wouldn't hesitate to label him an anti-Semite. Therefore it seems fare to say that Arabs can be anti-semitic. And certainly anti-Jewish sentiment has a long history in the Islamic world.
The Prophet himself would probably be puzzled by your statement that Muslim treatement of Jews has "been consistently good since the dawn of Islam." The Quran is filled with anti-Jewish passages, such as claims that the are the worst enemies of Islam(5:82) and are condemned for believing that Ezra is son of God just as Christians believe Jesus is the son of God.(9:30) and the ahadith are even worse. Also while I suspect he would defend his decision to have all the men of the Banu Qurayza beheaded, and all the women and children enslaved or turned into concubines, I doubt he would claim that the treatment of them was "good."
Moreover, while up untill the 18th or 19th Centuries Jews were treated better in the Islamic world than they were in the Islamic world to say that it was "good" or that they lived "in harmony" is absurd and frankly insulting to the Jews of that time period. Being Dhimmis, in accordance with the pact of Umar, amongst other things they were forbidden to bear arms, forced to pay the Jizya(poll tax), forbidden to ride horses or camels and forced to wear distinctive clothing. According to Norman Stillman, they were regularly subjected to "ritualized degradation." That's why Jews and Christians were allowed only to ride donkey and use pack saddles as if they were women. Even Maimonides was forced to ride a donkey while he was Saladin's personal doctor and Saladin, one of the most "tolerant" Muslim leader of the Middle Ages, reportedly had one Jewish doctor executed for riding a horse. Similarly, the Jizya was often, though not always, collected in ways designed to humiliate. Dhimmis were not allowed to testify in courts against Muslims which menat that often a Muslim could do whatever he wanted to a Jew without fear of punishment so long as he wasn't observed by another Muslim. Muslim men could marry Dhimmi women but Dhimmi men certainly weren't allowed to marry Muslim women.
Also, no one familiar with Muslim-Jewish relations would say that their treatment was "consisent." Their treatment and status often varied dramatically depending on the whim of whatever Muslim leader held power. Now, they rarely faced the violent persecution that Jews in Chrisendom often faced because they were usually usefull because they filled in administrative, commericial, and medical fields that Muslims, for a variety of reasons, tended to shy away from, and they were always a good source of taxes, but there were still many pogroms against in the Islamic world. The Jews of Corobda, Grenada, and Fez could certainly testify to how fast relations could change.
I'll also note that in Persia of the 18th and 19th Century, Jews were classified as Najes(unclean) and they were forbidden from coming into physical contact with Muslims and limited in their occupations to prevent them from "polluting" Muslims, and regularly pelted with stones by children. There were even laws forbidding them from going outside in the rain lest the rainwater wash filth off them onto Muslims.
I have no problem saying that not only would I rather be a Jew in 19th Century Britain than in 19th Century Persia, but I would rather be a free black person in the antebellum South(prior to the reconstruction) than be a Jew in 18th and 19th Century Persia.
To be fair, what was true in Persia was not true in the Sunni parts of the Islamic world, though even during the best of times referring to the relationship between Jews and Muslims as "apartheidlike" would not be completely unfair and a far better description than the term "good."
Ibn Warraq
Banned
Also, the idea that Jewish settlers in Palestine "seized" Muslim land prior to the recognition of the state of Israel is absurd.
Jewish settlers and Jewish agencies didn't "seize" the land. They legally purchased it from the Arab owners, almost of whom were absantee landlords who usually lived in Beirut or Damascus. Usually the land was considered unarable, but yes, there were many Arab fellahin(peasants) who lost land this way, but they didn't own the land. Moreover, as Benny Morris, one of Israel's harshest critics whose work is often cited by such Israel lovers as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, notes while thousands of Arabs were effectively displaced this way over the course of fifty years, it was nowhere near the numbers put forward by many of Israel's critics and also didn't come close to the number of Arabs who were often pushed off their land by their own governments due to projects like the Al Aswan dam. While Morris doesn't mention it, it's worth keeping in mind that far more people have been displaced by various urban renewal projects in the west.
Now, most of us many not like urban renewal or absantee landlords selling off land that others lived on, lets not treat it like a massive human rights violation or use words like "seized" to describe it. Let's just say "legally bought" instead. Let's keep in mind two things. First, as Morris notes more
land was being offered for sale by Arabs than was being bought by Jews. Second, not all Muslims believed that the Jews were "seizing" land. In his memoirs King Abdullah of Transjordan acidly wrote, "The Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it."
Once can make legitmate criticisms of the early settlers but let's leave aside the misleading terms.
Jewish settlers and Jewish agencies didn't "seize" the land. They legally purchased it from the Arab owners, almost of whom were absantee landlords who usually lived in Beirut or Damascus. Usually the land was considered unarable, but yes, there were many Arab fellahin(peasants) who lost land this way, but they didn't own the land. Moreover, as Benny Morris, one of Israel's harshest critics whose work is often cited by such Israel lovers as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, notes while thousands of Arabs were effectively displaced this way over the course of fifty years, it was nowhere near the numbers put forward by many of Israel's critics and also didn't come close to the number of Arabs who were often pushed off their land by their own governments due to projects like the Al Aswan dam. While Morris doesn't mention it, it's worth keeping in mind that far more people have been displaced by various urban renewal projects in the west.
Now, most of us many not like urban renewal or absantee landlords selling off land that others lived on, lets not treat it like a massive human rights violation or use words like "seized" to describe it. Let's just say "legally bought" instead. Let's keep in mind two things. First, as Morris notes more
land was being offered for sale by Arabs than was being bought by Jews. Second, not all Muslims believed that the Jews were "seizing" land. In his memoirs King Abdullah of Transjordan acidly wrote, "The Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in weeping about it."
Once can make legitmate criticisms of the early settlers but let's leave aside the misleading terms.