Ok EK, lets address your contention of,
"Originally Posted by EagleKeeper View Post
Yet the thieves of '48 should be rewarded?
What did those Palestinians do for 20 years when they had full access/control over their land.
Did they request statehood or were they busy plotting with the Arab nations how to take over all of the Palestine Mandate?
Are they interested in statehood at the present? Apparently not - the Israel government has opened a window of opportunity for them to talk - where is Abbas? Like the last opportunity, they are ignoring it until to late.
Just wondering"
The first thing we have to ask, is where did all the Present day Palestinian refugees come from? And the basic answer is, they too lived in the former British mandate of Palestine that became the State of Israel in 1948. Often living peacefully with many Jewish immigrants who had been filtering onto the former British Mandate of Palestine for the last 60 years. But fact, as of 1948, the majority of the land in the future State of Israel was owned by Palestinians.
And then we have to realize quite another thing, it was not Palestinians who then attacked the State of Israel in 1948, and in fact it was the Surrounding Arab States with their standing armies that attacked the State of Israel. After all, most Palestinians lived in simple farming villages and did not even have the access to guns to fight.
Many of the Palestinians that left the state of Israel did so based on promises from the Arab nations that they would be able to return with complete control of Israel.
There were some Palestinians that chose to stay.
There were some that chose to fight on the side of the Arabs.
Those that did not support Israel (fighters and/or voluntary refugees) were then enemies and should not be granted an automatic right to return to their land. They chose the opposite side and lost. Why should they be rewarded?
Granted that some Palestinians lost their property during the fighting and afterwords. That is what happens during a war. The Allies did not reimburse people of the Axis nations for land that was destroyed. Just like Germany did not do the same for other European nationals.
But by in large, Israeli farming villagers and Palestinian farming villagers did the only sensible thing to do when invading and defending armies choose to make their homes ground zero in some battlefield, namely get the hell out leaving homes and possessions behind. After the armies battled it out, better organized Jewish terrorists beat back Arab state armies barely, which should then allowed both Palestinian and Jewish farmers and land owners to return to their land and resume life as before.
Those Palestinians that stayed, still had property. Not every Palestinian left Israel from within the '48 boundaries and after the conclusion of the '48 war.
But that is exactly where the newly minted nation of Israel took the wrong and low road, because when Jewish farmers came back, they were welcomed home and Palestinians farmers who had also fled had their land confiscated and were forced out of Israel at the point of a gun.
There was no purification done after the conclusion of the '48 conflict. There were still Palestinians living in Israel. There were Palestinians that existed outside of Israel that wanted to take over Israel also.
Israel had no way of delineating "good" Palestinians from "bad" Palestinians that lived outside her borders. And apparently history has shown, neither could the Arabs. The Palestinians were more than willing to destroy Arab lands for their own purposes.
Which makes your initial statement of, "Yet the thieves of '48 should be rewarded?" When the only thieves of 1948 was the government of Israel. It was not Palestinians who attacked the State of Israel, it was the Arab States. So why, EK, should the Palestinians be collectively punished which is illegal under the very UN doctrine that formed the State of Israel.
The Palestinians are not being collectively punished. Only those that went against Israel in one way or another. And the Palestinians collectively may have had no qualms about destruction of Israel. there are always a minority of opinions floating around - there was a minority of Palestinians that wanted to live/stick by with the Jews. Those were the ones that have prospered. The rest have reaped what they had sewn - distrust
The only partial justification Israel may have had in 1948 was to truly maintain a minority of SOME Palestinians had in fact joined Arab armies, but since Israel did not do this in any case by case basis, it simply amounts to Israeli illegal land seizures on a massive scale.
Which is why the issue of the right to return still exists and will never go away.
But in 1948, no one really cared about the Palestinians, so Israel got away with it at the time. But if Israel did the same to its Arab nationals in 1948, the Arab armies would have certainly renewed the attack.
Well fast forward to 2011, and now the world community is starting to care about both the Palestinian State and the Israeli danger to mid-east peace.
Hope that explains it to you Eagle Keeper, because your version of history is totally false. Of course, post 1948, Israel has added more Palestinians into its dual concentration camps, and those of are mainly former Jordanian residents of the West Bank that suddenly found themselves occupied by Israel in 1967.
And 43 years later, there is seemingly nothing more permanent than a temporary illegal Israeli occupation.