Very cool video regarding Israel's defensible borders and territory negotiations.

[Gandalf]

But we live in very different times to the development of America. I am in no way saying it is justifiable to wipe out the Palestinians here. We live in a global age where you can't get away with such things so obviously and easily. Israel should look for other ways to integrate into the region, wiping out Palestinians isn't the way to go. An unwelcome guest shouldn't try to further upset the party by kicking over tables and shooting other invitees. You could at least say sorry and try to move on somewhat.

When have the Jews ever tried to wipe out the Palestinians? The have blockaded for the last few years only because Hammas was firing 100 rockets every single day into their lands.

Imagine that Miles, 100 rockets every single day. How long would any other nation tolerate that before invading their neighbour?

And also, you are completely wrong about Jewish state being created illegally.

In fact it's probably the most legitimately created state ever being a legal creation of the United League of Nations, and not just because of the holocaust but (and this is written into the document) because they are recognised by the united nations of the world as having a unique historic right to claim the land as rightfully theirs.

I can't think of any other nation in the world ever that had such backing for its inception, seeing as all other nations were taken by force.

Bilbo, it is trying having to respond to you in these topics because we seem to disagree on pretty much everything everything. When have the Jews ever tried to wipe out Palestinians? Just tally up the death ratios of Jews against Arabs and see where that gets you. Admittedly they haven't gone the US/Nazi way of entire ethnic cleansing, but they have gone the way of full on apartheid and occupation. I would prefer a pistol to the head than years of pointless struggle and oppression at the hands of imperialist bullies and that is just what the Israeli's are. The elite are a seriously nasty bunch of people. Why can't you get that through your head? Why has the world opposed Israel on so many fronts and yet nothing gets done because of the US veto? Are you telling me the entire world has it wrong on Israel? That they haven't commited acts of international terrorism? That they don't purposely oppress the people in Gaza?

You say the blockade has been going on for the past couple of years. Simply not true, it's been going on for several years. It's just that the Israeli's used the wipe out of Gaza as an excuse to go public on it. I cannot excuse the use of rockets, but likewise can you justify the building of illegal settlements, the destruction of farmland, the restricted access to water supplies and so on. Are these the actions of benevolent colonialists? Israel likes to control Palestine in part because it relies upon on the water supplies, of course they don't want to let go in such an arid part of the world.

You are twisting my words on the illegitimacy of the Israel state (after all most states are illegitimate when we go to their roots like you agree), but UN backing doesn't neccessarily mean the correct decision has been made. It just means that the power brokers have reached agreement. How many resolutions have been passed against Israel and rejected by a single veto?Does that make all of them illegitimate? Of course not. And I'm sure you are not naive enough to think so either.

You don't need to respond, in fact I would love it if you didn't. Just let me have the final say and all will be well

You can do what you would have the Israeli's do and make the first conscession.

I find so much of what you are saying on this topic to be so heavily drawn on the Israeli side, that it's difficult to imagine that you aren't Netanyahu himself. I obviously have to respond to such arguments. We all know there are two sides to every argument, but how much actual reading have you done on the other side, Bilbo?

How about an actual response to the terrible actions commited upon the Palestinian people over the years? How do you feel about such actions carried out by the Israeli elite? And how do you feel about this so called inquiry into the flotilla attack? It looks to me like the Israeli's have managed to work it so that it isn't particularly independant at all. Surely you can't agree with that too.

[Kev]

But we live in very different times to the development of America. I am in no way saying it is justifiable to wipe out the Palestinians here. We live in a global age where you can't get away with such things so obviously and easily. Israel should look for other ways to integrate into the region, wiping out Palestinians isn't the way to go. An unwelcome guest shouldn't try to further upset the party by kicking over tables and shooting other invitees. You could at least say sorry and try to move on somewhat.

When have the Jews ever tried to wipe out the Palestinians? The have blockaded for the last few years only because Hammas was firing 100 rockets every single day into their lands.

Imagine that Miles, 100 rockets every single day. How long would any other nation tolerate that before invading their neighbour?

And also, you are completely wrong about Jewish state being created illegally.

In fact it's probably the most legitimately created state ever being a legal creation of the United League of Nations, and not just because of the holocaust but (and this is written into the document) because they are recognised by the united nations of the world as having a unique historic right to claim the land as rightfully theirs.

I can't think of any other nation in the world ever that had such backing for its inception, seeing as all other nations were taken by force.

Bilbo, it is trying having to respond to you in these topics because we seem to disagree on pretty much everything everything. When have the Jews ever tried to wipe out Palestinians? Just tally up the death ratios of Jews against Arabs and see where that gets you. Admittedly they haven't gone the US/Nazi way of entire ethnic cleansing, but they have gone the way of full on apartheid and occupation. I would prefer a pistol to the head than years of pointless struggle and oppression at the hands of imperialist bullies and that is just what the Israeli's are. The elite are a seriously nasty bunch of people. Why can't you get that through your head? Why has the world opposed Israel on so many fronts and yet nothing gets done because of the US veto? Are you telling me the entire world has it wrong on Israel? That they haven't commited acts of international terrorism? That they don't purposely oppress the people in Gaza?

You say the blockade has been going on for the past couple of years. Simply not true, it's been going on for several years. It's just that the Israeli's used the wipe out of Gaza as an excuse to go public on it. I cannot excuse the use of rockets, but likewise can you justify the building of illegal settlements, the destruction of farmland, the restricted access to water supplies and so on. Are these the actions of benevolent colonialists? Israel likes to control Palestine in part because it relies upon on the water supplies, of course they don't want to let go in such an arid part of the world.

You are twisting my words on the illegitimacy of the Israel state (after all most states are illegitimate when we go to their roots like you agree), but UN backing doesn't neccessarily mean the correct decision has been made. It just means that the power brokers have reached agreement. How many resolutions have been passed against Israel and rejected by a single veto?Does that make all of them illegitimate? Of course not. And I'm sure you are not naive enough to think so either.

You don't need to respond, in fact I would love it if you didn't. Just let me have the final say and all will be well

You can do what you would have the Israeli's do and make the first conscession.

I find so much of what you are saying on this topic to be so heavily drawn on the Israeli side, that it's difficult to imagine that you aren't Netanyahu himself. I obviously have to respond to such arguments. We all know there are two sides to every argument, but how much actual reading have you done on the other side, Bilbo?

How about an actual response to the terrible actions commited upon the Palestinian people over the years? How do you feel about such actions carried out by the Israeli elite? And how do you feel about this so called inquiry into the flotilla attack? It looks to me like the Israeli's have managed to work it so that it isn't particularly independant at all. Surely you can't agree with that too.

Well I think you are insanely heavily biased against Israel. It works both ways Miles

I noticed today how angry you were at us British for our part in the dreadful Bloody Sunday Massacre in 1972, where the inquiry has now put the blame entirely and 100 per cent on our troops, who killed it seems, in cold blood, unarmed civilians who posed no threat and were not attacking anybody.

I believe it was 19 or so who were killed in cold blood, unarmed, and have waited almost 40 years for justice.

You didn't seem that bothered.

Yet this flotilla of hate in your eyes is nothing but good old fashioned honest charity and aid. Nevermind the ignominious past of the IHH and their proven terror links, this doesn't matter to you because the Jews are guilty clearly.

Did you ever even read the report from the Danish Institute of International Studies?

This was completed in 2006 I believe and has nothing to do with Israeli bias or anything to do with them at all.

It's a fascinating document that exposes the new military strategy amongst terror groups, namely smuggling arms and conducting terror tactics under the guise of humanitarian aid. It's a growing concern and this important document highlights that.

If you scroll down to page 10 I believe in the document (pages on the document itself not the pdf's page count which counts the covers as pages obviously) and you'll see a few pages on the IHH.

http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publicat...2006-7.web.pdf

It was a new form of terror tactic, nothing less. The inquiry into this does at least have foreign observers which is more than the British internal inquiries to the Iraq War and the Bloody Sunday Massacre had I believe?

[Kev]

Also I don't understand this talk of more casualites being on the Palestinian side. That's common for ALL wars between unbalanced forces.

For example the Americans have now lost just over 4000 troops in Iraq. They have currently killed 105,000 civilians since 2003 that have been documented.

Rather imbalanced don't you think?

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

[Gandalf]

I said I wouldn't be starting threads on controversial issues for a while (Ralph Nader and my body don't count) so I wasn't going to go and start a thread on that and regardless today is my busy day so my posting time is limited. There will be no thread starting from me today. Anyway, of course Britain was to blame and we had absolutely no right to be in Northern Ireland. Show me a thread about it and of course my views would be laid out bare.

You keep on harking back to the flotilla which we have more than covered. You have today gone into the creation of Israel a little which we have dicussed. What about the numerous and many violations commited by the Israeli's?

How about...

1. Forging international passports to commit international terrorism?
2. Destroying Palestinian farmland and infrastructure?
3. Denying planning permission for Palestinians in Israel?
4. Trying to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa?
5. Building settlements on illegally obtained lands?
6. The denial of sufficient aid shipments?
7. The denial of Gazan rights to export?
8. The routine murder of Palestinians by Israeli forces

The list could probably go beyond 20 if I could be bothered.

When I asked you about your background reading I wasn't asking you about a report on the flotilla. I was asking you about your actual knowledge of Israeli acts of aggression and resistance to peace. Nameless already recommended Finkelstein to you. The other name I would add is Chomsky. It sounds to me like you have absorbed a whole heap of Dershowitz, Israeli state propaganda and the Bible and put them into a great big melting pot. If this is how you really feel on the issue then fair enough, but if you haven't read more then you should. Likewise, I'm always open for intelligent suggestions too.

[Gandalf]

6. Was poorly worded actually. Denying of direct aid to Gaza woud have been better and also I would add in something about the draconian restrictions upon what is also allowed in. No cement= no reconstruction. Not good when a good proportion of the place is rubble.

[Gandalf]

And now my final turn to hark back on about the flotilla before heading to work. It is hardly an independant enquiry is it though? And the Irish dude is heavily pro Israeli, they have been handpicked for crying out loud. Is that satisfactory? Independant means no strings attached and Israel knows it cannot do that because it WILL be found guilty as charged. Just like in the Goldstone report which even now Israel fails to recognise because once again it was in the wrong.

I have no axe to grind with peaceful nations. How often do you see me rant against Sweden or Canada for instance? Anyway, I'm off to work, catch ya later.

[Kirkland Laing]

According to Hitchens this confirmation; "by an Israeli historian using the most scrupulous and authentic Zionist sources, at last allows us to write finis to a debate which has been going on for a quarter of a century [...] between Erskine B. Childers and Jon Kimche."
In The Spectator 12 May 1961 Dr. Childers first wrote of his bafflement about the well-known Israeli claim that the Palestinians had been urged to flee by their own leadership:
Examining every official Israeli statement about the Arab exodus, I was struck by the fact that no primary evidence of evacuation orders was ever produced. The charge, Israel claimed, was "documented"; but where were the documents? There had allegedly been Arab radio broadcasts ordering the evacuation; but no dates, names of stations, or texts of messages were ever cited. In Israel in 1958, as a guest of the Foreign Office and therefore doubly hopeful of serious assistance, I asked to be shown the proofs, I was assured they existed, and was promised them. None had been offered when I left, but I was again assured. I asked to have the material sent on to me. I am still waiting.............

Childers also investigated the claims that Monsignor George Hakim, then Greek Catholic bishop of Galilee, had reported exhortations to his flock to leave. "I hold" wrote Childers, "signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years, and that the Arabs fled because of panic and forcible eviction."
The BBC monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948, and those records, and companion ones by a U.S. monitoring unit, could be seen at the British Museum. Dr. Childers decided to go through the lot. His conclusion was:
There was not a single order, or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.[2]


Blaming the Victims - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Kirkland Laing]

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, whose parents fled persecution in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, minces no words in telling the real story of Zionism's crimes against the Palestinians:

It is the horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget.




For his own research, Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel's "founding fathers."

These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli "heroes" executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years........



For example, in 1937 Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive, the organization charged with procuring land for Jewish settlements in Palestine, "I am for compulsory transfer; I don't see anything immoral in it." Ten years later, Ben Gurion maintained his opposition to sharing Palestine with the Arabs by rejecting the UN partition plan because he believed it didn't allocate at least the majority of Palestine to the Jewish state.....


Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. The expulsion took only a few hours and was carried out so systematically that the Jewish troops were able to evacuate and destroy another four villages on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of British troops stationed in police stations nearby.

The people of the village of Sa'sa were among the early victims. On the night of February 15, 1948, troops from Palmach (which had the largest Zionist militias) "took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside." Moshe Kalman, the Jewish officer in charge of the operation later recalled, rather poetically, "In the end, the sky prised open. We left behind 35 demolished houses (a third of the village) and 60-80 dead bodies (quite a few of them were children)."

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, where one survivor, Fahim Zaydan, described what Jewish troops did:

They took us one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him-carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her, they shot her too.

The news about the fate of the villagers in Deir Yassin spread like wildfire across Palestine, with Jewish troops cruising through other villages promising the villagers the same fate if they didn't leave. And though more recent accurate accounts of the number of those killed in Deir Yassin suggest a figure of 170 men, women, and children, Zionist propaganda broadcast over loudspeakers in the weeks that followed the massacre claimed that they actually killed over 300, in order to elevate the panic among Arabs.

On October 28, 1948, Palmach troops committed another massacre in the village of Dawaymah, described by Pappé as more brutal than the massacre in Deir Yassin. In just a few hours, all houses were blown up and 455 people were executed, including 170 women and children. The remaining 6,000 inhabitants-who included 4,000 refugees expelled earlier that year from other villages-were forcibly expelled. According to Israeli archives, "The Jewish troops who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death."

In all those villages that were attacked, the map compiled earlier by the Arabists proved to be extremely useful. It gave the Jewish troops complete understanding of the best way to attack those villages. And with the help of paid informants, it allowed them to pick out and immediately execute all potential resisters.

By the end of the war, Zionist troops had destroyed more than 420 Palestinian villages and turned their inhabitants into refugees. The same ill fate that befell the Palestinian countryside also befell the Arab population in cities-both Arab or mixed. The campaign against the Palestinian cities was also as relentless and brutal as that against the villages.

On the first day of Passover, April 21, 1948, Jewish troops began Operation Scissors (later renamed Operation Cleansing the Leaven or Bi'ur Hametz in Hebrew) to cleanse the mixed sea-port city of Haifa in the north of its fifty thousand Arab inhabitants. The troops attacked by rolling barrel bombs from the hills onto Arab streets and using heavy artillery while loudspeakers threatened the Palestinians to leave or else. Thousands of Palestinians fled to the port, attempting to get on boats to leave, but even there, Jewish troops continued to shoot, leading to more panic with parents trampling their own children. Many drowned when overloaded fishing boats capsized. This all happened under the nose of the British forces who were still stationed in the city and didn't fulfill an earlier promise to protect the city's Palestinian inhabitants.

Another example of what Pappé calls the urbicide, (killing of cities) of Arab Palestine is the attacks on the two cities of Acre and Baysan. On May 6, 1948, Jewish troops laid siege with intensive bombardment. Loudspeakers shouted everywhere: "Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy to the last man."

According to British doctors in the city's Lebanese Red Cross hospital, the troops also caused an outbreak of typhoid and dysentery among Arabs and even British soldiers by poisoning the water supply with germs. These germs were developed by the Biological Warfare Science Corps program, set up by Ben-Gurion himself in the 1940s and ironically known by its acronym HEMED, which means "sweetness" in Hebrew. _Exhausted, starved, and fearing more death and destruction, the Palestinian inhabitants of Acre and Baysan finally surrendered in a matter of days only to be loaded by Jewish soldiers at gunpoint onto trucks that drove them to their future refugee camps. By the end of the war most major Palestinian cities had become totally or almost totally empty of their Arab inhabitants.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. Some 660,000 Jews imposed military rule on 150,000 Arabs who dug in and didn't flee. The rest of the Palestinians were dispersed as refugees in the remaining 20 percent of their own country or in neighboring Arab states-made to live as refugees for the following sixty years. Today, they number over six million....



Ilan Pappe, Israel The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Papp book review by Mostafa Omar

[Kev]

Myth
"Arab leaders never encouraged the Palestinians to flee."
Fact
A plethora of evidence exists demonstrating that Palestinians were encouraged to leave their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies.
The Economist, a frequent critic of the Zionists, reported on October 2, 1948: “Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit... It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”
Time’s report of the battle for Haifa (May 3, 194 was similar: “The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city... By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa.”
Benny Morris, the historian who documented instances where Palestinians were expelled, also found that Arab leaders encouraged their brethren to leave. Starting in December 1947, he said, “Arab officers ordered the complete evacuation of specific villages in certain areas, lest their inhabitants ‘treacherously’ acquiesce in Israeli rule or hamper Arab military deployments.” He concluded, “There can be no exaggerating the importance of these early Arab-initiated evacuations in the demoralization, and eventual exodus, of the remaining rural and urban populations” (Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 590.)
The Arab National Committee in Jerusalem, following the March 8, 1948, instructions of the Arab Higher Committee, ordered women, children and the elderly in various parts of Jerusalem to leave their homes: “Any opposition to this order... is an obstacle to the holy war... and will hamper the operations of the fighters in these districts.” The Arab Higher Committee also ordered the evacuation of “several dozen villages, as well as the removal of dependents from dozens more” in April-July 1948. “The invading Arab armies also occasionally ordered whole villages to depart, so as not to be in their way” (Middle Eastern Studies, January 1986; See also Morris, pp. 263 & 590-592).
Morris also said that in early May units of the Arab Legion ordered the evacuation of all women and children from the town of Beisan. The Arab Liberation Army was also reported to have ordered the evacuation of another village south of Haifa. The departure of the women and children, Morris says, “tended to sap the morale of the menfolk who were left behind to guard the homes and fields, contributing ultimately to the final evacuation of villages. Such two-tier evacuation — women and children first, the men following weeks later — occurred in Qumiya in the Jezreel Valley, among the Awarna bedouin in Haifa Bay and in various other places.”
In his memoirs, Haled al Azm, the Syrian Prime Minister in 1948-49, also admitted the Arab role in persuading the refugees to leave:
“Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave. Only a few months separated our call to them to leave and our appeal to the United Nations to resolve on their return” (The Memoirs of Haled al Azm, Beirut, 1973, Part 1, pp. 386-387).
Who gave such orders? Leaders like such as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said, who declared: “We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down” (Myron Kaufman, The Coming Destruction of Israel, NY: The American Library Inc., 1970, pp. 26-27).
The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: “This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re*enter and retake possession of their country” (Edward Atiyah, The Arabs, London: Penguin Books, 1955, p. 183).
“The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two,” Monsignor George Hakim, a Greek Orthodox Catholic Bishop of Galilee told the Beirut newspaper, Sada al-Janub (August 16, 194. “Their leaders had promised them that the Arab Armies would crush the ’Zionist gangs’ very quickly and that there was no need for panic or fear of a long exile.”
On April 3, 1949, the Near East Broadcasting Station ( Cyprus ) said: “It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees’ flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem” (Samuel Katz, Battleground-Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, NY: Bantam Books, 1985, p. 15).
“The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies,” according to the Jordanian newspaper Filastin, (February 19, 1949).
One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said: “The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.”
“The Secretary-General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade,” said Habib Issa in the New York Lebanese paper, Al Hoda (June 8, 1951). “He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean... Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes and property and to stay temporarily in neighboring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down.”
The Arabs’ fear was naturally exacerbated by stories of real and imagined Jewish atrocities following the attack on Deir Yassin. The native population lacked leaders who could calm them; their spokesmen, such as the Arab Higher Committee, were operating from the safety of neighboring states and did more to arouse their fears than to pacify them. Local military leaders were of little or no comfort. In one instance the commander of Arab troops in Safed went to Damascus. The following day, his troops withdrew from the town. When the residents realized they were defenseless, they fled in panic. “As Palestinian military power was swiftly and dramatically crushed, and the Haganah demonstrated almost unchallenged superiority in successive battles,” Benny Morris noted, “Arab morale cracked, giving way to general, blind, panic, or a ‘psychosis of flight,’ as one IDF intelligence report put it” (King Abdallah, My Memoirs Completed, (London: Longman Group, Ltd., 197, p. xvi; Morris, p. 591).
According to Dr. Walid al-Qamhawi, a former member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, “it was collective fear, moral disintegration and chaos in every field that exiled the Arabs of Tiberias, Haifa and dozens of towns and villages” (Joseph Schechtman, The Refugee in the World, NY: A.S. Barnes and Co., 1963, p. 186).
As panic spread throughout Palestine, the early trickle of refugees became a flood, numbering more than 200,000 by the time the provisional government declared the independence of the State of Israel.
Even Jordan’s King Abdullah, writing in his memoirs, blamed Palestinian leaders for the refugee problem:
The tragedy of the Palestinians was that most of their leaders had paralyzed them with false and unsubstantiated promises that they were not alone; that 80 million Arabs and 400 million Muslims would instantly and miraculously come to their rescue (Yehoshofat Harkabi, Arab Attitudes To Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1972, p. 364).
“The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny but, instead, they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live.”
— Palestinian Authority (then) Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) (Falastin a-Thaura, (March 1976)

[Kirkland Laing]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

[Kev]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

It's the Arab's who invaded the Jews mate that caused the Palestinains to flee not the other round. The Arabs invaded on three different fronts the day after the British mandate expired. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria all went to war with Israel and they told the Palestinians (who were on the Arab side) to get out the way whilst they wiped the Jews out.

Only they didn't, they got their asses kicked utterly by a nation only a day old. They also expelled 800,000 Jews from their own Arab lands. Israel took them in at no cost to the rest of the world whilst the Arabs left the Palestinians to rot so they could continue to use them as a propaganda campaign against Israel.

To continue your analagy further if Britain, or indeed any Western World country had a colony of settlers somewhere and then told them to move aside for a moment whilst we conquer the rest of the land for you, but then got utterly beaten, my guess is they would be legally obligated to take the colonists back and offer them homes seeing as their aggression had lost their's originally.

If they had also expelled 800,000 people who shared ancestory with the side they were fighting, and took billions of pounds worth of property and land in so doing, they would probably use that land, property and money towards rehousing their own colonists and giving them full citizenship rights in their countries, just like Israel did for the 800,00 Arab Jewish refugees the above nations made homeless and destitute.

I guess you'll continue to ignore this point however and not even address it.

[Gandalf]

Kirkland isn't the only one who misses points, Bilbo.

I gave you a very basic list covering some of the issues which are pertinent to today and you completely avoided all of them. I guess they aren't very easy for any rational person to defend, but I was sure you would find some kind of off the wall spin.

[Gandalf]

Mind you, I should have kept quiet. I almost had the last word!

[Kirkland Laing]

Bilbo, let's assume the Israeli propaganda you got from the Jewish Virtual Library is all true and the objective assessments of Jewish and other historians and the actual historical record, the BBC monitoring radio broadcasts etc. is all wrong. Let's say the Arab armies did encourage the Palestinians to leave their homes. So what? Let's say some foreign army invades the south coast and the British government tell people living there to leave their homes as they'll be in the middle of a war zone and in great danger. So you leave your home and head north. After whatever military action is over you still own your home, right? You still own the land and the property. If that's the best excuse the Israelis have for ethnically cleansing a million Palestinians from their homes, mostly rounded up and put on trucks at gunpoint as is endlessly documented even in the memiors of former Israeli prime ministers who took part in the ethnic cleansing, then it's a pretty pathetic excuse, no?

It's the Arab's who invaded the Jews mate that caused the Palestinains to flee not the other round. The Arabs invaded on three different fronts the day after the British mandate expired. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria all went to war with Israel and they told the Palestinians (who were on the Arab side) to get out the way whilst they wiped the Jews out.

Only they didn't, they got their asses kicked utterly by a nation only a day old. They also expelled 800,000 Jews from their own Arab lands. Israel took them in at no cost to the rest of the world whilst the Arabs left the Palestinians to rot so they could continue to use them as a propaganda campaign against Israel.

To continue your analagy further if Britain, or indeed any Western World country had a colony of settlers somewhere and then told them to move aside for a moment whilst we conquer the rest of the land for you, but then got utterly beaten, my guess is they would be legally obligated to take the colonists back and offer them homes seeing as their aggression had lost their's originally.

If they had also expelled 800,000 people who shared ancestory with the side they were fighting, and took billions of pounds worth of property and land in so doing, they would probably use that land, property and money towards rehousing their own colonists and giving them full citizenship rights in their countries, just like Israel did for the 800,00 Arab Jewish refugees the above nations made homeless and destitute.

I guess you'll continue to ignore this point however and not even address it.

Only the Palestinians weren't the colony, they were the people living there for centuries. The Israelis were the colonists. And the historical record, BBC and American radio monitoring shows zero radio broadcasts were made telling the Palestinians to evacuate. And the million Palestinian refugees were caused by actual ethnic cleansing, not by people running away from their houses. Cities of 50 000 people were ordered onto trucks at gunpoint and dumped in Gaza or forced over the border into neighbouring countries.

But you're not answering my question. If your family, who have been living on the south coast for generations, are told to evacuate by the British government for their own safety because they're in a war zone, move out of their house for the duration of any military conflcit, does that mean they lose all title to their property? Bear in mind that under international law, like the people Slobodan Milosevic booted out of Bosnia and elsewhere, you'd have both the right to return to your property and the right to reclaim it if occupied.

[Kirkland Laing]

And about the 800 000 Jewish refugees. They also have the absolute right of return to their former properties and land too. The right of return of refugees is international law.