Very few people here have actually presented any facts and figures on the issue. From the limited amount of reading that I have done on the matter, it seems to me that the cause of the problem is the UN. The UN is an organization that tends to meddle with issues pertaining to a country, or an ethnicity of people without actually understanding the consequences of its actions. Take the 1947 partition plan.
In 1947 Palestine was made up of:
- 608,000 Jews (33% of the population)
- 1,237,000 Non-Jews (67% of the population)
The partition plan proposed to divide the land of Palestine into:
- 56% for the Jewish State
- 44% for the Arab Palestinian State
- Jerusalem would remain an internationally administered zone with a population of roughtly 1:1 Jew and Arab.
Source: http://www.representativepress.org/IsraelHistory.html
To me, that already seems like an unfair division. What I can't quite grasp was the continued expansion of the Jewish state:
"The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the UN. Now it's then that Israel was attacked by its neighbors - in May 1948; it's then, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before." p132 Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky
A Jewish state was already established so why not accept it and defend it, rather than seek to expand it?
Something that also strikes me as peculiar is how Arabs are accused of being the 'terrorists' but the figures show that since 2000, 6,568 Palestinians have been killed compared to 1,096 Israelis.
Soure: http://old.btselem.org/statistics/english/Casualties.asp
In addition, "ICAHD estimates that at least 24,813 houses have been demolished in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967."
Source: http://www.icahd.org/?page_id=76
I'm not trying to take sides, but from what I've briefly read so far, it just seems to me that Israel is definitely not the victim in this case. I'd love to hear the other side of the argument though.
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