Twenty years after WW2, Germans were selling us a million Volkswagens and the Japanese were flooding us with Honda motorcycles, having rebuilt their respective countries with massive American assistance. Germany and Japan are American allies to this day because of that gracefulness in rebuilding our former enemies.
Seventy-five years after the creation of the state of Israel via a massive act of ethnic cleansing, the people that Israel ethnically cleansed off the lands of their new country are still stateless and still living in misery. Israel has done nothing — zero — to help them rebuild or help them find a state to be home. All they’ve done is blame other people for the results of an action that Israel did itself — ethnic cleansing of people off of their lands.
Note that ethnic cleansing is *not* the same as genocide. When the USSR seized 1/3rd of Poland after WW2, they purged the ethnic Poles off of their new lands and replaced them with Russians. When Poland was given 1/4th of Germany after WW2, they purged the ethnic Germans off of their new lands and replaced them with poles. There was a massive refugee crisis in Europe in the aftermath of WW2 due to all this ethnic cleansing going on, such as the German population of Koenigsberg being deported to Germany and being replaced with Russians (and Koenigsberg being renamed to Kaliningrad). But — the difference is that the people being displaced had a nation to belong to.
The same is not true of the Palestinians. Seventy-five years on, they are still stateless and homeless due to Israel’s actions in 1948. You now have five generations of people descended from those whose birth certificates said “Mandate of Palestine” or “Province of Palestine” on them — people who have no nation to call home, because the one on their ancestors’ birth certificate no longer exists anymore.
I’m not saying that Israel could solve the Palestinian problem by themselves. But they have to take the lead, because they’re the ones who created the problem. Instead, they just blame everybody else but themselves for the problem they created.
— Badtux the “When will it end?” Penguin
I like the Jewish people a lot, but as a country, Israel is an asshole.
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It is sad that the Palestinians have basically nothing. No home, no income, no hope, no nothing. They also have a country next door that is totally hostile to them. I am Jewish by birth so I have some connection here however slight, and both sides of this bother me greatly. The Israelis have to help the Palestinians survive and that seems to be all there is to that. Hamas is the bad guy here, and other than the unarmed populace rebelling against them, there seems to be no cure. Neither Germany nor Japan were undercut by Anti-American hatred to this degree, so in effect, they were easy. I as well have no answer as to how to weed out the bad guys, or if that is even possible. A fine mess we have created now.
w3ski
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When was the surrender ceremony? I seem to have missed that.
(Yes, Germany and Japan surrendered. You seem to have skimmed over that trivial detail.)
As for “ethnic cleansing”, you also seem to have skipped over the part about the Jews who survived the Holocaust being forcibly not invited to return to their prewar homes. I guess you would have preferred it if the Jews had just laid down and were peaceably slaughtered.
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If you click on the “Related” links you will see my mention of that. The ethnic cleansing was necessary to create the state of Israel, and creation of the state of Israel was necessary in order to prevent a MSS St. Louis from ever happening again, so that the world’s unwanted Jews would have a place of refuge if ever another regime decided to genocide Jews.
But seventy-five years later, Israelis still make excuses for what they did rather than realize that they created the Palestinian people and have a responsibility to be a lead partner in dealing with the problem of millions of stateless people living in utter misery within territories ceded to them by Egypt and Jordan in those respective peace treaties.
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The tragedy of Israel is that it has real enemies. The far worse tragedy of Palestine is that it has no real friends. Everybody agrees that they’re a problem, and that they are somebody else’s problem.
Take, for instance, the border between Gaza and Egypt. It is guarded by Egyptian troops, with orders to stop any incursions from Gaza, by any means necessary. But who can blame the Egyptians? Taking in millions of Palestinian refugees would be expensive and risky. Why should they bother?
For Arab unity? The Egyptians will not take the Palestinians in. Nor will the Saudis, nor the Iranians. Not their problem. It’s the bystander effect writ large.
In my more do-gooder moments I fantasize America stepping up to the plate to take in all those refugees. After all, assimilation of wretched masses rejected by the wicked Old World is one of this nation’s core competencies. But not this decade, not with this Congress. The Palestinians will remain someone else’s problem.
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The Iranians definitely are not taking in Sunni Arabs, being neither Sunni, nor Arabs.
Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan lack the water to take in millions of additional citizens, and besides, Jordan already took in millions and gave them Jordanian citizenship. Egypt has the water but has their army deployed on the Gaza border to keep Palestinians from entering Egypt. Both Iraq and Lebanon are recovering from bloody civil wars between religious sects, and are not going to accept millions of Sunni Arab refugees as citizens to upset the delicate ethnic balance of the internal peace that they’re barely maintaining.
Of those countries, Egypt looks like the worst bad guys. Not only are they refusing to allow Palestinians into Egypt, they’re blaming Israel for “inciting” Hamas into slaughtering hundreds of unarmed Israeli civilians. Ugh.
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Plusssss, maybe the Palestinians don’t WANT to move. They’re living in a Warsaw ghetto, but it’s THEIR Warsaw ghetto. The pitiful possessions they have — OK, maybe “pitiful” is too derogatory a word — are there. They know who their neighbours are, and where the local shops are located. Crap as life might be — although it would be better if they weren’t getting battered by Israelis all the time — it’s life as they know it. Better that than a tent city in a vacant desert.
Which is the proposal by one Israeli politithug who I was watching on video today. “If you people don’t like getting bombed all to hell, why don’t you just go to this wasteland in the Sinai? That’s what millions of refugees in Syria did (after the civil war we Israelis helped start) when they crossed the Turkish border. Look how well that worked out for them. The Gyppos will make a nice place for you, just like the Turks did for those Syrian reffos.” OK, the Israeli didn’t say those LITERAL words, but that was the gist of his statement.
Remember the motto of the post-Holocaust, kids: “NEVER AGAIN! Unless WE’RE doing it”…
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Remember those thousands of rockets? Who supplied them? It seems that Hamas made them themselves. For the propellant they needed only sugar and fertilizer. Explosive, shrapnel and trigger were also home-made. How ingenious!
But where did they get the rocket tubes? It seems that they dug up plumbing to cut into lengths for rockets. Again, ingenious; but also a war crime against their own people, for Hamas destroyed vital civilian infrastructure, in a city already withering from dehydration. No doubt Hamas will call that a sacrifice for the war effort.
How do you send humanitarian aid to a land ruled by those who beat plowshares into swords?
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No doubt that Hamas are some bad guys who need to get the shit beat out of them. I’m more pointing out that if we’d treated Germany and Japan like crap for 75 years, we’d have German and Japanese terror groups targeting us just as much as Hamas target Israelis.
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