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| quote: | Originally posted by Anas Attia
Palestinian territories: 3,760,000[1]
Jordan 2,700,000[2]
Israel 1,318,000
Syria 434,896
Lebanon 405,425
Chile 300,000
USA 67,842[11]
Egypt 70,245
Honduras 54,000[3]
Kuwait 50,000
Brazil 50,000[4]
Yemen 24,000[3]
Canada 23,975 (2006 Census)[5]
Australia 15,000
Colombia 12,000[3]
Guatemala 1,400[3]
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I can't for the life of me understand what these numbers are supposed to mean. Where did they come from? Are they counting family lines that haven't lived in the region for several generations as "Palestinian"? By that logic, almost every Jew in the world today is "Israeli".
| quote: | If you want visit the following link to see who has taken over that area of land over the past couple of thousand years, doesn't matter who took it over, there is still a people called the Palestinians all throughout the conquests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine
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I'm loath to accept any Wikipedia article as a valid source for any topic that's even remotely controversial, but since you yourself posted this source, I'd like to dig up a few points that don't seem to jibe with your numbers:
| quote: | | According to Alexander Scholch, the population of Palestine in 1850 had about 350,000 inhabitants, 30% of whom lived in 13 towns; roughly 85% were Muslims, 11% were Christians and 4% Jews[165] |
| quote: | | According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy,[166] the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs. In 1914 Palestine had a population of 657,000 Muslim Arabs, 81,000 Christian Arabs, and 59,000 Jews.[167] |
Hard to believe that the number not only expanded to over 10 million in such a short time but managed to spread itself so thinly across the globe. Even if you accept that, a 19th century population of under 350,000 is hardly an entire civilization.
From the "travelers' impressions" section:
| quote: | Alphonse de Lamartine visited Palestine in 1835, "Outside the gates of Jerusalem we saw indeed no living object, heard no living sound, we found the same void, the same silence ... as we should have expected before the entombed gates of Pompeii or Herculaneam a complete eternal silence reigns in the town, on the highways, in the country ... the tomb of a whole people.[170]
...
The Dutch scholar and cartographer Adriaan Reland visited Palestine in 1695, made a population census, and came to the conclusion that Palestine was mostly empty with several existing communities of Jews and Christians.[183]
...
In 1898, German Kaiser Wilhelm II also visited Palestine. He was appalled at the condition of the country. The Ottomans had stripped the forests for lumber and firewood. The Palestinian Arabs had let an old Roman aqueduct fall into ruin. The ultimate ecological curse was the ubiquitous herds of black goats. For nearly 2,000 years after the dispersion of the Jews, Arabs had allowed their goats to graze unfenced across Palestine. They had eaten the grass down to its roots, and the topsoil had eroded and blown away. The biblical land of milk and honey had become a dust bowl.
– Palestine: The Original Sin, Meir Abelson |
So far, this isn't painting a picture of a vibrant community with a rich cultural history. It describes exactly as I said earlier - a mixed, tribal, almost nomadic population, scattered sporadically across the land. They grew a lot of wheat and that was about it.
Even on Wikipedia, the facts seem to be on my side, not yours. Yes, there was a region called Palestine. Yes, there were people living there. No, it was not a nation-state in the same way it has been since the mid-20th century. There was no independent central government, no Palestinian flag, nothing.
It's completely fine if you want to talk about the history of the Palestine region, or if you want to talk about today's Palestinian Territories and the State of Palestine, but it's absolutely crucial to realize that these two entities are not the same. When you talk about Palestinians living all over the world - descendants of families who emigrated from the region in the 19th century - these people don't have any closer ties to the present state of Palestine than I do to Poland and Germany where my family came from over 3 generations ago.
Now, land claims aside, because we all seem to more or less agree that they're tangential to the issue...
| quote: | | You will see that the amount of space available to the Palestinians has shrunk, drastically... even after the sanction in 1947. It is still shrinking. |
I haven't seen any evidence to support the claim that it's still shrinking, unless you mean per capita. Israel continues to make more and more land concessions and so the total amount of land available to Palestinians has actually been increasing over the past 20 years.
With respect to the less recent "shrinkage", yes, that's true, Israel is presently occupying more land than the original U.N. partition plan gave them. When you have war, borders change. Early on, the neighbouring Arab countries grossly underestimated Israel's military capabilities and made the very stupid mistake of launching actual military offensives, each time getting crushed. Even without a passing knowledge of military strategy, it ought to be obvious that Israel would have had no way to continue its survival without a military occupation of the hostile areas.
Now a lot of supporters of the so-called intifada maintain that Israel made the first offensive in 1948, but the Arabs had already rejected the U.N. partition plan at that point and were already mounting a major offensive. Regardless, it isn't and never has been customary at any point in human history to return occupied lands after a war, with the exception of a total regime change or severe restrictions (i.e. the USA having its own troops in Japan to enforce the ban on any Japanese military entity). Further still, it's well-documented in each and every war after 1948 that the Arabs (Palestinians, whatever) attacked first.
There's no argument here over whether or not Israel has expanded its borders into Arab (not Palestinian) territories; it most certainly has. But if you're really going to obsess over the recent history of the region as opposed to the real current reasons for the war (specifically, Hamas wanting Israel off the map, period), then you have to ask the question why. Israel has the technology, training, and intelligence to mount a full-out conquest of the region if they so choose; instead, they keep giving more land to Palestine and tolerate rocket attacks every day from the Palestinian state. It's pretty hard to believe that they're doing this for fun.
Can it really be a coincidence that every time Israel evacuates a particular territory, a new wave of rocket attacks start from that very territory? It's clear in hindsight that the military occupations of those regions were to protect Israeli civilians.
But, in the end, this speculation doesn't even matter, because as I mentioned before, the rocket attacks and suicide bombs aren't based on land claims. They're based on the expressly stated intent of Hamas to eliminate Israel at any cost. As long as the Israel and the rest of the west continues to try to interpret it as a land claim, the fighting will never end.
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