A reader writes and asks, "it is always Israel that is supposed to give up concessions." Er, this map pretty well proves which side has given up the most concessions (Hat tip, Teeth Maestro).
Factoids:
- 90 percent of Palestine’s “natives” in 1917 were Arabs.
- “Zionism — the quest for a Jewish national home in Palestine —was the brainchild of Theodor Herzl. A thirty-four-year-oldreporter...in 1894, he went to Paris to cover the unfolding DreyfusAffair.” Having experienced and observed vicious anti-semitism,he wrote of his vision of Jews returning to Palestine..."A poor,neglected strip of two disconnected Turkish provinces...Palestine was a malaria-infested backwater, but could be so much more.Under intensive Jewish settlement and development, Herzl argued,it would become the biblical ‘land of milk and honey’ again and bean avowedly modern place with a progressive slogan: ‘Faith holdsus together, science makes us free.’ ” (Quicksand, p. 18).
- There were Jewish immigrants of about 60,000 a year to Palestine,then thousands more as Jews fled Nazi Germany, Eastern Europeand Russia. During the 1930s, in part because of the GreatDepression and in part because of anti-semitism, America greatly limited the number of Jewish immigrants it would accept.
- “Why should the Arabs make peace? We have taken their country.Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them?Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, that’s true, but 2,000years ago, and what is that to them?” — David Ben-Gurion, p. 42 Quicksand.
- Israeli aggression has created more than two million Arab refugees since 1948 (P. 106-109, Quicksand ).
- “The Jewish settlements drove the Arabs out by not giving themjobs...Employment of non-Jews was explicitly debarred.” (P95, Quicksand.)
- The Israeli government in September 1967 “concluded it did not have the right to place settlers in the (occupied) territories, butwent ahead and settled them anyway. This created the intractible situation that exists today: 250,000 Israeli settlers living on the West Bank with all the rights of Israeli citizens, surrounded by 2.5 million Palestinians without rights, living under militaryoccupation.” (Quicksand, page 281.)
- The pretext for the 1967 Six-Day War was threats by Egyptian President Nasser to blockade the Straits of Turan, which the Egyptian navy would fail to execute. The Israelis took this minor threat and transformed it to a major one. It seized land Israel had failed to get from UN recognition in 1948. Israelis grabbed the Old City of (East) Jerusalem, with all its Muslim, Christian and Jewish holy places, which still lay in Jordanian territory. From Jordan, they also took Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah (the West Bank), and the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt. (Quicksand , “A Six-Day War” chapter.) Israel also occupied the Sinai peninsula (returned to Egypt in 1982), and took two thirds of the Golan Heights from Syria.
- When Israel took all this territory in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson privately asked the Israeli president if he was trying not just to make his country more secure, but creating an "armed empire." Publicly, however, Johnson did not challenge Israeli aggression.
