"To say that we are somehow occupying Palestine is like to say that Native Americans occupy America. The difference between US case and Israel is that in our case, the native people have won, while in the US they have lost."
Em, i see a lot of parallels between the Jewish people and the Irish; there are about 40 million irish people not living in Ireland, and only ~4.5 million in the republic (~6 million on the island of Ireland). Irish people claim to be of Celtic descent andjthe Celtic culture has been here for at least 5,000 years (see new grange burual structures, which are older than the great egyptian pyramids), so Iron age? There has been continuous occupation of these lands by the Irish, despite repeated invasions by Viking/Danish, Normans, modern English (protestant) settlers + mordern Scottish (presbyterian) settlers... There was a massive population reduction in the 1840s when famine hit; millions died while a foreign government (which was ruling the entire island at the time) exported food. (At the same time the potatoe blight also hit the netherlands but it managed to govern its own affairs and protect it's people, and banned the export of food) So while not a holocaust, it was one of the worst atrocities of the 19th century; though i will admit that colonial powers in Africa, Australia, ad America commuted a few which probably rank highly.
The territory of the Island is divided between two nations. And there had been a terorist war between these two nations (formed in the 20th Century).
So with so much in common, why do the Irish sympathise with the Palestinian cause? I mean we share no religion with either Palestinian or Israeli, we share little culturally, and we do however see Palestine as being in a similar position to Ireland in the 1840s, effectively ruled by a foreign power.
And in all such cases most Irish people would support self-rule by the local inhabitants (which i believe is inline with the UN charter, that our 1948 declaration claims to support)
And by the by, i wasn't claiming Israel-Palestine was like the US/USSR/Nazi examples, i was using them to describe different types of state actions, of justifications.
The Israeli Defence Forces do kill Palestinians, and yhey justify it based on self-defence. Which is closest to the US wiping out of native tribes, removal from their land and settlement. In the west bank, Israeli settlers are settling what Palestians claim is there land - now some Israeli settlers claim that the land all the way from the sea to Jordan is theirs.... So there is a competing claim there.
The point is, finally, the US can be said to be running affairs for the Indian nations within it's borders. Fortunately for both, there was enough land on the continent to move the Indians (at least those who survived and surrendered) to live in reservations (which may be compared to the concentration camps of the Nazis, and were historically part of the same school of thought on how to deal with local populations, just look at the earliest concentration camps run by germany in Africa, and earlier resettlements by the British in Australia and across Oceania. The Nazis happened to push this trend one step further seeing the forced removal of people as not being final enough, hence the final solution)
You are right to say 'the native people won', but apart from that winning entails havin power, and having power means you can choose how to exercise it.
Do you ( as a nation-state ) act like other Imperial power ( ie the USSR, US and Nazis ) or do ou act with compassion and understanding for other nationalities/ethnic groups(arabs)/religious groups within your borders?
The problem here is that winning is seen as acting like winner - ie you copy those models you have, so you act like the Inperial powers - because that is what winning looks like...
So you have prove that an oppressed people can become an oppressor. The Irish are fortunate in that we still haven't had a chance to become and Imperial agressor (our British neighbours are still too powerful on the world stage, though a lot of their comparative power comes from the industrial revolution - which didn't seem to hit Ireland even though we were part of the Brotish empire at the time; and their populaion - which didn't suffer the same massive population hit, due to death by famine and emmigration for economic reasons, in fact their population growth was helped by Irish immigration.)
But i digress, Israel is not a country from Iron age times. Much like Ireland is not. They are both fabrications of te 20th century. And both came about through violence (unsurprisingly) as part of a world wide rise in nationalism (and the failure of Imperialism) in Ireland it was the decline of the British Empire, and in Israel it was the decline of the Ottoman Empire.
Likewise there was competition for land, obstensibly owned by others. Here the two stories differ greatly. In the 20s Jews, Zionists i guess, bought up land (peacefully) from Arabs in Paelstine (a British mandate at the time, after the Ottoman empire collapsed) however the Palestinian Arabs started to resent the Jewish settlers as they were wealthy - often coming from far more developed countries, and also see them as a threat to the possibility of their statehood.
The collapse of the Ottoman Empire allowed several nationalist movements to form in the region, Arabs were promised a nation of their own by the British (Lawrence of Arabia being their negotiator organised Arab resistance to the Ottomans) but the British decided to make Palestine a colony instead (along with Iraq, and Syria which they agreed to give to the French)
So you can see here Palestine began it's existance identically to Israel, as an occupie state, with a nationalistic movement betrayed by Imperial powers.
The fact that there were two nationalistic movements there at the time claiming much of the same territory both effectively occupied by British forces was problematic at the time, but the Israelis were not a powerful enough movement to really cause trouble for the British in the 20s and it was mostly Palestinian Arabs who the British were occupying and ignoring...
From there to here is an interesting story. But you can easily see how the Palestinian nations feels like an occupied one controled by a foreign power, while the Israeli nation does not (as i said, behaving like an Imperial power BECAUSE you won.)
Debate tactics?
, 90%RR, 24 hr turns.
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