You are being selective in what lands you believe should be returned to prior owners on the basis of your religious beliefs Abu.

All everyone else is trying to point out is that once a land is lost, it is rarely given back.

Two choices, declare war, or get over it.

When you lose the war, then you can inflict decades of misery and bloodshed on everyone in your region by refusing to accept the fact that you lost.

Or you could get over it.

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Actually that'd be you. When it comes to giving a land to a people 2000 years removed from it, no problem, come on in, sit down, it's all yours.

Yet the people who are still half there, and only 60 years under occupation... sorry eggs can't be unscrambled.

mantra,

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You said:

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Which I took to mean that you were under the impression it belonged to the Muslims 1400 years ago, yet not now. Most of the lands (that were formerly Christian) now inhabited by Muslims became Muslims lands around 1400 years ago, and have been Muslim lands ever since. So 1400 years ago they belonged to the Christians, who briefly ruled them for about 400-500 years.

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It's quite ironic you say this regarding this situation, because if you knew the history of the land, you'd know that's the Jews only claim to  it. "Our ancestors used to live there over 2000 years ago, so you should kick out the 98% majority who are there and give it to us".

abu_rashid wrote on Aug 28^th, 2008 at 7:32pm:

Why ironic? I've never stated I think the Jews were right or wrong. All I've ever said is this tit for tat, who was there first bull will go on and on and on forever, and it's stupid.

abu_rashid wrote on Aug 28^th, 2008 at 7:24pm:



palestinians never ruled or had sovereignty in Palestine. Turks did but the turks conceded the land to britian. The english then let it go to whoever wanted it. Both Jews and Palestinians wanted it, they had a fight, Jews won, story over, go home.

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The Ottoman Caliphate was not a "Turkish" state, it was an Islamic state. Turks didn't rule Palestine, Muslims did. As was the case for the last 1200 or so years. The attempt to make it appear as though Muslim Arabs were just one of many competing peoples who lived there under some foreign Turkish occupation is just nonsensical. It demonstrates that you clearly don't have an understanding of the history of the region, nor of the dynamics that made up the Ottoman state.

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More nonsensical claims.

"When the Zionist movement started its ethnic cleansing operations in Palestine, in early December 1947, the country had a 'mixed' population of Palestinians and Jews. The indigenous Palestinians made up the two-third majority, down from nintey per cent  at the start of the Mandate. One third were Jewish newcomers, i.e., Zionist setllers and refugees from war torn Europe, most of whom had arrived in Palestine since the 1920s. As of the late nineteenth century, the indigenous Palestinians had been seeking the right of self-determination, at first within a pan-Arab identity, but then, soon after the First World War, through the Mandate system that promised to lead the new nation-states it had created in the Middle East to independance and towards a future based on principles of democracy. But Britain's Mandate charter for Palestine also incorporated, wholesale, the 1917 Balfour Declaration and, with it, Britain's promise to the Zionist movement to secure a 'homeland' for the Jews in Palestine.

Despite Britain's pro-Zionist policies and the presence of a growing Jewish minority, Palestine was still very much an Arab country by the end of the Mandate. Almost all of the cultivated land in Palestine was held by the indigenous population - only 5.8% was in Jewish ownership in 1947 - which makes the use of the adjective 'mixed' somewhat misleading, to say the least." (Ilan Pappe, The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, 2006).

What this means is that when the UN partition plan was drawn up, under which the Zionists were to receive almost 50% of the land, they owned only 5.8% of it. This meant that Palestinians were going to have to forfeit about 45% of their lands to a foreign people who were arriving en masse. The lies about massive Palestinian land sales to Jews were concoted after the Israeli militias had ethnically cleansed most of the Palestinians from their villages. The rest were reckoned to have just "got up and walked off, after being promised victory from their Arab brothers".

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Actually, I've just had the pleasure of spending the last two nights speaking to many senior Palestinians who all remember quite vividly the Nakbah (The great disaster). They were forced out of their villages and their homes at gunpoint, by militias, many of them prior to the war. In fact the war was largely a response to the brutal actions of Zionist militias against the civilian population, or so the Arab regimes claimed, most were in it for a land grab themselves, but it was still a reaction to the massacres and expulsions of civilians all over Palestine.

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From December 1947 till March 1948, over 2,000 Palestinians were killed and 4,000 wounded by attacks of Zionist militia and terrorist groups on Palestinians villages. In March 1948, Plan Dalet was put into action, this is part of the description of that plan:

Mounting operations against enemy population centers located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be divided into the following categories:

** Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.

** Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state

Benny Morris, an Israeli historian commented about the aims of Paln Dalet:

The essence of the plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the territory of the prospective Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the future State's borders before, and in anticipation of, the invasion [by Arab states]. The Haganah regarded almost all the villages as actively or potentially hostile[1]
    [Plan Dalet] constituted a strategic-doctrinal and carte blanche for expulsions [from villages that resisted or might threaten the Yishuv] by front, brigade, district and battalion commanders (who in each case argued military necessity) and it gave commanders, post facto, formal, persuasive cover for their actions.

Benny Morris also stated that: "the 700,000 Palestinians who fled their homes in 1947 left mostly due to Israeli military attacks"