Help me explain the conflict to a non political guy please

[four more wars]

Ok,

on another message board I post on regularly (music related) I found the following post in a thread, I have composed a reply, which I think illustrates the conflict to an non-political person.

I would appreciate your help refining it.

Thanks

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Its an interesting one. What happens from here? As Lepeep said "Hopefully a fresh start". Thats what would be ideal.

Im quite ignorant regarding who the real bad guy is in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, one, the other, both? I cant decide! I also cant understand how two countries cant just agree on their land and settle, end of story, surely some kind of agreement can be made, nothing is worth all the bloodshed.

If you guys could tell me if you were for Arafat or against him and why, maybe I could build a better picture.

Cheers
Hog
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My Reply:

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The general idea seems to be that the Palestinians had lived in Palestine for 1000's of years. Then one day in 1948 the Israelis turned up and told them to fuck off because God said it was actually their land.

The Palestinians and the neighbouring Arab states took a bit of offence to this, mainly because their God said it was their land.

The Israelis won a series of wars and established their country.

In the 1960's Yasser Arafat founded the PLO which was a quasi political terrorist group set up to fight 'Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Homelands'. Under his command they committed some pretty horrific acts of terrorism, one of the worst being the capture and killing of 11 Israeli Athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972.

Since then he publicly denounced terrorism and at Camp David in 1993 signed the oslo peace accord which was supposed to bring an end to the conflict, and was brokered by then President Clinton.

Yasser Arafat and the then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin were both awarded Nobel Peace Prizes for their work.

SInce then Peace has broken down many times, the general gist being that the Israelis said 'we're not talking until you stop with the terrorism' and Arafat said 'I'm not ordering the terrorism, and I can't get them to stop until you carry on talking to us about peace'

This reached a head, and Arafat was told to resign as President of Palestine by good old Dubya, who's grasp of middle easten politics is about as substantial as a fart in a hurricane. Also, he generally doesn't like Arabs who don't have much oil to give him. Especially ones who supported Saddam against Pops in 'Operation secure more oil for Halliburton in 1991'. Arafat did appoint a Prime minister, who later stood down and was replaced, but everyoe new that it was Yasser Arafat who still pulled th strings, so not much changed.

Now that Arafat is dead we will either see the emergance of a strong leader of Palestine, who can control the terrorism, and with whom Israel will deal with because

a) he isn't Arafat
b) Dubya says they should (America gives over $6bn to Israel every year without which they would be in a world of trouble).

OR, no one will come forward and they end up with a titular, but ineffective head who has no control over the Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers. In which case nothing much will change, and people will carry on being killed in their thousands until we get a new American President with some sort of grasp of foreign policy that isn't directly related to how much money Halliburton is going to make.

[unblock]

1. uh, "israelis turned up and told them to fuck off" ??

i know i'm going to regret getting involved in an i/p thread, but, please, many of the israelis were already there and also lived there for 1000's of years. the european jews that joined them were decendents of people from that land as well.

and let's also not forget the context, that being just after the holocaust, when many european jews were getting a heavy dose of anti-semitism, now from the victors, who blamed the jews for inciting the nazis, not to mention the enchroachment of the soviets into eastern europe.

let's also not forget that israel's new neighbors promptly evicted all jews, and that israel accepted these refugees. meanwhile, these same neighboring countries refused to accept the palestinians, who were never kicked out but declared themselves refugees anyway, preferring to use them as political pawns in their shared desire to "drive the jews into the sea".


i do not support the politics in israel 100%, especially not the conservatives of late, but your characterization is not exactly fair. not saying mine is either, but i'm just trying to provide some balance to yours....

[Violet_Crumble]

2. I think yr both wrong...

The Israelis didn't just turn up one day in 1948 and tell the Palestinians to fuck off. The Zionists started arriving in bulk in the Second Aliyah in the early 20th century. Prior to that there was not a large Jewish population in Palestine...

The Allies blamed the Jews for inciting the Nazis? That doesn't make a lot of sense. If that'd been the case, there wouldn't have been Western support for the partition of Palestine...

And large numbers of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from both the areas designated for the Jewish state, as well as from Arab areas that the Zionists took control over. In some cases the Palestinian inhabitants of villages were massacred, as in Deir Yassin, and others fled out of fear of the same happening to them. 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited' by Benny Morris details what happened to the approximately 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees...

On the refugee issue, why do you consider Jews who were forced to flee from Arab states to be refugees, yet don't consider Palestinians who were forced to flee from what became Israel to be refugees?

Violet...