Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

Left out of John Spencer's equivalencies is any discussion of the righteousness of flattening half the housing stock in the enclave. The "we warned them so they could get out" holds no water, when they really just herded the population into another area to assault.

Spencer discusses how Gaza compares to how the US conducted their campaign to assault and loot Iraq, but he fails to discuss how either came about, or how either was in any way necessary or inevitable. For all his expertise, he's merely the blunt instrument of policy. He's not the hand that wields it.

If Palestinians were capable of flattening Jerusalem, could they argue that the Israeli leadership was dug in among the civilian populace? Why couldn't they?

Could Osama bin Laden have made the statement that he had asked the United States to surrender peacefully, but we refused, so he had to attack?

Left out of any discussion of Israel's "right to defend themselves" is the part where they're defending themselves against the people that they've been torturing and abusing for the past 75 years. It's not quite like listening to the Nazis' side of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; the Jews of Warsaw weren't as brutal as Hamas... but it ain't far off.

Left out of any discussion of Israel's "right to exist" is their right to exist as the vicious, apartheid ethnostate they are, their right to expand their borders, their right to abuse and ethnically cleanse the local population. They started out as a country with a population that was about 40% Palestinian Arab. That didn't comport with their view of an ethnostate. They simply pushed those people out of their homes and villages, and off the land. Having consolidated power there, they proceeded to go after the rest. It was always the plan.

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From the beginning, Zionists advocated a "Jewish State" not just in Palestine, but also in Jordan, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights as well. In 1918 Ben-Gurion described the future "Jewish state's" frontiers in details as follows:

"to the north, the Litani river [in southern Lebanon], to the northeast, the Wadi 'Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al-'Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan" (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 87)

As WWI was ending, Ben-Gurion went on to draw a map of the "Jewish state" to be. This map clearly excluded Damascus (although it was part of Biblical "Eretz Yisrael"), and limited the "Jewish state's" future northern borders to 20 km south of the Syrian Capital. He rationalized this decision as follows:

"It is unthinkable that the Jewish state, in our day and age, could include the city of Damascus. . . . This is a large Arab city, and one of the four centers of Islam. The Jewish community there is small. The Arabs will never allow Damascus, their pride, to come under Jewish control, and there can be no doubt that the English, even were it in their power, would agree to such a thing." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 34)

In August 1937, the 20th Zionist Congress rejected the Peel Commission's proposed partition plan because the area allotted to the "Jewish state" was smaller than expected. On the other hand, the concept of partitioning Palestine into two states was accepted as a launching pad for future Zionist expansions, and to secure unlimited Jewish immigration. In September 1938, Ben-Gurion explained why he advocated partitioning the country NOW, and to accept the Peel Commission's proposal:

"The ONLY reason that we agreed to discuss the [Peel commission proposed] partition plan," Ben-Gurion wrote Moshe Sharett, "is mass immigration. Not in the future, and not according to abstract formula, but large immigration now." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 184)

And in October 1938, he wrote to his children:

"I don't regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188)

In September 1937, he stated to a group of American Jewish labor leaders in New York:

"the borders [of the Jewish state] will not be fixed for eternity." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188)

https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story638.html
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story600.html
https://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story795.html

"Greater Israel" map that was submitted by the Zionists to the peace conference after WWI.