What is Reddit's opinion of One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate?

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You might like: https://www.amazon.com/One-Palestine-Complete-British-Mandate/dp/0805065873

Then read https://www.amazon.com/One-Palestine-Complete-British-Mandate/dp/0805065873

I recommend the following books:

• Tom Segev's <strong>One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate</strong>
• Hillel Cohen's <strong>Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948</strong> and <strong>Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929</strong>
• Rashid Khalidi's <strong>The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood</strong>

I'd recommend One Palestine, Complete.

http://www.amazon.com/One-Palestine-Complete-British-Mandate/dp/0805065873

It covers how the Middle-East was split up after WW1 and looks into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Woah, I love how you link to random Google searches. "Jews France Muslims" because Muslims hate Jews and thus fight Israel?

Well, if you want to discuss about such topics you might want to read something about the history of Israel and the dynamics of this conflict. I recommend this book by an Israeli Jew. Because to say "Muslims want to destroy Israel" is not completely false, but it completely ignores the historical explanation for the ongoing tensions. It's not that the Muslims of the region are inherently evil and Jew-hating - they are not, they lived side-by-side with Jews and Christians for centuries - but rather that the Palestinians were incredibly wronged by first the British, then the state of Israel (which, it should be noted, is one of only very few states in the world that explicitly includes a religious affiliation in its constitution - while around 30% of the people living on its territory are not Jewish). This is still ongoing with Israel ignoring all international agreements on the matter, a complete trade and movement blockade and regular air and ground raids which destroy houses, farms, hospitals, ... - which is why Palestinian "terrorism" still keeps on going.

Essentially: It's WW2. After heavy lobbying he British decided ("Balfour delcaration") to create a new, Jewish state in the middle of what was back then the British colony of Palestine. The problem: There were people living there - millions of people, mostly Muslims and then a lot of Jews, Christians and some adherents of smaller religions. The British essentially handed the keys over to a Jewish "government" which then proceeded - first with British troops, then with Jewish troops paid by big donors from abroad - to force people off their lands.

There are still today refugee camps across the border in Lebanon - refugees from wave after wave after wave of people being chased off their lands either by Israeli troops and police or by radical Jewish settlers which to this day still keep creating settlements on lands for which everyone agrees that they are actually still Palestinian - even as this has been condemned a dozen times by the UN and pretty much every other organization on this planet.

I'm not saying that the Palestinians are pure and innocent - they turned to violence to defend their land - but I don't see what else they could possibly have done. At the core the problem has nothing to do with religion, but rather with a form of ethnic cleansing. The conflict is religious only insofar as this is the forced foundation of a Jewish state on lands that used to be owned by Muslims - and those Muslims didn't accept being forced off their land.

If you believe the "Muslims hate Jews" position then you are very much looking at the wrong end of the spectrum. There are plenty of Jews living all across the Arabian peninsula, but Muslims of the region hate Israel because Israel is a foreign creation that either killed or made refugees out of hundreds of thousands of people. And Israel has no intention to stop, which also means that the hate and violence won't stop.

Add to that an insane policy where Israel blocks a lot of basic stuff to get into the Gaza strip (including cement, because you could use that to fight Israel...), which makes it impossible for the remaining Palestinians to have any sort of economy (60%+ unemployment - because neither exports nor imports can come in and occasional nightly bombings destroy a lot of factories, power plants, etc).

As said, I'm not in any way condoning Palestinian violence, but if you look at what Israel does it is very understandable that they don't see any other way than violence. There were plenty of UN-brokered negotiations, there are even agreed upon borders that all states except Israel accept - and Israel has long overstepped those borders with settlements and a wall that goes straight through large parts of clearly Palestinian territories.

And, by the way, this still doesn't prove any point of our discussion. These are the Muslims of one region involved with a regional conflict with a power that happens to have another explicit religion. The vast majority of Muslims in those regions - but even more so those in other regions - still live peacefully side by side. Again, actually your example Israel-Palestine could be shown to prove that Judaism is the most violent religion (because there are no Jewish-state-counterexamples to that position) - and I doubt you want to take that viewpoint.