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The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton Paperback)?
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Just as a quick point for future. If you break your posts you want both responses under the parent not chained like this. I don't get notified if you reply to yourself.
> It was a very different time, and we shouldn't be doing things like that anymore.
And people then would have said the same thing, "sure this sort of formations happened during the 30 years war... but now we have more limited warfare and treaty enforcement...."
> Seems like ethnic nationalism to me.
Well yes Israel is ethnic nationalism. That's not a point in dispute. The point of dispute is why this particular ethnic nationalism is singled out for destruction when most of the world is governed by ethnic nationalists with little comment.
> According to the Shaw commission people were concerned that the new Jewish immigrants would eventually try to take the place over.
The Shaw commission is 1929. That's a decade into British rule. We are talking about the situation during the end of the Ottomans. You are a decade off here. The Shaw commission is a reaction to the fact that the Jewish population, as a result of Palestinian terror is now Zionized and has a distinct national identity. And when is firmly entrenched as well in the Arab population. Hapoel Hatzair (a cultural Zionist party) had merged into Ahdut HaAvoda (David Ben-Gurion's party). Labor Zionism was the dominant form of Zionism.
You seriously have to stop treating all of history as one big blog. 1882-1949 is 61 years. 61 years took just as long back then as it does today.
> But were they opposed to the immigration, or to the proposed partition, etc? The British had already promised the Palestinians independence, and then snatched the rug out from under them. I can see how people might have been upset.
Your order of events is backwards again. The opposition to Jewish immigration is organized to an overall political platform among Palestinian Christians by 1911. Balfour is not till 1917. Mostly the opposition is forming (at least among the Christians) well before there is anyone knows Turks will be replaced by the British as opposed to the French, Russians, Germans, Syrian nationalists...
> Now I'm just confused - what are you asking me about the US?
Assume the Green Party won the election. How many Americans is Jill Stein willing to lose in a war with Israel to achieve your goals. 1,000; 20,000; 400,000; 8m? Can she justify those loses to Americans? Remember you are talking a 1st world army with ICBMs. Beating them is certainly something the USA can do. Beating them cheaply is not.
> You know, sometimes people say that Palestinians hate Israel more than they love their children. It sounds like you are saying that about the Israelis. It is horrifying that the Israelis would nuke their own people. That really surprised me.
Let me really horrify you the party that had ordered that strike to happen had the tank battle gone the other way won the next 2 elections. The Israelis love Israel more than their children. Jewish history teaches them that their children have no future without Israel.The official strategic (as opposed to tactical) nuclear policy is called the Samson doctrine after the bible verse "God grant me your strength one last time that I may die with my enemies" (https://youtu.be/Ro3pIwHbHuQ?t=160). Ariel Sharon, prime minister 2001-6, had a quip he used with leaders who shared your view that the Israelis would surrender their freedom, "This time we don't go to Auschwitz alone". Let's not forget when you discuss Israel you are talking about the people who invented apocalyptic literature.
The Israelis love their country. They will die in large numbers for their country just like Americans. They are if anything substantially more determined than Americans would be. They are never leaving. They are never going to agree to return to slavery under Palestinians. They will go to war, and fight a brutal war to prevent Israel from falling. You can agree or disagree with nationalism. But don't assume Israelis are at all ambiguous on nationalism. Don't underestimate their determination. As you read more of the history of the Yishuv and Israel you'll see that many Arab leaders made the same mistakes through the decades thinking of the Israelis as colonizers and then discovering that they were willing to fight with the bravery of natives.
> But they're willing to be the foreign ruler over other people?
If they have to, yes. They would rather not. Israelis will accept humane compromises at reasonable cost. But that's as far as they will go. Just as your neighbors in Georgia might be willing to compromise with Mexico but not accept Mexican rule over them.
> This is why I say that the Israelis have turned into the pigs from Animal Farm. They started off like everybody else and then turned into what they claimed to be fighting.
If you want to use that analogy, the Zionists were horses who dreamed one day of being pigs.
> I haven't found any books, even history books, that aren't supporting a side. If you know of some, I'd love a list. Seriously.
The book that both knowledgeable Zionists, non-Zionists and Palestinians most agree on is https://www.amazon.com/Iron-Wall-Israel-Norton-Paperback/dp/0393321126 . I could list a bunch of others but if you are only going to read one this is the book. That's a very straight history, excellent research, balanced... but you will likely have a lot of trouble identifying with either side. If you want a narrator who is more of a western style liberal and thus you might be able to better relate to who is struggling with Israeli history while sharing your values: https://www.amazon.com/My-Promised-Land-Triumph-Tragedy/dp/03855217 .
> The English [17th century Massachusetts] were the foreigners...they came to conquer and colonize.
OK good clear answer. When did they become natives and Massachusetts their's rather than Mashpee, Pennacook...?
> But still nobody's denying those groups did awful things.
I'll deny they did awful things. They killed very few people to get the British to leave. They seem to have done a wonderful job of scaring the British off without killing too many of them. As humane as possible.
> I don't know what then. It does make the Harry Potter universe seem really appealing though.
What then is exactly what happened in China, France, Ireland.... a culture arises and people assimilate into it. The national identity becomes broader and encompasses essentially all the residents of the territory. The French don't think of themselves as Franks, Burgundians, Aquitaines... they all have a Frankish/French shared identity. That's what will happen. The nations that used to exist are absorbed into the now dominant nation and the oppression ends.
> But it hasn't made me less of an anti zionist. I still don't think it takes a genius or a scholar to know right from wrong.
I can't do anything about right from wrong. I'll settle for true and false.
>So you agree that geographically, Israel stopped expanding in 1967. In fact geographically it shrank massively on giving away the Sinai Peninsula.
A political exchange. Israel traded the Sinai for Egypt's subservience, thus neutralising the greatest threat to its existence. Egypt was (and still is) Israel's most powerful neighbour. What use would all these gains in the Sinai be if they were under constant threat by Soviet-supported Egypt?
Israel's borders are only finalised through the peace treaties it made with it's neighbours, further geographical expansion is not possible if Israel abides by these treaties. Demographic expansion is still possible though.
>The Israeli occupation of Lebanon was purely military, in response to first PLO and later Hezbollah attacks on Northern Israel. Despite lasting years, the occupation involved zero settlement building.
There has been zero settlement building because such a project would've been impossible due to the amount of resistance they met. It doesn't mean that Israel didn't try though:
>Dayan died in 1981. What is this "1999"?
The publishing date of the source of the quote.
Yep, really great book called 'The Iron Wall' about the history of Israel. Basically, being a dickhead from inception to the current day. With some humor. Israel threatened a war with Jordan in it's early days because sheep wandered across the border...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Iron-Wall-Israel-Paperback/dp/0393321126
http://www.amazon.com/The-Iron-Wall-Israel-Paperback/dp/0393321126
The Iron Wall by Avi Shlaim.
However, to be fair, it should be pointed out that he's British and that he may be a rabid anti-Semite.
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