Israel and Palestine Primer

Primer for discussing Israel and the Palestinian Arabs:

I think there should be some benchmarks of knowledge which must be achieved for anyone who wants to discuss the situation of Israel, both now and historically. Here are my suggestions of questions people should know the answers to-

1. In the last 3,000 years, has there ever been a time when no Jews lived in Jerusalem or Palestine?
2. How many Jews lived in Palestine in 1905? in 1930? in 1947?
3. Has there ever been a nation or state of Palestinian Arabs?
4. How many religions have/had a large presence in Syria, Lebanon and what is now Israel?
5. Who ruled the areas contained in Israel in 1890?
6. Who ruled the areas contained in Israel in 1925?
7. Did the Arabs in Palestine fight with the Ottoman empire or against it in World War I?
8. Did Great Britain and the United States want a Jewish state in 1947? Why not?
9. Was there ever a 'Two-State' solution in the Palestine Mandate territories?
10. What happened to the 'Two-State' solution?
11. How many times have Israels neighbors launched aggressive wars of annihilation against it?
12. Three of Israels neighbors have lost territory after losing wars they initiated against Israel. Should they get that territory back by right?
13. After the disastrous war against the new state of Israel in 1947/48, millions of Arabs voluntarily left Israel on the understanding that surrounding Arab states would soon destroy Israel and they could move back. Whose fault is it that those promises were hollow?
14. The millions of Arabs who left Israel voluntarily are spread all over the Levant in what are referred to as 'Refugee Camps'. Is it credible that someone who left their homeland 60 years ago is still a refugee? What is the difference between a 'Refugee camp' and a neighborhood?
15. The Ottoman Empire ethnically cleansed and murdered about 1.5 million Armenians in 1915/16. The Israelis have ethnically cleansed at most a few thousand Palestinian Arabs. Why is it Israel which is termed 'The new Nazi Germany'?
16. Why is the UN fixated on 'The Palestinian Territories', when in world terms there is virtually no violence, and much more serious territorial disputes?
17. In 1994, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered using extremely low-tech weapons by other Rwandans. The UN did absolutely nothing. Why is the death of four or five Palestinian gunmen enough to prompt a UN resolution?
18. In 2004, the (Arab) Sudanese government started using proxies to ethnically cleanse and murder the black population of Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. Why isn't there a UN department set up to agitate on behalf of Darfurians, like there is for Palestinian Arabs?


Answers:
1. No
2. The best estimates are: 60,000; 175,000; 1,200,000
3. No
4. Four- Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism
5. The Ottoman Empire
6. The British Empire via a League of Nations mandate
7. With the Ottoman Empire
8. No. They believed it would cause trouble with oil-producing Moslem countries.
9. Yes. In 1947, the United Nations GA resolution 181 created two separate states, one for Jews and one for Arabs.
10. The Arab Palestinian state, with the support of all the surrounding Arab nations, declared war on the Jewish state, and lost the war during 1948. Israel incorporated some areas of the Arab territories, both as a punishment and to make the state of Israel more defensible.
11. Five
12. Under international war, territory lost by an aggressor as a consequence of defeat is no longer the sovereign territory of the aggressor, and may or may not be handed back at the discretion of the victor
13. The Arab states promised Arab Palestinians that the Jews would be defeated shortly, and therefore all the consequences of those promises are the responsibility of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
14. At the end of World War II, there were millions of refugees dislocated from many countries round the world. In 2007, the only group from that era still referred to as 'refugees' are the Palestinian Arabs. In most of the countries where Palestinian Arabs moved to, their 'Refugee Camps' are indistinguishable from the neighborhoods which surround them. They are a polite fiction.
15. A seemingly permanent lack of perspective seems to govern discussion and appraisal of Israel and its activities
16. There are many examples of much more serious breaches of sovereignty (China invaded Tibet which it has now incorporated into Greater China, for instance) which are virtually never discussed, whereas the 'Occupied Territories' are a constant topic at international gatherings.
17. There is apparently an unwritten rule that Arab lives are worth vastly more than black African ones. There is vast evidence that this is the case in recent UN behaviour.
18. There is only one group of people on the planet who have their own UN agency- the Palestinian Arabs. Why this should be the case, one can only guess, but it probably has to do with answer 17.