h2ohno said:
Helloplite said:
Demographics from 1517 have the Israelis at a measly 1.7% of Jerusalem's total population. Centuries later , 1918 records show the population of Jerusalem to be almost 91.9% Palestinian. Israelis numbered 60,000 out of 660,000 citizens. In 1946 Israelis were approximately 30% of Jerusalem's population and by 1948 they somehow became the majority at 82.1% in the space of two years.
Such violent population shifts do not happen peacefully. Nor do they portray an "end of story" situation. Palestinians are being displaced or exterminated for nearly 70 years already. This is not anti-Semitism. Yes the situation is complex. Yes Palestinian resistance is hardly benign. Yes they commit regular acts of terrorism. Nothing is simple in politics.
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This is almost 100% wrong. Jews were a majority in Jerusalem starting at a certain period sometime in the 19th century. How early or late in the 19th century is up for dispute, but there is no dispute whatsoever that Jews were a majority in Jerusalem by 1918. If you mean the entire land of Israel/Palestine instead of Jerusalem, then you might have a point. But for Jerusalem your figures are garbage.
As for the overall population shifts, while there was definitely violence, it was instigated each time by the Arab side. The 1920 pogroms caused the formation of the Hagganah and the 1929 massacres, including the destruction of the 3,000 year old Jewish community of Hebron, caused the formation of the Irgun. That's not to say they didn't have a right to protest immigration policies, but had there been no Arab violence, there would have been no counter-violence and no refugees.
And during the period of the British Mandate, the Arab population itself doubled from around 600,000 to 1.2 million.
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Nope, his numbers do hold up. While immigration to the region increased after the first Zionist congress in 1897, it only did so marginally. Only with the nazi persecutions and after the war that Jews came to settle there in drowses.
Palestinians of today are the descendants of the original inhabitants who refused to get deported to the neighboring countries when the country was about to be formed. Jerusalem, being a holy city for all abrahamic religions (all forms of Judaism, Christianity and Islamism), was actually never intended to be part of Israel. When the UN in 1947 wanted to create a jewish country there, they also had large territories reserved for either a paestinian State or for them to become part of the neighboring countries, while Jerusalem itself was meant to become independent from either (basically a city-state). While the Jews accepted it, the Palestinians rejected it (mostly because Israel would receive almost all good arable land in the region). While the plan got accepted it never came into action, as the first arab-israeli war broke out about the issue. And like David Ben-Gurion said in 1937: "The partition is the first step to possession of the whole land".
Btw, it's a bit of a "create your own enemy" for the Palestinians. They revolted in 1936-1937 against the british rule, which led to the 2 state plan (and the quote above) and ultimately Israel acquiring the whole region.
xl-klaudkil said: Isreal are murderes,yet no nation does anything about it! They should have learned from ww2,but now they are doing the same. |
Maybe they did learn - just not the right things or not from the right people.