Comment by Georgelemental
2 years ago
Arabs rejected getting <50% of the land (and being evicted at gunpoint from the rest) when they were ~2/3rds of the population in 1948. 1948 was 75 years ago, things have changed since then.
2 years ago
Arabs rejected getting <50% of the land (and being evicted at gunpoint from the rest) when they were ~2/3rds of the population in 1948. 1948 was 75 years ago, things have changed since then.
Arabs got the vast majority of the land, which became Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt.
The reason Arabs supported the British against the Ottomans was because they wanted to create a unified Arab nation: https://awayfromthewesternfront.org/campaigns/egypt-palestin.... And Arabs got the overwhelming majority of the territory they wanted (notwithstanding the many minority groups they had conquered in the Levant), with the exception of what became Israel. Put differently, you could say that Arabs got 0% of Israel, and that’s technically true. But it’s not an accurate description of what they got in comparison to what they actually wanted.
This argument completely ignores both the cultural distinctions between the different areas of the former Ottoman empire, and the fact that a person's home is not interchangeable with any other place. Nobody would expect a Polish person in 1939 to say "well, we Slavs have the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia so I guess it's fine that German settlers took my farm at gunpoint and forced me to leave".
The implicit assumption is that any place with a majority of "Arabs" would ethnically cleanse all the Jews or become an Islamic theocracy, so we must view everything through the lens of competing ethno-states. It's important to challenge this assumption. Ethno-states are inherently violent because every population is a mixture of different ethnicities, and an ethno-state needs to maintain a majority of a certain population. If the "wrong" group's population grows in an ethno-state, it becomes a "demographic problem" that the government needs to "solve". This is why carving up the world into such states is never a lasting solution for peace.
Aside: "Arab" and "Jew" are not mutually exclusive. You can be an Arab Jew in the same way you can be a Hispanic Jew - Arab is a distinction based on one's mother language not one's religion. This is why the Arab League includes countries in north Africa where most people aren't descended from ancestral Arabians. The history of and literature of Judeo-Arabic is an interesting rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews
Every nation in that area is an Islamic theocracy, monarchy, a failed state or a military dictatorship.
If we waived a magic wand and made Palestine and Israel one country we wouldn't have peace. We'd have a a bloody civil war that makes the current conflict look like childs play.
7 replies →
Most of the world is competing ethnostates, including most if not all Arab states. (I’m certainly glad my parent’s generation secured our ethnostate, at great cost.) Whether there is a better way is an open question. But anybody would be an idiot to sacrifice their ethnostate for that experiment. It’s never ended well.
20 replies →
> Arabs got the vast majority of the land
I was (obviously) referring to their share of the population of Mandatory Palestine specifically.
Mandatory Palestine was an artificial creation of the British, which existed less than 30 years. For the 400 years before that, it was part of a single Ottoman province along with what is now Syria and Jordan (except for Jerusalem which was split off into a separate distinct in 1872).
Talking about “how much of Mandatory Palestine the Arabs got” is contrived, when it was just a part of a much larger Arab territory under the Ottomans, and was planned to be part of a much larger Arab territory after the Ottomans.
16 replies →