ah - I read 31 when googling.
Appears many of us are guilty of trying to simplify a very complex situation.
Pakistan wasn't Britain's idea. Just disastrous "facts on the ground" but our fault because of earlier divide and rule policies.Do you know how Pakistan was created? That was done to provide a religious haven for Muslims, who were a minority in British India. So the UK partitioned India unilaterally without the help of the UN the year before the Palestine partition. 15m people were displaced and possibly up to 2 million people killed. Many of those 15m ended up in refugee camps but funnily enough they & their descendants aren't there now, 70 years later.
I said Arab land, as in land lived on by Arabs, I didn't say Arab governed as I was aware that the Turks ran the place.It's certainly not anti-semitic to discuss it and it's been discussed many times on here. Occasionally people have overstepped the mark though and they've been sanctioned. I can assure you, after many discussions in the Mod forum, that Ric is very careful about being too reactive and will give people more than a fair chance to speak their minds. That's not always gone down well with me but he's right far more times than he's wrong.
But to answer some of your points, which are a little inaccurate. The region was Ottoman-controlled territory for hundreds of years, who were Turks not Arabs. The last self-governing (what we would now call sovereign) state on that territory was undoubtedly a Jewish one.
Secondly the UK didn't exactly give Israel the green light. They simply handed the problem back to the UN and actually abstained in the Partition vote. In fact the Russians proabably had more to do with its creation than anyone else as they saw a chance to embarrass the UK and create a rift between us and the USA so they and their satellites in the Soviet Union fully supported the resolution. It wouldn't have been passed otherwise. Resolution 181 was non-binding (as most UN resolutions are) but the Jews decided to declare a state on their territory while the Arabs around refused to accept it. As a consequence, Arab armies attacked as soon as the Israelis announced statehood and this triggered the 1948 War of Independence. It was that war that caused the displacement of so many Arabs not the creation of Israel in itself.
Had the Arabs accepted Resolution 181 they would have had a far bigger territory than they have now or could hope to get now. Had those Arab armies won the war in 1948, there still wouldn't have been a Palestinian state as their well-documented intention was to absorb the territories into Syria & Egypt. They may well have fought each other over that subsequently. Once that war was over and international boundaries finally agreed and established, Jordan could have created a separate state in the West Bank but it annexed the territory, then lost it in the Six Day War. Egypt didn't annexe Gaza but it was effectively under Egyptian military rule. Again, they could have created a separate state but didn't.
So it's not quite a simple as "Israel stole the land from the Arabs".
There’s an interesting theory that the Balfour Declaration was itself the product of antisemitism, coming just 12 years after the Aliens Act of 1905. That was passed to give the Home Secretary greater control over immigration following a political storm over the wave of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. The Jewish establishment mostly opposed the Declaration as they saw it as the first step in Britain trying to offload many of these Jews to Palestine.I said Arab land, as in land lived on by Arabs, I didn't say Arab governed as I was aware that the Turks ran the place.
Thanks for filling me in on the details of 48.
I was when I implied UK support thinking of the Balfour declaration.
Very interesting and sounds most plausible given the attitudes of the British ruling classes at the time.There’s an interesting theory that the Balfour Declaration was itself the product of antisemitism, coming just 12 years after the Aliens Act of 1905. That was passed to give the Home Secretary greater control over immigration following a political storm over the wave of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. The Jewish establishment mostly opposed the Declaration as they saw it as the first step in Britain trying to offload many of these Jews to Palestine.
So we had the bizarre situation of a generally antisemitic British establishment supporting a Jewish homeland that was seen as something of a Trojan horse by many Jews. History can be weird sometimes.
That's not to say all British Jews opposed it of course. Those who were Zionists were all for it naturally. It's an interesting fact that the man who probably did as much as most to get Balfour on-side was his constituency chairman Charles Dreyfus. Dreyfus was Jewish and a leading Zionist and Balfour was MP for East Manchester at that time. Dreyfus introduced Balfour to Chaim Weizmann, who eventually became the first Israeli president and Dreyfus employed Weizmann as a consultant at his company, Clayton Aniline. The site where Clayton Aniline stood is now the Etihad Campus.Very interesting and sounds most plausible given the attitudes of the British ruling classes at the time.
Your knowledge is pretty encyclopaedic and the last detail is fascinating. Thanks for these insights.That's not to say all British Jews opposed it of course. Those who were Zionists were all for it naturally. It's an interesting fact that the man who probably did as much as most to get Balfour on-side was his constituency chairman Charles Dreyfus. Dreyfus was Jewish and a leading Zionist and Balfour was MP for East Manchester at that time. Dreyfus introduced Balfour to Chaim Weizmann, who eventually became the first Israeli president and Dreyfus employed Weizmann as a consultant at his company, Clayton Aniline. The site where Clayton Aniline stood is now the Etihad Campus.
It's certainly not anti-semitic to discuss it and it's been discussed many times on here. Occasionally people have overstepped the mark though and they've been sanctioned. I can assure you, after many discussions in the Mod forum, that Ric is very careful about being too reactive and will give people more than a fair chance to speak their minds. That's not always gone down well with me but he's right far more times than he's wrong.
But to answer some of your points, which are a little inaccurate. The region was Ottoman-controlled territory for hundreds of years, who were Turks not Arabs. The last self-governing (what we would now call sovereign) state on that territory was undoubtedly a Jewish one.
Secondly the UK didn't exactly give Israel the green light. They simply handed the problem back to the UN and actually abstained in the Partition vote. In fact the Russians proabably had more to do with its creation than anyone else as they saw a chance to embarrass the UK and create a rift between us and the USA so they and their satellites in the Soviet Union fully supported the resolution. It wouldn't have been passed otherwise. Resolution 181 was non-binding (as most UN resolutions are) but the Jews decided to declare a state on their territory while the Arabs around refused to accept it. As a consequence, Arab armies attacked as soon as the Israelis announced statehood and this triggered the 1948 War of Independence. It was that war that caused the displacement of so many Arabs not the creation of Israel in itself.
Had the Arabs accepted Resolution 181 they would have had a far bigger territory than they have now or could hope to get now. Had those Arab armies won the war in 1948, there still wouldn't have been a Palestinian state as their well-documented intention was to absorb the territories into Syria & Egypt. They may well have fought each other over that subsequently. Once that war was over and international boundaries finally agreed and established, Jordan could have created a separate state in the West Bank but it annexed the territory, then lost it in the Six Day War. Egypt didn't annexe Gaza but it was effectively under Egyptian military rule. Again, they could have created a separate state but didn't.
So it's not quite a simple as "Israel stole the land from the Arabs".