RE: Very inconvenient
"......I mean, they there were, enjoying life in their own homes, their own land, and along comes some bloke in a foreign government (clue: headquartered in London) who bows to a pressure group to accede to the founding of the State of Israel....." Hmmm, it seems the most inconvenient factor in your life is your total lack of any form of history learning in what you presumably assumed was an "education". I'm amazed anyone that could have got past Peter & Jane also has not at some point read the historic facts that debunk the "there were no Jews in Palestine before 1948" hokum.
First off, there have been Jews living in the area you refer to as Palestine longer even than it has been refered to as "Palestine". The Romans came up wth the name as a way of rechristening the then Judaic Kingdom which they had conquered, probably in relation to the even older race of Philistines that did occupy the area centuries before. When the idea of partitioning down population lines in the post-WW1 area known as the Palestine Mandate was originally drafted it was due to the belicosity of the Arabs, not the Jews. Some areas were quite distinct, but most of the large towns and cities had very mixed populations. For example, the census of Haifa in 1945 showed a mix of 33% Southern Syrian (Mulsim Arabs), 20% Christian (mainly Greek Orthodox Syrians) and 47% Jewish, and so was classed as "Jewish" even though 53% of the population wasn't! As it was a port and gateway to the Mandate, many Jewish refugees from Europe entered the area via Haifa and some stayed and boosted the Jewish population to 51% by the time the UN had a go in 1947. Both the Christian and Muslim populations also grew, and nobody was "displaced" by the growth of any party, Haifa itself growing. The British had several goes at trying to please everybody, then post-WW2 gave up and handed the problem over to the UN. Having decided that the Jews lived mainly in cities (60%) and the Arabs mainly in the rural areas (72%), the first UN draft gave almost all the cities to the Jews!
In all cases, the Arabs were the party that resisted any form of division and insisted on ruling over everything. To appease them, the area we now call Jordan was broken off and given to the Arabs in 1922 as guaranteed Arab land, leaving the Jews 26% to negotiate over. Jews were banned from owning land in Transjordan, which meant Jewish families already there had their land taken away long before Israel even came into existance. Nowadays we call that bit Jordan. But I guess we won't be hearing you calling for the right of return for Jewish refugees to Jordan.
Secondly, the Arabs nationalists kicked off several pogroms against Jews in the Mandate long before the Zionists got their state. Try reading up on the events in 1921, 1929 and 1936-39. In Jerusalem, both before 1948 and aftewards, Arabs tried their hardest to clear out any pockets of Jews. After 1948 this was orchestrated by the Jordanian government and was in direct contravention of the UN ceasefire. It also marked the one attempt at settling any Palestinian refugees - they simply drove whole Jewish neighbourhoods out and gave their houses to Arab refugees. Hilariously, many later took up an offer from the UN to register themselves as refugees even though they now had taken Jewish homes. Jewish neighbourhoods that had previously been marked as Jewish by both the Brits and the UN were thus ethnicly cleansed and became Arab neighbourhoods on the Eastern and Northern sides of what became the 1967 Green Line. Will you be insisting they are given back to Israel? I doubt it.
Thirdly, there is no real group of people with the historic name "Palestinians". The British and UN both recorded that the Arabs in the area predominantly classed themselves as Southern Syrian, Bedouin, Egyptian or Arabian. The idea to call themselves "Palestinians" is a bit of Arab nationalist theatre supposed to imply some form of historical and collective link to the land, when the reality was a mix of clans from several areas, some that had only moved to the area after 1922. The funniest bit of this is that the average Arab can't pronounce the word "Palestinian" as they don't have a hard p sound in Arabic, instead pronouncing it "Falestinians". Not surprisingly given the history, that was soon corrupted by critics to become "Fake-istinians".
Fourthly, the final UN division gave the jews only 14% of the original Mandate land, in a convolved and disjointed shape, and left large numbers of Jews in hostile Arab territory. This was much less than the Greater Israel dream, far less than the promise of the Balfour Declaration, and far less than the population balance suggests they should have had. But the Jews took that offer in the hope of peaceful co-existance with the Arabs. In response, not one Arab leader from any of the neighbouring lands asked for anything less than the complete destruction of Israel. Not one "Palestinian" Arab clan leader did either, they all advoctaed war. They massively outnumbered and outgunned the Jews, but they lost, and mainly because the Jews were fighting for their homes whilst the majority of the Arab fighters were soldiers from neighbouring countries.
Why was it so upsetting for the Arabs to have one tiny little bit of land, already shown to be predominantly owned by Jews, be classed as a Jewish country? After all, compared to the land mass of the Mediterranean and Gulf areas dominated by Muslims, even the larger Israel of today is less than 2% of the area that is ruled as various Islamic republics. More of a question, why do westerners like yourself repeat their hatefilled propaganda at every chance?
"....Forget that proposed holiday. Best to continue to keep well clear of Israel....." By the sounds of it, you probably wouldn't feel very at home in Israel anyway, so I suggest you holiday somewhere you're limited education doesn't pose any challenges, like Clacton or Blackpool, and leave the foreign travel to those of us more equipped to think for ourselves.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
