Bomb disposal squad in Gaza faces risks amid little protection

[Mithrae]

The notion that the Arab-Israeli Wars and follow-on wars involving the State of Israel were defensive wars is partly an illusion. If one ignores the conflicts of 1947 and the first four months of 1948 then one can make the argument that the First Arab-Israeli war was purely a defensive war.

Quite the opposite; if you make the argument that Jewish immigration to Palestine and the mere prospect of Israel's existence were inherently acts of aggression or invasion, then you could suppose that it wasn't a defensive war. Doing so would require supposing that neither the British mandate over the region nor the moral imperative for a Jewish homeland (especially following the Holocaust, but beforehand too) nor eventually even the UN resolution were sufficient justification for Israel's existence. But given the legitimacy of establishing a Jewish homeland, the writing was already on the wall as to the Arab response; if you're considering the violence of non-state actors there was violence against Jews before 1948 too, but even ignoring that it would obviously be absurd and exceptionally callous to claim that the Jewish militias should have been required to wait for all the surrounding nations to strike their first genocidal blows before trying to defend their lives and existence!

Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary-General of the Arab League in the month before the UN partition vote:
"I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly:
"The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state."

Nuri al-Said, Prime Minister of Iraq:
"We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

But the Arab-Israeli wars of 1956 and and 1967 were both initiated by the State of Israel.

The 1956 conflict between Egypt and Israel was initiated by Egypt's blockade of vital Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, and by two allies and permanent UNSC members France and UK encouraging Israel to join them in military action (their own interests being Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal). Was that a good enough justification for military conflict? Maybe not, but the fact remains that the initial aggressive behaviour against Israel came from Egypt.

That is even more obviously the case in the 1967 war, when it was crystal clear that blockading the Straits of Tiran again would be contrary to maritime law and considered an act of war by Israel, yet Egypt not only initiated another blockade but also expelled UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula to move its own troops in. It is quite simply a lie to claim that Israel initiated that conflict, and again would be either hopelessly naive or exceptionally callous to claim that they should have waited for their would-be exterminators to get in the first shots before trying to protect their existence. Wiping Israel off the map by military force was still very much on the Arab League's agenda, as stated in a 1964 Arab League summit:

"The establishment of Israel is the basic threat that the Arab nation in its entirety has agreed to forestall. And since the existence of Israel is a danger that threatens the Arab nation, the diversion of the Jordan waters by it multiplies the dangers to Arab existence. Accordingly, the Arab states have to prepare the plans necessary for dealing with the political, economic and social aspects, so that if necessary results are not achieved, collective Arab military preparations, when they are not completed, will constitute the ultimate practical means for the final liquidation of Israel.[5]"

Of particular relevance to the Palestine issue, also note that even after the aggressive actions of Syria and especially Egypt beginning the 1967 conflict and knowing their co-operation with Jordan, the IDF's plans on that front had remained purely defensive: It was only because Jordan put an Egyptian general in command of their forces, who was told to commence attacks against Israel (with canon fire from the West Bank even reaching as far as the suburbs of Tel Aviv) that Israel eventually - after a last-ditch attempt asking King Hussein to stay out of the war and keep the peace between their nations - concluded that it was necessary to advance into the Jordanian West Bank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War#West_Bank

 

[Mithrae]

But Israel's involvement in attacking other nations like Lebanon in 1969 and in 1982 were not defensive in nature at all. Nor were Israel's repeated attacks against Syria and Jordan in the 1950s and 1960s. Israel's many offensive actions in the late 20th and 21st Centuries have been predominantly offensive operations and the rate and scale of such operations has been steadily growing.

I'm not overly familiar with all that, so you're going to have to provide some kind of source for these claims - particularly given the track record above! If memory serves, weren't Hamas and Hezbollah launching rockets into Israel from Lebanon? Had to remove it from my post due to length, but despite Israel's plans staying well within the parameters of the functional multilateral Johnston Plan for use of natural water resources between Syria, Jordan and Israel, Syria chose to actively alter the landscape in order to deprive Israel of its natural resources vital to development, leading Israel to conduct strikes against their machinery.

Israel like any other country is far from perfect, particularly given the hostile/hawkish inclinations which historical Arab aggression undoubtedly enhanced among its military and politicians. But trying to paint it as all one-sided aggression by Israel (oh, right, except for that one time) is nothing short of propaganda. Maybe not on your part, just from the sources you're repeating from?

Only by applying the rules of a rules-based international system will the most egregious rule breakers be finally disciplined. So you start lower on the food chain of international predation and then work your way up to the apex predators.

Nope. Nonsense. You're essentially asking us to endorse the big guys, notably America, as the world's policemen and legitimize their power through the UNSC by hammering weak and isolated countries with the letter of the law in even greyest of areas like Israel's occupation and settlements.

It's exactly like saying that you have to start cleaning up America by going after the people stealing bread to feed their families and profiling the black drivers with broken taillights, before gradually working your way up to the rich and powerful and the problems with the policing and judicial systems themselves. I'd hazard a guess that you know how foolish and self-serving that kind of reasoning would be on national scale.

The State of Israel is as good a focus as any number of other highly militaristic states with the bonus of sorting the Israeli-Palestinian crisis and the issue of Israeli non-compliance with nuclear non-proliferation protocols. In a sense it's a hat-trick choice, three problems potentially solved for one international intervention.

With just the slight problems that A) the kind of unified international co-operation against Israel and Palestine that you're proposing is never going to happen, it's a hopeless pipe-dream, and B) even if you succeeded in making life totally miserable for all Israelis and Palestinians (good job, Evilroddy!) there's still no guarantee that they'd be any more willing to make the compromises necessary to reach agreement than the Palestinians are today. There's big crimes and little crimes; using an imperfect system to deal with the big crimes is one thing (eg. genocide or aggressive invasions of other sovereign states), but relying on hopeless optimism that an imperfect system should be used to 'fix' all the little crimes (eg. defensive occupation of territories not legitimately belonging to any other state, and struggling to find a viable solution to the consequent problems) no matter the human cost or consequences is absurd.

 

[Evilroddy]

Quite the opposite; if you make the argument that Jewish immigration to Palestine and the mere prospect of Israel's existence were inherently acts of aggression or invasion, then you could suppose that it wasn't a defensive war. Doing so would require supposing that neither the British mandate over the region nor the moral imperative for a Jewish homeland (especially following the Holocaust, but beforehand too) nor eventually even the UN resolution were sufficient justification for Israel's existence. But given the legitimacy of establishing a Jewish homeland, the writing was already on the wall as to the Arab response; if you're considering the violence of non-state actors there was violence against Jews before 1948 too, but even ignoring that it would obviously be absurd and exceptionally callous to claim that the Jewish militias should have been required to wait for all the surrounding nations to strike their first genocidal blows before trying to defend their lives and existence!

That is a big "given". Was the Balfour Declaration a document which had international weight in guaranteeing a Jewish homeland? "Given" the promises that the British Empire also made to the Arab nations regarding their independence, the given of the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland guaranteed by such a two-faced regime as the British Empire is a very debatable thing. The real issue is the violent land clearing of Arab Palestinians which occurred both before and during the War of Independence in what is often called the 1947-1948 Palestine War. The Arab militias were poorly supplied and poorly trained where as the Jewish militias were very well supplied and both trained and led by former professional soldiers who had either joined the Jewish cause out of loyalty or as mercenaries.

Needless to say the Arab Palestinian villagers did not fare well and were killed or driven from their villages in droves. I remember reading accounts from the Golani Brigade and another brigade the name of which escapes me now of how when they were clearing the the Arab and Bedouin villages of the Negev in April-March of 1949 their soldiers were astonished at the poverty and lack of effective weapons possessed by the local inhabitants. Th Israeli forces simply walked into many villages, shot them up and drove off the survivours to leave or die in the desert. Then they destroyed the villages and moved on. On the rare occasions when the local Arab Palestinians or Bedouins put up a real fight, artillery was used to demolish the villages before the Israelis killed the defenders wholesale and then drove the survivours into the Negev Desert to die.

Abdul Rahman Azzam, Secretary-General of the Arab League in the month before the UN partition vote:
"I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."

Muhammad Hussein Heykal Pasha, the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly:
"The lives of one million Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state."

Nuri al-Said, Prime Minister of Iraq:
"We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

Yup, there were fanatics bent on ethnic cleansing and wholesale genocide on both sides of the conflict.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

The 1956 conflict between Egypt and Israel was initiated by Egypt's blockade of vital Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, and by two allies and permanent UNSC members France and UK encouraging Israel to join them in military action (their own interests being Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal). Was that a good enough justification for military conflict? Maybe not, but the fact remains that the initial aggressive behaviour against Israel came from Egypt.

Edited for word count.

No it wasn't. That was a pretext for war which Israel used to justify two wars of aggression (1956 and 1967). The UAR (Egypt) under Nasser struck a deal with Saudi Arabia in 1949 to occupy two Islands just off the Egyptian coast and in the western part of the Straits of Tiran which belonged to the Saudi kingdom. The deal between the Egyptians and the Saudis upset the Israelis who threatened military action just after signing the 1949 Armisteces with the Arab states. Saudi Arabia invited Egypt to fortify the island's so Egypt put artillery casements and land artillery on the two Islands and garrisoned them with infantry.

The State of Israel was very angry about the fortification of the two islands but did nothing but make vague threats against the UAR as it was entirely legal by international and matti me law. Then in January of 1950 Nasser declared a blockade of the Straits of Tiran but also guaranteed peaceful passage of international shipping on behalf of both the UAR and the Saudi Kingdom. No ships were ever prevented from reaching Elath/Elat/Eilat in Israel. All that was stopped was the transit of Israeli warships in and out of Israel's corner of the Gulf of Aqaba, which was entirely legal by the rules of the sea and maritime law at the time, given the state of hostilities which existed between Israel and the UAR (Egypt) a the time (the Armistice did not end the hostilities, it only reduced the fighting). No peaceful shipping was ever attacked or seized and ships were allowed to go on their way after brief inspections and manifest checks upon entering UAR or Saudi territorial waters.

Egypt Informs U.S. of Blockade of Staits of Tiran (January 1950)

Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

The blockade was a blockade in name only and conformed to international law.

Fast forward six years. Then in very early 1950's the USA and Britain broke contracts which they had signed with the UAR (Egypt) to help fund the building of the High Asswan Dam project. Nasser decided to then nationalise the Suez Canal which was run by a company owned and controlled by British and French investors, in order to use the fees from the canal to replace the funding lost by the British and Amercan defaults on the dam project. This he did, he declared martial law in the Canal Zone and seized the assets of the company and also in a moment of pique denied use of the canal to Israeli shipping. Israel was angry at the canal denial as were the French and British with the nationalisation of the canal company. The French secretly approached the State of Israel to provide a pretext for occupying the Canal Zone by French and British troops and to ultimately topple Nasser from power if possible. Israel would invade Sinai and race towards the Suez Canal. French and British troops would race to secure the canal from both the Israelis and the UAR. The company would be reinstated, Nasser would be humiliated, crippling reparations would be levelled on the UAR and the State of Israel would get more cooperation from France with weapons sales and nuclear power/weapons development.

Suez Crisis | Definition, Summary, Location, History, Dates, Significance, & Facts

Suez Crisis, international crisis in the Middle East, precipitated on July 26, 1956, when the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal. The canal had been owned by the Suez Canal Company, which was controlled by French and British interests.

www.britannica.com

The blockage on the Strairs of Tiran was a pretext for the State of Israel to start the war and give both the British and French to militarily seize back control of the Suez Canal, not a real cause of it. Israel was the real aggressor in the Suez Crisis War of 1956.

As part of the settlement the State of Israel, with the support of Britain and France, forced a treaty on Egypt to guarantee Israeli passage through the Strats of Tiran in contravention to existing maritime laws which only guaranteed peaceful passage. This was a set up for the next Israeli war of agression eleven years later.

I will deal with the 1967 Six Day war later when I have time.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

That is even more obviously the case in the 1967 war, when it was crystal clear that blockading the Straits of Tiran again would be contrary to maritime law and considered an act of war by Israel, yet Egypt not only initiated another blockade but also expelled UN peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula to move its own troops in. It is quite simply a lie to claim that Israel initiated that conflict, and again would be either hopelessly naive or exceptionally callous to claim that they should have waited for their would-be exterminators to get in the first shots before trying to protect their existence. Wiping Israel off the map by military force was still very much on the Arab League's agenda, as stated in a 1964 Arab League summit:

Mithrae:

Controversies relating to the Six-Day War - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

This link's first section sums up the case and exposes the lies and deception peddled intentionally by the State of Israel for the claim that the Six Day War was a defensive war. It was most certainly not.

The State of Israel launched air raids first into the UAR (Egypt) on June 5th, 1967 and falsely claimed that Egypt had attacked Israel first. It stuck to this justification for several days before switching to the preventative war excuse for attacking the UAR and its defensive treaty allies when it's lies about an Egyptian first strike were proven to be utterly false.

The Straits of Tiran was again a non-blockade despite the changes forced to maritime law by Israel, Britain and France with the cooperation of America in 1958 (two years after the Suez Crisis, where and when the "illegality" of the blockade had been declared by Israel despite maritime law saying otherwise, at the time of that crisis). No ships were attacked, seized or diverted by the UAR (Egypt). A few were stopped, boarded, inspected and then sent on their way which was in accordance with the 1958 changes to the Laws of the Seas precipitated by the Suez Crisis. The Straits of Tiran was once again a late-comer pretext for a war of aggression waged by the State of Israel after the lie of Israel being attacked first by Egyptian ground and air elements was disproved.

The UAR did not order the UN out of Sinai. It ordered them out of the immediate vicinity of Sharm el-Sheikh as a precaution against potential Israeli air raids and artillery strikes. It was the UN which decided to pull its own peacekeepers out of all of Sinai. The movements of Egyptian troops within Sinai were defensive in nature, anticipating an Israeli attack on the UAR. Senior Israeli officials later admitted this as did international officials who had remained silent during the hostilities but later admitted the point.

Jordan and Syria were in a three-state defensive treaty with the UAR. The appointment of the Egyptian General as supreme commander of combined UAR-Jordanian forces was part of that treaty's terms. When the State of Israel attacked one party in that treaty alliance (the UAR) it attacked all signatories. Thus the artillery attacks and air raids by Jordan and Syria were responses to aggression and not initiating aggression as the State of Israel has falsely claimed for 54 years now. Israel brought the shelling and bombing of Jerusalem and points as far as Tel Aviv on itself when it launched the surprise attacks on the UAR.

The State of Israel was spoiling for a war and they launched the war. What's worse is the State of Israel very likely may have planned to go nuclear too, in the event that their invasions did not go as they had planned and if Israel was losing the war it had started. By 1967 the Israeli Government had built two crude atomic bombs. These were loaded onto trucks and positioned on the the UAR-Israel frontier. In a bad situation they were to be driven into the UAR, and detonated remotely to thwart any Arab power from pushing a counter attack. The operation was called Operation Samson and is now documented by Israeli former scientists who worked throughout 1966 to make the bombs.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War was a war of aggression as was the 1956 Suez Crisis War. The facts prove it, despite Israeli lies and propaganda to the contrary.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[oneworld2]

oneworld2:

That protection must go both ways with protection of Israelis and Israel proper too. But your point is well taken.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

My very point was that protection should go both ways. I felt your comment on peacekeepers fell short of applying it to the Palestinians, who I know have way more to fear from Israeli attacks than Israelis do from Palestinian attacks.

We are well conditioned, imo, to only seeing Israeli state actions in the context of self defence but self defence is, again imo, a universal right also enjoyed by the Palestinians and everyone else for that matter. You could be excused ,reading this forum content, for not readily applying the right of self defence to the Palestinian side, I myself have had to remind so many people of it here it beggars belief at times

 

[oneworld2]

Not true:

Are UN resolutions binding? - Ask DAG!

Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the United Nations

ask.un.org

All UNSC resolutions against Israel are under the unbinding Chapter 6, not Chapter 7.

I am happy to learn this distinction and will admit to it giving me much food for thought. I am a greast believer in every day offering the opportunity to consider new and reasonable arguments and you have provided one in the above

From your link

In general, resolutions adopted by the Security Council acting under Chapter VII of the Charter, are considered binding, in accordance with Article 25 of the Charter.


Legal scholars have various opinions on this question. See, for example, selected articles and books listed in the Links section below.

As I see it they are legally binding even if under the umbrella of chapter 6, it just might fall short of the SC willingness/commitment to take action because of the lack of Chapter 7 inclusion. It seems the legal scholar jury is still out on this particular call.

 

[Mithrae]

@Evilroddy thanks for the detailed replies; seems a lot of the posts in this forum consist of vague generalizations and emotionalism, so posts with actual substance are appreciated! Many of my family members are vehemently opposed to Israeli policies, and as a lefty I'm often biased towards supporting the weak and oppressed; but I started posting in this section to challenge those biases and to learn more on the subject, so I appreciate your help and on some level hope that a largely negative portrayal of Israel can be vindicated. Before responding in more detail though, let me share a couple of views/observations from other threads - about Israeli society, and in contrast about the international community - which undergird my ongoing scepticism:

I believe that the people of Israel are people, same as people anywhere else in the world. Israel has high education levels, standards of living, communication/multicultural exposure, freedoms of expression and media, and a democratic government... basically all the preconditions you'd expect for a generally decent, compassionate population. Ignorance, desperation, insularism and indoctrination are probably the main causes of cruel or callous attitudes towards each other, and Israel doesn't seem to have much of them. Extreme political polarization (as in the US duopoly) would be another, but apparently that's not the case in Israel either; non-democratic governments obviously could be cruel or callous despite their people's general decency, but again obviously not the case in Israel (certainly not over periods of decades).

There are going to be extremist/xenophobic folk in any large group of people of course, including obviously the river-to-sea, "death to Arabs" variety of zionists, but under the good conditions of education etc. available in Israel I would expect those folk to be a relatively small minority. So as I see it there's only really four possibilities here:

1. Israelis are just different from other people, they're crueler and more callous than others would be in those circumstances
2. You (and many others) are simply wrong in attributing such cruel, machiavellian motives to them
3. Israeli policies are indeed cruel, but caused by other factors specific to their situation (eg. Arab hostility and violence)
4. My view of humanity is naively optimistic, and people everywhere generally are cruel and callous even in the best circumstances

For now I'm putting my bets mostly on (2), though I'd guess that historical Arab aggression has surely contributed some bias to more hostile/hawkish military and political environments in Israel than might otherwise have been the case. If (4) is the case then we may as well just throw in the towel and accept a cruel and callous, might makes right world.

Consider which countries might be better served in international relations or in domestic support by leaning towards an anti-Israeli stance: Most Islamic countries, for starters; many countries which might benefit or suffer from negotiations over oil with those countries; Soviet- or Russia-aligned countries, since the ramping up of US support in the 70s; even many Western or US-aligned countries when they have liberal or left-leaning governments, since we lefties have a tendency to support the weak against the powerful, obviously including the Palestinians. As you posted above, even the USA sometimes allows a resolution against Israel through the Security Council, as in the final days of Obama's term. How many countries have anything to gain by supporting Israel? Those with a similar combination of influences from both evangelical apocalypticism and a strong Jewish lobby as the US... if there even are any such countries?

We can perhaps see the true extent of this international bias in the UN Human Rights Commission, which in the first nine years of its existence created more resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations than the rest of the world combined. Not just more than China, or more than North Korea, or more than Iran, any of which would be laughable in themselves... more than everyone else combined. Presumably you can agree that's completely ridiculous. I'd hazard a guess that Israel's track record on human rights and international law is about on par with the UK or Australia or the USA. That's obviously not saying much; for every Palestinian used as a human shield by the IDF, a black person brutally killed by American cops; for every disproprotionate response to Palestinian rockets, a devastating drone strike against more abstract 'threats' somewhere in the world. Realistically the USA is probably much worse due to size and power.

 

[Mithrae]

Doing so would require supposing that neither the British mandate over the region nor the moral imperative for a Jewish homeland (especially following the Holocaust, but beforehand too) nor eventually even the UN resolution were sufficient justification for Israel's existence. But given the legitimacy of establishing a Jewish homeland...

That is a big "given". Was the Balfour Declaration a document which had international weight in guaranteeing a Jewish homeland? "Given" the promises that the British Empire also made to the Arab nations regarding their independence, the given of the legitimacy of a Jewish homeland guaranteed by such a two-faced regime as the British Empire is a very debatable thing. The real issue is the violent land clearing of Arab Palestinians which occurred both before and during the War of Independence in what is often called the 1947-1948 Palestine War. The Arab militias were poorly supplied and poorly trained where as the Jewish militias were very well supplied and both trained and led by former professional soldiers who had either joined the Jewish cause out of loyalty or as mercenaries.

I listed three justifications for the legitimacy of establishing a Jewish homeland, and you responded to only one... rather unconvincingly. The British gained control over that former Ottoman territory long before the fourth Geneva Convention, even before the creation of the League of Nations. Morally the right of conquest might not count for much, but unless I'm missing something then 'legally' they could do whatever they pleased that the other powers let them get away with, subject to any specific legally binding agreements. A case can be made that they should have established a Jewish homeland in the 1920s or 30s by the latest, which might have reduced the scale of the Holocaust by an order of magnitude and, depending on how the inevitable Jewish-Arab tensions played out in that process, potentially even allowed for a region united against the common threat of Aryan supremicism rather than leaving the looming abstract threat of Zionism as easy fodder for Nazi propaganda and diplomacy.

According to Wikipedia the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine ramped up, unsurprisingly, in the days after the vote on the UN partition plan; after the genocidal intentions of the Arab League and leaders were well-known to the Jewish inhabitants, who therefore obviously had every right to prepare for that eventuality. Furthermore,
The first casualties after the adoption of Resolution 181(II) by the General Assembly were passengers on a Jewish bus driving on the Coastal Plain near Kfar Sirkin on 30 November. An eight-man gang from Jaffa ambushed the bus killing five and wounding others. Half an hour later they ambushed a second bus, southbound from Hadera, killing two more. Arab snipers attacked Jewish buses in Jerusalem and Haifa.[19]

So in what way do you imagine that this was a Jewish war of aggression? There's no question that war crimes and terrorist acts were committed by both sides, as might be expected in any civil war let alone one with literal genocide as the stated intention by the allies of one side! But your claim that it was a war of aggression seems patently and obviously false. And your comments about Jewish military superiority actually make the fallacy of that claim worse because it seems that one of the main reasons for that fact was the aftermath of the 1936-39 Arab revolts which killed up to several hundred Jews:
The Arab revolt in Mandatory Palestine was unsuccessful, and its consequences affected the outcome of the 1948 Palestine war.[18] It caused the British Mandate to give crucial support to pre-state Zionist militias like the Haganah...

As I originally suggested, if you're considering the violence of non-state actors there was obviously violence against Jews long before 1947. The simple fact is that Arabs greatly outnumbered Jews both within Palestine and even more obviously in the region as a whole, so imagining that the Jewish organizations wanted warfare seems absurd on the face of it, and does not seem to be supported by the facts.

Yup, there were fanatics bent on ethnic cleansing and wholesale genocide on both sides of the conflict.

No doubt, but a rather important difference is that the genocidal fanatics were leading the Arab and Palestinian organizations and states, whereas the main Jewish organizations - whatever some of their members might have dreamed of - ultimately were content to accept the UN partition plan and live in peace with their Arab neighbours.

 

[Evilroddy]

Quite the opposite; if you make the argument that Jewish immigration to Palestine and the mere prospect of Israel's existence were inherently acts of aggression or invasion, then you could suppose that it wasn't a defensive war. Doing so would require supposing that neither the British mandate over the region nor the moral imperative for a Jewish homeland (especially following the Holocaust, but beforehand too) nor eventually even the UN resolution were sufficient justification for Israel's existence. But given the legitimacy of establishing a Jewish homeland, the writing was already on the wall as to the Arab response; if you're considering the violence of non-state actors there was violence against Jews before 1948 too, but even ignoring that it would obviously be absurd and exceptionally callous to claim that the Jewish militias should have been required to wait for all the surrounding nations to strike their first genocidal blows before trying to defend their lives and existence!

Mithrae:

My apologies for not dealing with your three points. I will attempt to correct that now.

1) The British Mandate:
The British Empire made many contradictory promises to various groups regarding the Levant during and immediately after WWI. Therefore sussing out what British policy was with respect to the Mandate of Palestine is very difficult. The Balfour Declaration which was written by Walter Rothchild with the aid of Chaim Weismann and Arthur Balfour (who actually signed it) and to a lesser extent Nahum Sokolow was actually quite vague about British intentions regarding what would become the Mandate of Palestine five years later. The British Empire was desperate to get the Americans into the war and find a way to keep the collapsing Russian Empire in the war too. The Balfour Declaration was a way to curry favour with powerful Jewish communities in both America and pre-revolutionary Russia so that these communities could use their influence with their governments to enter/stay in the war against the Central Powers. Thus the motives for the declaration are suspect at worst and opaque at best. The Balfour Declaration also was in contradiction with the Sykes-Picot Agreement which the British and French negotiated and agreed upon in secret in the period 1915-1916. The Balfour Declaration was also contradicted by negotiations and agreements made by the British Empire between 1919 and 1923. So it may not be a good road map for figuring out what the British Empire's true motives were regarding a Jewish Home in Palestine.

Balfour Declaration | History & Impact

Balfour Declaration, statement on November 2, 1917, of British support for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for Jewish people.’ It was made in a letter from the British foreign secretary to a leader of the Anglo-Jewish community and was later included in the British mandate...

www.britannica.com

The Balfour Declaration 1917 -- 2017: 100 Years Of Deceit, Devastation And Genocide| Countercurrents

Since 1948 the state of Israel has celebrated annually its independence as a nation, though it is not clear from what or whom it has declared independence.

countercurrents.org

The British were surprised when the leaders of the Zionist movement declared their intention to destroy the Palestine Mandate and to take it for their Zionist project. As British-Zionist relations deteriorated over things lake illegal land purchases by Jews the relationship became more and more strained. Add to this rising Arab anger of the betrayal of British Empire' promise of national self-determination and independence in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks and Britain started moving away from the Zionists and toward the Arab Nationalists despite Arab rebellions and violence. Things reached a head in 1939 when the British passed laws in both the UK and in the Mandate of Palestine limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. This decision began the terrorism and armed rebellion by Zionists in the Mandate of Palestine against both the British Empire and Palestinian Arabs. From 1939 - 1948 British troops fought against the most fanatic Zionists to prevent Jewish immigration from overwhelming the local Arab and Bedouin populations. So the support of Britain for a Jewish Home in Palastine was never a clearly defined thing and was vigorously opposed by the British Government at times between the Balfour Declaration.

Continued next post.

 

[Evilroddy]

Continued from last post.

2) The Moral Imperative for a Jewish Homeland: Was there a moral imperative for a Jewish Homeland before WWII (except in the Zionist movement)? That is a very debatable position. Certainly by the end of WWII there was support for such a movement. But why was this idea so attractive to Europeans, Americans and the Commonwealth countries? Anti-Semitism was still very strong in the 1940's and part of the support was the hope that local Jewish communities would leave these countries (a rather anti-Semitic motive). There was also profound guilt over the horrors visited on European Jewry by all European countries before and during the war. The Holocaust rightly shamed all of Europe and so Europe and the Western Allies were keen to make whatever restitution they could to amend the savage cruelty which the Jews had suffered. But it was also an easy restitution they could because locating this Jewish Home in Palestine dumped the problem on the local Arabs far away from Europe, the British Empire/Commonwealth and America. Not the noblest of expediences. As the world began to realise the trouble such a Zionist project might cause and was causing in the Levant and Greater Middle East and with the near-bankrupt British Empire imploding rapidly, decisions were made in haste to get the project done as fast and as cheaply as possible. The result is that the non-Jewish residents domiciled in the Levant and especially the former Mandate of Palestine became victims of European and wider ranging anti-Semitism and guilt of the Western world. The question arises was the cure better than the disease. The jury is still out, but if the State of Israel ever uses the nuclear weapons they have amassed, then the body count in the Greater Middle East could quickly dwarf the numbers of Jews slaughtered remorselessly by the Europeans during the Holocaust.

Number three to be explained later due to time constraints.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Evilroddy]

3) the United Nations' Dererminarion to Create a Jewish State in the Levant:

UN Resolution 181 outlined the creation of two states, not just one. It called for the creation of both a Jewish State and an Arab State. If either side rejected it then the deal was dead. This was a non-binding resolution. All,of these facts that the UN only envisioned the creation of a Jewish state in th part of the former Mandate of Palestine if and only if there was the parallel creation of an Arab state at the same time. The UN also forbade the use of force to alter the boundries between these Tripoli states. Thus the desire to create a Jewish state in Palestine was contingent on the simultaneous creation of the Arab state in Palestine and by extension no Jewish state could exist in Palestine without an Arab state with guaranteed borders. That was the intention of the UN, not the creation of a sole Jewish state in Palestine.

Both Arab countries and hard-line Jewish Zionists rejected this resolution but the Arab Palestinians were not directly consulted and the Jewish Agency overrode the hard-line Zionists and opted to accept the deal, knowing full well that such acceptance would not stop militant Zionists from using violence to alter or even eradicate the borders between the two proposed states. (Remember the 1922 declaration of Zionists to destroy the Mandate of Palestine and to take all of it for a Jewish Home.) So the Palestinians's collective goose was cooked from Nov. 29, 1947 and well armed and well disciplined Jewish militias accelerated their clearing of Arab villages and small towns, driving out Palestinians by the tens and then hundreds of thousands. The Arab Palestinians tried to fight back and tried to some of the same population displacement but they were out classed and out paced by the Jewish militias. These events were not part of the UN's vision and were explicitly forbidden because they were the last thing the UN wanted.

Then the British Mandate ended, the Jewish Agency declared independence and the creation of the State of Israel was announced. The land grabbing on both sides accelerated and the balloon went up in the first Arab-Israeli War. The Nakba was now fully under way and to add gasoline to the fire, Jewish communities in other parts of the Arab world suffered the wrath of the polarisation and hate in Arabs created by Britain's craven abjuration of its responsibilities and the rise of the State of Israel. Arab hate and Jewish zealotry plus land grabs and population displacement broke the Middle East, which wasn't in terribly good shape anyway.

Cheers and be well.
Evilroddy.

 

[Mithrae]

Continued from last post.

2) The Moral Imperative for a Jewish Homeland: Was there a moral imperative for a Jewish Homeland before WWII (except in the Zionist movement)? That is a very debatable position.

The only thing even remotely debatable about it IMO was the potential impact on local people. Self-determination is about as fundamental as moral rights can be, and the Jewish people in particular have suffered extensively for the lack of it, in both Christian and Muslim regions and obviously including the 19th and 20th centuries. The Holocaust was different only in scale and efficiency from hundreds of earlier and later bouts of persecution or permanent oppression, including against Jews in Arab regions both before and after WWII. If the 'holy land' hadn't held such religious importance to Christians and Muslims, and strategic significance as the gateway between continents, odds are there would have been an Israel centuries ago; there've been enough migration waves of Jews to Palestine over the millennia to make it an otherwise-inevitable and potentially peaceful demographic transition. Instead their numbers were kept down by intermittent and often violent oppression, for reasons which I'm sure you would agree were not exactly compelling.

So what relevance did the artificial Arab majority in the early/mid 20th century hold? On the one hand it obviously wasn't their fault that Jews in the past had been repeatedly pressured or driven out of Palestine, nor that they faced discrimination or persecution in much of the rest of the world. On the other hand I can't think of any legitimate justification for Palestinian Arabs of this century to repeat prior centuries' opposition to what would have been a natural demographic shift towards a Jewish majority. It's not as if the region was overpopulated so as to infringe on existing residents' wellbeing. Provided all peoples' individual rights were protected regardless of ethnicity or religion, a majority Jewish state offering a better hope of respite from persecution and genocide was surely long overdue even before the rise of Hitler. But instead of acknowledging it as both a natural demographic transition and an opportunity to mitigate the ongoing plight of Jews worldwide, what happened? "Jews will not replace us!"

 

[Mithrae]

The Balfour Declaration also was in contradiction with the Sykes-Picot Agreement which the British and French negotiated and agreed upon in secret in the period 1915-1916. The Balfour Declaration was also contradicted by negotiations and agreements made by the British Empire between 1919 and 1923.

A "national home for the Jewish people" around the area of Haifa and Acre would have been consistent with both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence; British negotiations with the French and Arabs might be considered in conflict with each other, but the Balfour Declaration seems sufficiently vague to avoid that technicality. Such fine details of circumstantial plans and evolving conditions hardly seem relevant though; the point is that the moral imperative for a Jewish homeland was supported first by Britain and eventually by the League of Nations in the Mandate for Palestine. If the British had chosen to unilaterally create a Jewish state after WW1, 'legally' they would have been well within their rights to do so. By opting for a more internationalist approach, as of the 1923 League of Nations approval there was not only a moral imperative and not only a 'legal' right but now also a significant obligation for the establishment of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine.

The British were surprised when the leaders of the Zionist movement declared their intention to destroy the Palestine Mandate and to take it for their Zionist project. As British-Zionist relations deteriorated over things lake illegal land purchases by Jews the relationship became more and more strained. Add to this rising Arab anger of the betrayal of British Empire' promise of national self-determination and independence in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks and Britain started moving away from the Zionists and toward the Arab Nationalists despite Arab rebellions and violence. Things reached a head in 1939 when the British passed laws in both the UK and in the Mandate of Palestine limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. This decision began the terrorism and armed rebellion by Zionists in the Mandate of Palestine against both the British Empire and Palestinian Arabs.

Where on earth are you getting all that? Early violence between Jews and Arabs was predominantly instigated by Arab groups (eg. 1920 Nebi Musa riots, 1921 Jaffa riots, 1929 Buraq riots and the Black Hand organization in the early 1930s). At the same time it seems Arabs mostly opposed efforts to fulfill the mandate's obligations such as rejecting the 1922 Legislative Council and boycotting its elections (which would have granted Arabs 10 out of 12 elected seats, but also 2 to Jews) or the 1937 Peel Commission recommendation for partition with a meagre ~20% of the territory being granted to a Jewish state (which the Jews equivocally acknowledged as a step for further negotiation, while the Arab High Committee not only rejected outright but also demanded a complete end to all Jewish immigration and land purchase).

Apparently setting a precedent for the success of violence as a political strategy, the long-running 1936-39 Arab Revolt eventually culminated in Neville Chamberlain's government issuing the 1939 White Paper; rejecting the partition idea as the Arabs had wanted, severely limiting Jewish immigration for five years (just as Nazi persecution had started taking its ugliest turn) and leaving immigration policy up to the Arabs' discretion after that, and largely outlawing Jewish land purchases. Yet even then it was mostly just fringe Jewish groups such as Lehi and Irgun which fought against the British administration, while the main Jewish paramilitary group the Haganah hunted down many of their members and indeed were directly funded by the British in the establishment of their elite Palmach force. Many Arabs by contrast, notably including Amin al-Husseini (the grand mufti of Jerusalem, chairman of the Arab Higher Committee and eventually President of the All-Palestine Government) remained so bitterly opposed to any prospect of Jewish statehood or apparently even the open oppression of Jews enshrined in the 1939 White Paper that they were readily courted by Nazi diplomats and propagandists in an effort to undermine British power in the region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Paper_of_1939
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_Palestine#World_War_II

As I suggested in #109 noting the looming threat of Nazism - and also by comparison to the 1928 autonomy of Transjordan - a credible Jewish homeland, semi-autonomous at the least, most likely should have been established much sooner; surely by the mid 30s at the latest, once the intractable obstructionism of the most prominent Arab leaders was obvious. It almost beggars belief that you're instead trying to create a narrative of Jewish lawlessness and terrorism!