Really now I don't mean to be the least bit controversial and I may be looking at it through American eyes so to speak but, what the hell is going on with Israel and Palestine? I will give you my view and of course, that and about ten bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Let's see, after World War I the League of Nations approved a British Mandate that set forth the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people" So, in 1947 the United Nations approved what was known as the partition Mandate of Palestine into 2 separate states. One was to be Jewish and one was to be Arab. The Arab League of course rejected the plan outright (oil wasn't on the table yet obviously). Even with the Arab League's bitter objections, but with United Nations approval Israel Declared it's sovereign independence on May 14, 1948.

To be honest I think everyone was afraid to have the Jewish community mingle with the Christian community in their own country. Also nobody cared much for the Arabs and all their various tribes (we all know it would be a bit different today with all the oil they produce). Also with Hitler exterminating over 6 million Jewish people, the world in general felt the Jews deserved a piece of dirt in the land they thought was holy (I tend to agree with that sentiment). So basically you put the ones you don't really want with the ones you don't really like.

Palestine is considered holy land by three faiths to my understanding. Jews, Christians and Muslims all consider the area holy. The area was known as Canaan to the ancient Hebrews. And the name Palestine comes from the Philistines that occupied the southernmost coastal area around the 12th century B.C.

Now the Hebrews had a kingdom that was there around 1000 B.C. and it was split into Judah and Israel. They then were invaded by almost everyone, including but certainly not limited to Alexander the Great as well as the Romans. After all the invasions there weren't many Jews left by around A.D. 135, they had mostly scattered and were living in small villages or communities around the Diaspora area of the region. Then the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and Palestine became the center of Christian pilgrimages.

Palestine then was ruled by the Arabs who took it from the Byzantine Empire somewhere around the year 640. With a few interruptions the Arabs kept control until the early 1900's. The British defeated the Turks to take control of Palestine after that.

In the 1930's Jews poured into Palestine which was under British control. The British had granted the Jewish community the right to establish a homeland in Palestine in 1917 under the Balfour Declaration. Ok now, British won the ground in a war so it was theirs right? So if they won it, why can't they give it to the Jews?

So after World War II, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state that should have been it, right? In less than a day the United States recognized Israel and with 24 hours they were viciously attack by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

When the cease fire was agreed to some 19 months late in January 1949 Israel had grown by at least 50%. They had taken the western part of Galilee and cut a nice path thru central Palestine to Jerusalem. In May of 1949 the UN recognized Israel and admitted them to the UN as well.

In the mid 1950's Israel was denied shipping through the Suez Canal by the Arabs. So with the help of an Anglo-French force they took the Gaza Strip and then took the east side of the canal. They backed off of the canal after enormous pressure from the United States and the UN.

Israel captured the West Bank of the Jordan River, The Golan Heights, Jerusalem's old city, all of the Sinai and once again the east bank of the Suez Canal in the infamous 6 day war in 1967. This time Israel attacked simultaneously most of its enemies and grew by 200%.

Jimmy Carter got a peace accord signed in 1979 by Egypt's President Anwar Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Israel then returned the Sinai to Egypt some 2 months later. Most Arabs left Palestine after Israel was declared a state but the Palestinians still recent the fact that Israel has any claims to any of the land in Palestine.

Yasser Arafat went a long way towards recognizing Israel but lacked control or the desire some claim to stop terrorist type actions against Israel.

Every cease fire seems to be an opportunity for the Palestinians to rearm. Then, as soon as they are rearmed they target the Israeli population, not their military.

I don't see how someone who targets your women, children, hospitals and any other civic building has a right to complain about disproportionate force coming in return. Hey, you pick a fight with the biggest guy in the bar, (so to speak) you better be prepared to get your ass kicked. I know Israel is a bully in the region, but wouldn't you be too if all your neighbors didn't think you even had a right to exist on the planet earth.

By: Terry L Miller
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The International Tribune Herald is reporting an Associated Press story today stating that Israel is targeting mosques used by Hamas. What caught my eye - beyond the fact that Israel is not tiptoeing around mosques to begin with - is that the Associated Press even acknowledged Hamas using mosques, but even more so in such prominent fashion. I had expected that if they had mentioned it at all, it would be buried at the end of a latter paragraph. Will wonders never cease?

It is a positive sign that Israel first rejected the phony truce offer as a clandestine method for Hamas to regroup and re-arm, and is now pulling out all the stops to topple them for good. It's also encouraging to see the press starting to come around, finally. In addition to the AP's headline admission of Hamas' culpability, the very first paragraph reads thus (emphasis mine):

JERUSALEM: Mosques and Muslim prayer halls have not escaped the relentless bombardment of Hamas targets in Gaza by Israel, which claims the Islamic militants misuse some of the holy sites as weapons depots and command centers.

Also from the article:

A security official said Israeli intelligence - probably surveillance aircraft - saw missiles being fired outside the mosque and the men who launched them running inside the building. Worshippers denied the mosque was a military outpost.

Well, of course they did, but what this illustrates is the inability of ordinary Palestinians to direct their ire towards those who truly desecrate holy sites by hiding in them, assuming that the Israelis will behave in a war like ... well, like we would.

No, it is still all too convenient for them to chant in opposition to the "Zionists" who are only doing them a favor in the grand scheme of things. I would be willing to bet, also, that if the outraged Palestinians at last rose up against Hamas and their cowardly practice of hiding in mosques - thereby making them targets - and accepted peace, that Israel would gladly help rebuild the mosques they destroyed. What a New Year that would be.

As an aside to this essay, I am including a link to an IAF video that I was unable to embed. It is quite a demonstration of the precision of the Israeli air assault. It is in stark contrast to the haphazard practice of Hamas cavalierly launching rockets at Israel.
View it here.

By: Daniel James Wood
http://sanitysentinel.blogspot.com
Keeping An Even Keel In The Sea Of Liberalism
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Jewish emigration into Israel did not begin with refugees from Hitler's Europe back in the 1920s the typical Jewish home already have a little blue box of the Jewish national fund for the collection of nickels and dimes to assist Israeli land reclamation then long underway long before anyone outside of Germany had heard of Hitler.

Nor did the emigration begin with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. A Jewish militia, a direct ancestor of the Haganah, was already protecting settlement in Israel in 1909, at a time when Arab nationalism did not yet exist Tel Aviv was founded in that year as far back as 1905 an addition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica reported the population of Jerusalem as 40,000 Jews 13,000 Christians and 7000 Muslims.

Jewish immigration into Israel did not even begin with the founding of the Zionist movement in 1897. 15 years before that it was already so great that the Turkish government banned it. The modern revival of Hebrew as a means of communication among Jews coming to Israel from various countries goes back at least to the 1850s.

Actually there was no beginning. Both the intent and the actuality of Jewish return to Israel have been continuous since ancient times, since even before the Romans began a policy of de-Judaizing the land. It has been constant; it is not a modern revival.

The central prayer of the Jewish liturgy speaks, among other things, of the return of the Jewish people to Israel and Israel's reestablishment of the Jewish political entity with Jerusalem as its capital. This prayer was composed of the Roman Empire was at its height, while Israel was still predominately Jewish, and has been recited constantly, from that era to the present, three times daily, without a break.

Jews first came to Israel in the second millennium B.C. The peoples they found they are no longer exist. For the most part they were absorbed by the Jews. But they were not Arabs. The Arabs came later. Space the country was predominately Jewish for about 1500 years. But in the second century A.D., after a series of rebellions against Roman rule and sporadic periods of regained independence, the Romans determined to crush the Jews permanently by driving out great numbers of them, sending their young men into the arenas as gladiators, and replacing them with the Greek speaking population. Even after this, Jews remain the majority for a long time. The prayer for political reconstitution in Israel continued to serve notice that the Jewish people had not surrendered their claim. Whatever one may think of the functions of prayer, here was a thrice daily notification, by an entire fault, they had every intention of reoccupying their land at the first opportunity. Of course a claim without an army to back it up as little standing in international law. But the claim was there, waiting for its army, and no occupant who might enter in the meantime could be unaware of it. Other references to the claim or throughout the liturgy - in the prayer after every meal, for instance. And every Passover in Yom Kippur ended with a cry, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

There are always been millions of Jews taking all of this very seriously. Throughout the Middle Ages, no matter how bearing the desert is really become, and regardless of the conditions under which Jews lived, there were always some making their way there to settle. Some went in old age, in order to die there. Others settled in groups. Many who had no prospect of getting there, sent for little bags of Israeli soil which they treasured and had poured on their bodies and their coffins, so that they could come as close as possible to burial in Israel. In the 1500s there was a major attempt to reestablish Jewish political autonomy in northern Israel and to make the desert bloom (not with citrus groves, as today, but with silkworm culture). It failed when the leader of the movement, who was an associate of the Sultan, fell out of favor, but it was not an isolated incident.

The emancipation in recent centuries that caused some Jews to take the Israeli claim less seriously also made it easier for others to work for its realization. With us in the 1700s, and in the 18 hundredths, as in the present century, there was one movement after another, one organization after another, with a constant stream of emigration and settlement.

It was all this that made it inevitable that sooner or later, along about the middle of the 20th century, the Jews of Israel would ask for political independence and defend it with an army. It would've happened, even if there had been no World War II or Hitler, even if there had been no United Nations.

Jews and Arabs, as it happens, both originally came to Israel in much the same way. Each was at first the Bedouin people that came out of the desert to conquer a land of ancient towns; each then adopted a subtle way of life and made the towns of their own. It is a frequent pattern in history.

The Arabs first came to Israel as conquerors on horseback in the seventh century A.D.. The peoples then living there spoke Greek and Aramaic, but after the Arab conquest the Arabic language became dominant. Before that the Arabs had lived in the Arabian Peninsula, and still do. When it burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, they conquered not only Israel but an empire extending from the Pyrenees to the border of India. Their religion to call them perch up at their language did not, and neither their language nor the religion was permanent in Spain or Portugal (though both florist there for several centuries). But the rest of their empire corresponds roughly to the Arab world of today. The same 7th-century wave of conquest that brought the Arabs to Israel brought them also to Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and North Africa and made them a major power.

The Jewish settlement and confined itself to the small territory from the Jordan Valley to the coast, the areas of modern Israel and Jordan, and the Jews would retain no connection with any previous region. Their whole culture and religion identified itself permanently within this very small plot. The Arab conquest was of a different order and magnitude. It did not lose momentum at it until it stretched from the Atlantic to Babylonia and beyond, and it retained the ancient homeland of Arabia as well. Israel with a tiny part of the whole.

It was not only a tiny part, but also an unimportant one. The Arab empire split into diverse dynasties or parts fell under invading dynasties, and its pieces were eventually annexed by the Turks, but at no time did the Arabs, or the Turks for that matter, ever make "Palestine" a distinct entity - it was never even a province. It was always an outlying backwater of some other province. The present claim that "Palestinians" are distinct nationality has not the slightest basis at all the centuries of their history. No Arab administration regarded Palestine is anything but an outlying part of something else; they never even had a word for as a whole. "Falastin" in those days was only a part of it, a district. Not only did in the territory have no form of political identity, but it was also neglected physically. Until during the 18th and early 19th centuries the population of Jerusalem had fallen below 10,000 in the road countryside had few people left the occasional nomads.

With the breakup of the Turkish Empire at the end of World War I, the British foreign office, in the course of its map drawing, invented the political and territorial concepts of Palestine and Transjordania (now Jordan). These were not Arab concepts. Arabs simply thought of the whole region is Syria, and an Arab in Jerusalem or Bethlehem, if he wanted to define themselves geographically, called himself a Syrian.

Transjordania was carved from what had been a larger Israel by the British in 1922; they made a kingdom for Bedouin sheik whose family had been driven from the Arabian peninsula by rival Bedouins, also protégés of the British.

The Jews who had fought the Turks, in time found themselves fighting the British. In 1947, the UN passed a resolution urging the partition of Palestine into two intertwined halves - a Jewish state and an Arab state. The following year at the British left in the Jews proclaimed their state. Nobody troubled to set up a state in the Arab half. The surrounding Arab states made ready to invade the hole and take it over. But they had no more intention of setting up an Arab state in Israel than did the Arabs already there; their intention was rather a free-for-all to fragment the territory and annexed the pieces. In other words, in 1947 and 1948 the surrounding Arab states had no more concept of "Palestine" as a permanent Arab entity than did the Arabs who live there. And why should they? There had never been such a state! The Arab farmers in town dwellers of Syria, Israel, and Jordan were homogeneous, alike in language and culture. Among them were other groups such as the Bedouins and the Druzes, but these two were the same everywhere. The British drawn boundaries represented no ethnic or cultural reality.

As a matter of fact the Arab population of Israel, like the Jewish population, had been swelled by recent immigration. In the 19th century the country received not only increasing waves of Jewish immigration a sizable wave of Arab immigration - the latter from Algeria, then being conquered by the French. Even so, for most of the century the population was sparse, and on balance it was still declining. Travelers described his countryside as abandoned, dismal, and desolate. (E.g., Mark Twain in 'The Innocents Abroad': one may write 10 miles hereabouts, and not see 10 human beings.) With the turn of the century, however, Jewish activity increasingly stimulated the economy, and attracted Arab immigration into Israel from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt. The Jewish and Arab populations grew simultaneously. The Jews also introduced health measures that reduced infant mortality among Arabs. Between the world wars, the Jewish population of his role rose by 375,000 and the Arab population by 380,000. The air of increase in Israel with 75% in that period as compared to 25% and prolific Egypt, and the biggest Arab increases were in the areas of the most intense Jewish development.

In 1947 Jews were majority and half of Israel then assigned to them by the UN resolution. Their numbers would have been greater but for the British restriction on Jewish immigration. On the other hand, the British had placed no restriction at all on Arab immigration into Israel.

It is easy to exaggerate the role of the Nazis in bringing Jews to Israel. Jewish immigration into Israel have been increasing steadily since the 19th century, both from Europe and from Arab lands; in killing 75% of all the Jews in Europe, the Nazis eliminated as well as stimulated potential immigrants

1948 war left Egypt in possession of a small southwestern corner of what had been Israel known as the Gaza Strip, and Jordan in possession of the central portion of irregular shape known today as the West Bank, and including the old city of Jerusalem. There was no protest by Palestinian Arabs as asserting that they did not want to be Egyptians or Jordanians. The Egyptian government as it turned out, kept the Palestinians combined to the Gaza Strip and did not let them enter Egypt. But the Arabs of Jerusalem, Samaria, and adjacent districts now became Jordanians with little or no protest

Haj Amin el Husseini, the British appointed mufti of Jerusalem, who had himself urged Arabs to flee from Israel, now try to set up a Palestine government in Gaza, and later in Cairo, but the idea died for lack of support.

For 19 years, until after the cease-fire of 1967, there was plenty of talk of destroying Israel, but no story about a Palestinian nationality. It would hardly have held water, with Arabs supporting Jordan's annexation of a big chunk of central Israel, and with Jordan referring to ancient Jewish ruins there in as Jordanian heritage.

Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy, called himself a Jordanian, quite naturally, though he and his family were from Jerusalem. That was the pattern, between 1948 and 1967. Jordan today still regards the occupied West Bank as part of Jordan, not as Palestine.

It was only after 1967 the Palestinians began to be spoken of as a distinct nationality, different from Syrians or Jordanians, who would always be in exile and must be returned to Palestine. The concept is so widely used today that we tend to forget that we scarcely heard of it before 1967.

The New York Times quoted an Arab nationalist as saying that the Israelis, "deny that there is a nation of Palestine." But the same Arab was chief administrator of Jerusalem for the government of Jordan. And when you founded in nationalist newspaper in Jerusalem after World War I, he called his newspaper South Syria.

Even if the nation of "Palestine" is a post-1967 ploy, the Arabs have been uprooted from their homes or human reality. To be displaced by the fortunes of war, to be forced from the scenes where your life is unfolded, is not pleasant, emotionally or economically. A man's tight to his surroundings is real.

This misfortune has happened to many peoples, and particularly in the 20th century. Yet none of these peoples have reacted like the Arabs. Each of these displaced populations was taken in by people of the same nationality elsewhere. It was never easy, and most of the individuals involved had little to do with the political disasters in which they were caught. But they began life anew and cease to be a problem.

The Arabs in this respect are unique. Only the Arabs remained unabsorbed elsewhere, still refugees while generations have grown to manhood. There are, after all, over a dozen separate Arab states with a combined population of nearly 200 million and considerable underdeveloped land, the refugees are but a fraction of this figure. Why were they not absorbed? Principally, because most Arab governments did not permit their absorption, preferring to use them as a casus belli against Israel.

By Aniyochanan Ben-Yochanan

"The European Union and Turkey on Sunday joined with Arab countries that have criticized Israel for using what they call disproportionate force in Gaza." -Associated Press.

Given that Israel has been hit by rocket attacks from Gaza every day for over two years, it is hard to understand just what response would be deemed appropriate by Turkey and the EU.

Turkey is now completing a military sweep in northern Iraq, where Turkish armed forces have been wiping out Kurdish rebels who have made numerous incursions into Turkey. Do the Turks appreciate the irony of criticizing Israel for doing what they are doing themselves, right now?

Unlike Turkey, the members of the European Union are not now suffering from over-the-border terrorist attacks. But if they were, how would they react? Would they fight back? We know that the United Kingdom responded to German bombing in World War II by revenge bombings, followed by participation in the invasion of Germany in early 1945. Was that "proportionate force" or was it the force needed to smash Nazi Germany?

The United States announced that "the violence needs to stop and talks need to resume." When the US was attacked by Al Qaida on September 11, 2001, the US responded, not with talks, but by invading Afghanistan and destroying both Al Qaida bases and Taliban rule. The US also invaded Iraq in 2003 because the Baath regime "might be" making atomic weapons which "might" be later used against America. The US was using military force against a potential enemy half-a-world away, while Israel is fighting an active enemy right across its border!

Actually, Israel has exercised remarkable restraint in waiting this long to counter-attack Hamas-ruled Gaza, which has launched an unprovoked war against the Jewish state. But you won't hear Turkey or the EU recognizing that!

By: Gerald Glazer
http://glazerbeam.blogspot.com
Gerald Sherwin Glazer was born in Milwaukee in 1942 and educated in Milwaukee Public Schools. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Unversity of Chicago and master's from Northwestern University, both in mathematics. He has taught math at the University of Wisconsin at Waukesha and several other local colleges. Prior to his retirment in 2004, Glazer was a real estate broker. He has been a candidate for the Milwaukee County Board and the Milwaukee Board of School Directors.