Horner's Corner

Israel-Palestine: The Israeli Occupation

by on Feb.18, 2010, under politics

 

 

 

Israel-Palestine_maps1

GREEN = Palestinian Land; WHITE = Israeli land

 

If someone took your land like this, wouldn’t you fight?

Anyone interested in how the dispossession of the Palestinians got started might find Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine useful. About 700,000 Palestinians were driven by out or fled in 1948.

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13 Comments for this entry

  • Eliyak
    April 23rd, 2010 on 9:44 pm

    Hmm, let me see.

    1946 Arab state created in Palestine (Jordan)

    1947 U.N. partitions Western Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

    1948 Israel declares its independence. Arabs attack Israel, Israel fights back and enlarges its territory.

    1967 Egypt mobilizes its army, Israel launches preemptive strike, Arab states attack, and Israel enlarges its territory.

    1973 Arabs attack Israel, Israel does not enlarge its territory this time.

    1979 Egypt signs a peace treaty with Israel. Israel cedes land to Egypt.

    1987 Palestinian Arabs launch campaign of terrorism. Israel clamps down on Palestinian territories.

    1994 Palestinians negotiate peace with Israel. Israel eases restrictions.

    2000 Palestinians launch more terrorism. Israel clamps down again on the territories.

    2005 Israel unilaterally leaves Gaza. Palestinians attack Israel with mortars and rockets.

    If Israel is a scab on the Middle East – like your mother said, stop picking at it, it’ll only get worse!

  • Chris
    Chris
    April 24th, 2010 on 10:41 am

    Israel has been founded on the expropriation of the land of other people (Palestinians); Israel has engaged in ethnic cleansing (1948 and since); Israel has occupied land that doesn’t belong to them (West bank, Golan Heights, Gaza etc); Israel has partitioned land that doesn’t belong to them; Israel has launched massively disproportionate strikes against urban centres (e.g. Gaza); Israel continues to build on other people’s land; Israel engages in assassination, using forged passports from other countries; Israel has bombarded housing estates with field guns (Lebanon); Israel is in defiance of the unanimous UN security council resolution that it should quit the occupied territories. Some scab.

    Sometimes you have to stop blaming the victims of aggression, Eliyak.

  • Ron
    February 10th, 2011 on 10:41 pm

    Regarding the maps:

    In 1946 Palestine-Israel was a British mandate, so there were neither Jewish nor Palestinian Lands. Who drew these maps, and based on whose data ?

    In 1947 the Jewish side accepted the partition resolution of the UN, even though it was a minuscule size of the British mandate (which comprised of what is today the countries on both side of the Jordan river). Please recall that the British received their mandate from the Leage of Nations in order to create a homeland for the Jewish People.

    The Arab (what the Palestinians of today called themselves then) side rejected the UN partition resolution and started attacks on the Jews the day after the 29 November 1947 UN resolution. These attacks continued until 15 May 1948, when the Egyptian, Trans-Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Rescue (Qaukji’s) armies invaded.

    During 1949-1967 the Gaza strip was part of Egypt and the West bank part of the Kingdom of Jordan. During all these years, the Palestinians’ Arab brothers did not offer to create a Palestinian State in these territories.

  • Chris
    Chris
    February 11th, 2011 on 12:31 pm

    It’s quite remarkable the amount of effort some people will put into not facing a moral-political enormity they don’t want to acknowledge.

    Before 1948 there were about 700,000 Palestinians living on land that they were to lose thanks to a policy of ethnic cleansing by Israelis. Isn’t that the moral-political starting point that we should be focusing on? See Ilan Pappe’s book, ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’ for more information, if data and truth matter to you.

    Did the mandate justify the forcible displacement of 700,000 people and the subsequent expansion of Israel into lands that were/are inhabited by other people? Of course not.

    As for your third paragraph, I refer you to Pappe to give you a primer on what happened. I hold no brief for Arab or Palestinian leaders back then; many were and are corrupt and dictatorial -but again, will you use that to avoid facing the nature of the real oppression of the Palestinians? I’m also puzzled at your interest in the word ‘Arab’: would you prefer it in order to disconnect these people from their lands?

    Why does the failure of Arab -or whatever -regimes to help the Palestinians affect the central facts of the matter? It doesn’t of course. Meanwhile, as I write these words, Gaza is blockaded and the West Bank is colonised.

    The ultimate effect of these policies, if unchecked, will not only be war and oppression for the area but the transformation of Israel into a totally militarised ethnic-national racist entity. How ironic that the model the state of Israel should come to resemble most is the German ‘Volkish’ one. ‘Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return’. Truly.

    Look at the map: what Israel is doing is wrong.

  • emdin
    February 14th, 2011 on 8:53 am

    Dear Chris,

    would you mind to explain more what do you mean by “Palestine land” on your nice chart? I failed to find any occurrences of state “Palestine” in the encyclopedias, as well as “Palestinians” as a ethnic or social group. However, I do able to find terms “British Mandate territory” and “Arabs”, isn’t this strange?

  • Chris
    Chris
    February 15th, 2011 on 4:48 pm

    Dear Emdin

    I will, if you’d like to explain why you deny the Palestinians any ethnic or social status. Are you not aware that that is the classic first step in a series that starts with denying people their status as a people and ends with their physical annihilation? not that I’m accusing you of being a racist of that type as I don’t know you, but I can’t say that it augers well.

    Again, I’m puzzled at the way in which you seem to be keen on avoiding the central point illustrated by the sequence of maps. Do you support the kind of territorial aggrandisement by Israel or not? And building on the West Bank -OK or not? And the occupation of the West Bank in direct flouting of the unanimous UN security council Resolution 242 (1967) which says in paragraph 1:

    (i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict

    What do you think?

  • zertashia hussain
    February 15th, 2011 on 11:32 pm

    There is no longer a strategic nor a morale rationale, if there ever was one, for Israel to continue its occupation. Many of us who support the Palestinians do not deny Israel’s right to exist, but we do believe in a universal application of morality, in which all human beings have the right to live. Israel needs to withdraw and seek a long term solution to the humanitarian crisis that quite literally has enslaved an entire population. Israel has the upper hand, it is far more powerful than the Palestinians that it so conveniently calls a threat. We all celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ridiculous that Israel can build a wall around Gaza and deny freedom of movement not to mention the very freedom to live that it claims for itself. The issues are something that can be discussed at great length but all good humans, including many Jews understand that the way to peace is to be honest and not the Israeli state’s application of selective morality. A two state solution is very possible but it must start with an honest attempt by Israel to acknowledge that land has been taken that was not theirs to take,and that when oppressed people will fight against the eradication of their unequivocal human rights. There is a reason why Desmond Tutu said that the occupied territories reminded him of apartheid South Africa. It is a disgrace, and that is a very mild way to put it.

  • Josh
    February 16th, 2011 on 12:37 am

    It’s interesting to see how people can ignore what is so obviously demonstrated by these maps and instead opt to challenge the presupposition that there ever was a place called “Palestine” or a “Palestinian people”. Not only are such insinuations are on a slippery slope to racism, to say the least, they are indicative of everything wrong with the “discourse” surrounding the conflict.

    These insinuations might be adequately summed with “A land without a people for a people without a land” is absurd. The claim that there was never a Palestinian nation-state is risible because the nation-state is a European invention exported through empire, which is why the British and the French have drawn up 70% of borders in the world. Just because a region is “stateless” does not give foreign powers any entitlement to the land there. As for the assumption that the land was unpopulated, that is simply false and the implication that the Palestinian people do not constitute a people is outright racism.

    I recall the poll taken in the US in the 90s which concluded that the American people on average think that 100,000 Vietnamese died during the Vietnam War. If a similar poll was conducted in Germany today and the average figure of how many people died during the Holocaust came to 200,000 – we would be rightly disgusted and outraged. Similarly in regards to Palestine it is disgraceful to revert to a position of self-pitty and denial, whilst blaming the victims for these atrocities.

    Yes, it is right to condemn terrorism as a defence of Palestine for it is immoral and counter-productive. However the Palestinians have a reason which is defensive in nature, whereas the Israelis have no such defensive cause. Israel is the aggressor, not the victim, so why should anyone accept their “reason” to drop white phosphorus on children? Especially when the Palestinians are condemned as terrorists for firing rockets into Israeli communities.

    If the Israeli government cared about the security of Israel they would stop pursuing further expansion and aggression at the expense of national security. And that goes without addressing the moral degeneracy in which these ultra-nationalists are engaging in right now…

  • Roopal
    February 16th, 2011 on 8:10 am

    Josh is right – Israel is the aggressor and looking up definitions and examples of the existence of something officially called ‘Palestine’ does not change this.

  • dan
    February 16th, 2011 on 12:57 pm

    to read more about how land is still being taken from the Palestinians, check out ‘Hollow Land’ by the Israeli architect and academic, Eyal Weizman.

    He writes about the sophisticated methods of piracy after the 1993 Oslo accords to get new permits to settle land, including erecting phone masts on palestinian hilltops, then needing someone to maintain it, their family to live there, then police to protect it etc.

  • Roopal
    February 16th, 2011 on 5:16 pm

    This is an interesting factsheet containing the quote from Desmond Tutu which Zertashia refers to:
    http://www.palestinecampaign.org/images/apartheid%20factsheet%20-%20web.pdf

  • Steve
    February 24th, 2011 on 2:41 am

    Hi, Chris. Where do you get your map? I would like to use it in a short speech for a class.

  • Chris
    Chris
    February 24th, 2011 on 10:13 am

    At this point i can’t remember the origin, which is bad as I usually make a point of noting sources. It’s easy to find via a Bing or Google search, and I may have got it from a US site, at the ‘Atlantic’ magazine, but as I say, I’m not sure. Apologies.

    I have checked it against other maps and sources and it seems pretty accurate.

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