Cancelled Israel Lorde gig sparks anti-boycott lawsuit

[Ken Burch]

15. First of all, I don't agree with Abbas on that particular point.

Last edited Tue Feb 6, 2018, 06:51 PM - Edit history (1)

There were valid reasons for Israel to exist in 1948(now, in an era in which Jewish people are fully welcome to immigrate to any English-speaking country and live there in absolute peace and safety, can we be sure those reasons still exist? The state is not going away, but is it really, at this stage, any more sanctified or righteous in its need to exist than any other?).

After 1967, everything forever changed.

There is no way to describe the West Bank settlement project as anything BUT colonialism. Israel had no practical or "security" needs to start taking any of that land. While it could have been justifiable to insist on the resettlement of the indigenous West Bank Jewish community who were driven out by the Hashemites in 1948, but there was no excuse for sending in people with no personal connection to the West Bank and, in some cases, only a tangential connection to Israel itself(such as the Russian immigrants).

It can't be anything but colonialism to say to the people who have lived on those lands, without interruption, for 14 going on 15 centuries "sorry, this is ours-it was never yours, and nothing you've done or been here in the whole time counts. You can either leave, or you can stay but as nothing but powerless outsiders".

It can't be anything but colonialism to forever have the IDF swaggering through the streets of every West Bank city acting as though everyone is a terrorist.

And those doing the rejecting in 1948 weren't the Palestinians-they were the OTHER Arab countries who had their own agenda-which was mainly about keeping the U.S. and "the West" out of the region, and which would have caused them to reject the creation of ANY non-Arab state in the area. The Palestinians had no real say or role in the Arab decisions of '48. They had no voice in any negotiating process and none of the parties who claimed to be acting on their behalf gave a damn about them.

BTW, at the time of 1948, had the Palestinians themselves had a real say in anything, what possible reason would they have had to trust the new state to actually ALLOW them to create a state on their own? Why should they have assumed that they could trust the people who were in the process of expelling those 800,000 people and in destroying hundreds of Arab villages? Would YOU have trusted the side that did that if you were a Palestinian? I'd refer you to some of the things Moshe Dayan(a man no one would call a dove) said about that.

It's not as simple as "if they' said 'yes' in 1948, everything would be fine now".