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LadyEllen -> RE: Israel says screw you US (6/14/2009 6:28:08 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: DJCatoose
umm... wrong... Israel was created because other nations didn't want to take in any refugee Jews... including the US. And most Jews do not claim Israel because God gave it to them... it's because it was theirs thousands of years ago, forcefully taken from them, and then they had the clout to take it back... God doesn't really figure into the equation for most, except that he gave them enough strength to hold onto it. And Israel does not owe its existance to genocide, it owes its 2000 year setback to anti-semitism... two sides to the coin my friends.
There was a fascinating documentary on BBC Radio 4 last autumn about the aftermath of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The occupying allied army did its best to nurse the former prisoners back to health, in readiness for them to go home to their countries of origin in Europe - with almost every country represented.
The former prisoners however refused, saying that they were not Polish, Romanian, French etc but that they were a distinct nation, Jews, and that they wanted to go home alright, but back to what had been home for their ancestors and what was even before the holocaust being prepared as a homeland for the Jews.
The British army officer in charge was perplexed - he had spent five years fighting against the idea of the nazis that the Jews were an alien nation in the countries they had come to inhabit, yet here they were now apparently insisting that the nazis were right.
Neither was it a happy homecoming for those former prisoners who did go home to their country of origin. Jews returning home found themselves most unwelcome with comments from newly liberated former compatriots along the lines of "we thought we'd got rid of you dirty Jews, fk off back" and many being killed out of hand by the same people who had just recently finished resisting the nazis.
Ultimately it is strength of arms which determines who has right to anything. In this way, the emigrees and those who had moved to Palestine before the war and their descendants have as much right to Israel as any other people has to their homeland. But this is a dangerous way of establishing legitimacy for it also legitimises Palestinian resistance, which in many ways learned its "terrorist" methods from the post war Jewish immigrants' struggle.
Meanwhile the historical argument is purely trash. If such an argument had any merit then I ought to be shipped off to Denmark and my home given over to some Welsh person - or alternatively I ought to be able to lay legitimate claim to some part of Denmark. Denmark would be overfull mind, what with all the descendants of the Anglo Saxons and Danes that are nowadays found worldwide similarly sent home or laying their claims.
As for the "2000 year setback", it was the Romans who expelled the Jews - the pagan Romans, for not conforming and submitting to Roman norms. Anti-Semitism of this time (and in former times in relation to Egypt, Babylon, Assyria et al) is not what we would understand as such and is ill described as such; it was rather an annoyance at the Jewish insistence of the primacy of their God and hence resistance to their conquerors than accusation of their alleged role in undermining the world order as in later times - that is it was military action as one might undertake against any rebellious provincial population in former times, (right up to the 18th century in the Scottish Highlands for instance) including their removal and forced migration.
The Empire only became properly Christian some centures after that expulsion, and from there does anti-Semitism as we understand it derive, after all its a bit awkward for any Roman to have the blood of his God on his hands, so it must have been those Jews mustnt it? This put Jewish people in a uniquely invidious position over centuries culminating in the holocaust because it made of them not a rebellious provincial population but an "enemy within".
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