The Legitimacy of Israel [Copperknickers vs. Goodguy1066]

[Copperknickers II]

I am not an antisemitist. I have great admiration for Israel. In the UK, we learn that Israel is a highly successful country that has many great governmental systems and social wellbeing. We also learn that it has a history of many human rights abuses and is generally behaving unacceptably towards the Palestinians.

I however would like, at first anyway, to take this back to the roots. Why do the Jews feel they have a right to the Holy Land? Who supports them? Why do the Arabs feel their premise is false? Then perhaps we can move on to current events and perhaps recent activities.

As the proposition is that Israel is legitimate, and i will be opposing this proposition, i will invite my opponent to introduce the argument.

[Copperknickers II]

Goodguy has declined the invitation, therefore i will start with a brief summary and explanation of my beliefs as far as history is concerned:

Part 1

In the Tanakh, Moses is a Jewish man who leads his people out of Egyptian oppression and into the 'promised land' of Israel. The Jewish religion views the land of Israel as a God-Given birthright for every (Jewish) mother's son/daughter that calls himself/herself a Jew. In the beginning, that is to say shortly after the coming of Abraham and the subsequent kingdom of Judah, the land was indeed under the control of Jewish kingdom. This kingdom was conquered briefly by the Babylonians, then was held for some time by the Persians, Greeks and Romans. For a short time in the 1st Century BC, there was also a brief period of independant Jewish rule. After this, the region flitted from Christian to Muslim control for more than 1000 years, up until the British annexed it from the Ottomans in the 19th Century.

In 1967 of course, there was still a large enough Jewish contingent to justify a Jewish state, so we can see that there has been a more or less constant Jewish presence there since Judah. It is important to note however, that from about the Roman period onwards Jews had been migrating throughout Europe and the Middle east, and had communities all over Western Eurasia by the Medieval era. At the beginning of the Renaissance, there were very few of them at all left in Palestine. The Aliyahs helped repopulate the area, especially with the rise of Zionism in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and by the end of WW2 over a third of the population was Jewish. That, of course, is by no means a majority.

Zionism, the belief that Jews had a right to take by force if necessary a Jewish homeland in the lower Levant, had the support of the then rulers of the area, Britain, although the huge immigration led to Arab upheavals aplenty. The British, realising that they had a full scale civil war on their hands if they weren't careful, tried to stop this migration towards the end, but basically gave up on it.

This reaction by the Arabs of course can be said of any area experiencing immigration of a minority group; there was bitter resentment. The twist of course is that the Arabs were the historical interlopers on that land, and the Jews were just returning to their own homes. After the brief, piffling, inconsequential 1000 years absence:

'Here Mohammed, save my seat for me, i'll be back in a couple of centuries...

...hey, i said save it!'

Part 2

Now as we all know: 'finders keepers, losers weepers'. It is quite frankly ridiculous, disregarding religious beliefs for a second, to say 'i want you to move into your land because God says i can'. Anyone who has read my previous debate, also coincidentally involving Jews, knows my opinion on their religious beliefs - they are welcome to them, as long as they don't force them on anyone else where such will cause undue suffering. It is quite clear to me that mass immigration is a bad thing, when it happens to the point of displacing and disturbing the balance of the original settlers, and i am sure that you, Goodguy, agree with that as well.

This of course affected everyone, not just the Muslims, when there are hundreds of thousands more people in your small country at the end of your life than when you were born. Now, there is always going to be conflict between differing cultures, i am a 3rd generation immigrant myself, so i can completely identify with the problems face by the Jews. Why should they not be allowed to live there? What gives the Muslims the right to live there at all? Well, there are good ways and bad ways of solving these conflicts, and although there is debate between what is effective and what is not so much, probably the single worst way of reducing tension is to overthrow the majority and take their land away from them.

The agreement that the Jews and Muslims eventually came to was that the Jews get Israel, and the more numerous Muslims are expelled from their homes, get out-of-proportion small pieces of land, and are exluded from the Jewish state. Anyone who would make such an agreement willingly would be consigned to a mental asylum. The Zionists forced this agreement, against the will of the Muslims. The agreement did not take into account the interests of the indigenous Arab settlers, it did not provide them with anything like a fair compromise, and the current arrangement reduces Palestine to little more than an Israeli detention camp not all that dissimilar from the ones that were forced upon the Jews themselves in WW2. (that's Godwin's Law invoked already i know, but my point is that there is an element of revenge, and wanting to get back at persecutors by persecuting people themselves) This is not a suitable or in any way acceptable way to treat what are by rights the citizens of the state of Israel, therefore i move that the state of Israel is illegitimate.

I look forward to your reply.