Teribus is right: the colonial power occupying Palestine was in fact the Ottoman Empire, with the Brits acting as the victorious conquerors at the behest of the League of Nations after WWI, so my saying "British Palestine" may have been unwarranted shorthand. Nevertheless, the British were the power in the area for about thirty years, and established such things as a bureaucracy and currency and other marks of colonial rule. Whether you choose to call this colonialism or not is up to you; the Jews at the time certainly did. In any case, the Ottoman occupation was colonialism, albeit not strictly European.

CarolC, I could go to other websites and provide the "facts" from the opposite perspective. But it is neither useful nor within the purpose of even below-the-line mudcat to do this; instead I suggest visiting www.palestinefacts.org; if the blickymaker isn't working I won't post all the contents of the site here.

It is true, as I said, that some Arabs were bound to be displaced by the establishment of Israel. But the original plan created by the Brits provided for them by creating the state of TransJordan (now Jordan), which once again comprises 77 percent of Palestine. That Jordan was and is Palestine was never in dispute; the currency of transjordan, for example, was the same "Palestine mandate currency" that was used in what is now Israel. The British simply unilaterally gave Jordan independence in 1946, essentially ending its inclusion in the rest of Palestine. But it was Palestine, and it still is. If the Palestinians had gone into that part of Palestine, and the Jordanians had let them in, there would have been no "Palestinian refugee problem."

Then the UN came up with another plan, and if the Palestinians had accepted that they would now have a state on the West Bank. Having rejected offer after offer from the Brits acting for the League of Nations, the League of Nations itself, the UN, and Israel, and having helped initiate several wars in the region, they STILL claim they are being prevented from establishing a state.

I actually agree with you, CarolC, that ultimately Israel should give up the West Bank and allow a Palestinian state there. I do NOT think they are somehow required to do it, because you and I have very different views of the past. But it would be both generous and logical to do so and it would prevent any kind of onerous apartheid system from coming into play in Israel. There obviously has to be a negotiated settlement to achieve this, and there has not been the proper combination of a progressive Israeli government and someone on the Palestinian side with both the power and the good faith to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians. I suspect it will never happen until Arafat is dead, and maybe not for a long time after that. In the meantime, there is no use blaming a succession of quite different Israeli governments when the more obvious problem all along has been Arafat.

You're right, I was probably hysterical before. It's one of those weeks at work. Plus I was egged on by my ol' friend and sparring partner mg and his drool remark!