Nickhere:

Thank you for your thoughtful responses. I do not mean to denigrate the folk living in then Palestine who lost their homes because, frankly, they ended up living in a war zone and they quite sensibly fled it. And as you say the Ottoman Empire, which was established by force of arms (as are all empires) lasted for quite some time. When it lost, it lost big-time, and Great Britian took on that part of the world.

I was attempting to make the following point: I think a lot of people come to these arguments pre-ordained, and typically they will not compare apples with apples, oranges with oranges. They will take the traditional 'illegal occupation' argument against the 'right of conquest' when it suits. Few nations throughout history either were created or expanded by negotiation, pursuasion, or purchase. (One recent exception seems to be The Slovak Republic). The United Nations attempted to negotiate a partitian plan, I think against the odds, and it did not work out. Force of arms prevailed, and it was by no means a sure thing. The Israel Independence war of '48 was a hard won conquest. I had a Hebrew teacher who lost her sister in the battle for Jerusalem.

Populations were uprooted, Jews from Arab countries were displaced in addition to the severe European Jewish displacements post-war. Arabs who'd been living in the former Palestinain were uprooted. Many of them and their descendants now live settled lives in Jordan. Others live encamped in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon. There has always been a militant sense of re-possession and re-occupation amongst them. This has been nurtured in the education they have given their children, once done with a 'communist cast', in the wake of later times, it has shifted to an Islamic cast. All in the service in recovering their perceived losses.

If one looks at the overall case symmetrically, one acknowledges that both sides have rights, both sides have losses. I take the view that the Israeli Jews have quite literally nowhere else to go. They have within their society not only a great variety of once displaced Jews from Europe, as you mentioned, but a substantial number of Muslim and Christian Arabs and Druze, and even some Bosnians from the late unpleasantness in Yugoslavia. The Arab nations around Israel have attempted to maintain the refugee Palestinians in a stateless life, purely as a means of threatening Israel. For all intents and purposes Jordan is already a Palestinian state within a state, Lebanon has suffered greatly at the hands of Syria with Palestinians in the mix, and Egypt, while making official peace with Israel, has kept a tight seal on Gaza. The only state that has tried to negotiate a way out is Israel, but because Israel has refused to negotiate her own existence away, this has not yet got anywhere.

If there were an overall fairness, then any negotiator who insisted on recompense for displaced Arabs would also look for recompense for displaced Jews. This is conveniently overlooked in so many of the anti-Israel arguments that Israel and her partisans have very little motivation to pursue or even argue into such lopsided tactics.

Even worse is the comparison of Israelis to Nazis. Put most bluntly, the Jews moving to Israel took land, land they needed in order to live, and land they have an arguable right to. They did not kill beyond the actual wars, and they killed enemies. There are a ton of alleged Palestinians around to lay claim to well, whatever they want. The Nazis took lives, every Jewish life they could. Almost all civilian lives, noncombatants lives. Their existence was their crime. The property, possessions, lands, were de-facto expropriated, after the Nazis had eliminated the owners. That this has to even been made clear is rather hideous. Those who make equivalences between Israel and the Nazis are giving way to an intellectual laziness in order to make a cheap point, but again, they make it not worthwhile to argue, because they demean the argument itself.