From: horen@rs.com (Jonathan B. Horen)
Subject: Re: He Who Saves a Single Soul...
Reply-To: horen@rs.com
Organization: Renaissance Software, Inc.
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1992 16:18:38 PDT

In article 24590@ncrcae.ColumbiaSC.NCR.COM, nabil@ncrcol.ColumbiaSC.NCR.COM (Nabil Idriss) writes:
>>>Well, I realize that, but what about the Arabs inside Israel, they don't
>>>have the right to adopt or bring-in orphans? Don't they hold Israeli
>>>passports. What about the non-Israeli's in Gazz and the WB? They don't
>>>have the right too? 
>>
>>No, they don't have the right to bring in immigrants without the
>>government's okay, either by adopting them or by any other means. Nor
>>do the Jewish citizens. Nobody has a right to immigrate to any country,
>>with or without the sponsorship of residents of that country, without
>>government approval; regulating immigration is a standard government
>>function. In this case, the government has said okay, which makes it
>>fine. In some cases, the Law of Return being the most obvious, the
>>government issues a blanket okay to a fairly wide range of people. The
>>right to decide, however, belongs to the state as it does to every other
>>state in the world, and not to any individual, whether Arab or Jew.
>
>I wish you apply what yor are saying above to the immigration of Jews 
>in 1948 from Europe. They not only immigrated, they also took our land.

Well, in all fairness one must remember that from 1939 until the end of
WWII, the British (who at that time controlled Palestine, and *not* the
Arabs) wouldn't let the Jewish refugees in. You might take a look at the
book "Ship of Fools", by Katherine Anne Porter -- it tells the story of
a ship full of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany who were denied entry
into Israel (Palestine) by the British, and which, returning to Europe,
was torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats.

What's more, the Jewish immigrants from Europe were not the only
refugees to return to our ancestral homeland. During the 1950s there
was the return of the Jews from their centuries-old humiliation and
degradation in Yemen, Morocco, and the rest of North Africa. There was
the return of the Jews from their imprisonment in Iran and Iraq. Since
the 1970s there has been the return of the Jews from the Soviet Union,
and also the return of the Jews from Ethiopia.

We are a nation, a people (neither word does us justice) that has been
fleeing for our lives throughout our history.

Show us Arab refugees from "Palestine" who were forced to leave or to
lose their lives, who had nowhere to go except among strangers, and who 
were repeatedly subjected to the debasement and genocidal actions of
murderous nations.

I'm truly sorry that your parents left Haifa, Nabil -- they made
(perhaps) the wrong decision. But they left of their own choosing,
not at gunpoint. My ancestors left Israel as part of the Babylonian
experiment in "population resettlement", and nobody asked them if
they might not rather spend their vacation at home...

>>I wasn't claiming democracy... although you're wrong; anyone who
>>thinks democracy means fairness hasn't studied history. Democracy
>>is majority rule; it is as good and fair as the majority is, or as
>>bad. What the majority decides to do has no effect whatsoever on
>>whether a country is dempcratic, although it does on whether the
>>country is good -- the two have littlw to do with each other. But
>>my point was not that Israel was democratic in the first place; it
>>was that the Arab countries are being consistently less decent to
>>other Arabs and Muslims than Israel is to a variety of Arabs and
>>Muslims.
>
>Why then in 1948 when the Arab majority opposed the establishment
>of the Jewish state did not rule?

The Jewish state, "Palestine" to the British, has *always* existed
during the last 3O00+ years -- the "Modern" State of Israel is just
that -- modern -- but it is not "new". Because of this, we had no
reason to listen to the wishes of the Arab nations who opposed us 
(and because their opposition to us and to things Jewish was already 
well-known), only to their threats (which, as we all know, were/are
very real).

j.horen@rs.com


Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast