From: steve@work.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: Exploding Historical Myths
Date: 10 Apr 1992 17:00:43 GMT
Organization: /etc/organizaton
NNTP-Posting-Host: work.berkeley.edu

In article <1992Apr10.161206.16025@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> bc744@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Mark Ira Kaufman) writes:
#>
#>   Since my explanation of a statment made about Palestine has been
#>part of Israel.  It was not as big an error as the one you continue
#>to make when you claim that no part of Jordan was ever Palestine. It
#>is regarded by most non-Israel-hating historians that what we regard
#>today as Jordan contains land that was once Palestine.  This part of
#>Jordan that was Palestine covers an area that is larger than ALL of
#>Israel.

The above is nonsense and has nothing whatsoever to do with hate
or love of Israel. All of Israel is in historic Palestine. None
of Jordan was ever part of Palestine. Your assertion to the
contrary doesn't change those facts, which can be documented
in any number of accepted scholarly works on Middle Eastern
history.

#>   Another manner in which you toss aside historical fact is that 
#>the Palestinians had an opportunity to have their own state in the
#>region.  And they turned it down!  The United Nations Partition Plan

The above statement is equally preposterous on two grounds.
First, on the narrow ground that Palestinians in Gaza did indeed
try to set up their own state at that time; that state was not
permitted to survive. Second, on the broader ground discussed
in talk.politics.mideast many times: what Palestinians turned
down was the partition of their homeland, not least because of
the totally in equitable way in which the partion was to be
made. Indigenous Palestinians constituted approximately
two-thirds of the population; they lived in virtually all parts
of the country. More than half (54%) of Palestine was to be
allocated for a "Jewish" state, when only one-third of the
inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish (indigenous and immigrant
Jews taken together) and these lived in only a few parts of the
country, mostly in the large cities. Therefore to state that
Palestinians turned down an opportunity to have their own
state is a historical distortion of monstrous proportions.

#>of 1947, the plan that created the State of Israel, also partitioned
#>land that was to have been a Palestinian state.  The area that was 
#>to be under Arab sovereignty covered an area far more vast than the
#>territories that are currently in dispute.  In 1948, when the United
#>Nations voted on the plan that would have given the world two brand
#>new nations, the Arabs rejected the plan, and instead cose to attack 
#>the new Jewish State.  Now that the Jews have developed the region,
#>the Arab world has changed its mind!

More racist nonsense. The region was quite well developed prior
to the arrival of Zionist immigrants. I've posted more than once
long excerpts from a scholarly treatise that demonstrates the
tremendous expansion of the Palestinian economy in the two
decades prior to the onset of Zionist immigration. I still have
that material online and can repost it any time it is needed.

What has changed since 1948 is that Israel has consolidated its
apartheid state and Palestinians and other Arabs have been
seeking some way to end Israeli apartheid. Israel's overwhelming
military strength, mostly supplied by the United States, has
skewed the power balance so far toward Israel that many
Palestinians are now willing to accept what was correctly viewed
as totally unjust in 1947.

Perhaps you should read more than one book to get a more
objective view of what has really happened in Palestine in
the last century.

Steve Goldfield