What are strongest cases on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict?
The Palestinian Case:
- Palestinians have an exclusive right to Palestine – Palestinians are analogous to Native Americans.
- The state of Israel is the creation of imperialist Western powers – Secretary of State George Marshall was right and Truman and Clifford were wrong. (Marshall opposed US recognition of Israel in 1947/8)
- Palestine is sacred to Muslims and once a land is Muslim it will always be Muslim. The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Old Jerusalem is the third holiest place in Islam. From there Muhammed ascended into heaven.
- Palestinians are treated as second class citizens by the Israelis – with the perfect symbols of apartheid being the West Bank Wall, the ID system, and the Palestinian exclaves.
- There have been many massacres of Palestinians by Jews: Safsaf (1948), Deir Yassin (1948) , Kafr Kasim (1956), Sabra and Shatila (performed by the Lebanaese Phalange with the complicity of the IDF), war crimes in Gaza in 2014 including airstrikes killing 1472 one third of which were children, confirmed by UN Human Rights Commission.
The Israeli Case:
- If any people on the earth has a well documented claim to any land, it is the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s even in the Koran, Chapter 7, verse 137.
- The Jewish people were homeless for almost 2000 years and the most persecuted minority on the planet, culminating in the Holocaust.
- Jerusalem is to Judaism as Mecca is to Islam and while the Jews have but one country Arabs have 22, and Muslims 50.
- Jews came to Israel in the 19th and early 20th centuries not as invading army but as settlers and refugees who turned a desert into a garden and built a state where Muslims (especially women) have more rights than they do in most Muslim lands.
- Israeli territorial expansion and any restrictions on Palestinian life after 1945 was in response to threats to its national security by the coordinated invasion by surrounding Arab countries (1948), (1974) or by the planned invasion whose success was prevented by a preemptive air strike (1967) or by vicious terrorist attacks or bombings from Gaza.