Palestinian statehood

[Ghost14]

Re: Palestinian statehood

@Minar_e_moor

I don’t know a whole about the past details of Palestine but I have some questions about current status:

1. It is a significant number of people living in a land mass - why do someone else have to accept or authorize them to be a country? Don’t we have many recent examples of sections of countries simply voting themselves into split up nations?

2. Is Israel saying Palestine cannot be a country and if so that it is a part of Israel? If so, why?

3. I can understand Jerusalem being an issue because of religious issues but can’t that be just an issue about Jerusalem and nothing to do with Palestine being a country?

Would like some historically knowledgeable person to respond

1. The Palestinians were supposed to receive a country just like the Israelis. The problem is that the decision was unfair, as I listed above, and was made by Europeans only, a unilateral decision, which is something that Israel now denies the Palestinians. Israel began the ethnic cleansing of the natives to remove them from territories it now claimed. When neighbouring Arab countries intervened, they were defeated by Israel’s superior military, which was supplied by Europeans. That’s when the occupation began and for 20 years the world forgot about Palestine until the Munich terrorist attack. So yes, the Palestinians were supposed to receive a country but Israel claims that the Arabs attacked them so the occupation is for their safety, and the territories are spoils of war. The real reason of course, is Zionism, which, for the clarification of our anti-Jewish members, is a not something all Jews support.

2. Israel has given citizenship to some Arabs, although this is probably for appearance sake because giving all of the Palestinians citizenship would effectively kill the idea of a Jewish majority state (Arabs would far outnumber the Jews). This is also why Israel denies the descendents of the 700,000 Palestinian refugees the “right of return”, which is a human rights law recognized by the UN.

The two state solution was implemented in order to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority demographic. It can’t be implemented because there are those within Israel who want the Biblical “Greater Israel”, which includes all of the Palestinian territories. On the other hand some Israeli and Palestinian leaders (like Netanyahu and Arafat) built their political careers on this conflict, and Arafat in particular, became very wealthy by siphoning off foreign aid. No one knows why he denied the 2000 Oslo Accords, which would have given the Palestinians a state along 1967 borders, something they have to fight for today, but I believe it was to prolong the conflict. Therefore, to keep the conflict going, Israel slowly keeps building settlements in “disputed” territory, and the US protects Israel in the UN, effectively handcuffing the Palestinians diplomatically.

3. Jerusalem is just one issue in this overall conflict. Israel claims that the city is its capital, although most other countries don’t recognize it as such. Solutions for Jerusalem have included splitting the city, as well as declaring it a city state belonging to the UN, similar to the Vatican.