Can we agree that the British government didn't have the right to make that declaration, considering all the arabs living in Palestine at the time? Could we further agree that it was probably that declaration that led to the beginning of serious conflicts between Jews and Arabs? After all, your Wikipedia article had the first serious fight between Jews and Arabs in 1920.
I can certainly agree that the Nazis and others gave Jewish people ample reason to want to find a safer place. The main issue is that, as a general rule, robbing Peter to pay Paul (or robbing arab land to ameliorate the Jewish situation) is not the way to go. It creates the type of situation that we are in today.
Can we agree that it stands to reason that the Arabs would fight everyone who was trying to take their land?
After World War II, can we agree that this was instigated mostly if not entirely by western powers and the Jewish immigrants?
Some? From what I read in Wikipedia (and let's not forget that you were the first to use it as a resource), the damage was -primarily- done by the Israelies. I suspect you read little if any of what I quoted in the post you're responding to. I'll do it again for anyone who might have not read it the last time around:
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The Nakba (Arabic: النكبة an-Nakbah, lit. 'The Catastrophe') was the ethnic cleansing[1] of Palestinians in Mandatory Palestine during the 1948 Palestine war through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings, along with the destruction of their society, culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.[2] The term is also used to described the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel.[3] As a whole, it covers the shattering of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.[4][5][6][7]
During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, dozens of massacres targeting Arabs were conducted and over 500 Arab-majority towns and villages were depopulated,[8] with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Approximately half of Palestine's predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people,[9] were expelled from their homes or made to flee, at first by Zionist paramilitaries through various violent means, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by the Israel Defense Forces. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.
[snip]
The 1948 Nakba
The central facts of the Nakba during the 1948 Palestine war are not disputed.[34]
About 750,000 Palestinians--over 80% of the population in what would become the state of Israel--were expelled or fled from their homes and became refugees.[9] Eleven Arab urban neighborhoods and over 500 villages were destroyed or depopulated.[8] Thousands of Palestinians were killed in dozens of massacres.[35] About a dozen rapes of Palestinians by regular and irregular Israeli military forces have been documented, and more are suspected.[36] Israelis used psychological warfare tactics to frighten Palestinians into flight, including targeted violence, whispering campaigns, radio broadcasts, and loudspeaker vans.[37] Looting by Israeli soldiers and civilians of Palestinian homes, business, farms, artwork, books, and archives was widespread.[38]
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Full article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
Where are you getting this notion that the Arabs "largely" created this refugee issue? I suspect you're unfamiliar with Israel's "Plan Dalet". Wikipedia has a
good article on the subject. Quoting from it:
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Background
In the summer of 1937, according to the official history of the Haganah, the commander of their forces in the Tel Aviv area, Elimelech Slikowitz ("Avnir") received an order from Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion, anticipating an eventual British withdrawal from the country after the Peel Report, asked Slikowitz to prepare a plan for the military conquest of the whole of Palestine. According to the historians Walid Khalidi and Ahmad H. Sa'di, it was this Avnir Plan which provided a blueprint for future plans. The blueprint was refined in subsequent adjustments (A, B, C) before emerging in its final form over a decade later as Plan Dalet.[11][12]
From 1945 onward, the Haganah designed four general military plans, the implementation of the final version of which eventually led to the creation of Israel and the dispossession of the Palestinians:[13][unreliable source?][citation needed]
•Plan Aleph (Plan A), drawn up in February 1945 to complement the political aim of a unilateral declaration of independence. It was designed to suppress Palestinian Arab resistance to the Zionist take-over of parts of Palestine.[14]
•Plan Bet (Plan B), produced in September 1945,[15] emerged in May 1947 and was designed to replace Plan Aleph in the context of new developments such as Britain's submission of the problem of Palestine to the United Nations and growing opposition from surrounding Arab states to the Zionist partition plan.[citation needed]
•Plan Gimel (Plan C), also known as "May Plan", produced in May 1946,[16] emerged in November/December 1947, in the wake of the UN Partition Plan. It was designed to enhance Zionist military and police mobilisation and enable action as needed.[dubious – discuss][17][18][19]
•Plan Dalet (Plan D), of March 1948, is the most noteworthy. Guided by a series of specific operational plans, the broad outlines of which were considered as early as 1944, Plan Dalet was drawn up to expand Jewish-held areas beyond those allocated to the proposed Jewish State in the UN Partition Plan. Its overall objective was to seize as much territory as possible[dubious – discuss] in advance of the termination of the British Mandate—when the Zionist leaders planned to declare their state.[18][19]
[snip]
Controversy about intent
The intent of Plan Dalet is subject to much controversy, with historians on the one extreme asserting that it was defensive, and historians on the other extreme asserting that the plan aimed at maximum conquest and expulsion.
According to the French historian Henry Laurens, the importance of the military dimension of plan Dalet becomes clear by comparing the operations of the Jordanian and the Egyptian armies. The ethnical homogeneity of the coastal area, obtained by the expulsions of the Palestinians eased the halt of the Egyptian advance, while Jewish Jerusalem, located in an Arab population area, was encircled by Jordanian forces.[49]
According to The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, whilst there may be controversy whether Plan Dalet was a centralized plan of ethnic cleansing, it could as well be a case of Haganah forces discovering that they could carry out ethnic cleansing at the local and regional level, as their offensive drove out large numbers of Arabs.[50]
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It was only -after- Israel had embarked on what I can only think of as ethnic cleansing, executing 13 operations that are detailed in Wikipedia's Plan Dalet article that several Arab countries decided to step in. Quoting from Wikipedia's article on the 1948 Palestine war:
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On 14 May 1948, the day before the expiration of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel.[61] Both superpower leaders, U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, immediately recognised the new state, while the Arab League refused to accept the UN Partition Plan, proclaimed the right of self-determination for the Arabs across the whole of Palestine, and maintained that the absence of legal authority made it necessary to intervene to protect Arab lives and property.[62]
Over the next few days, contingents of four of the seven countries of the Arab League at that time, Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, and Syria, invaded the former British Mandate of Palestine and fought the Israelis. They were supported by the Arab Liberation Army and corps of volunteers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Yemen. The Arab armies launched a simultaneous offensive on all fronts: Egyptian forces invaded from the south, Jordanian and Iraqi forces from the east, and Syrian forces invaded from the north. Cooperation among the various Arab armies was poor.
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On these points, we can agree.
War, you say? Don't you mean massacres? Wikipedia has some articles on the 2 massacres in question:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Yunis_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafah_massacre
Yes, Egypt had a bit of war with Israel then as Wikipedia relates in its
Six-Day War page, but as for the Palestinians, they just had more suffering:
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Naksa period (1967–1986)
During the 1967 Six-Day War, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees were driven from the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Most were driven into Jordan.[92] This has become known as al-Naksa (the "setback").[93] After the war, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip.[94]
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Yes, the Yom Kippur war. Not sure if it was the first time, but the U.S. definitely helped Israel a lot in this war:
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By the beginning of December, Israel had received between 34 and 40 F-4 fighter-bombers, 46 A-4 attack airplanes, 12 C-130 cargo airplanes, 8 CH-53 helicopters, 40 unmanned aerial vehicles, 200 M-60/M-48A3 tanks, 250 APCs, 226 utility vehicles, 12 MIM-72 Chaparral surface-to-air missile systems, three MIM-23 Hawk SAM systems, 36 155 mm artillery pieces, seven 175 mm artillery pieces, and large quantities of 105 mm, 155 mm and 175 mm ammunition. State of the art equipment, such as the AGM-65 Maverick missile and the BGM-71 TOW, weapons that had only entered production one or more years prior, as well as highly advanced electronic jamming equipment, was also sent. Most of the combat airplanes arrived during the war, and many were taken directly from USAF units. Most of the large equipment arrived after the ceasefire. The total cost of the equipment was approximately US$800 million (US$5.49 billion today).[391][392][394][395]
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Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
According to Wikipedia's
Israeli-Palestinian conflict page, you're missing some wars- the 1982 Lebanon war, the first intifada (1987–1993) and the second intifada (2000–2005). Anyway, moving on...
Somehow, I doubt that's how these countries would put it, particularly parts of Lebanon. There are other countries active in the current conflict Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well. Again from Wikipedia's page on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
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The war spilled over, with Israel engaging in clashes with local militias in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon and northern Israel, and other Iranian-backed militias in Syria.[89][90][91] Iranian-backed militias also engaged in clashes with the United States,[92] while the Houthis blockaded the Red Sea in protest,[93] to which the United States responded with airstrikes in Yemen,[94] Iraq, and Syria.[95]
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From what I've heard, this was aided and abetted by outside forces.
Aided and abetted by Netanyahu himself:
For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces | The Times of Israel
I can certainly agree that a lot of bad things have happened as a result of Israel's terrible misdeeds starting for the most part in the 1948 war.
One can say the same thing of Nazi germany. I actually saw a documentary wherein legitimate grievances from the partition of their land after World War I was brought up. I think we can agree that this notwithstanding, they went far beyond addressing grievances and I think the situation in Israel is much the same. Wikipedia has a page on the similarities between the 2 states as well if you're interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_between_Israel_and_Nazi_Germany
Quoting a some passages from their article:
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Historical examples
Comparisons between Zionism and Nazism predate the foundation of Israel in 1948. British Army officer and politician Edward Spears, who "best highlighted the Gentile use of the Zionist-Nazi analogy",[12] wrote that:
Political Zionism as it is manifested in Palestine today preaches very much the same doctrines as Hitler... Zionist policy in Palestine has many features similar to Nazi philosophy... the politics of Herrenvolk... the Nazi idea of Lebensraum, is also very in evidence in the Zionist philosophy... the training of youth is very similar under both organizations that have designed this one and the Nazi one.[13]
In 1948, Hannah Arendt compared a Jewish political party to Nazism, writing that, “Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the ‘Freedom Party’ ( Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” [14]
English historian Arnold J. Toynbee believed that sinking back into the barbarity of Nazism was something that threatened not only Israel but the Western world generally. he described the contemporary Israeli “a Janus-figure, part American farmer technicians, part Nazi sicarius.”[13] Comparing what Israel did to the Arabs, he considered that it was, morally but not statistically, worse than what Nazis did to Jews.[15] [16] This formed part of his critique of Zionism. In the final volume of his A Study of History, Toynbee reconsidered his view that Zionism was like Nazism. He wrote that:
I think that, in the Zionist movement, Western Jews have assimilated gentile Western Civilization in the most unfortunate possible form. They have assimilated the West's nationalism and colonization. The seizure of the houses, lands, and property of the 900,000 Palestinian Arabs who are now refugees is on a moral level with the worst crimes and injustices committed, during the last four or five centuries, by gentile Western European conquerors and colonists overseas.'[17]
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I've seen no evidence of this. Being as fair as I can to the state of Israel, I can say that after World War II, Jewish leaders in Israel, spooked by what was done to them by the Nazis, decided to essentially copy some of the worst aspects of Nazi germany, with predictable results.
Now here we can certainly agree. Britain had no right to gift Palestinian lands to Israel.
Even from what you've said, one can easily come to the conclusion that it's more complicated than that. I'm sure we can agree that most people don't like getting dragged into wars if they can avoid them. I'm sure all the Arab countries saw what happened in Lebanon and decided it would be best to deal with the Palestinians at arms length.
