Ricky hyperventilated:

Is ethnic cleansing continuing today?
What happens when Israel annexes land? They evict the Palestinians on it...
Isn't that what ethnic cleansing is? The forcible eviction of a people from their land? Its continuing today, in small increments. There was an annouced annexation just last wek...

Yes, there was a settlement announced last week (which I don't agree with), but no one was forcibly removed from land. No one was evicted (which isn't the same as ethnic cleansing anyway). No Palestinians were forcibly removed from Palestine last week.

Your inflammatory language is unhelpful. Ethnic cleansing is a serious charge. You need to be more careful.

Ricky quoted an historian:

"and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint".

Really. Do you ever read critically? Here's Wikipedia's take which seems balanced to me.

The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba (Arabic: النكبة‎, al-Nakbah, lit. "disaster", "catastrophe", or "cataclysm"),[1] occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. ...

The very precise number of refugees is a matter of dispute[3] but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (50 percent of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.[4][5]

The causes are also a subject of fundamental disagreement between Arabs and Israelis. Factors involved in the exodus include Jewish military advances, attacks against Arab villages and fears of another massacre by Zionist militias after Deir Yassin,[6]:239–240 which caused many to leave out of panic; Arab evacuation orders; expulsion orders by Israeli authorities; the voluntary self-removal of the wealthier classes,[7] the collapse in Palestinian leadership,[8] and an unwillingness to live under Jewish control.[9]

So, 700,000 left for a multitude of reasons yet you are willing to quote an historian that says 1 million left at gunpoint.

Ricky said:

Who distorts the facts?

He does!

ray

Ricky quoted an historian:

I quoted TWO historians.Both Israelis.
Because I know that some facts are in dispute.
I don't accept that either is unassailable.
which is why i said

I'm pretty sure that both sides have temporized the facts at a minimum

Are you not guilty of distorting my position?

ray

Yes, there was a settlement announced last week (which I don't agree with), but no one was forcibly removed from land. No one was evicted (which isn't the same as ethnic cleansing anyway). No Palestinians were forcibly removed from Palestine last week

.
I'm sure the Palestinians who were evicted will take note of the fact that they were"not ethnically cleansed" and breathe a sigh of relif. Forcibly evicted is focribly evicted. And they were evicted because they weren't Jews. For no other reason.
The evictions are pretty constant.... see below:


http://muftah.org/factsheet-settlements ... BG98fldX4Y

On December 25, 2013, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNWRA) condemned a recent wave of Israeli demolitions, including ones carried out on Christmas Eve, which displaced 68 Palestinians, including 32 children, one of them a five-year-old paralyzed girl. The demolitions were carried out in the town of Ein Ayoub near Ramallah and Fasayil al-Wusta near Jericho in the occupied West Bank. The UN statement noted that 1103 Palestinians were displaced by Israeli demolitions in 2013, with 663 Palestinian structures, including 259 residential units destroyed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. In condemning the destruction, UNRWA Spokesman Chris Gunness observed: “These demolitions are a common trigger of forced displacement and may amount to a forcible transfer and forced eviction under international humanitarian law and human rights law.”
On December 23, 2013, Israeli authorities handed out demolition orders against two residential buildings in the highly-sensitive Silwan neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, where extremist Israeli settlers have been implanting themselves into the heart of the historically Palestinian neighborhood. The orders threaten to displace 19 Palestinians.
On December 17, 2013, Israeli authorities distributed evacuation orders to 10 Palestinian families from the town of Bartaa al-Sharqiyya in the north of the occupied West Bank, ordering them to abandon currently inhabited and recently built homes.
On December 13, 2013, Israeli authorities confiscated 10 dunams (approximately 2.5 acres) of privately-owned Palestinian farmland and restricted Palestinian access to another 500 dunams (approximately 123 acres) in the town of Qusra near Nablus in the north of the occupied West Bank. The land in question is located between Qusra and the settlement “outpost” of Esh Kodes.
On December 11, 2013, UN Humanitarian Coordinator James Rawley condemned a recent wave of Israeli demolitions that resulted in the destruction of some 30 Palestinian structures in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank. Rawley’s statement noted:
The demolitions resulted in the displacement of 41 people, including 24 children, and affected another 20. Both refugee and non-refugee families were affected… Some of the families were displaced for the second time this month and a number of donor-funded structures were among those demolished.

Ricky had the balls to say:

Are you not guilty of distorting my position?

When his lead in to the quote was:

Lets start with historical fact. Llan Pappe claims that the original story of the period from 47 to 49 was etnic cleanisng.

No, I'm not guilty of distorting your position. You are. When you preface a quote with "Lets start with historical fact.", you own it.

By the way, here's the last sentence of Muftah's mission statement:

Second, we are solidly pro-Palestinian and will not publish pieces that are contrary to this perspective.

This is very unusual because usually organizations clean up their mission statements to be less specific. So, when Muftah labels something a "factsheet", you need to be more careful.

The following is biased towards Israel but I found it to be very informative.http://www.mythsandfacts.org/conflict/8/refugees.pdf

By the way , Ricky please stop using the term ethic cleansing. You are clearly using it for alleged behavior that does not qualify (you might try looking up the definition or looking at historical examples). Now the Palestinian version of what happened in 1947-1949 might qualify but that is (1) not historical fact (certainly not an historical fact in the sense of being broadly agreed upon), (2) and the term does not apply to isolated instances of Palestinians being moved for security or other reasons . You should know that misuse of the term is offensive.

freeman3 wrote:The following is biased towards Israel but I found it to be very informative.http://www.mythsandfacts.org/conflict/8/refugees.pdf

It's brilliant. Thank you.

freeman

and the term does not apply to isolated instances of Palestinians being moved for security or other reasons

When you move someone for "security reasons" because they aren't jewish .... that doesn't qualify as ethnic cleansing?

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of making it ethnically or religiously homogeneous. The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), as well as mass murder, and intimidation.
Ethnic cleansing is usually accompanied with the efforts to remove physical and cultural evidence of the targeted group in the territory

Why doesn't it qualify? Because there were 'security reasons?"
Or because there was only a small piece of land, or a small group of citizens involved. Over the year there's been a lot of evictions and that adds up.

ray

When you preface a quote with "Lets start with historical fact.", you own it.

I'm quite prepared to own it.
I was responding to this from you...
ray

Your entitled to your view, but let's not distort the facts

.

I was not presentong a fact i was challenging yours with, as I said

Llan Pappe claims

and

other Israelis historians like Benny Morris tend to concur.

and I offered you a source.
All to challenge your use of the phrase "lets not distort the facts".

rickyp wrote:ray

When you preface a quote with "Lets start with historical fact.", you own it.

I'm quite prepared to own it.
I was responding to this from you...
ray

Your entitled to your view, but let's not distort the facts

.

I was not presentong a fact i was challenging yours with, as I said

Llan Pappe claims

and

other Israelis historians like Benny Morris tend to concur.

and I offered you a source.
All to challenge your use of the phrase "lets not distort the facts".

So, you deliberately quoted something that is woefully inaccurate to challenge my accusing you of distorting facts? That does not sound like a good negotiating tactic.

Look at the definition you posted, Ricky.If Israel evicted all Palestinians from a town or even many you might have an argument. Evicting a few does not qualify.

Freeman3

The following is biased towards Israel but I found it to be very informative

hertz is a chair of AIPAC. Its history written by the victors.

http://mondediplo.com/1997/12/palestine

ABove Is a history written by a neutral source with no axe to grind. If you read the history from leMonde, and compare it with the Aipac white wash .... the differences are startling

By the way, if a term is offensive .... and it fits, then what?
When Bishop Tutu calls the security fences and the security measures that Palestinians have inflicted on them every day, apartheid, I'm sure that offends too.
The question is, can, does, the term fit?



.

freeman3

Ricky.If Israel evicted all Palestinians from a town or even many you might have an argument. Evicting a few does not qualify.

Like i said. they evict a few at a time... Over time, as they annex more suburbs, more security zones ...it adds up.
Its the same thing, because the result is the same. No more Arabs where there used to be Arabs.

Have you proven your assertion that Israel has driven Palestinians out of significant geographic areas through evictions. No you just posted several instances of evictions--that's it. You want to assert that Israel has been driving Palestinians out of certain areas wholesale with evictions then prove it. And by the way it needs to be a significant area. You cannot change the definition by saying the geographical area is a house...

There is no such thing as unbiased sources, especially with regard to this conflict (I was careful to note that the source I quoted was biased towards Israel). The source you posted is not unbiased. So how do you analyze biased sources ? You look at how they support their arguments, whether their arguments appear reasonable, how well they they are sourced, etc. I read the article carefully, noted the bias, got a lot of information from it and thought his arguments were supported fairly well. What I would interested in is whether some counter- arguments can be made against his assertions but just because the source is biased does not mean it is inaccurate.

I read the LeMonde article. Fortunately the two pages was not too taxing..
They rely extensively on an Israeli historian, Benny Morris, who has moderated his own position.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/14/israel

They rely on Benny Morris but then says he contradicted himself when he states something that the LeMonde author does not like. The article does not go into a detailed examination of the Palestinisn community and examine what caused so many Palestinians to flee. A lot of assertions, cite a few Israeli historians, a little bit of Plan Dalet and !viola the Palestinians were all forced out...if you actually read the source I posted you would find it to be much more nuanced with the kind of factual/narrative detail that lends credibility to a source.