Doctor Fate wrote:South Africa and Israel are comparable if you believe that Jews have no right to a homeland. The whites in South Africa were clearly remnants of colonialism.
I really don't get this at all. Opponents of Apartheid were not claiming that the whites in South Africa had no right to a homeland. And the Boer colonists arrived not long after a lot of the ancestors of the current black population did, in the last part of the Bantu migrations. And the Boer treks happened at about the same time as the Zulu expansion - meaning that they were both 'colonists' of parts of the interior.
The opposition to Apartheid was purely on the basis that the whites had dispossessed, oppressed and marginalised the black majority. Not that either side was the 'owner' of all the land.
Similarly, opposition to the way that Israel treats Palestinians is often solely about that. Both sets of people have a right to a home, and to be in a nation. To my mind, neither has a right to expel the other in order to create a greater homeland.
The fact that the "promised land" was ever known as "Palestine" owes to the Romans expelling the Jews and renaming the territory. If you think that makes Arab control of the area legitimate, then the two situations are analogous.
This is not actually true. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5thC BCE referred to the area of Syria between Phoenicia and Egypt as Palestine, and it was where (among others) the Philistines lived. The Romans did not pull the name out of nowhere (and it was used by them to describe the area of Judea and Syria before the Jewish Revolt).
The Jews were not completely expelled from Israel after the rebellion against Rome - just from Jerusalem. There was oppression and massacre, and many Jews did leave. Others converted to other religions (including Christianity of various types). But there were Jews and Samaritans active in the region for centuries. The Talmud was written there in the following two centuries. Constantine allowed access to the Wall once a year. There were later rebellions, and even a short-lived restoration with assistance from the Persians during the early Byzantine period.
Apparently, when the Arab armies conquered the area, Christians and Jews were given the best access to Jerusalem that they'd had for 500 years.
And at that point, it is likely that many people who were native to the area (Christian, Jewish, other) started to convert to Islam. So it's likely that there are Palestinians who are direct descended from pre-Revolt Jews. DNA testing suggests the same.
The "two-state solution" will only work when the Arabs recognize Israel's right to exist and to have defensible borders. Please demonstrate to me that the Palestinians agree to these two principles.
I already have cited the first one. It was given in the lead up to the Oslo accords and reaffirmed later. "Defensible" is perhaps subjective - and Palestine would also want the same thing, surely. But it would require open negotiation on both sides to get to that point. One thing about the truce line from 1949 is that it was pretty static (and so was being defended by both sides - although there was a general slowdown to that point). On that, the Palestinians definitely have set out the position that they would want to use those borders as a starting point for negotiations. Israel's latest position as at Camp David was to have border including about 10% more territory, and that only as a final end point of a long process.
20 Nov 2014, 9:34 am 
