I once ended up in a discussion with a strongly pro-Israel LSU REU student [name removed at the request of the other participant] who attempted to convince me of the absolute purity of the Israeli people. Since I felt we weren't getting anywhere without supporting materials, I asked him to write up his positions and view of history in E-mail, where I could take the leisure to examine matters more fully. He did so, and then seemed quite surprised when I made point-by-point responses based upon what I could find in my own research on the history of Israel, and declined to follow up on the discussion except verbally.

My reply is sadly lacking in references, and I wouldn't quote from it, but I've decided to make my reply (quoting his message) public, for those who might find it interesting.

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 10:30:31AM -0500, [name removed at the request of the other participant] wrote:
> 
> Barak bears no responsibility whatsoever for the failure to come to an 
> agreement at Camp David. Barak actually shocked the world (very much 
> including Israel) with the extent of the concessions offered.

    I dispute both sentences, with the acknowledgement that Barak
*did* manage to shock Israel, which I think didn't catch on to what he
was up to.


> For a well formulated article, see 
> http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/religion/features/n_9622/index3.html .
> The 3rd paragraph on that page begins a discussion of the camp david talks. It 
> is a small part of a larger, and also very interesting article.

    It's an editorial with no references.  Here's a couple of opposing
views, the first of which is a quick point by point summary of what
the concessions weren't, with references.

http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/failures_of_camp_david_2000.htm
http://www.wrmea.com/html/faq.htm

    Also, there's dispute that it was even that friendly, as it has
been claimed by at least one Israeli (Tanya Reinhart,
"Israel/Palestine, How to end the war of 1948", to be published in
September) that Sharon was actually setting up a shell game, never in
fact offering true control over that territory by retaining control of
all the access points and military facilities, while demanding that
Arafat concede sovereignty.  She compared it to an offer of a prison,
where the prisoners had 95% of the space, with the jailers keeping for
themselves only the bars, the control systems, the walls, and a few
access points -- a very small portion, and very generous to the
prisoners.

    If that was the proposal on the table, Arafat was being very
polite when he did nothing more than walk out.

    Tanya Reinhart has a web site at http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart/,
and an excerpt of her book covering Camp David is at
http://www.tau.ac.il/~reinhart/books_ME/Camp_David_Negotiations.html

    It is a fascinating read, especially coming from a respected
Israeli academic.


> For another good (and short) synopsis of my views with some short historical 
> references, see http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=25425 . 

    Here's an eyewitness report from the Israeli incursion into
Ramallah, March 2002, by an American living there at the time.

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ramallah2.html

    You do something like that to a people, and you don't get to be
surprised when they decide that if they're going to get wiped out
anyway, they might as well pick up a bomb and take a couple of their
tormentors with them.  In addition, the destruction of Palestinian
means of production causes economic devastation and death by
starvation.  Israel's goal has been to keep the Palestinians a broken
people until they finally die out.



> There were 2 large Jewish immigrations to the land of Israel (called
> the first aliyah an second aliyah) in approx. 1880 and 1890.

    Granted in general, but disputed in detail: the First Aliyah was
1882-1903, and despite major problems with disease and transportation
of goods, went reasonably well (with minor clashes, they even got
along reasonably well with their Arab neighbors, who didn't much like
them, but didn't much interfere with them, either, which is about as
good as you could expect given the cultural differences).  Some Arabs
even helped them with the draining of swamps and planting of trees,
and formed some friendships at the time.

    The Second Aliyah was 1904-1914, and consisted of a much rowdier
bunch than the first, including political and religious
revolutionaries.  This batch disturbed even the first wave of
settlers, and really annoyed the neighbors.

    I'm not sure where you're getting the 1890 date.  Both Aliyah's
together comprised only 3% of the international Jewish migration,
however (about 70k people altogether), so I'm not entirely certain
they could be considered "large".  The majority of the Jews around
this time went to the United States.  The Jewish population boom in
the area came mostly after WWI.


> These were the response to widespread anti-semitic violence
> througout the world (especially Europe).

    Granted.  (And Russia, actually.  Most of the initial settlers
came from Russian Poland, and a lot of the drive at this time was
caused by the pogroms of Czar Alexander II.)


> At this time, the region was vastly unoccupied, and the few people
> living in the region were nomadic tribes with no settled homes.

    Disputed.  Even by 1914, the settlers comprised only 12% of the
population, according to the Turkish census, and the Jewish settlers
were easier to count than the Arabs.  The tribes *were* mostly
nomadic, but that made things more difficult, because their "home"
then consisted of the land under their usual traveling pattern, which
was enormous.  It also made census-taking very difficult, especially
since the census was also related to the taxation and military
conscription of the Ottoman Empire, which the inhabitants pretty
universally wanted to avoid.  There were also settled areas, however,
some of them even settled more or less jointly with Jews from Spain,
North Africa, and some of the Arab countries, and had been in place
for hundreds of years.  Originally Hebron, which you will mention
below, was one such place, though they got themselves into trouble in
the mid 1800s when European refugees started coming faster than
cultural assimilation would handle.


> These Jewish settlers bought the land they moved to, mostly from
> Absentee landlords (usually in Damascus) at often exorbitant prices.

    Disputed.  They bought the land they moved to mostly from various
British agents, who were absentee landlords in much the same sense
that early American settlers were absentee landlords of the homes of
the various native American tribes, who were never asked about the
matter.  This actually gets to be *really* interesting, because the
region was controlled by the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire, and a lot of
funny games were being played with the documents.  I've never been
able to find a readable source that untangled the whole mess.

    There's actually a lot of parallels to what happened to the Arabs
in the region to what happened to the various native tribes in
America, especially as it relates to the French, but that's another
topic.

    I will grant that the settlers paid *someone* (and consider it
eminently reasonable that they were bilked from time to time in the
bargain), and probably had reason to believe that it was enough.  This
gets much worse around 1917, however, when the British betray the
Arabs.


> The land that they rightfully bought was considered poor land and
> was nonarable.

    Granted for the majority of the land (minus the "rightfully
bought" comment, see above) though not all of the land was in that
state.


> Through the fruit of their own hard work, these Jewish settlers
> developed the land and soon had a growing agricultural economy. Many
> arab familes settled around these Jewish settlements to benefit from
> these growing agricultural economies. Among the benefits for these
> arab families who were willing to peacably live with their new
> Jewish neighbors was the increased life-expectancy due to better
> health-care.

    Granted, though it wasn't as one-sided as you paint.  There was
open trade during this period, and the settlers got a fair amount out
of it as well, if I recall, including better storage techniques.


> There were rather common attacks on the Jewish settlers who had done
> nothing to create a war.

    This isn't quite true.  Keep in mind that the Arab neighbors
weren't really a single nation at this point, and what happened were a
number of cultural clashes with individual tribes.  A settler would
manage to seriously offend an Arab, or vice versa, and things would
snowball pretty rapidly (if you can use that metaphor in a desert
region).  This sort of thing accelerated in the Second Aliyah, with
the arrival of a lot of hotheads.  I don't think even the Jewish
histories dispute that part -- some of the letters of the time refer
to actions that horrified even the settlers, for instance a Jewish
group of youths tearing the Torah scrolls into shreds in one of the
newly settled towns.

    There's no accurate record of all of the clashes, to the best of
my knowledge, and little record of exactly what caused the original
animosities.


> As an example, the age-old Jewish community in Hebron (the burial
> place of our patriarchs) was massacred, and the few Jewish survivors
> fled to the west to cities like Tel Aviv.

    The 1929 incident.  We are skipping ahead here chronologically,
because this is post-1917, which was kind of the point at which things
really started to head downhill.  Prior to that, the skirmishes were
minor, and pretty much related to personal disputes or cultural
clashes.

    This is a really interesting event, however, because it really
highlights how differently the groups of Arabs could react, and how
different some of the Jewish groups were.  This is yet another
snowballing incident -- somehow the rumor had gotten started that the
Jews had recently been involved in large-scale killings of Arabs, but
there's unfortunately not a whole lot of history on how this got
started, or why.  There weren't any recorded massacres at the major
Arab settlements, though certainly an attack on a travelling tribe
could have well been taken that way.  I don't think it's really
disputed that there was by this point a really deep-seated resentment
(and to be honest, hatred) coming from people on both sides, and that
both sides had taken to killing each other from time to time, and
while the Jewish version of this tale depicts the rumor as being
entirely falsified for the sole purpose of driving the local Arabs
into a frenzy, I find it entirely reasonable that there were a couple
of incidents recently prior that simply mushroomed in the telling as
the rumor spread (as all rumors, violent or not, are wont to do).  In
any case, to the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever worked out
exactly what happened with respect to the original rumor.  If you have
a research paper that shows otherwise, I'd be interested in seeing it.

    It is not disputed that the first strike was Arab.  There was a
riot, at first stones were thrown, then a group of rioters killed a
Jewish student, and then all hell broke loose when Jews panicked and
started taking measures to protect themselves.  A lot of the hatreds
stemmed from the opening of the Yeshiva school in 1925 (which is why a
student was the first to die), where the students lived separately
from the rest of the community, and as a result, never got a chance
for their Arab neighbors to see them as anything but arrogant Zionist
immigrants.

    The reason there were Jewish survivors at all, though, was also
because of the Arabs.  Hebron was a settlement of Sephardi Jews, who
spoke Arabic and got along *really well* with their neighbors (and
it's a great pity that the settlers didn't spend more time asking the
Sephardi for advice on how to get along, since that could have saved a
lot of clashing and possibly changed the course of history).  It was
mostly the clashing of *other* communities that got this started, and
there were some 20 Arab families around Hebron that literally took up
arms and hid and protected escaping Jewish settlers, which was a
pretty strong act of bravery, considering that once that riot got into
full steam, it was looking for a razing, Arab or otherwise.

    67 died, but hundreds were saved.  There was an injustice at the
end, in that the survivors were never allowed to return, and were
never recompensed, but Hebron wasn't an example of the "common
violence" against the Jews.  It was an absolutely unique tragedy,
because in an effort to strike back against the Jews that were in fact
causing trouble, trampling over their culture, and occasionally
ending up in skirmishes, militant Arabs managed to destroy one of the
few model communities where the Jews were actually getting along just
fine.  Even the students, who were well aware of the hostility their
presence caused, weren't afraid to walk alone at night all the way up
to the night before the massacre.

    I note that in 1994, the situation reversed itself, with a Jewish
massacre of Arabs in Hebron.  Hundreds of Jews came out to London the
following week to demonstrate their outrage.  I even found a news
clipping:

http://www.nkusa.org/activities/demonstrations/04Mar94/HackneyGazette.htm

    Sadly, this didn't stop the Jewish hatred from continuing, as
militant Jewish groups continue to celebrate the anniversary of the
1994 event.


> Indeed, the Jews had rightfully bought the land and were trying to
> lead peaceful lives away from the anti-semitism in Europe.

    While it's true that most people, anywhere, are interested in
leading peaceful lives, if you don't think there were militant Jewish
groups in that area at that time, you read a completely different set
of history books than I did.  In any case, most of the Arabs there
were actually *also* interested in leading peaceful lives.  Cultural
clashes and mounting population pressures led to rampant xenophobia on
both sides, which came out as violence, started by one side against
the other, in retribution for some prior offense.  After a few cycles
of this, the retribution was generally for some prior *violent*
offense by the other side, and it only takes a few killers on each
side to reinforce the xenophobia on the other end and make it more
widespread.


> After WWI, the British gained control of the region. They inherited
> the problem of the violence against the Jews as well.

    Ah, this is an ultrashort summary of one of the core events that
shaped how things developed after 1917.  The problem was, Britain
enlisted the aid of the Arab tribes against Turkey during WWI.  They
got that aid by recognizing the Arab tribes as an independent nation,
and promising them control of their lands in the Palestine area.  Then
the war ended, and the British went back on their word.  This really,
really, aggravated the Arabs, who were in essence betrayed by the
British after dying for them, and increased resentment of the Jewish
settlers, who were there with British assistance.

    At this time, Britain cautiously made a statement supporting the
formation of a Jewish nation in the Palestine area as long as the
rights of the non-Jews in the area were respected (the Balfour
Accord).  A lot of people came out and said that this was going to
cause a lot of problems, as it basically amounted to stealing land
from the Arabs.  Ghandi and a few other famous believers in peace
openly condemned it.  Previously the British had been offering
territory in Uganda instead, which was at first accepted by a Zionist
congress meeting, but then rejected, possibly because they were
informed about the possibility of getting the Palestine region
instead, but my history is a little shaky on that.  There's some
political involvement here as well with the French, since the League
of Nations was busy chopping the area up into Mandates, and Britain
was trying to frustrate France, which would have gained if the
Palestine area had ended up more closely tied to Syria.  Feeling
caught between a rock and a hard place, the British sent increased
numbers of police forces and military troops to protect the settlers.
This, of course, made things worse, as the Arabs (rightfully, in my
opinion) felt that they were being camel-nosed out of their own land,
and any goodwill that had been built up between the then-small Jewish
settlements and their Arab neighbors began to evaporate, and clashes
between the British and the Arabs got lumped in along with the
Jewish/Arab clashes.

    In the next ten years, the Jewish population in the region more
than doubled.  These were people with no interest in the culture of
their neighbors at this point, and deliberately separated themselves
as much as possible, which is about as fatal a mistake as you can make
in those circumstances.  The attitude, from what I remember of the
summaries of their writings, was that it was *their* home they were
rightfully making, and the Arabs could just get out of the way because
the Jews had nowhere else to go.  Granted, they were desperate
refugees (mostly still from Poland at this point), but this isn't any
way to make friends, and whether or not the Jews were told that the
land was rightfully theirs, the Arabs had a very strong reason to
believe otherwise, and had no interest in being placed under Jewish
rule.  The interference (and frankly, the very presence, considering
the still very recent feelings of betrayal) of the British forces just
made this worse, and it's over this period that the two groups really
learned to hate each other.  There was a lot of Arab rioting, probably
aimed at demonstrating to the British that a Jewish state would be
ungovernable, and making sure that everyone knew that there was going
to be a lot of resistance to displacement -- which was even
acknowledged as a problem by the British, who came out with a white
paper in 1929 showing that at most, if there was substantial economic
development, the region could handle another 20,000 immigrants without
significantly displacing Arabs (see the Hope-Simpson report and the
Passfield White Paper).  The British Prime Minister, for whatever
reason, completely rejected this and basically made a statement that
the immigration would not be stopped for any reason.

    As a side note, even the first leader of the Jews in Palestine,
David Ben Gurion, noted that the Arabs had a valid complaint, and
basically came out and said that if he were Arab, he wouldn't be doing
much negotiating either.  The Jews wanted the land to be their nation,
and so did the Arabs, and while he was solidly on the Jewish side, he
made it pretty clear that they didn't have the moral high ground when
doing so, relying pretty solidly on the philosophy that since they
didn't have anywhere else to build a nation, they were going to build
it where they were no matter what anyone else wanted.


> (skipping a few years of violence and no real political
> change)... . The British, in an effort to settle some of the
> problem, created the State of Jordan and put a Monarch over it. The
> concept here was to give these people a state and separate them from
> the violence against jews (still going on at the time west of the
> Jordan).

    Disputed.  They did create split off the area east of the river
Jordan from Palestine as the Transjordan area as a separate mandate
(1922), and eventually did give it independence, but there was no way
they were going to relocate all of the Arabs in the Palestine area to
the east side of the river Jordan, and I don't believe they ever
thought that it was possible.  The British were still trying to put
together self-governing institutions in Palestine, which the Jews
sabotaged because they didn't want to have a majority rule in an area
where the majority was Arab, and the Arabs sabotaged because they
didn't want the Jews there *at all* anymore.  The displacement they
had been fearing from the beginning had become widely obvious.

    Also, by this point, it wasn't just "violence against Jews", it
was violence between Jews and Arabs, going in both directions.  Also,
splitting off the Transjordan area upset enough Jews that it created
the Revisionist Movement, led by Jabotinsky, which will be important
below.


> They recognized as the leaders of the Palestinian people (west of
> the Jordan) a man by the name of al Huseini.

    Absolutely disputed, and I have no idea how you came to that
conclusion.  The Husseini family was certainly powerful, but they were
never recognized as the leaders of the Palestinian people.  It was in
fact their lack of control over the way things were playing out that
made them receptive when the Nazis gave them the funds and inspiration
for the Husseini family to lead the 1936 Arab Revolt.

    This is actually an interesting bit of history, because while the
Husseini family members were real psychopaths, they were pretty
straightforward about the way they were fighting, while the Jews,
lacking the strength for straightforward resistance, engaged in
terrorist acts, led primarily by Jabotinsky, heavily against civilian
targets (reference the Irgun Tsvai Leumi).  After a fashion, it's the
Jews that taught the Arabs what they know today, though the truth of
the matter is that terrorist attacks are what you invent as soon as
you can't field an army anymore but still need to fight.


> In 1937, the Peel Commission suggested a conclusion to the violence
> by splitting up the land, where the jews got a very small (less than
> 1/2 of the land Israel got in 1948) discontiguous state and the
> arabs would get the rest - a large contiguous state.

    Not quite correct.  While they did suggest the partitioning in
roughly the ratio you describe, the actual design of the partitioning
was left up to discussion (the Woodhead Commission of 1938), and is
what eventually caused the breakdown in talks with the Arabs -- nobody
could come up with a partitioning plan and relocation program that the
Arabs would agree to.  It was, at its core, a plan for a final element
of displacement, a single painful break to bring peace, and the hope
was that the size of the sacrifice that the Jews were making would
overcome the anger at all the sacrifices that the Arabs had already
endured.  The Arabs never could get past their desire for an absolute
justice with no compromises, however, and ended up walking away from
what was probably the only deal that could have been used as a
starting point for the two cultures to start actually trying to make
friends with each other again.


> The Jews readily accepted this offer.

    Disputed.  It caused a heck of a lot of debate, and although the
Peel Commission results were eventually accepted by the Jews, they
weren't very happy about it, nor did they come up with very good
partitioning schemes.  Granted, there weren't really a lot of very
good partitioning schemes, and the fact that most of them hurt the
Jews far worse than the Arabs didn't make the Arabs feel any more
grateful at being further dispossessed.


> The Palestinians, lead by al Huseini rejected the offer and
> continued violence against the Jews.

    While the Arab leadership did reject all of the Woodhead plans, I
find it difficult to believe that al Husseini was at all involved,
seeing as he had fled by that point to Iraq, unless I have my dates
all wrong.  Furthermore, they were at the table for Woodhead, which
means that they did, in fact, also accept the basic idea as put forth
by Peel.  It was just that they couldn't bring themselves to accept
any of the implementations.

    I will grant that the Arabs put a lot less work into trying than
the Jews, but from their perspective, it wasn't really their
responsibility to do so.


> At the beginning of WWII, Huseini allied himself with Hitler and
> requested that when done with Europe, Hitler institute his
> 'solution' to the Middle-East as well.

    Correct, except that Husseini's relationship with Hitler began
well before then, with Hitler financing the 1936 revolt.


> Huseini supported Hitler, with the endorsement of his people, and
> waged violence against the Jews in the middle-east as what he
> considered part of the WW.

    Husseini did support Hitler, but his actions during WWII were as
an Axis broadcaster and an SS supporter in Yugoslavia.  He never
returned to Palestine, to the best of my knowledge.


> After the end of the war, in 1947, again the Palestinian people were
> offered a still rather large contiguous state where Israel would be
> a weak state strategically.

    Disputed.  The areas were about even, aimed at generating peace
through economic trade, but Israel was not at a significant
disadvantage in the offer.


> The lands offered to the Jews were only the lands where they already
> had a majority and where they had already instituted a de-facto
> government to support the needs of the people.

    Specifically, the area was split up in a weird zig-zag fashion so
that one half would have a majority of Jews, and the other a majority
of Arabs, but I dispute the presence of a de-facto Jewish government,
especially since less than 10% of the land was actually owned by the
Jewish Agency, the rest being Arab or Crown Lands.


> The Jews already had fully opperational health-care facilities and 
> waste-disposal facilities, etc.

     I have no reference to this, one way or the other, nor any
reference to the state of things in Arab areas.  I can grant it
temporarily for the sake of argument in absence of any contrary data.


> The government was already, in essence, established (though without
> international recognition as they were part of Britian's colonies).

    Disputed, even if the above statement was accepted.


> In 1947, the Jews accepted the offer and again the Palestinians as
> well as surrounding Arab countries rejected it. They all attacked
> the small just-founded Jewish state of Israel.

    Specifically, fighting between Israel and the surrounding lands
continued.  It was not one-sided.  Furthermore, throughout the
1948-1949 independence war, Israel went out of its way to purge and
drive out some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs (see the incidents at Lydda,
Ramle, and Deir as particular cases), including massacres of
civilians, driving them to Lebanon and Jordan, setting the stage for
some of the upcoming conflicts.

    It can be claimed, perhaps, that they were fearing for their lives
in a hostile Arab region, but Arab response after 1948 can be
understood only in the context of their reaction to attempted genocide
of Muslims in Palestine by the newly formed Israel.


> Israel was able to defend herself because of 3 things... And the
> more you understand the history and culture of the state, you
> realize that all 3 are crucial...
> 1) They were fighting for their dreams of peace

"I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian
I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With
one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to
encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women
is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody
tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do."
  - Ariel Sharon, in an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956.

"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation,
and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab
population."
  - Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum", 1976.

"Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it
employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the
poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." 
  - Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization,
    speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12,
    1895 entry.

    There were large Israeli underground groups that were clashing
with Arab irregulars even during the 1947 partitioning discussions.
Ben Gurion, referring to the Palestinian refugees, said at the time,
"We must do everything to insure they never do return."  "The old will
die, and the young will forget."  And Ben Gurion was basically the
most decent leader Israel ever had.

    Israel might have been fighting for their dreams of safety within
their own empire, but they hadn't been fighting for dreams of peace
since 1920, and the leaders knew they were going to be displacing the
natives since the beginning.  That isn't a plan for peace.


> 2) They were fighting for their very lives - all the arabs united
> under the rally-cry "kill the jews; drive them into the sea".

    By this point, granted.  Half a century of mutual hatred will do
that to a people, though.  The Jews weren't much better, as some of
the quotes above show.  Sharon in particular is a genocidal
psychopath.


> 3) By miracle.

    Let's not invoke the divine, here.  What happened was entirely
human.


> In 1967, the Arab nations declared war on Israel again (if you wish
> to hear the larger story of how the war started, please ask in
> person to save my poor fingers from typing more).

    I'm afraid I work better with my fingers than my tongue, so
written it will have to be.  The 1967 war was in a way an aftereffect
of the Suez War of 1956, which was a setup between England, France,
and Israel to topple Nasser because of his decision to nationalize the
Suez Canal (remember that the reason for almost all political
decisions can be found by following the money).  See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Suez_War

    That itself was partly a fallout of the Israeli terrorist
operations in Egypt, which they were caught at in 1954 (see the Lavon
Affair), which finally caused Ben Gurion to resign after blaming the
entire thing on his defense minister, Pinhas Levon, who in turn blamed
it on his subordinates.  I'm not sure why Israel was going after
Egypt, since they had been pretty much at peace for the last 8 years.
It may have had something to do with Ben Gurion's expansionist goals,
however.

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash
Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the
Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall
establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab
Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb
and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." 
  - David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion,
    A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

    The fallout of the Suez war was the creation of the Fatah and the
PLO, which had decided that by this point Israel was a treacherous and
deadly neighbor, and nothing short of its complete removal would be
acceptable.  The PLO would later (under Arafat, amusingly enough)
become much milder and give up this position, finally accepting that
Israel wasn't going away.

    By 1967, border skirmishes between Israel and Egypt were pretty
common, instigated from both sides. Egypt finally got fed up with
this, and remilitarized Sinai and blockaded the Straits of Tiran to
Israel, as well as setting up defensive alliances with neighboring
Arab states.  However, the only nation actually shooting at that point
was Syria, which wasn't really involved with this -- they were still
fighting over Israel's National Water Carrier, and the destruction of
their own water diversion facilities by Israel.


> Israel defended herself gaining the Sinai peninsula and Gaza from
> Egypt, the Golan heights (used by Syria to attack Jewish
> settlements) from Syria, and the West Bank from Jordan.

    Self-defense is always such an interesting thing to claim, since
the origin of aggression is so hard to prove.  I will grant that
Egypt's withdrawal of UNEF and militarization of Sinai was a hostile
act, but it could also be seen as a method of enforcement of the
blockade, which was merely economic warfare, and an extension of the
hostilities started by Israel in 1954.  Egypt had certainly been
making a lot of really hostile noises, and Nasser in particular was
crowing about his intent to destroy Israel, but on the other hand,
Israel had been provoking Egypt pretty severely by that point.

    In any case, it is not disputed that Israel launched a preemptive
attack, destroying Egypt's air force while it was still on the ground.
It was a beautiful tactical decision, and basically won the war in two
days, though fighting continued for four more when the rest of the
allied Arab nations jumped in to defend Egypt.  Not many will dispute
that Israel won *because* they shot first.  A "war of defense" is thus
a very interesting term to apply.

    If I stretched, I could accept the term applying to the war in
1948, when they declared themselves a nation and basically made it
clear to the Arabs that they were never getting their land back and
had a militarized nation growing on their doorstep.  But declaring the
Six Day War to be a war of defense is a bit like claiming that the
1948 Arab invasion of Israel was a war of defense, predicting the
eventual Israeli actions once they had a heavily armed state.


> Resolution 242 came out in November of that year declaring that
> Israel need give back lands (though not all) gained from the
> defensive war, in return for peace. They offered the golan back to
> syria in return for peace, but Syria refused to make peace with
> Israel.

    Granted, though negotiations apparently continue to this day.


> They returned the Sinai to Egypt, and Israel has had a peace
> with them ever since.

    Factually incorrect.  Israel actually refused to withdraw troops
from Sinai, and talks broke down in 1970, with Nasser trying a war of
attrition over Suez.  When Nasser died later that year, he was
replaced by Sadat, who tried to get Israeli troops to partially
withdraw in exchange for cease-fires and partial peace agreements,
with a total peace agreement to follow.  Israel's Prime Minister was
Golda Meir at this time, a warhawk who wanted no part of this.  As a
result, Egypt and Syria launched a joint action in 1973, supported by
the Soviets, and would have basically recaptured Sinai and Golan
completely except for the action of a brilliant military leader named
Ariel Sharon who disobeyed his superiors to make a very risky run into
Egypt to cut off the supply lines.  That worked, and a cease-fire was
offered about a month after the fighting began.  Meir was forced to
resign, which opened the way for Henry Kissinger to eventually
negotiate partial withdrawal of Israeli troops from Sinai, under less
agreeable terms than Sadat had originally offered (see Camp David,
1978).  Israel wouldn't completely withdraw until 1982.


> Israel offered the west bank to Jordan, who refused control of the
> land but did accept peace.

    Granted.  Jordan hadn't really wanted to get into the 6-day war at
all to begin with, but felt compelled to support its neighbors.


> The people in the west bank were quite happy that Israel liberated
> them from under Jordanian rule (though Israel had never meant to do
> anything other than to defend herself).

    I can't find a record of the primary part of this statement, and I
dispute the parenthetical for reasons that should be obvious by now.
Do you have a reference to support your claim of the West Bank support
of Israel?


> It seemed that there was a state of peace between the Israeli's and
> the Palestinians for some 13 years or so until a man by the name of
> Yaaser Arafat started gaining popularity and power within the
> Palestinian people. He (related to Huseini - nephew I believe)
> started convincing people that the entire land should be theirs -
> including all of Israel.

    Actually, even that wasn't true.  Even the original PLO only
wanted to revert things to what they were in 1917, and was perfectly
willing to accept an Arab nation with Jewish settlers owning small
areas of land.  This was a pretty widely held opinion, though, and I
doubt Arafat had to much convince anyone of anything.

    Also, Arafat took over leadership of the PLO from his old position
as the head of the Fatah at the end of the 6-day-war, and had held a
fair amount of popularity even before then.  His revolt against Jordan
that got the PLO expelled was in 1970, about the same time as the
attrition war, and he was launching attacks from Lebanon by 1976,
before Sinai was even recovered, and was finally expelled from Lebanon
in 1982 by the Israeli invasion, about the time they were finally
withdrawing from Sinai.

    There was never a period of peace.

    Lebanon itself is a fascinating tale.  To a certain extent, Israel
was justified in going in, but they went so far over the top in
looking for the PLO, massacring civilian refugees and causing
widespread destruction, that the entire world pretty much condemned
them for it.  Israel's actions also created the Hizbollah, which
haunts it to the present day, and prepped Lebanon to become a much
closer ally of Syria.  
 

> He praised Huseini as a hero and a wise leader.

    Oh, yeah.  Arafat's a freak.  He's not really any worse than
Sharon, though.  See above quotes.


> He initiated the tactic of terrorist attacks via suicide bombers and
> thus made a rather peaceful period into a real conflict.

    I dispute that it was peaceful.  See above.  Furthermore, he
didn't have enough of an army to fight any other way, and the Jews
weren't above doing exactly the same thing when they were in the same
position a few decades prior.


> Israel tried to make peace with him (as the now clear leader of the
> palestinian people) on many occasions including the oslo accords,
> camp david, taba marking the largest Israeli concessions. To sum up
> this entire time frame, Israel makes offers to get greeted by
> violence. Israel gives concessions in the hope of peace, and gets
> greeted by violence. Eventually, Israel takes steps to prevent the
> violence and stop the attacks, and she is demonized by the world for
> her acts of self-defense. This is where we sit.

    Well, my dispute of the above claims is pretty well covered above.
Israels steps to "prevent violence" seem to be "get as close to
genocide as we can and get away with it".  They seem to be desperate
to avoid the Arabs doing to them what they did to the Arabs -- forming
a small, well-defended nation on their doorstep that can receive
international support, especially one with almost a century of
vengeance to claim.  On top of that, they aren't any more capable of
keeping hateful Israelis from participating in terrorist attacks than
Arafat has been in keeping hateful Palestinians from doing the same.
Witness the "Revenge of the Babies" bombing of a Palestinian school by
Israelis in April, 2003.

    This isn't to say that the Arabs are without blame.  These people
can hold a grudge like no other, and until they either give that up or
get nuclear weapons, they'll never come out on top.  However, Israel's
attempts to paint itself as the poor victim all this time only
aggravate matters, especially while they wage war against civilians,
trying to find the enemy cells that they create with every attack.
People don't strap bombs to themselves unless they're desperate.
Given a choice between eating regularly and blowing themselves to
bits, people choose to eat regularly when they can.

    In addition, some of the "child bombers" have been manufactured by
Israelis to create international sympathy for themselves.  It came out
only because they missed once and grabbed an American kid.  See
http://www.mediamonitors.net/muthannaalqadi1.html


> Israel has offered to the Palestinian people everything they could
> ask for, yet they were refused peace and the violence continues. I'm
> sorry for the terse ending of the history, but my poor fingers are
> forcing me to make this a bit quicker. Let me know your thoughts or
> any objections to this history, which I believe is quite accurate.

    Well, you have them now.  I'm quite curious to see what you intend
to do with them.