[fastpat]

Originally posted by Noah
I know this is kind of pointless, but what the heck. Here's a quick history of Israel and the Middle East, for those who believe that Israel "stole" land from the Palestinians.

For about 500 years, the Ottoman Empire ruled the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire was dissolved in the aftermath of World War 1, and France and Britain became the colonial powers in the Middle East. Algeria, Morocco, Syria, and Lebanon became French colonies, and Transjordan (what is today Israel and Jordan), Egypt, and Iraq became British colonies. The Arabian peninsula was largely autonomous, ruled by Ibn Saud.

Starting in the late 1800's, successive waves of Jews immigrated to what is today the state of Israel, especially in the years before World War 2 when the prescient Jews fled the ensuing genocide. During the second world war, the Middle East Arabs openly sided with Hitler, mostly because of their shared hatred of Jews (the Koran is positively obsessed with the Jews, if anyone was wondering where the Muslim hatred of Jews comes from...). Anyway, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in between inciting riots that killed thousands of Jews, visited Berlin and was greeted as a Jew-killing hero by Hitler. Meanwhile, thousands of Jews living in Israel were desperately trying to let the British Mandate government allow them to enlist in the British army to fight Hitler, even as the Arabs were arming themselves for the hoped-for Axis swoop into the Middle East, where the Final Solution could be continued.

At the end of WW2, there were several hundred thousands of Jewish refugees from Europe, mostly Holocaust survivors. They wanted to come to Israel, but the British Mandate government restricted immigration. There was various Jewish-Arab-British violence, and finally the British relented and decided to allow a vote in the United Nations on whether to allow partition of Israel between two equal states, Arab and Jewish. The UN and the British approved the partition plan, and in May 1948 Israel declared statehood. The next day several Arab armies invaded, with the explicitly-stated goal of killing every Jew in Israel. But the Jews repulsed the attacks.

This is where the Palestinian "refugee" crisis comes from -- mostly from the Arabs who fled their villages to allow the incoming Arab armies to slaughter the Jews more freely. Until 1967, there was no West Bank or Gaza Strip -- there was Jordanian territory (the West Bank) and Egyptian territory (the Gaza Strip). When Israel was once again invaded by several Arab armies in 1967 from those two areas, it occupied the areas to protect itself (of course, Gaza is unoccupied as of last summer, and we see what that's gotten everyone...). The "Palestinians" never were a nation or a people. They're Middle East Arabs. And Gaza and the West Bank were Egypt and Jordan until 1967.

That's just a quick stream-of-consciousness recap. Enjoy, Pat.

Great, you've repeated the Israeli version, but left out a couple of key points.

Number one, where did the immigrating Jews get the land in Palestine during the late 19th century Zionist movement?

Where did they get the land after World War One?