Some additional points that did not fit my article today, "Not Stealing Palestine but Purchasing Israel":
- The ultimate justification for the Jewish presence is, of course, the ancient tie and the love of Zion, not modern land purchases; but these purchases reinforce the legitimacy of the in-migration.
- "Palestine" today represents the country that would rise out of Israel's elimination; but in the decades before the creation of Israel in 1948, the term represented Zionist aspirations.
The anti-Zionist argument emphasizes that, at the time of the British withdrawal in 1948, Jews owned only 6 to 10 percent of the territory's land area. True, but when one discounts uncultivated and public land, the percentage becomes very much higher.
The United States Government engaged in conquest against Indians but it too purchased substantial portions of its patrimony, especially the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Alaska Purchase of 1867.
The 1947 United Nations partition borders were drawn precisely to include within the Jewish area those lands that had been purchased; had the Palestinians and Arab states not responded to partition by trying to snuff out the "Zionist entity," Israel today would be a quite tiny state delineated by the land purchased during the Mandatory era.
By coincidence, the Wall Street Journal published an article yesterday, "What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?" by Warren Kozak that makes a parallel point to my own: "It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II... Yet within a very brief time, this epic calamity disappeared, so much so that few people today even remember the period. How did this happen in an era when Palestinian refugees have continued to be stateless for generations?"
(June 21, 2011)
