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.
- Israel's existence refutes Pascal Bruckner's generalization that "There is no state that is not founded on crime and coercion."
- "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.
- Along with Hitler, the mufti was the chief unintended creator of the Zionist state. Had it not been for Husseini's ruthless, extremist, and vicious opposition to any Jewish presence in the Holy Land, modern Israel may not even exist today. Some Arabs realized this irony, such as the Arab League's American representative, Cecil Hourani, who noted in 1947 that "If a Jewish State is established in Palestine, [Zionists] will have to thank the Mufti."
No less ironically, the one Arab leader who did accept the Jewish presence in Palestine and even saw it benefiting the Arabs, King Abdullah of Transjordan, nearly choked the Zionist enterprise to death at birth. As Efraim Karsh observes, "Had Abdullah discarded his Palestine (and Greater Syria) ambitions and played a less prominent role in the Palestine conflict, the Arab states might well have contented themselves with political posturing and military support for the Palestinians." - 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)
July 31, 2016 update: In the article to which this is an addition, I stated that Palestinians "are overwhelmingly the off-spring of invaders and immigrants seeking economic opportunities." My blog today looks at the authoritative Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, dating from 1910-11, to confirm this point and provide details on the many, many peoples who lived in the area known as Palestine.
July 18, 2020 update: Israelis continue to be accused of "stealing Palestinian land." Moshe Dann dispatches this calumny in an article today, "What is not 'private Palestinian land?'" He establishes that because most land on the West Bank "has not been registered, proving ownership is often difficult." It's a complex picture that again vindicates Israeli practices.
