[andyfox]

No doubt Jews fare better in the west today than they do in Arab countries. We were talking about the advent of Zionism, however, and there is also no doubt that historically they have fared better under Islam than under Christianity. I've quoted extensively, in the past, from Lewis's and others works, so I won't bore everyone by doing it again. While I believe that the so-called "Golden Age" was a myth, and we can find numerous examples of poor treatment of Jews in Islamic countries in history, there is no doubt and no question that they historically fared far better under Islam than under Christianity. They were not "severely mistreated" as they were in the West and in Russia.

We have a horrible legacy of anti-Semitism in this country. But I would still say that Jews fared much better in this country than they did in Europe. There's a big difference between being beaten twice a month than being beaten every day. Twenty-eight or twenty-nine nice days. I'm not sure if it's an apt comparison, but yes, Jim Crow is better than slavery. Every day of the month.

Many Jews did not live in Palestine at the time of the development of the Zionist program. Benny Morris, citing the most careful study of the demography, Justin Mccarthy's The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate, indicates 457,000 total population in 1881: about 400,000 Muslim, 42,000 Christians, and 13,000-20,000 Jews.

The impasse that Jews and Palestinians face today is, with all due respect, your attitude. A complete unwillingness to see any degree of responsibility on one's side for the problem. Jewish actions did more than "exacerbate the problems somewhat." Much of what I write below is from Benny Morris's Righteous Victims. Morris is an Israeli Jew who has made headlines in recent years for his increasingly right-wing beliefs about the current situation in Israel.

From the beginning, the Zionist spoke of cooperation and friendship. But they were hiding their true intentions, which were revealed by their actions. In 1899. Herzl wrote to the Arab notable Husuf Zia al-Khalidi of Jerusalem that Zionism did not pose a threat of displacement for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine; rather, the arrival of an industrious, talented, well-funded people would materially benefit them. But in private he was thinking only of displacement and transfer. In his diary he wrote, "We must expropriate gently . . . We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by . . . denying it any employment in our country. . . . Both t process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Many Jews who came to Palestine in the Second Aliyah were veteran of the self-defense groups that had formed inside Russia. Self-defense was to be the major pillar of their ideology in Palestine. Many of them instantly translated their Russian experiences into Palestinian: Arab = gentile, Arab marauding = pogrom, local antagonism and territorial feuding = anti-Semitism.

It was natural, at this time, for Europeans to look down on the natives as Europeans had always done. The settlers "looked down" upon "these barbarians" [Chaim Hissin]. "There is no more cowardly, hypocritical and false race than this race" [Avshalom Feinberg]. "We are dealing here with a semi-savage people, which has extremely primitive concepts . . . These Semites--they are anti-Semites" [Moshe Smilansky]

The settlers quickly began to behave like lord and masters. Some Jewish observers saw this as the "new Jews" compensating for centuries of being at the receiving end of gentile violence. [All of them cited Christian violence, none Arab mistreatment.] Ahad Ha'Am, as early as 1891 saw the Jews exhibiting "a tendency to despotism as happens always when a slave turns into a master." He noted that "the attitude of the colonists to their tenants and their families is exactly the same as toward their animals."

Ha'am noted that these attitudes turned into deeds, that the Zionists "behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass without justification, beat them shamefully without sufficient cause and then boast about it."

The Zionists sought to radically change the status quo, but as much land as possible, settle on it, and eventually turn an Arab-populated country into a Jewish homeland. For decades they tried to camouflage their real aspiration. They were, however, certain of their aims and of the means needed to achieve them:

"The ultimate goal is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand year. The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand, declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland" [Vladimir (Ze'ev) Dubnow].

"The thing we must do now is to become as strong as we can, to conquer the country, covertly, bit by bit. We can only do this covertly, quietly. We will not set up committees so that the Arabs will know what we are after, we shall act like silent spies" [Eliezer Ben-Yehuda].

"We have made it a rule not to say too much, except to those we trust. The goal is to revive our nation on its land if only we succeed in increasing our numbers here until we are the majority. There are now only five hundred thousand Arabs, who are not very strong, and from whom we shall easily take away the country if only we do it through stratagems" [Ben-Yehuda and Yehiel Michaal Pines].

The Palestinians saw, from the Jews' actions, what their true intentions were. "We are a nation going to its death before the Zionist stream in this land of Palestine."

What I see when I see you and Chris Alger argue is that both sides refuse to even acknowledge the other side's point of view. The fact is that the Zionists were uninterested in the Palestinian Arabs' nexus with the soil or in Jerusalem's sanctity to Islam. Nor were they able or willing to recognize the Palestinians as a people. In many respects they still are not because they have always regarded all of Palestine as its patrimony. The fact that it regarded partition as merely a stepping-stone to the whole land might well be behind their later accusation that Yasser Arafat secretly harbored the same thoughts and plans.

Time to get the history right and then move beyong to make a new history.