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This Land is Whose Land?
By anitamckay on 2010-11-10 07:53:38
If I were Jewish, I would want there to be a Jewish homeland. The Holocaust alone would be enough. Any other pogrom
would be enough. Consider the violence against Jews which took place in Romania in 1941. Among other forms of violence,
200 Jews were subjected to the inhumane experience of being taken to a slaughterhouse, put on a conveyor belt, and killed
in the way food animals are. The idea of a defined, defensible state would give me comfort, whether I chose to live there or
not.
None of this justifies what is happening in the Middle East today. None of this addresses whether the modern state of Israel
was created in the best place, or whether the creators could have predicted trouble from the start. The borders of Israel were
determined primarily by the British after WWI.
The world has found no good way to determine what lands belong to which people. Look at the problems in Africa caused
by Western nation making. Look at Macedonia. Does it belong to Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, itself? How are these decisions
made? Who gets to make them? Someone is always quick to jump up to point out that some of the world's disputes have
been going on for millennia, and that nobody can sort them out now. Perhaps. What I think we need, though, is fewer people
taking sides, and more working on figuring out a just way to solve the disputes.
Now let's look at the State of Israel. It is roughly 8,000 square miles, or roughly the size of New Hampshire or Vermont..
More than half of the area is desert. The population is about 7.3 million. Over 4.5 million of these immigrated since the
formation of the state. The population density in Israel is about 300 per square mile. The land governed by the Palestinian
Authority has a population density of 550 per square mile.
What were the British thinking? How can the region sustain the numbers is has now, let alone a population increase of close
to 2% a year? How can there be peace when millions of people have been added to an area lacking the resources for the ones
it had? England considered Madagascar as an alternative location, an idea first proposed in 1885 and periodically, even by
the Nazis for a brief time. I doubt that Madagascar would have worked, since that island's resources were depleted by
colonialism, but was there no other location for Israel?
How could anyone have expected peace in the Middle East? When will we learn that political determinations made from
outside a group are seldom likely to gain favor, especially when it is to the detriment of that group? When will we as a
country stop leaping to take sides and work to find peaceful solutions which will take the needs of both sides into account?
