Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Is Palestine a country?

Source: Yahoo Answers

Is Palestine a country? Or is it a part of Israel? by mande

I often get confused on this... Is Palestine a country or just a disputed area inside Israel like "Kashmir" in India?
 
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
 
This is a HUGE question!!!
And the answers will vary depending on who answers it.

Right after WWII, the British (& the UN) made the decision to carve out a chunk of what was the original homeland of the Jews - Israel, to give to Jews to have their own homeland once again. (It had been taken from them almost 2,000 years ago).
The reasons for this are fairly obvious; everywhere Jews went, (Germany for instance), people didn't want them there, and the world kinda sat by and let them be almost annihilated by the Germans.

So, the obvious question was "what about the Arabs already living here?" (They were not called Palestinians yet))
So they gave Israel this small chunk of land, and gave the Arabs this giant chunk of land with all the best fertile farmland, water sources, etc., and named that TransJordan.

Mission accomplished, you might think - the Arabs got without question the best and biggest chunk of land, and the Jews got this fairly miserable piece with malarial swamps, etc.

The Jews started pouring in from all over the world to live in their new(old) homeland, and brought all their skill and money to rebuild.
They drained the swamps, made fertile farmland there, built viable towns & cities out of what were slums, and then Arabs from all over started immigrating there, because it was a better place to live, and there were more jobs there.

Most of the people who call themselves Palestinians now, living there, are from these Arabs who did not even have roots there.
These people hated the fact the Jews were there, and started the Palestinian movements you see still going on today, to try to take the land from the Jews, saying it's theirs.

The issue is MUCH more complicated than this, but I'm trying to show a part of the story that never gets told, and that is:
They ALREADY gave the Arabs/Palestinians their own land & country, and it's what is known today as JORDAN.
But that's not good enough, they want it all.

Anyway, to clarify one thing; there is not, nor has there ever been, a country named Palestine.
It's what the territory of Israel was called in antiquity, but there has NEVER been a nation called Palestine.
The people there didn't even call themselves that until after WWII.
 
Asker's Rating: 5 out of 5
Asker's Comment:
Thank you ! That was an informative one. By the way I neither support Muslims nor Jews. But it is a fact that Muslims are aggressive & they always see themselves as supreme & others as enemies. They take the path of violence which they claim themselves as "Jihad" or "Holy war".

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