Judaism - Israel - Palestine - Part IV

Part III - This is Part IV

https://www.georgemarx.org/2024/01/judaism-israel-palestine-part-iii.html

In examining whether Israel should be a Jewish state, it is interesting to look at another area where “fairness” and “entitlement” results in obvious discrimination.

Though not exactly the same thing, it should be noted that the below-noted Ivy League Schools discriminate in their admissions policies to the present.  Who is discriminated against today and is it legal? 

A flurry of recent news stories, including in-depth reporting from Susan Dominus at The New York Times, has documented that colleges put a thumb on the scale for boys. If they didn’t, the percentage of college students who are female—58 percent—might be even higher.

This story crops up periodically as if it were something new, but colleges have been favoring boys for years. In 2006, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote a New York Times editorial apologizing “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected” in favor of less-qualified boys. “The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants,” she said.  

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/college-admissions-gender/#:~:text=A%20flurry%20of%20recent%20news,percent%E2%80%94might%20be%20even%20higher.

Tulane University has a total undergraduate enrollment of 7,350 (fall 2022), with a gender distribution of 39% male students and 61% female students. (Google Search – initial listing in response to: “Tulane student body by gender” (1/24/2024))

For the 2022-23 academic year, women and men made up 58 percent and 42 percent of the applicant pool, respectively, but 51 percent and 49 percent of the enrolled class. (Harvard applicants by gender 1/24/2024 Google Search top result)

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It seems unfair to me to selectively discriminate against others. 

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Yes, the Palestinian People had never had an independent country of their own.   I can not imagine one would argue that a resident of New York City should freely accept being forcibly moved to rural Mississippi.  To equate the education, cultural, and religious issues as “basically nothing” is what we are doing with Palestinian People when we have said to them over multiple generations that they had to leave their ancestral homes.

Wealthy absentee landowners sold the land that many poor Palestinian People had lived on for generations in the period starting after World War I.  They grazed animals and grew crops such as olives on relatively small pieces of property.  In some areas there were communal lands as well as areas where Druze and other peoples moved over (often) desert lands living nomadically.

 Wealthy Jews from Western Europe, such as some of the Rothschild’s, helped purchase sizeable portions of the land.  Their relative wealth had no Palestinian counterpart.

A myth or gross “misunderstanding” was also put forth.  It posited  that the Jews would “modernize” Palestine and that the Native Population would welcome the “increased economic opportunities”.    In none of these visions of Palestine and later on Israel was a basic idea of economic equality and creating a true “democracy”.

The Jewish Shtetl Population of Eastern Europe wanted to maintain the Jewish traditions and had little desire to “integrate” into “Christian cultures”.    Why Palestinians should be different is not generally explained ??

Where Jews did want to be treated equitably in Europe was in “integrated institutions” such as in secular schools and universities.  Significant numbers of such people became   physicians, classical musicians and similar.

I grew hearing the myth that the local Arab leaders urged their people to abandon their homes.  Purportedly they were to await their return for after the Jews were driven out of Palestine.   Wealthy Palestinians did leave for safer areas proximate to 1947.

Multiple Israeli academicians and others have confirmed over past decades the roles that Jewish leaders like David Ben-Gurion had in the fleeing of much of the Palestinian People.  Jewish leaders wanted the Palestinian People out so that Jews could take over the land and be a majority population in what became modern Israel.   The politicians and the soldiers supported each other.

Unfortunately most of us have been told a lot of distortions and lies.   Israeli Jews are made “heroes” and Palestinians are viewed as cruel people with no humanity, or as misguided ignorant individuals..

Yes, there were Jews killed by Palestinians in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s!   Such killings related to what had been a Palestinian country becoming increasingly dominated by Jewish immigrants.   The Palestinians had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler in Germany!   Why they should end up being essentially responsible for giving up their country for the Jews is never satisfactorily explained.   It isn’t comparably suggested that Canadians or USians should exit the U.S. and return to Britain and other countries, leaving the U.S. to its Native People.

I hear no blame for World War II on the reparations Germany was required to pay starting in 1919. If we had treated West Germany post World War II as Germany was treated after World War I, the Germans probably would have reacted similarly with violence over time.

Obviously, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 created urgency for Western European Jews.   Hitler’s annexation of Austria and subsequent invasions of Poland and adjacent countries greatly stressed  Eastern European Jews.   They were rarely allowed to emigrate outside of Europe, especially to the U.S. and Canada.   England accepted some children, but few adults.

The Palestinian uprising of 1936 to 1939 was not an irrational rejection of the beleaguered Jews of Europe.  It reflected the increasing threats that were coming to the Palestinians’ economic and political power in their local communities.

The Palestinian resistance to Jews emigrating from the mid-1930’s until 1948 was not “Anti-Semitism” nor a rejection of Judaism and the Jewish People. Zionism, a political movement seeking to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, was a threat to the growing Palestinian nationalist movement.  The Jewish aspirations for an independent country directly conflicted with the Palestinian aspirations for their own state. 

The Jewish population of Palestine rose from:

1.   11% in 1922 to

2.   16.9% in 1931 to

3.   28.1% in 1936 to

4.   30% in 1946 to

5.   32% in 1947

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present

As is noted above, the Jewish population of Palestine in 1947 was 32%.  Google indicates that the 1948-1948 Armistice Agreement gave Israel 77.4% of the land of Palestine.   The Negev desert is 60% of the land mass of Israel.

If one excludes the Negev, the Jewish population of Palestine was roughly its 1947 proportional land mass.   Beersheva, with a 1950 area population of 28,000, and Eilat, with a relatively small population (also) – were the “cities” of the Negev.   Israel wanted Eilat for its Red Sea access (an option avoiding the Suez Canal).   It remains unclear why such a large area, populated “deliberately” by a few Kibbutzim, should belong to Israel at all.

A summary of the UN’s 1947 Partition Plan is explained from “traditional Jewish perspective” – in the Jewish Virtual Library which I have copied at:

https://www.georgemarx.org/2024/01/the-1947-1948-partition-plan-for.html

Specifics of it may be noted further along in this series of writings.

 


Part V 

https://www.georgemarx.org/2024/02/judaism-israel-palestine-part-v.html


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