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