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Originally Posted by Akira
Their are consistent genetic marker shared between all jews and palestinians and lebanese, this is known and understood, but you are falling into the dogma of not accepting the european influx of the Jewish peoples was primarily perceived by those people in the region as a European influx. The behaved and looked european, this is a truism. they brough european methods of warfae with them. That was profoundly intimidating to an established population, and understandably so. i don't consider Israel invalid but I can see with two clear eyes why palestinians, be they Christian, muslim, samaritan and even traditional Jewish, could find the influx threatening. It doesn't take a logical leap of faith to imagine a reaction in the US to the doubling or tripling of say, the Mexicans.
Imagine if they not only doubled the US population in 20 years but built enclaves where only mexican labour was permitted, if they built settlements on land you lived on, even if you had no title.
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I believe you make two critical errors here. The first of which is that you consider people's perceptions as having the ultimate validity, even when those perceptions are misguided. This is not a dogmatic position I am taking, since Jews never left the region in question and were tied to the land through culture and blood. Just because some arabs SAW them as Europeans, this does not justify the hatred.
The second error you make is by not really following through on your analogy. THis is one that I was actually thinking of submitting, myself, since it is actually quite apt. Those Americans who are most prejudiced against people from Mexico, you would probably consider bigoted, no? If so, then why justify the bigotry? The onus should be placed upon the racists and bigots for their own attitudes and not the targets of their hatred.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Akira
That is reactionary but I agree with facets of your argument. I believe it was an American who coined the term "the enemy of my enemy". That Arab interest in the nazis is predictable but wholly misguided as any sane man would agree.
It is also why the arab street invests so much interest in denying the size of the holocaust, because they want a sanitised reason for holding a general view of the Jews as enemies, as an ethereal concept. Everybody tries to sanitise their world, and you or I are no different.
we want our heroes and leaders to be spotless, but they never are. i argued in a another part of the forum about the evil of hiroshima, and sane people tried their best to rationalise and sanitise an horrific event. that's the same mechanism in action, and why the arabs can digest the idea of nazis as the enemy of their enemy. Misguided but predictable, and you know every bad deed the Israelis do makes them run further to that corner, the same way every bad deed by hamas makes Israelis run to the corner of hating Muslims. it's misplaced hatred in both cases.
That's why the attitude of pushing palestinians into the sea , or Israelis for that matter, will only pour water on bad seeds. that's why the only solution to the conflict lies in ditching religious dogma and looking over the fence as people to people, because people can get along but dogmatic zealots can't.
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I think we do agree to at least the extent that we see cause and effect here, but I see the agitprop provided by the Nazis as much more the cause here rather than the effect. There simply wasn't the level of Judenhass UNTIL the the Mufti imported the nazi ideology, and as that ideology gradually won out over a more cooperative ideology, it grew to contaminate more and more ofthe population. I often bring up the "enemy of my enemy" fallacy, myself, but that doesn't quite get at why peopel are enemies in the first place. Since the Palestinian mandate area shifted from one that was generally welcoming or indifferent to Zionism (between the 1880s and 1920s) to one increasingly hostile (Muslim Brotherhood originated in the 20s) to acutely hostile (mid to late late thirties when Nazis thoroughly consolidated power and exerted influence outside Germany), I don't see the influx of a "different" acting people to be the sole cause. If it were, there would have been greater hostility further back in time than there was.
The Muslim Briotherhood and the Nazis provided the catalyst for this change, and I don't think it is reactionary to say so, but merely the acknowleging of the truth.