http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vne.../419aff792d179

“I am not ashamed to stand in front of you and say I am Walid Shoebat and I used to be a Palestinian terrorist,”........Once imprisoned for his violent attempts to kill Israeli citizens, Shoebat now advocates for his former enemy, speaking worldwide about his rare and controversial transformation into a leading Zionist.

In a speech in the Alfred Lerner Cinema, Shoebat rejected occupation and land ownership as causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, instead citing global and rising anti-Semitism, propaganda in Palestinian schooling, Islamic fundamentalism, and the relative silence of pro-Israel activists as major factors contributing to the problem.

“My family hates me now,” said Shoebat, who spoke to his father last month for the first time in years after his father received a call predicting that Shoebat would be shot by those who oppose him.

“If go back home, I have five minutes to live,” said Shoebat. In the Middle East, “I am only safe in Israel proper.”

Shoebat’s family took away his land when he defected from their cause and converted to Christianity. His parents told him that he would have to return to Islam in order to regain acceptance.

“I was always taught that the Jews stole my land. My own family did,” Shoebat said. “I cannot go home ... not because of the Jews but because of my opinion.”

Shoebat said he “woke up and smelled the hummus” at age 33 when his wife asked him to prove that the negative things he claimed about Jews were right. For months he intensively studied Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Bible to understand the people he said he used to hate.

“In order to understand the enemy you must put yourself in his shoes,” said Shoebat.

After “realizing that all that I was taught was a lie, I made a pledge to cleanse my grandfather’s house,” he said.

There is hope folks.

__________________
"...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
(from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "the Younger," circa 4 BC-65 AD

A simple understanding will often solve a lot of problems.

BS. It takes a moron to deny that occupation is not a cause of Arab-Israeli conflict. One has to be seriously demented to believe this.

The cause of the conflict is the creation of a national home in Palestine for all the world's Jews. If the Jews hadn't been dumped there by the Europeans and Americans there would not have been any conflict. Couldn't they just have given them a slice of Germany as recompense?

No, it takes a propagandizes 1 celled dip to claim it is. Just what is occupied? they were fighting Israel and making the same claims before the 1967 war so the west bank and Gaza have ZERO to do with it. that leaves Israel proper so you must be admitting that its the complete inhalation of Israel you want. well, tough. the u.n. recognized Israel with the legitimacy of any other nation and offered the Palestinians their own state. they chose a racist war instead.

The jews were ALREADY there. they have always had a presents and they were getting land that was barren and worthless to turn into something to be proud of. If the "palestinians" had not been allowed to flock to what the jews made and been dumped in teh camps by their fellow arabs as fauder we would not be having this litle talk

__________________
"...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
(from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "the Younger," circa 4 BC-65 AD

The Jews were there before the creation of Israel, but they were not as many as they are now. There were more Arabs than Jews in Israel, still Jews were given more land when Israel was created.

Israel is occupying, the Palestinian Arabs are occupied. The West bank, Gaza and Jerusalem are all occupied! There is still no free Palestine. Its time to put an end to the 1967 occupation and establish a Palestinian State!

Let the Palestinians build a viable state, and the people will have no reason to fight Israel anymore. Of course, it will take time for the resistance to fade away, the unjustices will not be forgotten in a day. But most Palestinians just want to live in safety and be provided a hope for the future. If they are given a choice to fight or live in peace among their own, what do you think they will choose?

Neither wer the PA.No they were not given more land .that is a common myth.The UN established a Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) to devise a solution. Delegates from 11 nations* went to the area and found what had long been apparent: The conflicting national aspirations of Jews and Arabs could not be reconciled.

The contrasting attitudes of the two groups "could not fail to give the impression that the Jews were imbued with the sense of right and were prepared to plead their case before any unbiased tribunal, while the Arabs felt unsure of the justice of their cause, or were afraid to bow to the judgment of the nations."[Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), pp. 369-370.]

Approximately 60 percent of the Jewish state was to be the arid desert in the Negev.

The Arabs constituted a majority of the population in Palestine as a whole — 1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews. The Jews never had a chance of reaching a majority in the country given the restrictive immigration policy of the British. By contrast, the Arabs were free to come — and thousands did — to take advantage of the rapid development stimulated by Zionist settlement. Still, the Jews were a majority in the area allotted to them by the resolution and in Jerusalem.According to British statistics, more than 70% of the land in what would become Israel was not owned by Arab farmers, it belonged to the mandatory government. Those lands reverted to Israeli control after the departure of the British. Nearly 9% of the land was owned by Jews and about 3% by `Arabs who became citizens of Israel. That means only about 18% belonged to Arabs who left the country before and after the Arab invasion of Israel.[Moshe Aumann, "Land Ownership in Palestine, 1880-1948," in Michael Curtis, et al., The Palestinians, (NJ: Transaction Books, 1975), p. 29, quoting p. 257 of the Government of Palestine, Survey of Palestine.]

Nearly 80 percent of what was the historic land of Palestine and the Jewish National Home, as defined by the League of Nations, was severed by the British in 1921 and allocated to what became Transjordan. Jewish settlement there was barred. The UN partitioned the remaining 20-odd percent of Palestine into two states. With Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank in 1950, and Egypt's control of Gaza, Arabs controlled more than 80 percent of the territory of the Mandate, while the Jewish State held a bare 17.5 percent[Historic Palestine comprised what is today Jordan (approximately 35,640 square miles), Israel (8,019 square miles), Gaza (139 square miles) and the West Bank (2,263 square miles).]

At the time of the 1947 partition resolution, the Arabs did have a majority in western Palestine as a whole — 1.2 million Arabs versus 600,000 Jews. But the Jews were a majority in the area allotted to them by the resolution and in Jerusalem.[Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, (NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), p. 252.]

Prior to the Mandate in 1922, Palestine’s Arab population had been declining. Afterward, Arabs began to come from all the surrounding countries. In addition, the Arab population grew exponentially as Jewish settlers improved the quality of health conditions in Palestine.

The decision to partition Palestine was not determined solely by demographics; it was based on the conclusion that the territorial claims of Jews and Arabs were irreconcilable, and that the most logical compromise was the creation of two states. Ironically, that same year, 1947, the Arab members of the United Nations supported the partition of the Indian sub-continent and the creation of the new, predominantly Muslim state of Pakistan while refussing similar in transjordan Palestine.The Peel Commission in 1937 concluded the only logical solution to resolving the contradictory aspirations of the Jews and Arabs was to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Arabs rejected the plan because it forced them to accept the creation of a Jewish state, and required some Palestinians to live under "Jewish domination."
Again, in 1939, the British White Paper called for the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine within 10 years, and for limiting Jewish immigration to no more than 75,000 over the following five years. Afterward, no one would be allowed in without the consent of the Arab population. Though the Arabs had been granted a concession on Jewish immigration, and been offered independence — the goal of Arab nationalists — they repudiated the White Paper.

With partition, the Palestinians were given a state and the opportunity for self-determination. This too was rejected.

Sorry but the PA had their chance. They chose war. The occupation is of israel if anything eing surrounded .

Sorry but thay is easily shown false. they had one at the start and refussed it. Jordan and egypt annexed what was to be the PA state and the PA attacked israel instead so as I said, a PA state is a re herring and was never the issue.

__________________
"...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
(from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "the Younger," circa 4 BC-65 AD

Palestinians never refused their own state. As the refugees' exile continued, some Palestinian groups chose war, considering it as a necessary way to regain what they saw as their rights over the land they came from. Some Palestinians do not oppose a Jewish state as such, but all Palestinians feel that it should not have been established at their expense. They argue that after the World Wars the world allowed a state for Jewish people in Palestine to be established without much concern for the existing indigenous Arab population.

The British census of 1922 counted 752,048 in the British Mandate of Palestine, comprising 589,177 Muslims, 83,790 Jews, 71,464 Christians and 7,617 persons belonging to other groups. If we exclude the Jewish population (although at the time a significant proportion of them would have been considered Palestinian), this implies 88% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 1% other. However, the British censuses are believed by some to have significantly undercounted the Bedouin.

4,082,300 Palestinians are registered as refugees with UNRWA; this number includes the descendants of refugees from the 1948 war, but excludes those who have emigrated to areas outside of the UNRWA's remit. Thus, if the estimates above are correct, 46% of all Palestinians are registered refugees.

Palestinians have made reference to the statement made by Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator who was killed by Zionist extremists, concerning the right of return of refugees: "It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine" (UN Doc Al 648, 194.

UN General Assembly Resolution 194 calls for refugees to be allowed to return to their homes, or to receive compensation if they don't wish to return.

UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw from territories occupied during the Six-Day War, the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from confiscating occupied land and transferring its own population to that territory.

UN Security Council Resolution 446 declares that the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal.

Israel's image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath.

Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN resolution, not a single Palestinian would have become a refugee. An independent Arab state would now exist beside Israel. The responsibility for the refugee problem rests with the Arabs.

The beginning of the Arab exodus can be traced to the weeks immediately following the announcement of the UN partition resolution. The first to leave were roughly 30,000 wealthy Arabs who anticipated the upcoming war and fled to neighboring Arab countries to await its end.
a leader of the Arab National Committee in Haifa, Hajj Nimer el-Khatib, said Arab soldiers in Jaffa were mistreating the residents. "They robbed individuals and homes. Life was of little value, and the honor of women was defiled. This state of affairs led many [Arab] residents to leave the city under the protection of British tanks."[Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, (NJ: Transaction Books, 1984), p.270.]

“The Arab States do not want to solve the refugee problem. They want to keep it as an open sore, as an affront to the United Nations and as a weapon against Israel. Arab leaders don't give a (*)(*)(*)(*) whether the refugees live or die.”

— former director of UNRWA, Ralph Garroway, in August 1958[Terence Prittie, "Middle East Refugees," in Michael Curtis, et al., The Palestinians, (NJ: Transaction Books, 1975) 55.]

Jordan was the only Arab country to welcome the Palestinians and grant them citizenship (to this day Jordan is the only Arab country where Palestinians as a group can become citizens). King Abdullah considered the Palestinian Arabs and Jordanians one people. By 1950, he annexed the West Bank and forbade the use of the term Palestine in official documents.[Speech to Parliament, April 24, 1950, Abdallah memoirs, p. 13; Aaron Miller, The Arab States and the Palestine Question, (DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1986), p. 29.]

Although demographic figures indicated ample room for settlement existed in Syria, Damascus refused to consider accepting any refugees, except those who might refuse repatriation. Syria also declined to resettle 85,000 refugees in 1952-54, though it had been offered international funds to pay for the project. Iraq was also expected to accept a large number of refugees, but proved unwilling. Lebanon insisted it had no room for the Palestinians. In 1950, the UN tried to resettle 150,000 refugees from Gaza in Libya, but was rebuffed by Egypt.

After the 1948 war, Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip and its more than 200,000 inhabitants, but refused to allow the Palestinians into Egypt or permit them to move elsewhere. Egypt’s handling of Palestinians in Gaza was so bad Saudi Arabian radio compared Nasser’ regime in Gaza to Hitler’s rule in occupied Europe in World War II.[Leibler, p. 48.]

In 1952, the UNWRA set up a fund of $200 million to provide homes and jobs for the refugees, but it went untouched.


When plans for setting up a state were made in early 1948, Jewish leaders in Palestine expected the new nation to include a significant Arab population. From the Israeli perspective, the refugees had been given an opportunity to stay in their homes and be a part of the new state. Approximately 160,000 Arabs had chosen to do so. To repatriate those who had fled would be, in the words of Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett, "suicidal folly."
THEY CHOSE TO LEAVE AND ARE HOSYILE ALLIENS.Plane and simple.

In the Arab world, the refugees were viewed as a potential fifth-column within Israel. As one Lebanese paper wrote:

The return of the refugees should create a large Arab majority that would serve as the most effective means of reviving the Arab character of Palestine, while forming a powerful fifth-column for the day of revenge and reckoning.[Lebanese newspaper, Al Said, (April 6, 1950), quoted in Prittie in Curtis, p. 69.]

The Arabs believed the return of the refugees would virtually guarantee the destruction of Israel, a sentiment expressed by Egyptian Foreign Minister Muhammad Salah al-Din:

It is well-known and understood that the Arabs, in demanding the return of the refugees to Palestine, mean their return as masters of the Homeland and not as slaves. With a greater clarity, they mean the liquidation of the State of Israel (Al-Misri, October 11, 1949).

A parallel can be drawn to the time of the American Revolution, during which many colonists who were loyal to England fled to Canada. The British wanted he newly formed republic to allow the loyalists to return to claim their property. Benjamin Franklin rejected this suggestion in a letter to Richard Oswald, the British negotiator, dated November 26, 1782:

Your ministers require that we should receive again into our bosom those who have been our bitterest enemies and restore their properties who have destroyed ours: and this while the wounds they have given us are still bleeding![The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, (NY: The Macmillan Company, 1905), p. 626.]

The idea of retuning hostile traitors is iassinine to any logical rational person.

NO compensation was offered or has been to the hundreds of thousands of jews run out of the now arab states.

UN resolutions are documents issued by political bodies and need to be interpreted in light of the constitution of those bodies. They represent the political viewpoints of those who support them rather than embodying any particular legal rules or principles. Resolutions can have moral and political force when they are perceived as expressing the agreed view of the international community, or the views of leading, powerful and respected nations.

The UN Charter (Articles 10 and 14) specifically empowers the General Assembly to make only nonbinding "recommendations." Assembly resolutions are only considered binding in relation to budgetary and internal procedural matters.

Under Article 25 of the Charter, UN member states are obligated to carry out "decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter," but it is unclear which kinds of resolutions are covered by the term "decisions." Regardless, it would be difficult to show that Israel has violated any Security Council resolutions on their wording and the Council has never sanctioned Israel for noncompliance.

Apparently,the u.n. puts different priorities on the two sections 7 and 6.

I noticed something.The resolutions passed against israel are all under article 6.These are not backed up with any force or
mandate of inforcement or even a requirement for it.They are more along the lines of wishes to follow or sugetions.

The iraq resolutions are under article 7.These are all requirements.They are mandated to be followed or force will be used
to do it.

Clearly,even the u.n. does not see the israeli resolutions in the same light as those for saddam.

I dont know if I have seen all the israeli resolutions but so far this is the case.

Israel ,an occupier??
The Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits the forcible transfer of people of one state to the territory of another state that it has occupied as a result of a war. The intention was to insure that local populations who came under occupation would not be forced to move. This is in no way relevant to the settlement issue. Jews are not being forced to go to the West Bank and Gaza Strip; on the contrary, they are voluntarily moving back to places where they, or their ancestors, once lived before being expelled by others. In addition, those territories never legally belonged to either Jordan or Egypt, and certainly not to the Palestinians, who were never the sovereign authority in any part of Palestine. "The Jewish right of settlement in the area is equivalent in every way to the right of the local population to live there," according to Professor Eugene Rostow, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs.[American Journal of International Law, (1990, vol 84), p. 72.]

As a matter of policy, moreover, Israel does not requisition private land for the establishment of settlements. Housing construction is allowed on private land only after determining that no private rights will be violated. The settlements also do not displace Arabs living in the territories. The media sometimes gives the impression that for every Jew who moves to the West Bank, several hundred Palestinians are forced to leave. The truth is that the vast majority of settlements have been built in uninhabited areas and even the handful established in or near Arab towns did not force any Palestinians to leave.You start a war and loose, you loose land. its always been that way.

__________________
"...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
(from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "the Younger," circa 4 BC-65 AD

__________________
"...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est." [...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand.]
(from Lucius Annaeus Seneca, "the Younger," circa 4 BC-65 AD

No matter how you try to deny the Palestinian refugees, they have an inalienable right to their land and dignity. As for the Arab regimes, they are contemptible, but I would also say the same about Israel.

The Palestinian refugee case is the largest and one of the longest standing refugee cases in the world. The Palestinians should not and will not give up the right of return.

Palestinians were forcibly expelled as a direct result of Zionist military actions [see Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; and Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948.]

Anyhow, the reason a refugee left his or her home is simply irrelevant to his or her rights. No matter why you leave your home, whether in fear, because you were studying abroad, someone urged you to flee, or you were forcibly expelled, your rights are the same. Even though Israel did not forcibly expel all the Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, it deliberately excluded and dispossessed them when it banned them from returning, expropriated their
land and property and refused to implement UN Resolution 194.

Arab states have badly mistreated Palestinian refugees. But the fact is that, by and large, Palestinians did not want to be assimilated, fearing correctly that assimilation would be used as a substitute for their legitimate national and individual rights.