The Israel/Palestine Conflict Mk. IV

Godwin's law is a crutch for lazy apologists who appear not to realise that Godwin does not preclude valid comparisons

Transjordan was part of Mandatory Palestine.

Err, you seem to be confused as to the meaning of anachronistic.

When the Arab states invaded Israel, the State of Israel had been declared.

With no defined territory, so there being no 'Israeli territory' as such to invade.

The territory was clearly defined by the UN committee, the borders of which were confirmed by the UN General Assembly

And the Provisional Government deliberately did not designate the Partition Proposal's borders as the new state's borders. It was in the original draft of the Declaration, was deliberately removed.

Israel didn't attack the Arabs, it was the other way around. If the Arabs had not have attacked, Israel today would be in the borders provided to them in the UN resolution

I don't accept this interpretation of events, it's simplistic at best. It implies that Israel was a clearly established state at peace and then suddenly the Arab states invaded. The Arab states invaded the area that had until the previous day been Mandatory Palestine, which was already involved in a civil war. Indeed, as Yigal Allon said, had the Arab states not invaded, the Zionist paramilitaries (which would eventually form the IDF) would have taken control of the whole mandatory territory. Israel had been declared a matter of hours before the Arab states' invasion, and at the time was obviously unrecognised, and more crucially had no defined borders or territory. Indeed, the Arab states' initial invasion (with the possible exception of the Syrians) was into the areas proposed for the Arab state under the Partition Plan. The decision to go to war had been made weeks earlier, when they did not know the Jewish Agency planned to declare a state so soon; if anything the Israeli Declaration of Independence was a reaction to the anticipated invasion, rather than the other way round.

You seem to be treating the de facto territorial borders which became established as a result of this process as already established borders. With the possible exception of Jordan (who would gain legitimisation of their control of the West Bank), what did the Arab states have to gain from a full peace if not territory (and to a lesser extent, repatriation of the refugees)? To them the Israeli-held area was merely conquered territory, which they wanted something in exchange for giving legitimacy to.

X.

This is mostly just a matter of semantics. None of it changes the fact that the Arab states (with the possible exception of Jordan, which was a special case) invaded the territory of Mandetory Palestine with the aim of preventing the emergence of the Jewish state

I would say that given the genocide the Jewish people suffered, given the fact that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a close personal friend of Hitler's, given the Secretary-General of the Arab League called for genocide of Jewish people in 1947/48 and the five well-armed, professional armies of the Arab states ganged up on Israel (a tiny state taking up 2% of the Middle East, with a population of 500,000), given the Arab world repeatedly tried to wipe Israel out during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, and given they repeatedly refused reasonable peace offers, given Hamas' charter incites genocide by calling for the murder of all Jews everywhere.... we know who the aggressor is.

The aggressor is an ideology that cannot abide Jews living in the Middle East unless they live as dhimmis. It is an ideology that counts ISIS, Al-Qaeda and Hamas as its greatest champions. It is an ideology that saw an innocent French man beheaded yesterday and 15 innocent British tourists gunned down in front of their families. The aggressor is an ideology that throws gay men off tall buildings and performs "honour" killings against "wanton" women, and commits genocide against the Yezidi and the Kurds (the latter of which have close relations with Israel). It is a death cult ideology.

Tell us, which side do you support?

That's significantly different from saying they "invaded/attacked Israel".

Eventually they were, yes, but that was by no means clear from the start, and certainly not by the Arabs at that point. For instance, take the dispute over the DMZs in the armistices.

True, you can take that point of view and say that essentially both/neither (depending on how generous you are) were particularly at fault for the failure to deliver peace in this specific instance, but that would only prompt a further analysis of the conflict up to that point

What a load of ramble.

Tbh this conflict is a no-brainer. It's civilisation vs savagery.

A load of ramble? Is that the kind of wit and eloquence we can expect on TSR these days?

Instead of a load of ramble, I'd put it to you that your post was a crock of ****.



What are you talking about? They did. There are almost no indigenous Jews living in the Middle East outside Israel. You are obviously ignorant of Middle Eastern history some I'm unsure whether it's worth engaging you on that point



Of course they fit into a single bracket; it's called Islamism.



You'll "save [your] time and hope"? What does that even mean?

Where on earth did you go to school? I'd be asking for my money back; your prose style is the linguistic equivalent of fingernails down a blackboard.

That level of balance in the first post...