As for the whole "zionist" movement, the Palestinians were offered (and I believe the offer stands) statehood. They've rejected it opting to continue to fight for the day when Israel is removed. Frankly, Israel should just take Gaza and the West Bank back. If the Arabs and other Islamists think so highly of them, when not carve out part of southern Jordon, Lebanon, and western Saudi Arabia for them? Because it's not about Palestine it's about destroying Israel.
I can now fully dedicate myself to addressing this comment. First, a little history for you:
According to Fred M. Donner, Professor of Near Eastern History, The Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago in a letter to the Princeton Alumni Weekly
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/web_exclusives/more/more_letters/letters_doran.html
[C]heck it out in the standard works on the Palestine-Israel conflict by Professors Charles D. Smith, Mark Tessler, or Deborah J. Gerner, from which I draw the following: The population of Palestine (west of the Jordan river) in 1880 was under 590,000, of whom 96 percent were Arabs (Muslim or Christian); roughly 4 percent of the population was Jewish.
By 1914, the population of Palestine was about 650,000. Of this, the Jewish population was about 80,000, or a little over 12 percent. Of the 88 percent remaining, 570,000 people, Israeli and non-Israeli scholars estimate that at least 550,000 were Palestinians (Christian or Muslim) who were descendants of families in Palestine already in the 1840s — or almost 85 percent of the total 1914 populaton of Palestine. The great majority of them, in other words, were not recent immigrants.
There was a lot of immigration to Palestine between 1880 and 1948, of course, but most of it was by European Jews, who came in several well-defined aliyot ("waves"), drawn to Palestine by the Zionist dream or fleeing economic hardship and persecution in Europe. The first aliya (up to 1903) brought 25,000 new Jewish immigrants, roughly doubling the Jewish population of Palestine.
The second aliya (1904-1913) brought another 35,000 Jews. The third aliya (1919-1939) saw the arrival of 350,664 Jewish immigrants, according to British Mandate statistics.
In 1945, the Jewish population of Palestine stood at about 554,000, or about 30.6 percent of the total population of Palestine at that time, which was 1.8 million. Mr. Schell is absolutely right: Some Jewish communities have existed in Palestine for hundreds of years. But, as the figures above make clear, most Jews in Israel today are, in relative terms, newcomers — descendants of people who arrived during the past three or four generations; to call them "colonists,"....is not inappropriate.
He continues:
As we see, most Palestinians of today can trace their ancestry to families who have been resident in Palestine for hundreds of years. The debate over immigration figures is, of course, merely part of the broader effort by Palestinians and Israelis to delegitimize each other by claiming the other side to be interlopers. [The author's correspondent's] evident desire to cast doubt on the historical roots of the Palestinians' claim to their land suggests that he has been taken in, like many other people, by such works as Joan Peters's tract "From Time Immemorial," which popularized for obvious political purposes the myth that many Palestinians were descendants of recent immigrants.Such a view is simply not supported by the evidence.
The reason I begin with this information is in order that you might better understand the next part a bit better.
According to Avraham Sela in The Continuum Political Encycolpedia of the Middle East:
During the time of the British Mandate, the Balfour Declaration, signed in 1917, stated that the government of the United Kingdom supported the establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. This exacerbated tensions between the Arabs living in Mandate Palestine and the Jews who emigrated there during the Ottoman period. Signed in January 1919, the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement promoted Arab-Jewish cooperation on the development of a Jewish National Homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East, though this event had little to no effect on the conflict.
In 1922 the League of Nations formally established the British Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan by assigning all of the land east of the Jordan River to the Emirate of Jordan, ruled by Hashemite King Abdullah but closely dependent on Britain, leaving the remainder west of the Jordan as the League of Nations British mandate of Palestine. The semi-autonomous Arab Emirate of Transjordan was later created in all Palestinian territory east of the Jordan river (roughly 77% of the mandate).
The following is attributed to Wikipedia.org -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Arab-Israeli_conflict
The conflicting forces of Arab nationalism and the Zionist movement created a situation which the British could neither resolve nor extricate themselves from. The rise to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany created a new urgency in the Zionist movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, and the evident intentions of the Zionists provoked increasingly fierce Arab resistance and attacks against the Jewish population (most notably in the preceding 1929 Hebron massacre, the activities of the Black Hand, and during the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine). The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husayni, led opposition to the idea of turning part of Palestine into a Jewish state. He objected to any form of Jewish homeland on what he regarded as Arab land. In search for help in expelling British forces from Palestine, thus removing the enforcer of the Zionist enterprise, the Grand Mufti sought alliance with the Axis Powers.
The response of the British government was to banish the Mufti (where he spent much of World War II in Germany and helped form a Muslim SS division), curb Jewish immigration, and reinforce its police force. However, many of the British reinforcements were Arabs who supported and collaborated in the Great Arab Uprising. The Jewish leadership (Yishuv) "adopted a policy of restraint (havlaga) and static defense in response to Arab attacks."[5] It was at this time that critics of this policy broke away from the Hagana (the self-defense organization of the Yishuv) and created the more right-wing militant Irgun, which would later be led by Menachem Begin in 1943. For a list of Irgun attacks on the Palestinian population during this period, see List of Irgun attacks during the 1930s.
A British Royal Commission of Inquiry that came to be known as the Peel Commission was established in 1936. In its 1937 report, it proposed a two-state solution that gave the Arabs control over all of the Negev, much of the present-day West Bank, and Gaza and gave the Jews control over Tel Aviv, Haifa, present-day northern Israel, and surrounding areas. The British were to maintain control over Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and surrounding areas. The Jews were bitterly divided over the Peel Commission,[6] but they ultimately accepted the principle of partition.[7] The Arabs, however, rejected it while demanding "an end to Jewish immigration and land sales to Jews, calling for independence of Palestine as an independent Arab state."[4]
Violence against the British Mandate continued to mount throughout the 1940s, with attacks by the Irgun, assassination of British Mandate officials by the Lehi, and the 1946 King David Hotel bombing.
As of 1947 the population was reported as 1,845,000, consisting of 608,000 Jews and 1,237,000 Arabs and others.[8]
It was against this backdrop that the United Nations in 1947 proposed the Partition Plan which proposed the establishment of Arab and Jewish states in Palestine. The Arabs had rejected the plan while the Jews had accepted it. This is what led to what Israel refers to as its war of independence and the Arabs refer to as
al-Nakba.
I again refer to Wikipedia.org -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_exodus
In the first few months of the civil war the climate in the Mandate of Palestine became volatile. Although throughout this period both Arab and Jewish leaders tried to limit hostilities between Jews and Arabs[3]. According to historian Benny Morris, the period was marked by Arab initiatives and Jewish reprisals[4]. On the other hand, Flapan points out a pattern in which terrorist attacks by Irgun and Lehi resulted in Arab retaliations and then 'the Haganah - while always condemning the actions of Irgun and Lehi - joined in with an inflaming counterretaliation'[5]. Typically the Jewish reprisals were directed against villages and neighborhoods from which attacks against Jews had originated[6], were more damaging than the provoking attack and included killing of armed and unarmed men, destruction of houses and sometimes expulsion of inhabitants[7]. The Zionist groups of Irgun and Lehi reverted to their 1937-1939 strategy of placing bombs in crowded places such as bus stops, shopping centres and markets. Their attacks on British forces reduced British troops' ability and willingness to protect Jewish traffic[8]. General conditions deteriorated: the economic situation became unstable and unemployment grew[9]. Rumours spread that the Husaynis were planning to bring in bands of fallahin to take over the towns[10]. Some Palestinian Arab leaders send their families abroad. The Arab Liberation Army embarked on a systematic evacuation of non-combatants from several frontier villages in order to turn them into military strongholds [11]. Arab depopulation occurred most in villages close to Jewish settlements and in vulnerable neighborhoods in Haifa, Jaffa and West-Jerusalem[12]. The poor inhabitants of these neighborhoods generally fled to other parts of the city. Many rich inhabitants fled further away, most of them expecting to return when the troubles were over[13]. By the end of March 1948 thirty villages were depopulated[14] and around 100,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled to Arab parts of Palestine, such as Nazareth, Nablus and Bethlehem or had left the country altogether[15] to Transjordan or Egypt.
According to [Ilan Pappé, Professor of History, University of Exeter] the Zionists organised a campaign of threats[24], consisting of the distribution of threatening leaflets, 'violent reconnaissance' and, after the arrival of mortars, the shelling of Arab villages and neighborhoods[25]. The idea of 'violent reconnaissance' was to enter a defenceless village at night, fire at everyone who dared leave his or her house and leave after a few hours[26]. Pappé also notes that the Haganah shifted its policy from retaliation through excessive retaliation to offensive initiatives[27]. During the 'long seminar', a meeting of Ben-Gurion with his chief advisors in January 1948, the departure point was that it was desirable to 'transfer' as many Arabs as possible out of Jewish territory, and the discussion focussed mainly on the implementation[28]. The experiences in a number of attacks in February 1948, notably those on Qisarya and Sa'sa', were used in the development of a plan, detailing how enemy population centers should be handled[29]. According to Pappé plan Dalet was the master plan for the expulsion of the Palestinians[30].
By May 1, 1948, two weeks before the Israeli Declaration of Independence, nearly 175,000 Palestinians had fled.
On 9 April 1948, 254 men, women and children were butchered at Deir Yassin by Zionist forces to secure the road to Tel Aviv. Because this was one of the few such episodes that received media attention in the West, the Zionist leadership did not deny it, but sought to label it an aberration by extremists. In fact, however, the atrocity was part of a broader plan designed by the Zionist High Command, led by Ben Gurion himself, which was aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the British mandate territory and the seizure of as much land as possible for the intended Jewish state.
There is an interesting article commemorating this event and recounting the atrocities therein at
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9445.shtml
There is obviously as much of a right for the Palestinians to remain and return to the lands which they occupied before the arrival of the emigrating Jews, despite any and all claims to the contrary, and despite any and all attempts on the part of the "Greater Israel" adherents to post their own illegal "facts on the ground" through settlements and the apartheid wall.
The reason I felt the need to recount all of this is in order to give you a wider scope of what actually occurred during this period. It was not a matter of the Palestinians simply being "offered" statehood and rejecting it as you so blithely state here. As it stands, the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 has never been revoked or rescinded, and yet it is the State of Israel which today stands in the way of its implementation, for which they have been censured on various occasions and have wilfully ignored, with strong US backing.
The claims by radical Zionists that the Palestinians should just "go back to Jordan" and other ridiculous statements to that end are so indicative of the dishonesty inherent in their "arguments" and the complete lack of any real knowledge of the issues involved. I do not doubt the cynical misinforming of those who are better informed, but believe that the vast majority of spewers of this nonsense are just ignorant of the facts.
