Comments on: What does a blockade feel like? Video depicts last night of ‘Spirit of Humanity”s attempted passage to Gaza

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:27:30 +0000

Theodor Herzl supported the transfer idea. Land in Palestine was to be gently expropriated from the Palestinian Arabs and they were to be worked across the border "unbemerkt" (surreptitiously), e.g. by refusing them employment.[103] Herzl's draft of a charter for a Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) gave the JOLC the right to obtain land in Palestine by giving its owners comparable land elsewhere in the Ottoman empire. According to Walid Khalidi this indicates Herzl's "bland assumption of the transfer of the Palestinian to make way for the immigrant colonist."[104] " target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_and_Palestin...

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:19:54 +0000

IV: The "Concept of Transfer in Zionism" According to Nur Masalha the concept of 'transfer' was deeply rooted in mainstream Zionism. The debate on the 'idea of transfer' in political Zionism became popular in the later 1980s when the State of Israel declassified documents pertaining to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War period and the so-called New Historians began publishing articles and books based on those documents. Proponents of this theory say that the driving force of the 1948 Palestinian exodus was the Zionist leaders' belief that a Jewish state could not survive with a strong Arab population and that a population transfer would be most beneficial.

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:17:10 +0000

III: The Peel Commission's plan and the Yishuv's reaction The idea of population transfer was briefly placed on the Mandate's political agenda in 1937 by the Peel Commission. The commission recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It called for a "transfer of land and an exchange of population", including the removal of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from what would become the Jewish state[77], along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. According to the plan 'in the last resort' the transfer of Arabs from the Jewish part would be compulsory.[78] The transfer would be voluntary in as far as Arab leaders were required to agree with it, but after that it would be almost inevitable that it would have to be forced upon the population.[79] " target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_P...

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:16:16 +0000

II: Israeli historian and former diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote: The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war should not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article in the mindset and thinking of the main leaders of the Yishuv. These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise orders to that effect were issued by the political leaders.[76]

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:15:04 +0000

I: Origins of the ‘Transfer Idea’ Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes: Many if not most of Zionism's mainstream leaders expressed at least passing support for the idea of transfer during the movement's first decades. True, as the subject was sensitive they did not often or usually state this in public[74]. Morris also concludes that Zionisms aim was "to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population". According to Morris only after Arab resistance emerged did this become a rationale for transfer.[75] Other authors, including Palestinian writers and Israeli New Historians, have also described this attitude as a prevalent notion in Zionist thinking and as a major factor in the exodus.

By: Thom

Thom — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:37:39 +0000

Both the hearsay rules (produce the original source, or a reason why the original source and every link in the chain to the witness on the stand is reliable) and the best evidence rule (produce the original document, not what someone wrote about or said was in the original document) in courts are based on this principle. Even if the person you are talking to isn't lying or mistaken, their source could have been.

By: Thom

Thom — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:27:44 +0000

No, the entire edifice of historical scholarship is a system of lazy, thinly veiled copying and pasting. Very very few papers go to the original sources. That is what makes it so easy for propaganda and false quotes and statistics to spread. We have seen it in action on this very website. Someone will say "the says that Israel committed this or that action." Then you check it and what the article says is that "Hamas says that Israel committed this or that action". In realistic terms, a newspaper that quotes a claim by Hamas does not make that claim any more reliable than the original source. Reliability decays every time something is quoted. If a 99% reliable source quotes a 50% reliable source the reliability of the information is 49.5%. As a matter of fact, the problem has gotten better in some ways since the advent of computers and worse in others. When someone was transcribing by hand, they could easily miss a "not". Such as Ben Gurion's statement that "We do not want and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places." which is often misquoted as "we must expel…"

By: Thom

Thom — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 21:12:39 +0000

I know that because people on this web site have been coming up with fake quotes from Ben Gurion over and over. Fake ben Gurion quotes are too common and too widely spread through the echo chamber to trust anything but the original sources. As I have said elsewhere, people don't check the original sources, they just lift the quote, supposed source and all from someone else quoting it, and print it as though they had gone to the original source.

By: manfromatlan

manfromatlan — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:28:47 +0000

You know that before you even read them? Cool. But then, there seems to be a better class of debate and historical truth from Israeli scholars than North American apologists (not that I have any way of knowing what you are)

By: lovelyisraelis

lovelyisraelis — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:26:03 +0000

Sure, Thom The entire edifice of historical scholarship is all an elaborate ruse to make Israelis look like pigs. Do you have even a LITTLE idea of how laughable you are?