What should Israel do with Gaza?

[Anonymous]

What land, all of Israel? Even the land that was legally purchased? This is the problem with land for peace: Define the land.

Pre-67 borders....ok. Pre-47, ok let the british have it back. There never was a Palestine. Ideally, there would be one; there could have been one in 1948. Instead, they chose to fight.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What land, all of Israel? Even the land that was legally purchased? This is the problem with land for peace: Define the land.

Pre-67 borders....ok. Pre-47, ok let the british have it back. There never was a Palestine. Ideally, there would be one; there could have been one in 1948. Instead, they chose to fight.

We came very close to figuring out the land for peace solution, and then Israel ramped up its settlement construction.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What land, all of Israel? Even the land that was legally purchased? This is the problem with land for peace: Define the land.

Pre-67 borders....ok. Pre-47, ok let the british have it back. There never was a Palestine. Ideally, there would be one; there could have been one in 1948. Instead, they chose to fight.

We came very close to figuring out the land for peace solution, and then Israel ramped up its settlement construction.

Yes and I disagee with the expanded settlements (despite being an Israel supporter) but that only happened after Arafat turned down Israel's offer in the 2000 accords which basically offered him 90% of what he wanted.

"Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in 73 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian percentage of sovereignty would extend to 90 percent over a ten- to twenty-five-year period. Also included in the offer was the return of a small number of refugees and compensation for those not allowed to return. Palestinians would also have "custodianship" over the Temple Mount, sovereignty on all Islamic and Christian holy sites, and 3/4 of Jerusalem's Old Quarters. Arafat rejected Barak's offer and refused to make an immediate counter-offer."

Following this rejection was the Second Intifada with its many suicide bombings, thereby derailing the peace process yet again.

[Muslima]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What land, all of Israel? Even the land that was legally purchased? This is the problem with land for peace: Define the land.

Pre-67 borders....ok. Pre-47, ok let the british have it back. There never was a Palestine. Ideally, there would be one; there could have been one in 1948. Instead, they chose to fight.

We came very close to figuring out the land for peace solution, and then Israel ramped up its settlement construction.

Yes and I disagee with the expanded settlements (despite being an Israel supporter) but that only happened after Arafat turned down Israel's offer in the 2000 accords which basically offered him 90% of what he wanted.

"Barak offered Arafat a Palestinian state in 73 percent of the West Bank and all of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian percentage of sovereignty would extend to 90 percent over a ten- to twenty-five-year period. Also included in the offer was the return of a small number of refugees and compensation for those not allowed to return. Palestinians would also have "custodianship" over the Temple Mount, sovereignty on all Islamic and Christian holy sites, and 3/4 of Jerusalem's Old Quarters. Arafat rejected Barak's offer and refused to make an immediate counter-offer."

Following this rejection was the Second Intifada with its many suicide bombings, thereby derailing the peace process yet again.

Com'on , don't make this sound like it was a generous offer. Let's analyze that offer and see why anyone in their right mind would accept it :
 
1. only proposed to relinquish control over between 77.5-81 percent of the West Bank excluding East Jerusalem, which most likely included Israel’s retaining of the Jordan Valley.

2. wanted sovereignty over one-third of occupied East Jerusalem and all of West Jerusalem.

3. wanted control of the third holiest site in Islam, al-Haram al-Sharif (which Israel refers to as the ‘Temple Mount’), where “Israel, incredibly, also demanded Palestinian agreement to the construction of a synagogue.”

The intended result is that an eventual Palestinian state would consist of four cantons on the West Bank: Jericho, the southern canton extending as far as Abu Dis (the new Arab “Jerusalem”), a northern canton including the Palestinian cities of Nablus, Jenin, and Tulkarm, and a central canton including Ramallah.

The cantons are completely surrounded by territory to be annexed to Israel. The areas of Palestinian population concentration are to be under Palestinian administration, an adaptation of the traditional colonial pattern that is the only sensible outcome as far as Israel and theUS are concerned.

The plans for the Gaza Strip, a fifth canton, are uncertain: Israel might relinquish it, or might maintain the southern coastal region and another salient virtually dividing the Strip below Gaza City. The Israelis portrayed it as the Palestinians receiving 96% of the West Bank. But the figure is misleading. The Israelis did not include parts of the West Bank they had already appropriated.

The Palestine that would have emerged from such a settlement would not have been viable. It would have been in about half-a-dozen chunks, with huge Jewish settlements in between - a Middle East Bantustan. The Israeli army would also have retained the proposed Palestinian state’s eastern border, the Jordan valley, for six to 10 years and, more significantly, another strip along the Dead Sea coast for an unspecified period: so much for being an independent state. A genuinely generous offer by Barak might have secured peace. That was the missed historic opportunity. If Israel had been more magnanimous at Camp David, it could have had the greater prize of long-term stability.

There is a huge danger attached to the Israeli view that Arafat spurned a great offer. Accepting this version perpetuates the Israeli myth that the Palestinians will not be happy until the Jews are pushed back into the sea and that the West Bank and Gaza are full of gunmen and bombers intent on making that happen.

There are such people - but most Palestinians are interested less in the destruction of Israel than in establishing a proper Palestinian state. Most are as exercised about the poor quality of the leadership round Arafat and about the endemic corruption and lack of democracy in their own society as they are about Israel. What they want is for the Israeli army to go home and to take the Jewish settlers with them. There will be no peace until that happens.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What land, all of Israel? Even the land that was legally purchased? This is the problem with land for peace: Define the land.

Pre-67 borders....ok. Pre-47, ok let the british have it back. There never was a Palestine. Ideally, there would be one; there could have been one in 1948. Instead, they chose to fight.

I would like to know what you propose to do with the claims of 500,000 to 700,000 Palestinians whom Israel expelled in 1948 to make room for the Jewish state, and then promptly passed a law voiding their title to properties they left behind. It basically read like this: if you were absent from Israel during day X and day Y, what was yours is now mine. If you were PRESENT within Israel between day X and day Y, I will still consider you absent, and call you a "present absentee", a legal concept Israel invented specially for this occasion. Still what was yours is now mine.

The kicker: Jewish claims to property dating to pre-1948 are honored without a hitch. Arab claims to property dating to pre-1948? Sorry. You're an Arab. What's yours is mine.

From Mr Wikipedia:

According to Flapan,[27] "a detailed account of exactly how abandoned Arab property assisted in the absorption of the new immigrants was prepared by Joseph Schechtman:

It is difficult to overestimate the tremendous role this lot of abandoned Arab property has played in the settlement of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants who have reached Israel since the proclamation of the state in May 1948. Forty-seven new rural settlements established on the sites of abandoned Arab villages had by October 1949 already absorbed 25,255 new immigrants. By the spring of 1950 over 1 million dunams had been leased by the custodian to Jewish settlements and individual farmers for the raising of grain crops.

Large tracts of land belonging to Arab absentees have also been leased to Jewish settlers, old and new, for the raising of vegetables. In the south alone, 15,000 dunams of vineyards and fruit trees have been leased to cooperative settlements; a similar area has been rented by the Yemenites Association, the Farmers Association, and the Soldiers Settlement and Rehabilitation Board. This has saved the Jewish Agency and the government millions of dollars. While the average cost of establishing an immigrant family in a new settlement was from $7,500 to $9,000, the cost in abandoned Arab villages did not exceed $1,500 ($750 for building repairs and $750 for livestock and equipment).

Abandoned Arab dwellings in towns have also not remained empty. By the end of July 1948, 170,000 people, notably new immigrants and ex-soldiers, in addition to about 40,000 former tenants, both Jewish and Arab, had been housed in premises under the custodian's control; and 7,000 shops, workshops and stores were sublet to new arrivals. The existence of these Arab houses-vacant and ready for occupation-has, to a large extent, solved the greatest immediate problem which faced the Israeli authorities in the absorption of immigrants. It also considerably relieved the financial burden of absorption.[28]

How much of Israel's territory consists of land confiscated with the Absentee Property Law is uncertain and much disputed. Robert Fisk interviewed the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property, who estimates this could amount to up to 70% of the territory of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip:

The Custodian of Absentee Property does not choose to discuss politics. But when asked how much of the land of the state of Israel might potentially have two claimants — an Arab and a Jew holding respectively a British Mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property — Mr. Manor [the Custodian in 1980] believes that 'about 70 percent' might fall into that category (Robert Fisk, 'The Land of Palestine, Part Eight: The Custodian of Absentee Property', The Times, December 24, 1980, quoted in his book Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War).

The Jewish Virtual Library, estimates that Custodial and Absentee land comprises 12% of Israel's total territory.[29]

The Jewish National Fund, from Jewish Villages in Israel, 1949:

Of the entire area of the State of Israel only about 300,000-400,000 dunums -- apart from the desolate rocky area of the southern Negev, at present quite unfit for cultivation -- are State Domain which the Israeli Government took over from the Mandatory regime. The J.N.F. and private Jewish owners possess under two million dunums. Almost all the rest belongs at law to Arab owners, many of whom have left the country. The fate of these Arabs will be settled when the terms of the peace treaties between Israel and her Arab neighbours are finally drawn up. The J.N.F., however, cannot wait until then to obtain the land it requires for its pressing needs. It is, therefore, acquiring part of the land abandoned by the Arab owners, through the Government of Israel, the sovereign authority in Israel. Whatever the ultimate fate of the Arabs concerned, it is manifest that their legal right to their land and property in Israel, or to the monetary value of them, will not be waived, nor do the Jews wish to ignore them. ... [C]onquest by force of arms cannot, in law or in ethics, abrogate the rights of the legal owner to his personal property. The J.N.F., therefore, will pay for the lands it takes over, at a fixed and fair price.[30]

The absentee property played an enormous role in making Israel a viable state. In 1954, more than one third of Israel's Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property (Peretz, Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, 1958).