Quote:
Originally Posted by hiredgun
This is part of what I was getting at in #201. If "all is fair", as you say, then on what basis do you make any of the moral judgments you make in the rest of the thread? If you believe that, then you believe that there is no morality in international relations, that in times of war there is no law but the law of the jungle, the law that might makes right. In itself this is a coherent belief, but you cannot hold to this and simultaneously denounce or praise either side. In fact, you cannot hold to this and make any moral judgments about war at all.
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I didn't say there were no morals or laws; I was referring to tactics and strategy. Call it a Battle of Ideas if you want to stay morally neutral I suppose. And roachboy, I posted what I did here because I think alternative perspectives are a good thing, and since tfp is a democracy perhaps some enjoyed the distraction. Ill add this since the op of the thread decided to indulge me in a temporary change of topic and we left it hanging:
In the late 1800s, what you call Palestine was a land without a people, in the sense that the people living there did not think of themselves as a nation. While much of the land was barren, there were a few hundred thousand people living there. The Arabs living there did not, however, call themselves Palestinians. That is because in the late 1800s, there was no sovereign entity known as Palestine. (In ancient times, it was a Roman province.) The whole region, along with much of the Middle East, belonged to the Ottoman Turkish Empire, and Palestine did not even exist as a specific entity within the empire; nor had there ever been a sovereign entity known as Palestine. The area that today is called historic Palestine was at the time of Ottoman rule subdivided into different districts within the empire, reporting to different governors.
If there was no Palestine, then there were no Palestinians.
If you asked the average person living there at the time to identify themselves, they may have identified themselves as members of a family or clan, as Muslims, possibly as Syrians (since historic Palestine was considered by many to be part of southern Syria, which itself was not an independent entity at the time), or they would have identified as Arabs or as subjects of the Ottoman Empire. The Palestinians didnt become a self-identifying people until later, perhaps around 1920 (or even much later), and that was largely in response to Zionism. One could say that had there been no Zionism, there likely would have been no Palestinianism. Research the difference between an Arab, a Kurd, a Berber, and a Persian - all Muslims who live in the Middle East - and find out which states are associated with which of these peoples today, and which nation has no state. Also, define Pan-Arabism, and find out the years in which it appeared to thrive.