Brian Peacock wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 9:50 am
Now now. One can grant that Jerusalem existed as a "Palestinian city" if one accepts that Palestine existed as a geo-political entity under the League of Nations mandate that gave the British administrative control of "Palestine" after WWI up until the formation of Israel in 1948? Through the mandate and the Sykes-Picot agreement Palestine was effectively created as a colonial possession by the Western powers. Acknowledging this shouldn't have any impact on your current views, unless you wish to disavow the legitimacy of any and all claims the previous non-Jewish residents of that territory, and more significantly perhaps their descendants, might have to the land within the borders of the nation of Israel created in 1948.
You could argue that Paris was a German city between 1940 and 1944, and that would be equally absurd.
"Palestinian city" Tel Aviv didn't even exist until it was built out of the desert by Jews, on land purchased from the Bedouins; there are photos and everything.
The whole point of these gloriously specious maps is to perpetuate the falsehood that there was some independent nation of Palestine from which the "native Palestinians" were dispossessed (they didn't even start calling themselves Palestinians until the 1960s; until then they were always Arabs who baulked at the term Palestinian, which was traditionally interchangeable with Jew).
Palestine wasn't "created" as a colonial possession by Western powers, it was only ever a colonial possession under that name.
"Palestine" was nothing but the occupied region of Judea, renamed* by the Roman occupiers , then ruled over by different colonial powers continually over the millennia, until midway through the last century, when part of it was liberated from imperialism and returned to the native Jews.
Anyone who thinks the Jews are going to be driven from their land again is pissing in the wind. The sooner the Arab Muslim colonisers recognise that and make their peace with Israel's existence, the better.
(*of course the Romans, always fans of irony, still gave a nod to the original inhabitants; check out the meaning of the Latin word
palaestes, then check out what
Israel means)
