There is no official, existing map of Israel today. It is a hodge-podge of treaty borders (including an exchange of territory with Jordan in the Arava Desert region), and numerous cease-fire lines & UN-marked boundries (following the San Remo Demarcations, for example, at Lebanon) and self-designated barriers & security roads (along various seams).
Israel's land area is in constant flux and will continue to be adjusted according to the outcomes of negotiations with Israels peaceful neighbors who have not, as yet, all decided that peace is preferable to war. The map of Israel is a brief snapshot in time, but is not a constant thing set in stone, and Israelis do not claim it to be. We are prepared to redraw the map at any time, so long as across the border, we don't face attempts again by our neighbors to build up forces whose publicly-stated aim is to kill us whenever the opportunity presents itself.
(see: Lebanon Battles, 2006, and the still-missing Goldwasser & Regev)
For the better part of 130 years, since the 1880's when the Zionist Congress proposed making a concentrated and determined effort to re-settle "palestine" --- there has been no official map of Israel. As I showed in my earlier posting,
HERE, #49 the "official map of Israel" (in 1947) looks very different than what Israel encompasses today. What the Arabs are proposing, essentially, is a return to this map of 1947-1949. Yes, a_u_p, that is a fact. The Arabs are saying that they will only "recognize" Israel after a full withdrawal to the 1949 lines (they phrase it as the "1967 Borders" but that is a lie), which for all intents and purposes, is the land area defined in the blue map. (Which, if you don't recognize it, is the jewish-populated section allocated as a "jewish state" within the 1947 UN partition plan)
And it was the Arabs who helped remove the Ottoman/Turkish empire, and expected independence for doing so. Instead the European powers ratted on the deal.
Incorrect totally. Both the Mandate Powers, France and Britain, relinquished their holds on large swaths of "palestine" (and the surrounding Ottoman sanjaks) to Arabs and independent States came about (specifically, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia,). This whole idea that you seem to cling to that "palestine" is just the narrow strip on the coast of the Mediterranean, is completely mistaken, a_u_p.
thinkingaboutit proposes:
My thesis is that Palestine/Israel is at the heart of the Arab Jewish conflict
No.
Islamic fundamentalism and the overall "dhimmi" attitude towards jews is at the core. The idea that jews would stand on their own, and defend themselves adequately, and were creating an alternative to being subservient and persecuted within the Islamic societies, is an anathema to the Islamic world.
There is no evidence to suggest that Israel is about land, per se. On the contrary, there is plenty of empirical evidence to show that Israel has relinquished (more than once) valuable land areas, and is fully prepared to do so again, under the right conditions.
