Drooper said this in response to davefoc's about whether the violence would be ongoing to day if Israel had not embarked on a colonization effort into Palestinian land after 1967.
Dave, even with my own limited reading in the area of Isaraeli history I know enough to believe that this conflict would exist regardless of the expansion of Israel under whatever means.
From the time of the very first Jewish settlement Palestinians and Arabs were attacking the settlers. And we are talking about settlers on barren land that was purchased from Palestinians or Arabs, not any occupation.
I am reading David Ben Gurion's autobiography right now. He talks a bit about what life was like in the 1930's in Israel.
There were ongoing efforts to get Jews to come to Israel at the time. Interestingly many times these immigrations didn't work out as people found the life too hard.
A significant problem for the immigrating population was that the landowners, at least some of who were Jewish, didn't want to hire the Jewish immigrants. DBG talks about how the Jewish landowners didn't want to hire the Jewish workers because they wanted more money and were allied with labor union type organizations.
DBG worked hard to overcome this and in particular worked to make it so that Jewish landowners would hire only Jewish workers. DBG seemed always to be considerate of the well being of Palestinians and would often explain how he was happy that the native Palestinians were profitting in some way from the Jewish immigration. But two unrelenting goals of his were the increased immigration of Jewish people and the isolation of the Jewish people from the native populations.
DBG also talks about some of the terrorist actions by the Palestinians against the Jews at the time. ZN will see in these the justification for increased expansion of the Jewish population so that they could protect themselves from the Arab population. Others might see the terrorist actions as the typical repsonse by a people to a colonizing population that they oppose.
I think the above goes a bit to what Drooper was talking about with regard to the relationship between Jews and Palestinians before the major increase in Jewish immigration after WWII. It seems like the two populations were living in a strained peaceful existence. The two populations were trading together, working together and interacting in other ways.
The twin Zionist goals of Jewish isolation from native populations and massive Jewish immigration were guaranteed to exacerbate the somewhat strained relationships that existed in the 1930's when the massive immigration that WWII provided allowed the achivement of their goals.
That is of course what happened, but my thought is that the modern Israeli is on average much more secular and much less racist than the founders of Israel were just as the average European is much more secular and much less racist is than the average European was in 1948. This suggests to me that the average Israeli is in a position to begin to come to grips with the reality of the founding of Israel and is thereby more able to consider the possibility of stopping the colonization efforts and realistically addressing Palestinian grievances.
I think one of the main impediments to this is the US. Our subsidies make the foolish settlement policies possible. Our foreign aid seems to reward a constant state of hostility rather than peace.
I do not know that the cessation of the unquestioning US support of Israel and the absurdly huge foreign aid transfers would make things better, but I think it's about time that the US considered the possibility that nothing we're doing is making anything better for Israelis, for Jews, for Palestinians, for US citizens, for US allies or for anybody.
