January 08, 2009
The Shrinking Map of Palestine
From here.
SOURCE: London Times, 5 May 2006, titled, Truth in Mapping
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted in The Jewish Paradox, by Nahum Goldmann, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978, p. 99
"We must expel Arabs and take their places."
-- David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.
"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country."
-- David Ben Gurion, quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky's Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech
"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!"
-- Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
"Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."
-- Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, speaking to students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many (Palestinian) hilltops as they can to enlarge the (Jewish) settlements because everything we take now will stay ours...Everything we don't grab will go to them."
-- Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, Nov. 15, 1998.
"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
-- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 March, 2001 quoted in BBC News Online
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 05:26 AM | Permalink
Comments
Abbas,
I understand the point you are trying to make here, but you'll note that from 1995 to 2006, the size of Palestine actually increased.
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Jan 8, 2009 9:14:03 AM
@Hektor Bim: While what you say is correct, I don't see why you say "but". The data is what the data is; hiding facts that go against the grain of a hypothesis is the mainstream media's business. The change from 90% to 87% is true; that's what happened when the settlers were forced to pull back. We have to get away from this idea that a point is weakened or invalidated by a lack of unanimous data.
On another point, while gross occupied landmass offers a picture of the degree of takeover and occupation, it would be far more interesting to see other charts over the years:
- percentage of arable land
- percentage of land with wells
So a gain of gross land mass (again, it would be interesting to know what kind of land it was) was made by the Palestinians in the last dozen years; that doesn't change the fact that they have lost a tremendous amount of land. If you're talking trends and are willing to make extrapolations from one variance in a long-standing trend, the Palestinians can expect land parity (50%) in (11 x (37/3)) = 131 years.
Posted by: Marco | Jan 8, 2009 10:09:41 AM
Marco,
I think we agree actually. This is a misleading metric. One could look at this metric and think that the lives of Palestinians has improved from 1995 to 2006. But I'm not sure there are many who would make that argument.
If you have better metrics, bring it on!
Posted by: Hektor Bim | Jan 8, 2009 10:21:26 AM
Impact of Zionism
Posted by: Bild | Jan 9, 2009 7:32:39 AM
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