(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

Why does Israel have to be put on the defensive internationally after its commandos use limited force in response to being attacked with potentially deadly weapons? Would anyone be complaining if the men and women of the US Navy were to use lethal force to defend themselves in the course of interdicting Somali pirates?

Comments

[sildra.livejournal.com]

Umm... you have your chronology a bit mixed up. The Balfour Declaration was in 1917, and was defunct by the middle of WWII. The Jews were not legally allowed to immigrate to British Palestine after the war--any more than they were legally allowed to move to the British Isles--although the enforcement was patchy. My grandfather was nearly killed for being on a ship headed to British Palestine in 1947 (he jumped ship and swam over a mile to shore; most of his shipmates drowned, were shot, or went to jail, although a few others also managed to wash up on shore), and his two sisters were jailed by the British for several years. The enforcement of the borders may have been intentionally patchy because they felt guilty about not letting the Jews live anywhere else, but the fact is one couldn't just move to Palestine.

The Jews already in Palestine--the ones who'd been there all along and the ones who'd come a generation earlier under the Balfour Declaration--were the ones who invited the Holocaust victims in, and provided them with housing and jobs. It was emphatically not a project of the Western diplomats--they merely turned a blind eye. It was only once the European Jews were mostly already there, at the end of 1947, that the UN decided to partition the land into Israel and Palestine.