If Israel's 1948 War of Independence had failed, and the Arab armies had crushed the Jews, would an independent Palestine have arisen in its place, I wonder? Or would the former mandate have been absorbed by one or more of the surrounding Arab nations?
There was already an accepted plans for Jews to live in the British Mandate of Palestine, only with secret agreements was Transjordan carved out, and the remainder of the Mandate divided approx. 54/46 Jews : Arabs. With the Declaration, however, Israel assumed all of it, and only after the war were West Bank and Gaza surrendered to (Trans)Jordan and Egypt respectively...Only to be reoccupied in the following wars, and up until this day.
George Carty said:
Palestine would probably have been carved up by the neighboring Arab states, because without the Nakba the Palestinian national identity would have been weak-to-nonexistent.
There was already a pan-Arab national identity in the region since the beginning of the 20th century. Only with the creation of Israel against international law, the dethronement of Faisal Al-Hashimi from the throne of Syria by the French (and their subsequent mandate there) and the creation of Transjordan were the Palestinians in what was supposed to be Arab Palestine (see 1948 Divisions in lands west of the river Jordan) left defenseless. T
The culture of the Arabs west of the Jordan River is significantly different than the Arabs in (Trans)Jordan. The (Palestinian) Arabs west of the Jordan are a relatively urbane people with a racial ancestry similar to other coastal eastern Meditterranean peoples, such as the Lebanese with European influences in culture and race; while the Arabs in Transjordan claim their racial ancestry from the Ghassani, and are Bedouin (non-sedentary tribal Arabs) Arabs, of a different ancestry, history, culture, and way of life. That is why they readily accepted the Al-Hashimi, a powerful Beoduin tribe, as their monarch, while the Al-Hashimi were easily overthrown in more-Levantine and urbane Syria, and never in Palestine, that is, west of the Jordan.
Campbell1004 said:
I have an incredible deep respect for the Jewish people. So much bad luck has come there way and look where they are now. Their kingdom (metaphoric, its actually a democratic republic!) has been restored and they have the arms to push back against their enemies.
Are you serious? I do hope you are kidding...
The Jews of Europe had no legitamate claims to establish their State in lands that they hadn't been residing in for thousands of years, not to mention the relation between modern day Israelis and European Jews are barely related to the ancient Israelities...Only by biting the hand that fed them, i.e. taking advantage of the allowance of local Arabs to welcome a persecuted people into their lands, did the European Jewry deceitfully establish the State of Israel.
If anything you should be ashamed of the modern Zionists. They deceitfully took advantage of a welcoming population, stole their land, killed their people, imposed their religion and laws, and demoted them to second-class citizens. They follow a path in creating living space for Jews eerily similar to their former enemies. They should be ashamed of themselves, they are an embarassment to Judaism, Semites, and humanity itself.