Well the issue here isn't that anyone is trying to sue Italy for destroying a temple 2,000 years ago. Palestinians live in Gaza and the West Bank today and they will tell you they were there before 1948 so any solution that isn't going to be repugnant has to account for that.
And what's not going to work would be ideas like "ship them off to Jordan, Saudi Arabia or some other Arab nation because, hey, aren't they all Arabs?" This is a challenge to Israel's claims about itself which it has not yet really put forth an answer.
Well, that comes down to 'how do you slice up 'the land'. Because Jordan was basically designed to be the Muslim portion of the Palestine mandate; the Jews got Israel, the Muslims got Jordan, similar to Muslims getting Pakistan, Hindu getting Israel. But the Muslims wanted it all.
Maybe that was warranted because the Jews had come and bought the land more recently. Well enough. The harder issue now is that after generations as refugees, Palestinians are not terribly functional as a society and so no other nation, Arab or otherwise, wants to attempt to integrate them at this point.
But my comment about reparations wasn't intended to be analogous to this situation, just an amusing aside to the author.
How you do it? Well easy solution (there are others but this is mine)>
West Bank becomes its own thing. Jews and Palestinians vote in it but no one can vote in both the West Bank and Israel proper (thereby undercutting the incentive to keep 'settling' by Orthodox Jews in Israel as that would undermine their voting bloc). Israel reserve a right to veto anything the WB decides to do for security or human rights reasons. Gaza becomes a separate Palestinian state with Israel's duty to supervise actual fair elections.
No one gets everything they want. The two 'Palestinian states' won't be full states meaning they can align with whoever they want etc. On the other hand in Gaza you'll have an actual pure Palestinian homeland, which is something Israel doesn't have since there are non-Jews in Israel.
As for what Jordan 'should have been', well not really relevant. If space aliens invaded NYC and set up shop on the even number streets of Manhattan the people who live on the odd number streets will balk at simply taking in the even number refugees even if they could simply get free buildings twice as tall.
First of all, you know you don't HAVE to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine, it's not like a voting requirement or anything. You are allowed to look at it all from a distance and say this is a very sad mess but nobody is asking you to solve it.
Second, I don't mean to offend whoever suggested "We Belong to the Land," but I would not even put that in the top 50. If you want a broader view of the history, read Ian Black's "Enemies and Neighbours," "Israel: A History" by Anita Shapira, and "'The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi. If you want more human stories, read "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story" by Nathan Thrall (his other writing is also good), also "Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life" by Sari Nussiebeh; "My Promised Land" is a favorite of journalists but it comes off to me as if the Jewish author is "apologizing" to his Palestinian neighbors in a way I found off-putting. Basically there are a ton of other books that I'd put ahead of Chacour's (I guess the appeal is the fact that he is Christian?) and I bet if you just searched the web you'd find good suggestions. There are also some great books that focus on specific conflicts and their impact, recent ones include Yardena Schwartz's "Ghosts of a Holy War" and "Eighteen Days in October" by Uri Kaufman. I know this is a lot - I think I'd suggest "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" as a first book to just appreciate what life is like in Jerusalem these days, without all the politics or history.
I'm aware that I don't have to have an opinion, but even if the error bar is huge, I should be able to elucidate how that error bar shifted as the result of a book. Which is to say I should have learned something, and be able to relate what I learned.
I have picked up "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" and I will report back.
About Palestine and Israel, I don't think anything new can be said, at least not by me now. It's a fractal tangle of conflicting interests and claims.
About your ancestors, I think you might have a claim to reparations for the whole destruction of Carthage thing?
You have a point. Too bad the Italians really don't have any money...
Well the issue here isn't that anyone is trying to sue Italy for destroying a temple 2,000 years ago. Palestinians live in Gaza and the West Bank today and they will tell you they were there before 1948 so any solution that isn't going to be repugnant has to account for that.
And what's not going to work would be ideas like "ship them off to Jordan, Saudi Arabia or some other Arab nation because, hey, aren't they all Arabs?" This is a challenge to Israel's claims about itself which it has not yet really put forth an answer.
Well, that comes down to 'how do you slice up 'the land'. Because Jordan was basically designed to be the Muslim portion of the Palestine mandate; the Jews got Israel, the Muslims got Jordan, similar to Muslims getting Pakistan, Hindu getting Israel. But the Muslims wanted it all.
Maybe that was warranted because the Jews had come and bought the land more recently. Well enough. The harder issue now is that after generations as refugees, Palestinians are not terribly functional as a society and so no other nation, Arab or otherwise, wants to attempt to integrate them at this point.
But my comment about reparations wasn't intended to be analogous to this situation, just an amusing aside to the author.
How you do it? Well easy solution (there are others but this is mine)>
West Bank becomes its own thing. Jews and Palestinians vote in it but no one can vote in both the West Bank and Israel proper (thereby undercutting the incentive to keep 'settling' by Orthodox Jews in Israel as that would undermine their voting bloc). Israel reserve a right to veto anything the WB decides to do for security or human rights reasons. Gaza becomes a separate Palestinian state with Israel's duty to supervise actual fair elections.
No one gets everything they want. The two 'Palestinian states' won't be full states meaning they can align with whoever they want etc. On the other hand in Gaza you'll have an actual pure Palestinian homeland, which is something Israel doesn't have since there are non-Jews in Israel.
As for what Jordan 'should have been', well not really relevant. If space aliens invaded NYC and set up shop on the even number streets of Manhattan the people who live on the odd number streets will balk at simply taking in the even number refugees even if they could simply get free buildings twice as tall.
First of all, you know you don't HAVE to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine, it's not like a voting requirement or anything. You are allowed to look at it all from a distance and say this is a very sad mess but nobody is asking you to solve it.
Second, I don't mean to offend whoever suggested "We Belong to the Land," but I would not even put that in the top 50. If you want a broader view of the history, read Ian Black's "Enemies and Neighbours," "Israel: A History" by Anita Shapira, and "'The Hundred Years' War on Palestine" by Rashid Khalidi. If you want more human stories, read "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story" by Nathan Thrall (his other writing is also good), also "Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life" by Sari Nussiebeh; "My Promised Land" is a favorite of journalists but it comes off to me as if the Jewish author is "apologizing" to his Palestinian neighbors in a way I found off-putting. Basically there are a ton of other books that I'd put ahead of Chacour's (I guess the appeal is the fact that he is Christian?) and I bet if you just searched the web you'd find good suggestions. There are also some great books that focus on specific conflicts and their impact, recent ones include Yardena Schwartz's "Ghosts of a Holy War" and "Eighteen Days in October" by Uri Kaufman. I know this is a lot - I think I'd suggest "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" as a first book to just appreciate what life is like in Jerusalem these days, without all the politics or history.
I'm aware that I don't have to have an opinion, but even if the error bar is huge, I should be able to elucidate how that error bar shifted as the result of a book. Which is to say I should have learned something, and be able to relate what I learned.
I have picked up "A Day in the Life of Abed Salama" and I will report back.