Geez, I dunno John, looks to me like the Israelis are looking after themselves ok - the Palestinians appear to be the ones being invaded, have you ever checked out the settler and barrier maps?
Perhaps check out Wikipedia as a more benign version of what is happening: see the various maps, and remember that Israeli settlers are all allowed to carry weapons, and no Palestinian is (including the West Bank police!) and that the IDF is sworn to protect all Israeli citizens, even if it is settlers chasing a Palestinian farmer off his own land.
Hi Mark
What Palestinian State? The 2 or 3 different Arab countries gobbled it up in 1949 and never mentioned creating a Palestinian State until after they lost it in the 1967 war? Now they want to give it to them. From 1949-67 when all of Judea-Samaria [West Bank & Jerusalem] and Gaza ... were 100% under Arab [Jordanian & Egyptian] control, no effort was EVER made to create a second Palestinian State for the Arabs living there.
Surely you do not expect Israel to now provide these same Arabs with their own country when their fellow Arabs failed to do so! Why was no request ever made upon King Hussein of Jordan by the Arabs living on the West Bank when he occupied it? And isn't it curious how Arafat and his PLO (formed in 1964) discovered their "ancient" identity and a need for "self-determination" and "human dignity" on this very same West Bank ONLY AFTER Israel regained this territory (three years later in 1967) following Jordan's attempt to destroy Israel! Is it logical that the PLO was formed in 1964 to regain the lands they would lose three years later in 1967? This sort of logic makes sense only to those who have not learned that the PLO was formed to DESTROY Israel before they lost the land.. And that is STILL their goal! A cosmetic name change from PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to PA (Palestinian Authority) does not change the stripes on THIS tiger!
The PLO realized in 1964 that the Arabs were never going to give them any land of their own. So the only non-Arab land was Israel in order to take it they had to wipe the Jews off the map so the PLO was born.
The Jews were willing to live in peace with them as neighbors way back in 1923-1967 and still are today!!!!
The actual history:
The British had taken it from the Ottoman Empire not the Palestinians and in 1923, the British gave it back dividing the "Palestine" portion of the Ottoman Empire into two administrative districts. Jews would be permitted only west of the Jordan river and the Arab Palestinian nation called Trans-Jordan (meaning "across the Jordan River") east of the Jordan River was given to Emir Abdullah (from Hejaz, now Saudi Arabia) who was not even an Arab-"Palestinian!" This portion of Palestine was renamed Trans-Jordan. Trans-Jordan would again be renamed "Jordan" in 1946.
In other words, the eastern 3/4 of Palestine would be renamed TWICE, in effect, erasing all connection to the name "Palestine!" However, the bottom line is that the Palestinian Arabs had THEIR "Arab Palestinian" homeland because Palestinians mainly lived there. The remaining 25% of Palestine (now WEST of the Jordan River) was to be the Jewish Palestinian homeland. However, sharing was not part of the Arab psychological makeup then nor now.
It really started on May 14, 1948 when the "Palestinian Jews" finally declared their own State of Israel on only the land the UN had given them authority over and became "Israelis." On the next day, seven neighboring Arab armies... Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Yemen... invaded Israel. Most of the Arabs living within the boundaries of the newly declared "ISRAEL" were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies to facilitate the slaughter of the Jews and were promised to be given all Jewish property after the victorious Arab armies won the war. The truth is that 70% of the Arab Palestinians who left in 1948 – perhaps 300,000 to 400,000 of them – never saw an Israeli soldier! They did not flee because they feared Jewish thugs, but because of a rational and reasonable calculus: the Jews will be exterminated; we will get out of the way while that messy and dangerous business goes forward, and we will return afterwards to reclaim our homes, and to inherit those nice Jewish properties as well. They guessed wrong; and the Arab Palestinians are still tortured by the residual shame of their flight. Their shame is so great because in their eyes running from Jews was like running from women.
So much for the blatant lie about Jews throwing out all the [Palestinian] Arabs!
The remaining 30% either saw for themselves that these Jews would fight and die for their new nation and decided to pack up and leave or were driven off the land as a normal consequence of war.
When the 19 month war ended, Israel survived! Those Arabs who did not flee became today's Israeli-Arab citizens. Those who fled became the seeds of the first wave of "Palestinian Arab refugees."
The Arab propagandists and apologists almost never mentioned that in 1948, Arab armies launched a war against a one-day-old Israel. Instead he focused on the main consequence of that war: the creation of Arab refugees, stating that Israel "war of genocide" expelled 800,000 of them. This not only disagrees with history but with UN estimates of a bit over 400,000 refugees but also ignores the fact that most of the Arabs/Palestinians were encouraged to leave by the Arab World itself!
The end result of the 1948-49 Israeli War of Independence was the creation of a Jewish State slightly larger than that which was proposed by the 1947 United Nations Resolution 181.
What remained of that almost-created second Arab Palestinian State was gobbled up by Egypt (occupying the Gaza Strip) and by Trans-Jordan (occupying Judea-Samaria (a.k.a. the "West Bank" of the Jordan River) and Jerusalem. In the next year (1950) Trans-Jordan formally merged this West Bank territory into itself and granted all those "Palestinian" Arabs living there Jordanian citizenship. Since Trans-Jordan was then no longer confined to one side of the Jordan River, it renamed itself simply "Jordan." In the final analysis, the Arabs of Palestine ended up with nearly 85% of the original territory of Palestine... called Jordan but in reality their ARAB "Palestinian state! But that was still not 100% and thus the conflict between Arab and Jew for "Palestine" would continue through four more wars and continuous Arab terrorist attacks upon the Israeli citizenry. It continues to this very day.
In the war of 1967 the Jews took the land away from Jordan, Egypt, and Syria not Palestine.
What Palestinian State? The Arabs took/ occupied it from the Palestinians, not the Jews, and never tried to give it back until they lost it in the 6 day war of 1967!