Benefit of foresight

There are so many irritating points that zionists try to score in debate with their detractors if the latter has negotiated all the hurdles trying to prevent debate in the first place but few are more irritating than when they make out that the whole conflict over Palestine wasn't foreseen. This post is drawn from Lawrence of Cyberia:

Nobody Could Have Predicted

...that forcibly establishing a Jewish state in Palestine against the wishes of its pre-existing non-Jewish majority - a state which would be surrounded by 200 million Arabs and one billion Muslims who are overwhelmingly sympathetic to the plight of the pre-existing population, and which would require for its continuing existence the repeated involvement of those Western powers who engineered its creation in the first place - would turn out to be a source of perpetual grievance and escalating instability that threatens regional war involving the countries of the entire Mid East and far beyond...

He then quotes at length from an article, Zionist aspirations in Palestine, by the then Military Governor of Ramleh, Palestine that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1920.

Certain Zionists writers in the London press have recently been making a most unfair use of the words 'Arab' and 'Bedouin.' In an article published recently it was stated that 'the Bedouin' question will in course of time settle itself, either by equitable purchase or by the Bedouin's desire for the nomadic life which he will find over the border in the Arab state.' If by these words the writer means the 50,000 nomadic Bedouins, no harm would be done and all parties would be pleased; for these Bedouins steal alike from Mohammedan, Christian, and Jew cultivators, and, except as breeders of camels and sheep, are of little use to the country [sic]. But he does not mean this. He hopes to buy out 'equitably' the half-million Mohammedan and sixty thousand Christian Arabs, who own and cultivate the soil -- a stable population living, not in Bedouin tents, but in permanent villages.

Should these landlords and farmers refuse this 'equitable' bargain, it is to be presumed that our Zionist writer, by forceful arguments to be applied by the protecting power, will arouse in them a desire for the nomadic life across the border. If the Zionists honestly believe that the land is occupied and worked by nomadic Bedouins without right of ownership, they should be informed that the Arab landowners possess title-deeds as good as, and much older than, those by which the American or English millionaire owns his palace in Fifth Avenue or Park Lane.

...

The theory that the Jews are to come into Palestine and oust the Moslem cultivators by 'equitable purchase' or other means is in violation of principles of sound policy, and would, if accepted, arouse violent outbreaks against the Jewish minority. It would, moreover, arouse fierce Moslem hostility and fanaticism against the Western powers that permitted it. The effect of this hostility would be felt all through the Middle East, and would cause trouble in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India. To this might be ascribed by future historians the outbreak of a great war between the white and the brown races, a war into which America would without doubt be drawn.

I'm tempted to say that it's remarkable but it's not. It was all so bloody obvious.