Questions for Palestinians, Israelis, others in Middle East?

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The Palestinians don't believe they are Jordanians----just like they don't believe they are Israelis. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan hasn't treated them too well, either. They treated them rather similarly to the Israelis.

I'm not sure about the folks in the Gaza Strip in relation to Egypt.

I've been doing a bit of web research in an effort to understand the "settler" issue better. I found quite a bit of helpful info in the following Wikipedia articles:

- West Bank Areas in the Oslo II Accord
- Oslo II Accord
- Palestinian enclaves
- Israeli demolition of Palestinian property
- State of Palestine

I've learned that the "settler" issue is a whole lot thornier than Palestinian Arabs just not wanting to have any new Jewish neighbors, which is how I had thought of it before.

Nor is the problem simply that these new Jewish neighbors are all too often anti-Arab racists and general a$$holes -- sometimes extreme a$$holes, sometimes going so far as to burn down Arab-owned olive trees, as I learned from salad in this thread just the other day. (See my initial response to salad here, written after I did some preliminary web research about the olive trees.).

It now seems to me that the biggest problem with the "settlers" is how they are intertwined with the whole question of how the land in the West Bank (a.k.a. "Judea and Samaria") is divided up, as a result of the Oslo II Accord, which was officially signed back on 28 September 1995.

The latter is a big mess in and of itself. According to the above Wikipedia articles, the West Bank was divided up into the following three kinds of areas:

- Area A: administered exclusively by the Palestinian Authority (PA).
- Area B: administered jointly by both the PA and Israel.
- Area C: administered by Israel.

Supposedly this division was temporary and everything was eventually going be transferred to the PA. That never happened.

Other reasons why this division is a big problem for the Palestinians:

1) Areas A and B each consist of a bunch of disconnected little regions. Thus the PA doesn't administer, or even jointly administer, any large continuous region. Area C, on the other hand, is continuous, like a single big piece of Swiss cheese, in which Areas A and B are holes. Areas A and B together constitute a total of 165 tiny "islands" in a "sea" of C.

2) Areas A and B tend to be Palestinian neighborhoods/"enclaves" within towns and cities, and hardly any rural land. Area C contains most of the West Bank’s natural resources and open spaces.

3) The Israeli "settlements" are all in Area C. Their increasing presence in Area C has made it increasingly unlikely that Area C, or at least the Israeli-settled parts thereof, will ever be turned over to Palestinian control, because the Israeli settlers want to be part of Israel, not Palestine.

4) The settlers often get preferential treatment in terms of access to critical resources like drinking water.

So apparently items #3 and #4 above, along with frequent violence and destruction of Palestinian property by some of the more racist settlers, are the biggest problems Palestinians have with Israeli settlers.

Yep...that’s the crux of it.

Until a couple of days ago, I never ran across anything that fully explained what I wrote above about Areas A, B, and C.

In the past, I had come across a variety of anti-Zionism-for-dummies articles, but none which really explained the Oslo II Accord and its consequences.

In the past, I had run across quite a few articles describing some of the hardships Palestinians suffer under occupation, but none which really put it into context or explained how the occupation works. (Also none of these articles described anything quite as shocking, to me, as the burning of olive trees.)

I had run across anti-Zionist articles that emphasized simple statistics, such as the decreasing percentage of land ownership by Palestinians. This usually gets dismissed by Zionists on the grounds that most Israelis don't own land either; most of the land is owned by the government.

I had also run across quite a bit of over-simplified sloganeering, such as "Zionism is racism!" or "Zionism is apartheid!" -- without detailing the actual similarities to apartheid (e.g. Areas A and B being similar to bantustans), beyond just being discriminatory. Zionists commonly dismiss these slogans by pointing to various differences between Israeli policies and apartheid (e.g. Palestinians can apply for Israeli citizenship if they so choose, whereas South African blacks couldn't apply to become white), and also arguing that Jews aren't really a "race."

In the past, I had also run across occasional objections to "settlers," arguing that the "settlements" are contrary to treaty and/or otherwise contrary to international law, but without fully explaining precisely why the "settlements" were inherently enough of a problem to be illegal in the first place.

To salad, if you're reading this: I'm sorry for any distress I've caused you by my earlier posts in this thread (before this one where I share what finally I learned within just the past couple of days about the "settler" issue).