New Reconquista?
It was just before Easter; if a repeat broadcast, then possibly related to Pope John Paul II's terminal sickness. TV Listing Channel 2 showed an Asper Foundation lecture ongoing. I went there, near the beginning, and who was there? Binyamin Netanyahu; with what must have been the talk he gave in Winnipeg when he had been scheduled to speak at Montreal's Concordia University and been prevented by a riot from delivering it.
First some stuff I had heard before, if not in quite that sweeping a way, about practically no Palestinian Arabs having been in the country until after the beginning of Zionist Jewish settlement; which then attracted the Arabs from elsewhere. So it wasn't their country, and they have no rights there.
Then a personal story. The University of Valladolid in Spain having awarded something to his historian father for what he had written about their Inquisition, he had gone there. Spanish prime minister Aznar ("my friend", also out now) then invited him over and asked him to explain what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was all about (high time he found out). Well, according to Netanyahu:
All it is is what you Spaniards had until five or six centuries ago. The Arabs had conquered Spain and occupied it a few centuries until you retook it in your Reconquista. That's what we are doing now after a few more centuries of Arab occupation of the Land of Israel.
Isn't that simple? Why didn't Aznar know about that? Why didn't you? Or I. Why all those long articles on the subject, and even longer books?
And the consequences if this character is unleashed again as prime minister? "Transfer" of "the Arabs" as in Spain's late Middle Ages (at least the Muslim ones; Catholic Arabs surely could have remained). At the time Jews were similarly subject to expulsion, if they wouldn't convert to Christianity; or burned alive if they did and backtracked. Netanyahu's plans for Jews (not just of Spain) are somewhat different. Have you heard of Haala'ah. Otherwise you saw it here first. It should accomplish what Aliyah was unsuccessful at.
First some stuff I had heard before, if not in quite that sweeping a way, about practically no Palestinian Arabs having been in the country until after the beginning of Zionist Jewish settlement; which then attracted the Arabs from elsewhere. So it wasn't their country, and they have no rights there.
Then a personal story. The University of Valladolid in Spain having awarded something to his historian father for what he had written about their Inquisition, he had gone there. Spanish prime minister Aznar ("my friend", also out now) then invited him over and asked him to explain what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was all about (high time he found out). Well, according to Netanyahu:
All it is is what you Spaniards had until five or six centuries ago. The Arabs had conquered Spain and occupied it a few centuries until you retook it in your Reconquista. That's what we are doing now after a few more centuries of Arab occupation of the Land of Israel.
Isn't that simple? Why didn't Aznar know about that? Why didn't you? Or I. Why all those long articles on the subject, and even longer books?
And the consequences if this character is unleashed again as prime minister? "Transfer" of "the Arabs" as in Spain's late Middle Ages (at least the Muslim ones; Catholic Arabs surely could have remained). At the time Jews were similarly subject to expulsion, if they wouldn't convert to Christianity; or burned alive if they did and backtracked. Netanyahu's plans for Jews (not just of Spain) are somewhat different. Have you heard of Haala'ah. Otherwise you saw it here first. It should accomplish what Aliyah was unsuccessful at.
posted by solar_sol | 12:25 AM
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