About China: I find it quite strange that both the Chinese government and everyone outside of the country insists to call the country communist, what does the party actually gain from it?
Plans were actually made for Madagascar too! Originally a French idea (who owned the island) it was actually thought of by the axis powers before they come up with the concept of wiping the jews off the earth. It was quite quickly realized that they would never be able to gather the resources let alone conduct the transportations.
@Hyena: Dosen´t "eretz Israel" directly translate to "greater Israel", the idea of a large Israeli state, stretching from the Sinai into modern day Iraq that a lot of ultra nationalists were voicing?
@Matse: I completely agree with you, anti-semitism and anti-Zionism is definitely two different things.
I find the ideas behind the creation of Israel quite scary right from the start. Jewish emigration started during the Ottoman reign in the area, pre 1914. The ottomans were quite easy rulers and weren´t into the whole oppression thing right then. The movement for a jewish state were able to raise quite huge sums om money during the early part of the 20th century, and used it as Hyena mentioned to buy up large parts of land in the area. The Arabic leaders were quite happy to sell the land, but noone actually considered what the people living in the thought about their living areas and farmlands. Thus the Zionist movement gained a lot of land in a fair way, although if you consider the unfairness of the land distribution in the area right from the start it´s not so strange that the Palestinians protested.
A lot of the Arab hatred comes from the British betrayal after the 1st world war. To help the triple alliances chances of winning the war the British supported an Arab revolt against the Ottoman rulers, with promises of a free unified Arab nation after the war. The Arabs successfully drove the Turks away from Arabia and the middle east, but when it came to splitting the cake France and Great Britain moved in and occupied the area establishing a puppet in Iraq (Sykes-Picot agreement), declaring they were holding "League of Nations mandates" and not actually annexing the Arab lands.
Promises of a Jewish state was made during this time to. Disregarding the fact that during this time the Palestinians outnumbered the Jews 10 to 1, it was to be a
Jewish state, and therefore not probably not a democratic one. The problem with the large amounts of Arabs was dealt with when the state of Israel was declared and during the war that followed, when a large number om Palestinians fled or were driven out of the country. I think estimations say that up to 1 million Palestinians fled during this time, securing a more homogeneous Israel and eventually creating large problems in the enormous refugee camps.
Finally, one thing to remember when talking about the Palestinian terrorists and Arabic fundamentalists is that Israelis also resorted to terror during the decades before the creation of Isreal. Among others were the Swedish UN representative Folke Bernadotte gunned down because of the UN:s proposal concerning what territory should belong to Israel and what should make up Palestine. One of the men responsible for the murder eventually made it to foreign affairs minister and later on Prime minister (I´ll get you his name).
