Comparing Tibet with Palestine

Tibet has been mentioned in one comment on this blog and in my email box. There are Tibetan parallels to Palestine. They are not exact: China did not occupy Tibet in response to a Tibetan attack on Chinese territory and a coalition of Buddhist states blockading a key port and whipping up their populations to conquer China; this is approximately what happened in analogous terms in 1967 when Egypt forced UN forces from their border positions in the Sinai, massed its army along the border, blockaded Eilat, whipped up its population into a war frenzy and formed an anti-Israel alliance and joint military command with Jordan, Syria and Iraq. And Jordan stupidly bought into Egyptian lies on how the war was going in its opening hours by shelling Jerusalem and suburbs of Tel Aviv and seizing a UN border post in a ground attack.

Also, Tibetan rioters do not threaten to overrun or "take back" China. The closest parallel is to Palestinian attacks against Israeli settlers and occupation authorities in the Palestinian territories. Unfortunately, the Palestinians have weakened their moral claim against the Israeli occupation by attacking Israel---and civilian targets within Israel almost exclusively; many Palestinian nationalists understand this as an error.

One should also keep in mind that Tibet was a sovereign country before the Chinese took it over in the 1950s. A sovereign Palestinian-Arab state has never existed but would have been created if the Arab world had accepted the UN partition plan of 1947.