I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
The working class in both nations. The people, divided and conquered.
the ones staying out of it
It’s important to separate out the government from the people, especially as it pertains to governments that don’t listen to their population and don’t have overwhelming support. Neither government is good. Most of the civilians from both sides are perfectly decent, though a number of them are misguided.
It’s really impossible to simplify it, but I’ll give it a shot with a quick timeline:
- ~1200 BCE: Several unrelated tribes of people group together to become what we now call Jews or Hebrews or ancient Israelites. How this happened and exactly when is disputed, and is significantly muddied by their own mythology.
- ~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others.
- ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time).
- ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let’s just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “The Jewish State” and births the modern Zionist movement, claiming Jews have a right to Israel primarily on religious basis. He approaches world leaders saying as such and finds little traction.
- 1920: Britain takes control of the area now called Mandatory Palestine.
- 1941-1945: The Holocaust. I assume no additional information needed.
- 1945-1948: The Holocaust gives significant weight to Zionists’ arguments that Jewish people need their own country. As many Jews have already been emigrating there (known as “Aliyah” or Jewish emigration to the promised land) since Zionism took hold, the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
- 1948: Israel is officially recognized by the United States, its primary backer today. As part of this recognition, Israel and its allies committed what is commonly known as “The Nakba.” A huge number of Palestinians were killed, injured, jailed, or forcibly removed from the area.
- 1948: Arab-Israeli War. The Arab countries unite to fight the new state of Israel. This, as with most wars, is primarily because of power. The don’t want the West to be controlling the region. The Arabs lose, but nobody loses more than Palestine.
- 1948: Palestinian attacks on Israel start. I don’t have anywhere else to put this, but know that the end of the Arab-Israeli War didn’t end Palestinians fighting for their land and independence. They will continue to do so by any means available to them.
- 1956: Suez Crisis. Israel and its backers invade and militarily occupy part of Egypt and take control of the Suez canal because Egypt decided to nationalize it. This war is transparent in its goal for power.
- 1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders, including land owned by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Palestine would be listed as well if it were recognized as a state. They’re successful in only six days. Notable areas you may have heard of that were militarily acquired by Israel at this time are the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Israel still retains control over these conquered areas.
- 1973: Yom Kippur War. Arab states attack to try to get back the land lost in the Six Day War. Israeli victory.
- 1978: Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to give some land back in return for being recognized by Egypt as a state. Sedat, the Egyptian leader, would be assassinated in part because of this action.
- 1987–1993: First Intifada. More organized and wide-scale Palestinian insurgency than we’ve seen before. Palestinians are fighting for their independence and their land. The insurgency is suppressed.
- 2000–2005: Second Intifada. Same reasons and result as the first.
- 2006-current: Much like the intifadas, there’s a lot to say here, but for the sake of brevity (lol too late) the Palestinian attacks that started in 1948 continue to this day. Israel intermittently declares various wars with the claim that they’re rooting out terrorists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and more.
This leaves out a lot. It’s just not possible to condense it. But (mostly) off the top of my head, that’s what I’d consider most of the most important bits.
The way I see it, whether or not you think Israel is “the good guys” largely hinges on whether or not you think Jews have a right to the land of Israel, and whether or not you think that claim was executed in a humane way.
I would compare it to the Native Americans - were the Americans of that time period the “good guys”? In my opinion, absolutely not. Were the Native Americans wrong for defending their land? Again, absolutely not. Were they wrong for attacking innocent civilians in retribution (for their land being taken, their own innocent civilians being killed, a genocide in progress)? Maybe, but it’s also understandable that when you’re working from a position of basically zero power against a behemoth, you can’t fight the way the behemoth fights, or you’re going to lose.
The way I see it, the Palestinian people just want a place to live and develop, and nobody’s giving them a way out, so they’re trying anything and everything they can.
lmao 1200 BC
Buddy, Zionism is a European settler colonial project from the 1800s that emerged as a response to European antisemitism but is of course, itself, deeply ethnocentric and racist.
All resistance to the occupation, which has repeatedly engaged in ethnic cleansing, is justified under international law. They have now, for a years engaged in a fast genocide, which makes choosing a side very easy so long as you aren’t yourself deeply racist.
You left out the protocol of the elders of zion and the backlash it caused against Jews. It’s fairly important as a catalyst for some of the 20th century shit.
I’m actually okay with that not being included as a critical point in Israeli history. My understanding is it was one piece in a long line of antisemitism, and while it was known by the Nazi party, it was known by the leadership to be fictional and wasn’t used seriously as propaganda by them. That’s not to say it didn’t have any effect, just that I’m not convinced it made much difference when it comes to the creation of Israel as a state.
I’m open to alternative viewpoints if you want to provide evidence or just offer some book titles that might change my mind.
1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders
You’ve made a pretty good summary, but I have one quibble: Egypt, Syria and Jordan were planning to attack Israel. Israel launched pre-emptive strikes.
lmao imagine being this easy to fool
I find it very difficult to justify most historical claims of anticipatory self-defense - it usually looks to me that it’s an aggressor using an excuse to justify their aggression. I haven’t seen nearly enough evidence to suggest Israel wasn’t the aggressor in the Six Day War. While the military mobilization of their neighbors certainly contributed toward Israel’s mobilization, that alone isn’t justification for invasion. Nasser thought Israel was preparing to invade Syria, but he didn’t preemptively invade Israel, he lined up his troops on the Israel-Egypt border and waited. We know now that Israel was not mobilizing troops on Syria’s border, but Nasser’s choice to defend his border was reasonable and nonviolent, even with false information.
But aside from that, I think it’s reasonable to suggest Israel would have attacked even had there been no mobilization of troops from the Arab states. We saw Israel attack Egypt during the Suez Crisis where they forcibly re-opened passage through the Straits of Tiran, their only shipping route to the south other than the also-Egyptian Suez Canal. Just prior to the Six Day War, Egypt cut off Israel from the Straits of Tiran again, something Israel publicly called an act of war. It’s not a coincidence Israel went ahead and took Sinai (immediately adjacent to the Straits of Tiran) during this war and didn’t give it back until the Camp David Accords. (It’s worth noting that had Nasser not gotten the original false information, he wouldn’t have done any of this, and it’s entirely possible the entire thing would have been averted. But he did, and that was a huge blunder on his part. Still, I disagree with Israel that refusing them passage through shipping routes is an act of war.)
I would also suggest that Israel’s behavior after the Six Day War doesn’t seem like the actions of a country that was acting in self-defense. They conquered land during that war and continue to occupy most of it to this day. They’ve invaded other countries since, with stated reasons that are as believable as the United States’ reasons for invading Iraq. They’ve continued to occupy additional land. These actions indicate a country interested in expansionism and power growth, not peaceful co-existence.
the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
Israel wasn’t created by the UK or the US (or the UN). Israelis declared the state of Israel themselves after seizing territory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.
The UN did have a plan to create an Israel in 1947, but that didn’t happen, because neither the Jews, the Arabs, nor the UK were on board.
I think this might be a semantic argument - it’s not important to me if we use the words “give” or “create.” Happy to use whatever words you prefer for allies having power and control of an area and ensuring that power and control is transferred to their chosen ally.
British Mandatory Palestine was officially ending May 15, 1948. Israel announced its independence on May 14, 1948. The United States officially recognized Israel as a state 11 minutes after it declared itself a sovereign state. It’s strange to suggest these are coincidences rather than planned action with their allies, but there’s plenty of evidence in addition to this to make it very clear that Israel wouldn’t have stood a chance without the backing of their superpower friends.
One minor, but important detail: The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, a decade before Herzl’s work. Land was purchased for settlements, and a few tens of thousands came, mostly from Eastern Europe. Within a couple decades the kibbutz system was established, small socialist communities where it was decided, unfortunately, to try to rely exclusively on Jewish labor and economy. This led to the first significant frictions between the settlers and the Palestinians, setting the stage for our situation today.
Very true! It’s hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.
Thank you for the detailed timeline. However, it raises a serious question for me. Am I misreading, or does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years? If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
As you now know, the Zionist project is one by Europeans who colonized and ethnically cleansed large regions of Palestine in the last 120 years or so. Ethnic supremacist myths about stolen Palestinian homes being on Israeli homelands are unacceptable.
Here’s the issue: who’s home is it? Is it the home of people who haven’t lived there for hundreds of years or the home of the people who currently do? Neither of these two groups had anything to do with what happened previously.
Jews had lived in the area for a very long time even after most were expelled. This was relatively peaceful (though not perfect). The current issues started when settlers came, who were not from there, and purchased farms. They later decided they would only hire Jewish workers, despite Muslims traditionally tending it (which hurt production because the Jewish settlers had no idea how to do so, but production wasn’t the goal). Muslims then fought back as their livelihood was being taken from them. The settlers used militias to attack back and used it as justification to take more.
Those militias became the IDF when Israel formed. Israel still uses this tactic of provoking an attack and then using that as an excuse to use more force to take more territory. This has happened many times now and the current fight is just the latest, but not a new event.
There are no “good guys” but there are victims. Anyone just trying to live their lives is a victim. The bad guys are the ones trying to take this away from others.
does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years?
That’s one interpretation, though I’d disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don’t practice Judaism as a religion and don’t really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that… well, I’m not sure, but history would suggest it’s highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn’t care if I did.)
Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?
If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
I would argue Israel wasn’t their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn’t where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they’re happy to call the United States home.
If we’re going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.
First, it’s worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven’t ever lived anywhere else. This means they’re also “so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home.”
Second, to be consistent, we’d have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you’re uprooting a lot of people - and you’d have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don’t see it.
Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn’t mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you’ve caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a “sorry we’re doing this, but we’re trying to make it right.” Instead, they’ve killed millions of people over the decades.
I’m referring to this part of your timeline-
“~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others. ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time). ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let’s just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.”
Maybe I’m misreading it, but it seems to imply that they were, as a people, born from that land, and systemically were persecuted through the course of around 2400 years.
I think there’s a lot of fuzzyness around the idea of “born from that land.” It’s not like they sprouted out of the earth. As with just about any people, there was a lot of rape and murder of warring tribes until some combination of them stopped doing as much rape and as much murder and somewhat arbitrarily called themselves “one people.” If you want to call that “born from that land,” sure, but their ancestry goes back further than that. We’re all just apes.
Also, approximately 900,000 Jews migrated, fled, or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and the establishment of the State of Israel.
True! That’s a good one to point out. It’s hard to overstate how significantly and suddenly the Arabs turned against the Jews. Plenty were understandably going to emigrate from Europe, but Israel made them very unwelcome in the Arab world, too. It’s also another good example of how Israel couldn’t have been established without their allies, since the US/UK were the primary providers of air travel for Jews seeking refuge from Arab states to Israel.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “The Jewish State”
- 1897 CE: Theodor Herzl writes “Mauschel”
Herzl believed that there were two types of Jews, Jiden (Yids) and Juden (Jews), and considered any Jew who openly opposed his proposals for a Zionist solution to the Jewish question to be a Mauschel. The article has often been taken, since its publication, to be emblematic of an antisemitic strain of thinking in Zionism, and has been described as an antisemitic rant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
Due to his Zionist work, he is known in Hebrew as Chozeh HaMedinah (חוֹזֵה הַמְדִינָה), lit. ‘Visionary of the State’. He is specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence and is officially referred to as “the spiritual father of the Jewish State”.
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The guys doing the genocide and the guys fighting the genocide and for a secular democracy are the same actually /s
So many enlightened centrists both-sidesing in this thread.
on a scale from 1 to 10 how serious are you in asking this, I ask because I am genuinly unsure if you are confused and unaware of what is happening, or if you are trying to start some shit
I’ve answered this in the post to another commenter, but I am 100% serious.
Well for Decades the Irealies have both been genociding the Palistinians, and have been on a long push to try to conflait zionism, an origionaly anti-symetic idea in eurpope, that was even embraced by the Nazis, and quinticentialy jewish, so they could use anti-semitism to shield themselvs.
The good guys are the palistinians who where there before anyone else got there, and have been being genocided agian for decades on end, and are being genocided now.
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Arabs have been murdering Arabs for hundreds of years. To say Israel started it is not only wrong but spreading misinformation.
“Israel” was internationally recognized as established in the 1940s based on a European movement from the 1800s to create a settler-colonial ethnostate. Israel did start it, it is an occupying force that displaced Palestinians from their lands in living memory, implemented violent apartheid conditions, and is currently doing a genocide.
Your “Arabs just kill each other this isn’t different” is frankly just relying on racism to avoid actually addressing the real history.
Who started it is pointless at this point
No, it is very much an important point as it happened in recent history via occupation, terrorism, and forced immigration by European settlers backed by the British empire and then the US empire. You must ignore this in order to share the positions that you have.
but this anti Palestine sentiment from Israelis has been brewing for decades. For some context look up Arab-Israeli war of 1948
Anti-Palestinian sentiment has been a core part of the Zionist project since its inception. 1948 is when the largest expulsions happened, the war was a response to this occupation and aggression.
Very few of Israeli Jews are actually Arabs. They are largely of European descent. So it is misinformation to characterize this as Arabs murdering Arabs. What this is is Western settler-colonialism.
I thought the Jewish heritage and population had been there just as long but were purged out from the area. And as part of the WWII agreements, land was set aside for them to reclaim what was theirs many centuries ago.
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10 kids born 2 killed guess what population still grew by 8
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oh right, totally forgot about those poor people who lived and partied next to the concentration camp and then got either kidnapped by people who wanted to break out of the concentration camp or were killed by the IDF. let’s all show a bit more empathy! 😥
It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years. But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed. I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel. And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
Replace US with Israel in this Stokely Carmichael Quote:
“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
Israel, or any bully, will not be swayed by your appeals to their conscience, no matter how hard you try. Ruling classes intentionally spread pacifist propaganda becomes its completely unthreatening to them. Pacifism overall is a losing strategy with zero historical successes, as the article below gets into.
Red Phoenix - Pacifism - How to do the enemy’s job for them. Youtube Audiobook
Dr. King also changed his opinion later on. People act like he was some lifelong pacifist without knowing his full history and what changes were caused by his pacifist actions and by other’s more aggressive actions.
I think it’s important to differentiate pacifism as a strategy – the total renunciation of anything that could be considered violence, often including even mere property damage – with non-violence as one tactic among many.
Many movements have had success using non-violence as a tactic in certain situations, so long as those movements don’t take the possibility of ever using violence completely off the table (pacifism).
I’m extremely confused. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, led by MLK, had massive, sweeping success. Brown v. BOE, Loving v. Virginia, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fair Housing Act of 1968, etc. The non-violent strategy succeded in striking down segregation, Jim crow laws, and nearly all forms of legal racial discrimination within a couple decades.
Securing legal rights for minority groups to be treated equally under the law and courts is a losing strategy? What exactly is your objective if you see the civil rights movement as a loss?
I understand that you’re probably not American so you may not have an extensive knowledge of American history. But this is pretty important stuff, and acting like MLK failed because of his non-violent strategy is 1,000,000% wrong. Literally could not be further from the truth.
What did the Black Panthers accomplish with their violent strategy? They committed a few terrorist acts and all ended up dead or in jail. They didn’t secure any major, permanent victories for future generations.
Saying that MLK failed because of his non-violent approach is like saying Julius Caesar failed because he was an ineffective military commander. It’s so incredibly incorrect that I don’t understand how you could ever come to think that.
You did not read the linked article.
And also if you read Michelle Alexander’s the new jim crow, you’ll realize that even de-jure de-segregation has mostly been circumvented / nullified by drug laws. 1 in 5 black men will spend some time in prison in the US, and slavery is still legal in the US under the guise of drug-based imprisonment.
The article gets more into it, but the material wealth divide was completely unaffected by the civil rights “wins”, and poverty is still growing along color lines. I’ll post a few of these below:
- The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3
- The US has the highest incarceration rates in the world. Even individual US states outrank all other countries.
- Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy. 1
- The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression. 1, 2
- In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
- The Obama era was one of the greatest decreases in working class and black wealth, 2 in history: home equity decreased by ~$17k between 2007 and 2016. His housing policies led to millions losing their homes. While Wall street banks recieved $29 Trillion in bailouts, $75 Billion in relief was set aside for housing foreclosures and mortgage assistance. Instead of being paid to families, this was paid to mortgage servicers, and the services found ways to pocket the money and continue foreclosures: by the end of the program, less than 20% of the funds were used, and most had dropped out of the program due to foreclosures. The Obama administration refused to prosecute the fraud, or any of those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
Ok I still think it’s wrong to criticize nonviolent resistance but I appreciate the data and links. It is true that I didn’t read the linked article at first.
While you sound reasonable, your mistake seems to be to believie that Judaism is the same as Zionism. It is not. It is completely not. They are inherently incompatible. Learn about it or don’t. I’m not some kind of theological scholar or history professor. Maybe ask your local Rabbi about it.
Anyway, sorry to sound like some kind of an extremist to you, but violence is (at the moment) 100% the only answer. Not against the Jewish people, but against the fascist, zionist apartheid regime, who is committing genocide, right now, right before your eyes. Every day, bless you too.
It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years.
This is a Zionism / Palestinian (and any other independence groups, really) “conflict”, which is to say, occupation and rrsistance.
But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
Diplomacy requires leverage and is not an inherent good on its own. Diplomacy can be a tool for delay, propaganda, and for achieving a lopsided deal with false representatives. All of these things have been done via US/Israeli “diplomacy” regarding Paleetine.
You see a people forced into a ghetto fighting back and say, “no that’s not the way” as if you have any understanding and have earned an opinion. An important lesson to learn is when you should have no opinion until you become informed.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
The divide is already there. It is genocidal settler-colonial apartheid vs. freedom fighters. And the camps throwing in for each side of this. Personally, I don’t find it difficult to place myself fully in the freedom fighter camp and against the genociders. Do you? And no, there is no third option because there is no third force with any leverage or will.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed.
The violence has already been here. What on earth are you talking about? What fantasy world do you live in where passive Palestinians are left alone? The Israeli project is premised on their oppression and expulsion.
And you are simply wrong in your generalization. Violence has been essential for virtually every liberation fight. This is not because the marginalized love violence, it is because the oppressor leaves no other options.
I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate doing a genocide. It is racist and horrible to wish the best for it.
And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
You don’t deserve an opinion on this topic because you do not know anything about it. You do not get to set the terms of others’ freedom. You should spend your time helping the resistance, not rationalizing a fairy tale about how to oppose settler-colonial genocide with “diplomacy” and no militarized resistance.
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It’s clear Judaism / Muslim conflicts have caused a lot more suffering to Muslims in Palestine for the last 100+ years. But the solution to this conflict will never be violence. Only diplomacy.
The mental model here is “violence and diplomacy are mutually exclusive”. In fact, they’re very closely connected, almost synonymous.
I’m arguing that such comments can generate hate and divide. You don’t have to agree with me on this, but I at least hope you agree that the solution is not hate, but diplomacy.
Agree here. I grew up in violence and lived through the peace process. It starts out violent, and you win concessions by showing strength, and then negotiate peace. That worked in Ireland in 1998 and almost worked in Palestine in 2000. Violence is the first part of the diplomacy.
When violence is acceptable the weak and marginalized are destroyed.
You’re saying that the weak should go to the negotiating table empty-handed, but that won’t solve anything for them. They need to stop being weak and start being strong, then diplomacy can start to happen.
The solution to weakness is strength. How can the weak become strong without the Armalite?
The Catholics took up arms in 1968 and came to the negotiating table in 1998. We won some concessions because we showed strength for 31 years, not “empathy”. Yasser Arafat understood this: he knew when to use violence and when to negotiate. If you defang yourself as Step One, you make diplomacy impossible.
I only wish the best for Gaza and Israel. And in my opinion the solution is empathy and diplomacy. It’s obviously terribly hard to negotiate and empathize with your abuser. But in my opinion, if this sentiment doesn’t start the conflict will only stop when the weaker side is destroyed. I hope we can respect each other. Bless you.
I admire your values, but you’re incorrectly equating “empathy and diplomacy”. Diplomacy is more a military matter; empathy has no place in realpolitik.
This is what Israel defending itself actually means
Israel and its settler garrison are carrying out the standard colonialist formula throughout history (epitomized by the US model in its conquest) : eviction and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants, and theft of their lands.
This is defended under many premises, a “religious” calling, a “civilizing” venture (with orientalist undertones), and many others, but the goal is the same as all imperialist ventures: theft of land, labor, and natural resources. People from around the world, no matter how rich or poor, are invited to join in this colonial project, and many do, because of the promise of cheap land.
Predictably, Israel calls anyone who opposes this genocide as “terrorists”, even though by all reasonable definition of terrorism, its the settler garrison who are the real terrorists: murdering innocent civilians, stealing their towns, and erasing the old names. In Palestine, the largest of this event was called the Nakba, whereas in the US, the entire 1800s was a westward-expanding colonial war defeating hundreds of native tribes and killing anyone who resisted.
The US is the primary supporter of this project, because Israel is for them, a giant, unsinkable aircraft carrier / military base in the middle east, which can be used to project western military power on the resource-rich middle east. As Joe Biden said: “If Israel didn’t exist, it would be necessary for the US to invent one herself.”
I suggest watching this video, as its the best short introduction: How Palestine became Colonized.
Thanks for the info. I’ve saved this video to my watch later list, and I’ll let you know what I think about it when I do.
👍
If you would not have called Rhodesia or Apartheid South Africa the good guys then you should not consider Israel to be the good guys either.
I don’t think a lot of westerners realize how highly propagandized and pro-colonialist their media is.
The US deemed the African National Congress (ANC, the main group resisting apartheid south africa) a terrorist group just like they do hamas now, and only removed Mandela from the US terrorist watchlist in 2008.
US media is saying all the same things about Palestine’s resistance that they did in the 80s w/ to south african apartheid.
It’s also worth noting that Mandela founded the ANC’s guerilla branch. Western media today portrays him as a purely non-violent, MLK-like figure, but in reality he was central to the ANC’s decision to begin an armed struggle against apartheid.
It’s almost as if:
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
The amount of bias, propaganda, and straight-up misinformation from western media regarding this “conflict” (more like massacre) is truly outrageous.
The people who won’t accept a two state solution are the bad guys, so much is clear.
“Why won’t you accept our proposal of Bantustans, you ingrates!? You deserve genocide for this”
Let’s just fight forever then. Endless hate. Only war. Is anyone who started this shit even alive anymore?
The attempt to “both sides” a genocuidal apartheid settler colonial ethnostate currently doing a genocide vs. the indigenous and regional people opposing them is disgusting. If you don’t put in any work yo understand this topic, you do not need to have an opinion, let alone share it. Though it is important to be politically educated, so you should do the reading so that you can be helpful rather than counterproductive.
And re: people alive remembering how it “started”, much of the leadership of the resistance are literal refugees driven from their homes in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. And of course it does not take much work to inform yourself of the origins of Zionism in 1800s Europe and the antisemitism a collaborating Zionist movement that built ethnocentric colonies in Palestine and eventually formed organized terrorist groups to force conflicts with the indigenous population and receive military backing from the British.
Maybe try looking at it from the point of view of the individual people living there (and having been born there for generations) instead of whatever strategic/historical layer you’re on. The state of Israel exists and won’t be going away, that’s a fact. You can hate the injustice if you want but it would still be better if they’d finally make peace and just live in the present instead of murdering each other over the past. But neither leadership is willing to do that.
Okay, now you can continue scolding me. Don’t forget to link this to Russia’s attack on Ukraine!
Like I said, you need to shed this idea that you are entitled to an opinion, and to share it, having done no investigation.
Maybe try looking at it from the point of view of the individual people living there (and having been born there for generations) instead of whatever strategic/historical layer you’re on.
Which people and where? What do they think? Have you ever actually interacted with Israelis, Palestinians? Israelis are extremely racist and support their settler colonial project and the genocide.
The state of Israel exists and won’t be going away, that’s a fact.
Apartheid South Africa went away.
Also what happened to thinking about the individual people? You didn’t talk about them.
You can hate the injustice if you want but it would still be better if they’d finally make peace and just live in the present instead of murdering each other over the past. But neither leadership is willing to do that.
You cannot live in peace under constant occupation, displacement, and genocide. “Just make peace” is a childish idealism that means you don’t know anything about this topic.
But neither leadership is willing to do that.
One is a gemoxidal racist occupier and the other is an occupation resistance group. Don’t give me this both sides bullshit.
Okay, now you can continue scolding me. Don’t forget to link this to Russia’s attack on Ukraine!
You should do the actual self-reflection required here. There is a genocide on. If you are going to share thoughts on this topic that defends the genociders in any way you better have spent at least a few houra educating yourself. Clearly you have not, and still have no humility about it.
You are really good at putting words in my mouth, that’s been clear from your first reply.
So what’s your great plan that isn’t childish idealism?
Take as much time as you need to actually reply to my response.
To me that seems the most optimal and level headed solution, but as you can see many people disagree. A lot of people in this thread are calling for the elimination of Israel as a state, and that confuses me, because they’re saying the things that Israel is SAYING that their enemies are saying, further justifying, in Israel’s eyes, their own actions.
With this post, I guess I was looking for more historical facts and context on who is historically the bad guy in this situation. I’ve gotten some of that. I’ll keep studying the situation and I think I’m going to actively try to avoid getting sucked into the idea that one side or the other should be completely eliminated. My gut just has a really negative reaction to that sort of talk.
Yeah, and the problem is that the history of the conflict didn’t even start with the current state of Israel being established. There really is no simple good/bad narrative to be had. It’s just a shitty situation for anyone who happens to live there.
Israel are absolutely and undeniably the bad guys. To use an analogy, imagine a school bully who is stronger and gets the support of the teachers and principal of the school, and the bully beats up the smaller kid every day until they hit a breaking point and throws a punch back. A reasonable school would support the bullied kid, but in this case, the principal just gives the bully a gun and looks away.
Israel has been dehumanizing and oppressing the Palestinian people since it’s inception and things have been getting worse. When October 7th happen, it was indeed horrible and many civilians got hurt, but Israel’s response was so completely disproportionately mad that they are actively committing genocide, treating the list of warcrimes like a to-do list.
In Western fiction, you are taught to support the scrappy underdogs facing oppression from a racist occupying force. You root for them and cheer when they blow up military facilities and you feel for them when they lose their compatriots to oppressor violence. You know very well who the good guys and bad guys are.
But then, in Western media, with a mere change of labeling and some paper-thin propaganda, they will have you believing the opposite. All they need to do is call the freedom fighter resistance “terrorists”, say that the occupiers “have a right to defend themselves”, and pretend the “conflict” is “complicated” and really about religion. And they will so this even when the occupier ramps up genocide to unignorable levels.
The good guys remain those fighting occupation. This is consistent with a basic understanding of liberation, with nearly everyone’s stated beliefs about self-determination, and international law. The bad guys are the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonist occupiers doing a genocide as well as their supporters.
Question- isn’t Hamas constantly attacking Israel with the stated goal to eradicate them?
Just to be clear, Hamas does not want to eradicate the Jews. That is a myth propagated by Israel.
Hamas wants to eliminate Israel, by which they mean they want Israel replaced by an Arab-majority state in which both Jews and Arabs live. (Hamas want the return of 4 million Palestinian refugees to Israel/Palestine, which would make it an Arab-majority state.)
Furthermore, they have indicated they are open to negotiating a Two-State solution.
I don’t think it makes any sense to portray Hamas as unreasonable for wanting Arabs to control the whole land (from the river to the sea) when Israel want the same thing for Jews.
Why does Hamas get to say they want to eradicate Israel as a state and have Arab-majority control over the region, but Israel doesn’t get to say they want to control the entire region? What makes who correct to say that in either case?
Israel is saying they want to destroy Hamas which is the government of Gaza.
And they are saying they want to control the region. They call it Greater Israel.
Because Israel set up an apartheid state. If they had set about building a representative democracy that included a constitutional right of return for Jews nobody would have had a problem. Instead they want to own all this land and oppress the people who live there.
Either that’s a legitimate goal or it isn’t. I don’t think it is.
but Israel doesn’t get to say they want to control the entire region?
What do you mean Israel doesn’t “get” to say that?
Israel does say that, and Israel does control the entire region, and almost every Western power allows them to.
I guess I meant to ask why is it morally okay for Palestinians to want to do that, but not morally ok for Israelis to want to do that. Is it because Israel is an apartheid, ethnostate?
Palestinians want the right to return from where they were ethnically cleansed, Israel wants to maintain a Jewish majority state.
Your confusing a state with a people.
Hama’s want to stop Israel (the state) from existing as they occupy their territory, and make them live in internment camps.
Israel wants to stop the Palestinian people from existing, because they are an inconvenience.
Because Palestine is a multifaith, multicultural country and Israel is a colonial foothold & apartheid that is actively and systemically trying to erase both Palestine and Palestinians.
Resistance is justified, oppression is not.
Did you watch the video I linked you below?
I’m sorry, I don’t see a video link.
Israel is a racist genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate. All good people wish for the destruction of such a thing just like all good people wished for the destruction of the apartheid South African ethnostate. If Hamas wishes this, they should be commended for it, don’t you think? And anyone who disagrees called out for the racial supremacist that they are?
I’ve seen many people in this post say the best solution is a two state system. You’re saying that’s not what you would prefer, and that Israel should be wiped out?
I don’t have a particular opinion on your view because my knowledge of what Israel and Hamas has done is admittedly limited, but I would lean towards the idea that you’re justifying Israel’s reaction and statements that the reason they are taking the action they are is because of, well, ideas like yours.
I think, from what I’ve learned over the past week of exploring this situation, that a two state solution is fair and striving for peace and understanding between the two parties is desirable. I seem to have an innately negative reaction to what you suggest here.
I’ve seen many people in this post say the best solution is a two state system.
That is not a solution, it is bantustans.
You’re saying that’s not what you would prefer, and that Israel should be wiped out?
The “state” of Israel should be destroyed thoroughly. The “state” of Israel is premised on ethnosuoremacist genocidal apartheid and colonization. Remove those things and the “state” of Israel will fundamentally no longer exist, both because injustice will have been addressed and also because a very large number of Israeli settlers will simply leave, as they only care about living in an ethnostate that serves them. Something similar happened with Boers.
I don’t have a particular opinion on your view because my knowledge of what Israel and Hamas has done is admittedly limited, but I would lean towards the idea that you’re justifying Israel’s reaction and statements that the reason they are taking the action they are is because of, well, ideas like yours.
Israel’s political leadership have always understood their project as ethnosupremacist, of requiring stealing land from the natives, as requiring oppression of the larger population of Palestinians who will not tolerate these conditions. They correctly understand that this project will end if those conditions are addressed, if justice is done. That is not a reason to accept their justification, as no ethnkstate deserves to exist or “defend itself” against those it oppresses.
I think, from what I’ve learned over the past week of exploring this situation, that a two state solution is fair and striving for peace and understanding between the two parties is desirable. I seem to have an innately negative reaction to what you suggest here.
A two-state solution is bantustans and not even taken seriously by the “Israelis” or their American sponsors. It is just a nice-sounding “compromise” they hold in front of liberals like a carrot so that they will accept their continued slow (or now fast) genocide and displacement of Palestinians. “Israel” prefers its slow and steady expulsion of Palestinians into smaller and smaller concentration camps, like districts from South Africa. Those could never be considered a “state” under any circumstances and “Israel” would never accept them as such, even in such a diajointed condition.
Justice requires an end to the ethnostate itself.
Thank you for such a detailed response. Considering your views that ethnostates should be done away with, an interesting question came up for me. Would you be in favor of forcefully going in and forcing regime change in Israel?
I think the latter is entirely unnecessary. The US and its co-sponsor lackeys could do plenty by simply withdrawing support. The Zionist project is 90% dependent on constant material aid from Western powers to prop up its regime and would be forced to concede to the larger and more committed Palestian liberation movement without it. If they were to do anything active that was helpful, it would be to denuclearize Israel first.
Both of this things would require significant changes, though. Israel is propped up because it’s violence against its neighbors is useful for US domination of the region. But we can work for this in pieces by blocking arms exports, disrupting supply chains, and builsing leverage to demand that countries spend domestically instead of supporting genocide. Ironically in EU countries it is far-right electoral groups that have more steam for the latter due to the fact that liberals have made themselves the warmongers focused on increased militarization, but of course we cannot trust those right wingers to follow through.
Please understand the distinction between the destruction of the state of Israel and the destruction of the people of Israel. The example you were just given was the destruction of the state of South Africa.
a two state solution is fair and striving for peace and understanding between the two parties is desirable.
That sounds nice, but Israel wants no such thing and never has, despite its past claims to the contrary.
I think a Two-State Solution would be a good idea (and I have opinions on exactly where the border should go), but it will have to be imposed on Israel by the international community.
Israel has never been sincere about a Two-State solution, and their “offers” to Palestine have been inadequate and unworkable, and the Palestinians have been right to reject them because there’s no point in accepting a deal that won’t lead to peace. Only a fair and workable deal can lead to peace.
Israel has demonstrated that they are an illegitimate state, because legitimate states do not bomb the stateless people living within their borders. At this point we should be treating Israel like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. The Israeli military should be placed under foreign control, and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza returned to the Palestinians.
So far, the only thing stopping this from happening has been the United States’ support for Israel.
Israel needs to realize that the United States is rapidly declining in power, and if Israel doesn’t voluntarily cede the Palestinian territories, Israel might not exist at all in the near future.
What does destruction of Israel as a genocidal settler-colonial ethnostate look like to you? Does it look like Oct 7 writ large across all of Israel? Does it look like the massive bombing campaign, displacement, and destruction of capacity for civilians to live that Israel has perpetrated in Gaza?
The end of apartheid, the end of ethnosupremacy at both the state and societal level, land back for displaced Palestinians. But most importantly, self-determination for the people of Palestine. They decide what they need or want once they are in a position to liberate themselves, not you and not me.
The side you are carrying water for is an ethnosupremacy at apartheid settler colonial occupation. You don’t get to hand wring about what you think the oppressed will do to their opprrssors.
First, I am not on Israel’s side in this matter. I denounce their historical and ongoing oppression of Palestinians to say the least and generally see a two state solution as an ideal outcome, along with the outcomes you mentioned, dismantling apartheid and establishing self-determination for Palestinians. However I would not condone atrocities to achieve this goal. Just as I am in support of Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, I would not condone any war crimes if they were to commit them. How we achieve our goals matter.
Sure, neither of us are directly affected won’t be the ones deciding, yet here we are expressing our opinions and hopefully having a worthwhile conversation about it. Perhaps all of social media is just political noise, yet us humans seem to like to weigh in on world events.
First, I am not on Israel’s side in this matter
And yet you used a tired Zionist talking point that amounts to, “what if the people we are oppressing do the same things to us if we stop the oppression?” It was also used for apartheid South Africa, incidentally. And we can see that the oppressed are far more humane than these ethnic supremacists.
But maybe you are anti-Zionist and just picked up this question from others.
I denounce their historical and ongoing oppression of Palestinians to say the least and generally see a two state solution as an ideal outcome, along with the outcomes you mentioned
The outcomes I mentioned are incompatible with a two-state solution. A two-state solution is bantustans and it was “agreed” to by compradors. It is not a serious proposal, which is why Israel/the US has never attempted to implement it and has instead further oppressed and fragmented Palestinians.
A two-state solution means no right of return, the continuation of the Israeli apartheid ethnostate, and the status quo for Gaza and The West Bank. There can be no state under occupation, with its orchards and homes stolen, with its towns disjointed, with a comprador government installed by Western interests. That is neither sovereignty nor justice and it would not be tolerated by the oppressed.
However I would not condone atrocities to achieve this goal.
Define atrocities. Israel will simply shoot and torture peaceful movements. It already has done so many times. Only armed resistance can defeat such an oppressor.
Just as I am in support of Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, I would not condone any war crimes if they were to commit them. How we achieve our goals matter.
Just as the West labels all Palestinians freedom fighters, they will label actions far lesser than what Israel does on a daily basis “war crimes” when it suits them, just like the ICC seems to basically only go after black African war criminals (Bush and Cheney weren’t tried at the Hague, hmm). Guerilla warfare against an oppressor will not be clean, this is impossible. Intelligence will fail and targets will be colocated, e.g. the IDF has part of its headquarters by a shopping mall. And individuals will do terrible and violent things. Also, Israelis and the West, including the US president, will simply lie, like with the “beheaded babies” narrative. So you will have to prepare yourself to question these narratives and accept a world where the freedom fighters will be accused of war crimes by the usual sources.
Though, if we are speaking of international law, occupied people are allowed to resist their occupiers by any means they deem fit.
Sure, neither of us are directly affected won’t be the ones deciding, yet here we are expressing our opinions and hopefully having a worthwhile conversation about it. Perhaps all of social media is just political noise, yet us humans seem to like to weigh in on world events.
I use this platform for chatting and agitation. This convo is in the agitation category, of course. Generally speaking it is important to shout down pro-genocide narratives, whether it is Zionist propaganda or Dems trying to get their voters to tolerate genocide.
How did it look when south africans overthrew the apartheid regime? Didn’t come anywhere near the racist nightmares of white supremacists, and there’s no reason to believe the return of palestine will be any different.
Also it’s up to Palestinians, and no one else to decide what to do with their land.
Does it look like Oct 7 writ large across all of Israel?
Can’t say they don’t deserve it
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Which is why Jews across the world have said Israel is genuinely the greatest source of danger to them in terms of antisemitism - because it has linked its atrocities to their identity, regardless of their personal support.
Because you’re unable to distinguish between a state and a people, you’re unable to imagine anything but the eradication of a people, even though the example of the state of South Africa was just given to you.
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conflation of state and people that Hamas’s ideology clearly makes
A Document of General Principles and Policies
by largely targeting and slaughtering civilians in their homes
That is not what happened. That is what Western media said happened.
- The Intercept:
- Al Jazeera: Why did Israel deploy Hannibal Directive, allowing killing of own citizens?
- Electronic Intifada: How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October
.
If Hamas wants to dismantle Israeli oppression through activism, negotiations, and political reform great.
- It has tried to do that for decades. The most recent significant attempt was Great March of Return, wherein the IDF slaughtered Gazans.
- Palestinians have the legal right under UN law to struggle against their occupiers by any means necessary, including armed struggle.
- Israel, as an occupier, has no right to “self defense.”
You can support Palestine as a people right to live, and condemn Israeli blanket bombing without supporting Hamas’ shooting civilians.
Or did you also struggle with condemning British occupation of Ireland, whilst also disagreeing with the IRA bombing of civilian targets?
Israel has been keeping Palestinians in a brutal and murderous apartheid state and brutalizing them for 80 years-- imprisoning them indefinitely without charges too. But you want to question what the oppressed do and why, as if it was mysterious. I’m having a hard time beleiving you when you say you want this explained to you, but I suppose I’ll take it at face value and hope for the best.
If you truly want to understand this stuff, start with a deep dive-- several actually, into history. Start with the jewish-roman wars to understand the zionist/zealot motivations. At this point the original states of Israel were 1000 years gone, having weakened themselves with civil war over taxation, then plundered and abosrbed by the neo-babylonians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish–Roman_wars
From there you’ll want to look at the expansion of the ottoman empire and jewish place in it, and how they were governed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_Ottoman_Empire This overlapped with the crusades. I recommend “empires of the sea” by crowley. Crucial in there is how the Ottoman empire depended on slaves to function, but their religion only allowed them to get slaves by capturing them in battle, and it forbade muslims from trading in slaves thesmelves, but allowed buying them. Hence the birth of slave traders as a caste, who were foriegn, and became largely a jewish group. This understandably was not well received back in Europe, where the slaves came from. The ottomans almost totally depopulated the mediteranean coasts gathering slaves. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_14 Toward the end of the ottoman empire (it was an 800 year empire), they officially tolerated muslims as slave traders. (Progress?)
You can also read up on how jews participated in and were persecuted in the crusades, and draw some conclusions as to why and how that played out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_the_Crusades#:~:text=In the First Crusade%2C Jewish,Jews in France suffered especially.
Then move on to jewish presence in the region during the ottoman empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Turkey
Read up on how jewish expulsions from european countries came about because of christianities Vix pervenit. Theres a lot there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vix_pervenit
See how because of medeival views of usury, Jews were ejcted by monarchs in europe as a way to justify seizing their assets, only to allow them back a bit later and starting the process over https://humsci.stanford.edu/feature/stanford-historian-explores-how-expulsions-became-widespread-medieval-europe
From there you can end up in the start of WW2, the jewish holocaust, and then Haganah and Irgun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
Partition, the UN creating a state of Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine
Israel’s leadership thoughts at the time: https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/
From there, the Nakba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
The six day war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War The USS liberty incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
The first and second intifada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Intifada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Intifada
Oslo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_I_Accord
The creation of hamas by Israel to thwart the PLO peace plans and two state solution https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
9/11 and Osama bin laden, and the use and weaponization of his logic by western powers https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/miller.html
The rise of indefinite administrative detention https://apnews.com/article/israel-detention-jails-palestinians-west-bank-793a3b2a1ce8439d08756da8c63e5435
Storming of al aqsa mosque on oct 4 2023 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/4/israeli-settlers-storm-al-aqsa-mosque-complex-on-fifth-day-of-sukkot
October 7 2023 attacks https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67039975
The use of the hannibal directive https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/
You can google and read a lot about the negoatiations and doubts for whether Netenyahu wanted to negotiate for the release of hostages at all, and the Israelis protesting his lack of interest in getting the hostages back. You can also look at settler groups auctioning off peices of gaza, and now lebanon.
That’s fine. Some of my leftist friends feel the same way, like I’m not asking in good faith. I don’t have any way to convince you that I am. I just feel like I’m not educated on the subject and that’s why I’m looking for a wide array of facts and opinions.
Personally I think your perception is part of a larger problem of a breakdown in communication and education, where people automatically assume the worst of everyone’s intentions because of either experience with other bad actors, or because you feel like since you have the knowledge you have and it feels intuitive to you, you feel like everyone else must also have that knowledge and anyone outside of that sphere is simply trying to be a disruptor.
Personally I think your perception is part of a larger problem of a breakdown in communication and education, where people automatically assume the worst of everyone’s intentions because of either experience with other bad actors
Thats a fair accusation. Theres often a lot of bad faith in these communications, so if you are coming from a place of good faith and are here to learn, I apologize, and I’ve added a bunch of history links to my original comment, so you can interpret the history yourself.
Thank you for adding all of that information to your original post. I will read through it!
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You can’t argue that in good faith when one military has so much more resources than the other.
It’s like if a child hits you, then you beat the shit out of him and use the “he started it” excuse.
It’s not just “hitting” when it’s done with explosives and bullets, and the ones doing the killing aren’t children. They’re all bad and all need to be stopped from abusing and slaughtering noncombatants. If you think that’s a hot take, hey congrats, you’ve discovered the thinking that perpetuates the violence.
Every person I’ve talked to that had some real qualifications on that topic says that Israel are the good guys and the people of Palestine are caught in the crossfire of the war.
Are the real qualifications a caliper set and an unwillingness to talk about what they used to do before they got a position in the west German military?
No, the qualifications are people who have studied that conflict for decades and journalists that have been to Gaza and Israel themselves.
I value their opinion significantly higher than the opinion of people on Lemmy that haven’t taken 5 minutes out of their day to read up on the conflict.
And all these people think Israel are the good guys? I wonder what their opinions about apartheid South Africa were at the time.
Israel was explicitly founded as a settler-colonial project, you can look up quotes from famous founding zionists.
“You are being invited to help make history … it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen, but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.”
Theodore Herzl to a Rhodesian representative
So, because the foundations were colonial, we should … kill everyone living in said country?
Is that a serious argument? Because then we have a lot of places to eradicate.
First off, the foundations remain the same, colonial.
Second off, is creating a secular democracy without an apartheid system, aka “destroying Israel” going to kill everyone? Did the collapse of apartheid South Africa kill all the white people there?
The collapse didn’t. But the goal or “Mission” of the Hamas is to eradicate all jews.
So yes, Israel falling would result in the eradication of a vast majority of the Jewish people.
But the goal or “Mission” of the Hamas is to eradicate all jews.
Source that isn’t from the 90s when they were a marginal fundamentalist group and not a leading member of a coalition fighting for a secular democracy?
Every “qualified” person you talked to says the ethnic supremacist apartheid settler colonists are the good guys?
Which Nazi bars do you hang out in?
In US academia anyone who advocates for the Palestinian cause are regularly purged
Funny you call me “Nazi” when you’re apparently the antisemite who wants to see the state of Israel destroyed.
The state of Israel is an apartheid ethnostate. No apartheid ethnostate should exist, just like it is good that apartheid South Africa no longer exists and was displaced through armed resistance, negotiations, and a plebiscite.
So, tell me which Nazi bars you hang out in where the only “qualified” people are pro-ethnostate.
Israel does genocide. That’s it.
