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That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of Europea

That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of European settlers via Zionism. It's easy to wave our hands and say "it's so complicated!" or "they've been doing this for thousands of years!" but it's not complicated, much like apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not complicated. Colonialism and ethno-centric racism are never good.

emchammer 2y ago
Doesn't the Torah count for something? It works slower than fiber optics but is massively parallel.
- gravisultra 2y ago
  No, that's mythology. Actual history is The Balfour Declaration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration And Nakba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to.
    - shprd 2y ago
      > The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to. What? Palestinians don't claim the land based on a promise by God. They claim it because they hold the legal documents going back for centuries. Even those expelled in 1948, still have the fucking keys covered with their grandparents blood after the Nakba ethnic cleansing. You know what? let's forget about legal documents, about who is native to the land by DNA, since it's you know "complicated", right? 1. Zionists today (not a story in the past) continue to put outposts in Palestinians farms to snatch more and more land. 2. Israeli troops and settlers killed 171 Palestinian children in the west bank (an area smaller than Delaware) in 2024 alone [1]. 3. They continue building illegal settlements on Palestinians land that's illegal even by US admission. 4. Israel is taking advantage of the power vacuum in Syria and advancing deeper inside Syria borders while taking more and more cities. It's literally provoking and asking for another war where they will claim they were victims. 5. The blood of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is still fresh [2] and more crimes in the past with no one held accountable, soldiers are literally posing and filming their war crimes with no accountability. Many humanitarian orgs believe the number of those killed is actually undercounted as many are still undocumented. They celebrates killing babies (who they claim will be terrorists of course) so soldiers are praised and incentivized to annex entire blood line like savages. Here's a challenge for you: Emit labels like "Palestinians" and "Israelis" and ask someone with no prejudice, hearing it for the first time, "who is in the wrong?" If you are honest and not manipulative you'll get your answer. But nah let's stick to the theory that the entire world is against us and respond to any other theory that it's "complicated" while continue committing war crimes openly admitted by our soldiers ever since Israel was established.[3] Do you agree that everyone who was involved in war crimes to be held responsible, no matter what ethnicity, religion, or passport they hold? That is the core of the problem, Israeli have done more terrible things than the side they claim as terrorists. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-children-killed-unprecedented-rate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-chil... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini... [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/
      - DiscourseFan 2y ago
        Hamas makes the claim from God; perhaps not the PA but they're barely a government anyway.
  - jameslk 2y ago
    Before the Balfour Declaration, the British promised the region to the Arabs if they helped fight against the Ottoman Empire via the McMahon–Hussein correspondence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_correspondence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_corres... Basically, the region was double promised to both sides during WWI, Arabs in the region being promised it first. This crucial detail is somehow often left out of any discussion regarding the Balfour Declaration even though it preceded it.
    - catlover76 2y ago
      You truly fail to realize that there were people living there, and it wasn't an empty plot of land that could get promised by the British to one group or the other?
  - EvgeniyZh 2y ago
    Even ignoring well-known Wikipedia bias in this issue, it is rarely a good source for "actual history"
  - narrator 2y ago
    I think the Israeli and Palestinian authorities would let atheists decide their problems as long as they agree with what they want, baring that, your argument probably isn't going to land with any of them on its merits, especially if it calls their religions "mythology."
  - cnlevy 2y ago
    TIL that Balfour déclaration created the jewish people, and maintained it through history
    - boringg 2y ago
      I think there's some more you can learn today. The Jewish people have been around well before Christ or Muhammad - some where around 1000 BCE not since the Balfour declaration. That doesn't mean anything regarding this comment thread but that you should know the difference between Jewish people and Israel the state.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > Doesn't the Torah count for something? No, absolutely not. If I try to use ancient religions to justify violently forcing a claim to your house and land, then you're entirely within your right to defend yourself by any means necessary. That's not a thing any more. This might help you understand: [0] And, many Jewish people decry Zionism as a perversion. 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3qp21N4qI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3qp21N4qI
robertoandred 2y ago
Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?
- gravisultra 2y ago
  Zionism is a colonial ideology created by Europeans in the late 1800s.
  - robertoandred 2y ago
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  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - dartos 2y ago
      > Colonialism is a leftist ideology created by college professors in the 1970s And that matters because…? > Furthermore, there is no colony without a mother country. I think you’re picking and choosing a definition of colony that fits your argument. Here’s a more applicable one: “ a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government” Instead of making ad hominem attacks and playing semantics, why not argue against the actual ideas?
      - jazzyjackson 2y ago
        I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to? I don’t know that I see a particular difference between ideas and semantics when the assertion is “Israel is a European colonialist project”
dismalaf 2y ago
This is a lot of buzzwords but no content. The background behind the current conflict goes something like this: Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down. The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British. The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it. The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them. They lose. The Jews gain more territory. The Arab parts of Palestine get annexed into Jordan and Egypt. Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less. Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area. Even during the Ottoman Era. In fact, Zionism started during the Ottoman Era. Also relatively few people lived in Palestine, less than a million total in 1922. And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs (plenty of Jews lived all over the middle east).
- dakom 2y ago
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- rayiner 2y ago
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  - alephnerd 2y ago
    The Ottomans definetly deserve a ton of blame, but tbf the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was in the midst of a massive collapse of authority from the Balkans to Basra. IMO, almost all the instability across Eurasia is because of the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Qajar, Mughal, and Qing Empires. It would be like if the US, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, snd Mexico all fell into a protracted collapse over 50 years at (roughly) the same time.
- 2y ago
reissbaker 2y ago
The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (aka, Jews who never left the Middle East), at 45% of the population [1]. This isn't about Europeans, or even "race": Mizrahi Jews and their Palestinian neighbors are racially indistinguishable. Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews. [2] Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism, Ashkenazi Jews are firmly within the Middle Eastern/Levantine clade and are more closely related to Palestinians than they are any European group. [3] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews
- ignoramous 2y ago
  > Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism You're reading things OP didn't even write; and addressing a historical assertion with present-day facts. OP posits that European settlers coming in during the Ottoman era (establishing Hebrew-only areas & businesses, only to later demand a Jewish State, in opposition to the local majority [0]) is what kickstarted the current conflict. It isn't a 1000 year old feud. Mizrahis, save for Yemenis, migrated en masse after the conflict was irreversibly set in motion by Imperial Britain & various Arab states. [0] https://www.pbs.org/video/1913-seeds-conflict-establishing-roots-palestine/ https://www.pbs.org/video/1913-seeds-conflict-establishing-r...
  - thomassmith65 2y ago
    That's a high quality comment but nothing at all like the comment it is defending whose main thrust is that the conflict is simple to understand and one side is just wrong.
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      Apartheid, oppression, occupation, genocide, and ethno-nationalist supremacy are "just wrong", and not all that complex once you get past the lie that they don't exist. Also, the comment's "main thrust" was in response to the claim that the area is 'just always like that', for 'thousands of years', which is categorically untrue; a deliberate thought-terminating lie. Israel's terror campaign and colonialist brutality of the last 80 years is something quite new and different, based as it is on brutal British and American colonial strategies.
thomassmith65 2y ago
It's 'not complicated' if one is lazy. The comment is missing a lot of mitigating pieces of information: - the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent - the lack of options for Jews facing persecution, pograms and a holocaust given immigration policies of nations around the world - the many Jews in Israel formerly from middle-eastern nations - the complication to the birth-right citizenship argument that all Jews have Israeli ancestry (albeit very distant, in many cases) - the UN Partition Plan for Palestine The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. It's not the Palestinians' fault that their land was least bad refuge for Jews, but it probably was.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago
  >The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. So true on a theoretical basis, and at the same time both sides are wrong for fighting on that same basis. Leaving the only sensible participants those who are committed to complete non-violence for a few generations, no-one else could possibly have beneficial actionable input without making things worse. >the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent You have my upvote but I consider this a fairly weak argument from all sides. After WWII there were only three kinds of people remaining on my home planet: 1. Those that won WWII. 2. Those that lost WWII. 3. Those that were saved by the ones that won WWII. Everyone else was killed. Sure, it's a fresh start, but pretty gloomy when you think about it. The winners rightly would be expected to take the lead from that point on, drawing lines of co-operation highly focused on preventing any more worldwide conflict in any predictable way. Definitely for the foreseeable future at the time, and it has proven to work more effectively than any other peace initiative in human history. Relative to the overall threat. Anyone who was saved by the winners of WWII and was not completely delighted with the outcome has certainly never had legitimate grounds for complaint considering the alternative. How quickly some people can forget. Then again religious hatred and/or superstition can misguide some otherwise intelligent people from just about anywhere, and this is nothing new since cave men were all there was. Of course it's been quite a while since prehistoric times, so too late now, nothing that happened before WWII will ever be a reason for further conflict ever. They'd have to be a complete moron. Looks like the world had settled into its most peaceful time by about 1950. Realistically the only major war that remained was a cold one after that, and regardless of whether you were unappreciatively saved by the winners of WWII, or happened to be disgruntled losers, the only way to change it was to start WWIII. At one time everybody knew that. Which "everyone" also knew would take one hell of a suicidal maniac, but if it happened it would probably be dealt with along the lines of how Kamikaze tactics were proven to be overcome when the scale reached world-threatening proportions. It was already the 20th century with worldwide communication and everything, and the century was only halfway along. Naturally with such a worldwide war brought to conclusion without complete destruction everywhere, previous conflict up until that time had been made as equally prehistoric as in 19,500 BC ever since. How could people forget so easily? Who would possibly be suicidal enough to let that kind of bloodthirsty hatred rule again?
redmajor12 2y ago
True, but Israel could be seen as just the latest Crusade.
raxxor 2y ago
That is wrong. There were conflicts before, the Hebron massacre (1929) for example. There was an Arab nationalism and the Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler and planned a middle-eastern Holocaust. Also, Jews were expelled from surrounding nations when Israel was founded, even more than Palestinians were driven from what now is Israel. There never was any compensation or talk about their right to return and these are not Jews with European ancestry. Frankly, I think not a single statement of yours is true.
awaywithcovid 2y ago
"The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud" Well, actually, it is. There were 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid up until the caliphate was defeated and broken up in 1920/1924. For 1200 years, non-muslims lived under apartheid (Dhimmi). Up until that point, Islamic supremacism was as firmly established as white supremacism was in America. I suppose if America (which itself was built on war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid) was defeated in WWI, broken up into various nations, and some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? After all, at that time, Native Americans accounted for only .25% of the population. Since there were so few of them it would make no sense for them to have their own nation. Wars have consequences. Many ethnic groups lost their lands due to the expansion of the caliphate over 1200 years. The caliphate was then defeated, and things have changed. "... ethno-centric racism are never good". While in no way saying that this supports the idea that "ethno-centric racism" is good, you should read the constitutions of the 22 Arab countries in the Arab League. They have, as their basic principals that they are Arab/Muslim countries, and have Islam/Sharia as their law. So, are all of these countries also illegitimate ? Or, just Israel ? Or maybe America should change its constitution to declare that America is a white European country based on Christian law ?
- shprd 2y ago
  > some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? You know that would have been great. But who are the native Americans in your example? Majority of Zionists that established Israel and their groups arrived by ships from Europe. Wouldn't that more resemble England and Spain colonization expeditions in your example? Weird.. like the story almost matches exactly to the how colonies were established Such an ironic example to give voluntarily. Let's take a look at the background of Israel's founding fathers and where did they came from: - David Ben-Gurion - Poland - Aharon Zisling - Belarus - David Remez - Russia - Pinchas Rosen - Germany - Moshe Sharett - Ukraine - Haim-Moshe Shapira - Belarus - Yehuda Leib Maimon - Moldova - Mordechai Bentov - Russia - ... Case in point, most weren't natives who lived there under "apartheid" but actually left Europe looking for a new land, backed by... England and the US (Sorry Spain, not this time). If you're struggling to use the real events in history and have to resort to a "hypothesis", it's a sign something is off and you're twisting history a bit too much. At least make sure it's not ironic, next time.
presentation 2y ago
That’s cool and all but the Israelis are in Israel already, there’s no turning back the clock on Zionism without the mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to. Palestinians have a legitimate historical claim and so do Israelis. They’re exactly that, historical. If both sides can’t let those be history, it’s either eternal conflict or the elimination of one of them.
- neoromantique 2y ago
  >mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to. What? They should just go back to Poland! /s
pron 2y ago
Ethnocentric racism is never good and it is, indeed, rampant in Israel, but it's hard to compare European colonialism to Zionism for a few reasons. The cultural and historical affinity of Jews, including Jews residing in Europe, was nothing like that of Europeans to the Americas, Africa, or East Asia. For well over a millennium Jews were praying for a return to Zion three times a day, even after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its later conquest (from the Byzantine Empire) by the Arab Islamic Empire, there have been many (small) migrations of Jews to the area [1], there has been an uninterrupted (small) presence of Jews there, and Jews in Europe were considered "racially" oriental "semites". Unlike European-style settler- or exploitation colonialism, there wasn't any metropole to Zionism, in the name of which colonisation was taking place. Finally, the bigger migration by modern Zionism in the time of the Ottoman Empire (that is when this conflict started, not under the Brits, who came into the picture -- after Tel Aviv was a city), came as a result of difficulties the Jews experienced in Europe and the Russian Empire, and certainly not on behalf of those powers. That's not to say that Israel (like all countries in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand) isn't a form of settler colonialism [1], sometimes openly and consciously so, but it is different from European colonialism (and in some respects it can be different for the worse, at least compared to some specific European colonies). So yes, some things are simple, but your comparisons to things that were quite different actually shows how other things are not so simple. But it is precisely because history is often complex and almost never easily generalisable that I hate using it either as moral justification or condemnation of present events. I don't think that the fact both Arabs and Jews came to the Levant through migration and conquest (even according to both culture's own national mythology) has any bearing on present moral responsibility. In the end, as you say, ethnocentric nationalism is just wrong. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judaism_in_the_Land_of_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism
crabbone 2y ago
What a pile of nonsense... Whose colony is Israel? Do you even understand what this word means? You are just parroting some propaganda lines that you don't understand. The propaganda lines that were specifically constructed to appeal to emotions (by referencing European colonialism that started with exploring Africa and India with subsequent conquest, which did result in many bad things, but has nothing to do with what happened in Israel beyond some superficial similarity). Colonialism was bad because the colonial powers took freedoms away from the local population, siphoned their wealth to the country-colonizer while devastating the colony's inhabitants. Israel did nothing of sorts. It never wanted to have anything to do with the local population. In fact, one of the major sources of conflict was that Jewish population that came to replace the Turks who owned the land worked by the locals didn't want the locals to work that land anymore. And the landless peasants thus became unemployed / unemployable. So, Arabs living in Israel used to be servants to the Turks, but once Jews replaced the Turks, and "freed" the Arabs, the later discovered themselves to be useless and without means of sustaining themselves. Not a good spot to be in, but hey, at least now they were "free" (I do use this ironically, I don't think they wanted that kind of freedom). Arabs, of course, thought about former Turkish land as their own (because they used to work it), but it's no more theirs than it is Jewish or whoever else inhabited that area historically. Bottom line, claiming land based on some historical past that was cancelled by more recent historical events is a road to nowhere. And if you try to follow it, Jews probably have a better claim to that territory than Arabs, who invaded and occupied that territory later. But, more importantly, today, the conflict isn't even about the land at all. All major players would be willing to make territorial concessions, if the core of the problem was addressed. And people are at the core of the problem, not the land. Something needs to be done with the Arabs inhabiting the occupied territories: they need to get some kind of a political status with an eye to permanency. Either completely abandon the program of building an independent state and join some other country, or the opposite. But neither seems likely. And so the conflict will go on for as long as this issue isn't solved.
kgwgk 2y ago
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weatherlite 2y ago
It's a 120 year old feud, quite a lot, and even with a one sided extremist view such as your own I would at least hope anti semitism, pogroms, the holocaust and the right for self determination would make you see there's at least a bit of complexity here. Also - even if this take was true , what's your end game - all states based on past colonialism need to be abolished ? Or is that the right solution only for Israel. E.g if Mexico starts bombing the U.S to get back Mexico, parts of Texas etc, we should all support them right?
kaba0 2y ago
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dmos62 2y ago
It is easy to say it's complicated, but you've inadvertently illustrated just how easy it is to say that it's simple too.

emchammer 2y ago

Doesn't the Torah count for something? It works slower than fiber optics but is massively parallel.

gravisultra 2y ago
No, that's mythology. Actual history is The Balfour Declaration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration And Nakba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to.
  - shprd 2y ago
    > The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to. What? Palestinians don't claim the land based on a promise by God. They claim it because they hold the legal documents going back for centuries. Even those expelled in 1948, still have the fucking keys covered with their grandparents blood after the Nakba ethnic cleansing. You know what? let's forget about legal documents, about who is native to the land by DNA, since it's you know "complicated", right? 1. Zionists today (not a story in the past) continue to put outposts in Palestinians farms to snatch more and more land. 2. Israeli troops and settlers killed 171 Palestinian children in the west bank (an area smaller than Delaware) in 2024 alone [1]. 3. They continue building illegal settlements on Palestinians land that's illegal even by US admission. 4. Israel is taking advantage of the power vacuum in Syria and advancing deeper inside Syria borders while taking more and more cities. It's literally provoking and asking for another war where they will claim they were victims. 5. The blood of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is still fresh [2] and more crimes in the past with no one held accountable, soldiers are literally posing and filming their war crimes with no accountability. Many humanitarian orgs believe the number of those killed is actually undercounted as many are still undocumented. They celebrates killing babies (who they claim will be terrorists of course) so soldiers are praised and incentivized to annex entire blood line like savages. Here's a challenge for you: Emit labels like "Palestinians" and "Israelis" and ask someone with no prejudice, hearing it for the first time, "who is in the wrong?" If you are honest and not manipulative you'll get your answer. But nah let's stick to the theory that the entire world is against us and respond to any other theory that it's "complicated" while continue committing war crimes openly admitted by our soldiers ever since Israel was established.[3] Do you agree that everyone who was involved in war crimes to be held responsible, no matter what ethnicity, religion, or passport they hold? That is the core of the problem, Israeli have done more terrible things than the side they claim as terrorists. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-children-killed-unprecedented-rate https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-chil... [2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestinians-has-israels-gaza-offensive-killed-2025-01-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini... [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/
    - DiscourseFan 2y ago
      Hamas makes the claim from God; perhaps not the PA but they're barely a government anyway.
- jameslk 2y ago
  Before the Balfour Declaration, the British promised the region to the Arabs if they helped fight against the Ottoman Empire via the McMahon–Hussein correspondence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_correspondence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_corres... Basically, the region was double promised to both sides during WWI, Arabs in the region being promised it first. This crucial detail is somehow often left out of any discussion regarding the Balfour Declaration even though it preceded it.
  - catlover76 2y ago
    You truly fail to realize that there were people living there, and it wasn't an empty plot of land that could get promised by the British to one group or the other?
- EvgeniyZh 2y ago
  Even ignoring well-known Wikipedia bias in this issue, it is rarely a good source for "actual history"
- narrator 2y ago
  I think the Israeli and Palestinian authorities would let atheists decide their problems as long as they agree with what they want, baring that, your argument probably isn't going to land with any of them on its merits, especially if it calls their religions "mythology."
- cnlevy 2y ago
  TIL that Balfour déclaration created the jewish people, and maintained it through history
  - boringg 2y ago
    I think there's some more you can learn today. The Jewish people have been around well before Christ or Muhammad - some where around 1000 BCE not since the Balfour declaration. That doesn't mean anything regarding this comment thread but that you should know the difference between Jewish people and Israel the state.
mandmandam 2y ago
> Doesn't the Torah count for something? No, absolutely not. If I try to use ancient religions to justify violently forcing a claim to your house and land, then you're entirely within your right to defend yourself by any means necessary. That's not a thing any more. This might help you understand: [0] And, many Jewish people decry Zionism as a perversion. 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3qp21N4qI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3qp21N4qI

robertoandred 2y ago

Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?

gravisultra 2y ago
Zionism is a colonial ideology created by Europeans in the late 1800s.
- robertoandred 2y ago
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- jazzyjackson 2y ago
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  - dartos 2y ago
    > Colonialism is a leftist ideology created by college professors in the 1970s And that matters because…? > Furthermore, there is no colony without a mother country. I think you’re picking and choosing a definition of colony that fits your argument. Here’s a more applicable one: “ a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government” Instead of making ad hominem attacks and playing semantics, why not argue against the actual ideas?
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      I’m sure the people of Israel would have loved to maintain ties with their homeland but they have been run out of Europe and the Middle East. so where is this Jewish homeland that the colonists in Israel are maintaining ties to? I don’t know that I see a particular difference between ideas and semantics when the assertion is “Israel is a European colonialist project”

dismalaf 2y ago

This is a lot of buzzwords but no content. The background behind the current conflict goes something like this: Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down. The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British. The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it. The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them. They lose. The Jews gain more territory. The Arab parts of Palestine get annexed into Jordan and Egypt. Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less. Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area. Even during the Ottoman Era. In fact, Zionism started during the Ottoman Era. Also relatively few people lived in Palestine, less than a million total in 1922. And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs (plenty of Jews lived all over the middle east).

dakom 2y ago
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rayiner 2y ago
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- alephnerd 2y ago
  The Ottomans definetly deserve a ton of blame, but tbf the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century was in the midst of a massive collapse of authority from the Balkans to Basra. IMO, almost all the instability across Eurasia is because of the collapse of the Ottoman, Russian, Qajar, Mughal, and Qing Empires. It would be like if the US, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Canada, snd Mexico all fell into a protracted collapse over 50 years at (roughly) the same time.
2y ago

reissbaker 2y ago

The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (aka, Jews who never left the Middle East), at 45% of the population [1]. This isn't about Europeans, or even "race": Mizrahi Jews and their Palestinian neighbors are racially indistinguishable. Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews. [2] Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism, Ashkenazi Jews are firmly within the Middle Eastern/Levantine clade and are more closely related to Palestinians than they are any European group. [3] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews

ignoramous 2y ago
> Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism You're reading things OP didn't even write; and addressing a historical assertion with present-day facts. OP posits that European settlers coming in during the Ottoman era (establishing Hebrew-only areas & businesses, only to later demand a Jewish State, in opposition to the local majority [0]) is what kickstarted the current conflict. It isn't a 1000 year old feud. Mizrahis, save for Yemenis, migrated en masse after the conflict was irreversibly set in motion by Imperial Britain & various Arab states. [0] https://www.pbs.org/video/1913-seeds-conflict-establishing-roots-palestine/ https://www.pbs.org/video/1913-seeds-conflict-establishing-r...
- thomassmith65 2y ago
  That's a high quality comment but nothing at all like the comment it is defending whose main thrust is that the conflict is simple to understand and one side is just wrong.
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Apartheid, oppression, occupation, genocide, and ethno-nationalist supremacy are "just wrong", and not all that complex once you get past the lie that they don't exist. Also, the comment's "main thrust" was in response to the claim that the area is 'just always like that', for 'thousands of years', which is categorically untrue; a deliberate thought-terminating lie. Israel's terror campaign and colonialist brutality of the last 80 years is something quite new and different, based as it is on brutal British and American colonial strategies.

thomassmith65 2y ago

It's 'not complicated' if one is lazy. The comment is missing a lot of mitigating pieces of information: - the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent - the lack of options for Jews facing persecution, pograms and a holocaust given immigration policies of nations around the world - the many Jews in Israel formerly from middle-eastern nations - the complication to the birth-right citizenship argument that all Jews have Israeli ancestry (albeit very distant, in many cases) - the UN Partition Plan for Palestine The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. It's not the Palestinians' fault that their land was least bad refuge for Jews, but it probably was.

fuzzfactor 2y ago
>The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. So true on a theoretical basis, and at the same time both sides are wrong for fighting on that same basis. Leaving the only sensible participants those who are committed to complete non-violence for a few generations, no-one else could possibly have beneficial actionable input without making things worse. >the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent You have my upvote but I consider this a fairly weak argument from all sides. After WWII there were only three kinds of people remaining on my home planet: 1. Those that won WWII. 2. Those that lost WWII. 3. Those that were saved by the ones that won WWII. Everyone else was killed. Sure, it's a fresh start, but pretty gloomy when you think about it. The winners rightly would be expected to take the lead from that point on, drawing lines of co-operation highly focused on preventing any more worldwide conflict in any predictable way. Definitely for the foreseeable future at the time, and it has proven to work more effectively than any other peace initiative in human history. Relative to the overall threat. Anyone who was saved by the winners of WWII and was not completely delighted with the outcome has certainly never had legitimate grounds for complaint considering the alternative. How quickly some people can forget. Then again religious hatred and/or superstition can misguide some otherwise intelligent people from just about anywhere, and this is nothing new since cave men were all there was. Of course it's been quite a while since prehistoric times, so too late now, nothing that happened before WWII will ever be a reason for further conflict ever. They'd have to be a complete moron. Looks like the world had settled into its most peaceful time by about 1950. Realistically the only major war that remained was a cold one after that, and regardless of whether you were unappreciatively saved by the winners of WWII, or happened to be disgruntled losers, the only way to change it was to start WWIII. At one time everybody knew that. Which "everyone" also knew would take one hell of a suicidal maniac, but if it happened it would probably be dealt with along the lines of how Kamikaze tactics were proven to be overcome when the scale reached world-threatening proportions. It was already the 20th century with worldwide communication and everything, and the century was only halfway along. Naturally with such a worldwide war brought to conclusion without complete destruction everywhere, previous conflict up until that time had been made as equally prehistoric as in 19,500 BC ever since. How could people forget so easily? Who would possibly be suicidal enough to let that kind of bloodthirsty hatred rule again?

redmajor12 2y ago

True, but Israel could be seen as just the latest Crusade.

raxxor 2y ago

That is wrong. There were conflicts before, the Hebron massacre (1929) for example. There was an Arab nationalism and the Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler and planned a middle-eastern Holocaust. Also, Jews were expelled from surrounding nations when Israel was founded, even more than Palestinians were driven from what now is Israel. There never was any compensation or talk about their right to return and these are not Jews with European ancestry. Frankly, I think not a single statement of yours is true.

awaywithcovid 2y ago

"The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud" Well, actually, it is. There were 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid up until the caliphate was defeated and broken up in 1920/1924. For 1200 years, non-muslims lived under apartheid (Dhimmi). Up until that point, Islamic supremacism was as firmly established as white supremacism was in America. I suppose if America (which itself was built on war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid) was defeated in WWI, broken up into various nations, and some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? After all, at that time, Native Americans accounted for only .25% of the population. Since there were so few of them it would make no sense for them to have their own nation. Wars have consequences. Many ethnic groups lost their lands due to the expansion of the caliphate over 1200 years. The caliphate was then defeated, and things have changed. "... ethno-centric racism are never good". While in no way saying that this supports the idea that "ethno-centric racism" is good, you should read the constitutions of the 22 Arab countries in the Arab League. They have, as their basic principals that they are Arab/Muslim countries, and have Islam/Sharia as their law. So, are all of these countries also illegitimate ? Or, just Israel ? Or maybe America should change its constitution to declare that America is a white European country based on Christian law ?

shprd 2y ago
> some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? You know that would have been great. But who are the native Americans in your example? Majority of Zionists that established Israel and their groups arrived by ships from Europe. Wouldn't that more resemble England and Spain colonization expeditions in your example? Weird.. like the story almost matches exactly to the how colonies were established Such an ironic example to give voluntarily. Let's take a look at the background of Israel's founding fathers and where did they came from: - David Ben-Gurion - Poland - Aharon Zisling - Belarus - David Remez - Russia - Pinchas Rosen - Germany - Moshe Sharett - Ukraine - Haim-Moshe Shapira - Belarus - Yehuda Leib Maimon - Moldova - Mordechai Bentov - Russia - ... Case in point, most weren't natives who lived there under "apartheid" but actually left Europe looking for a new land, backed by... England and the US (Sorry Spain, not this time). If you're struggling to use the real events in history and have to resort to a "hypothesis", it's a sign something is off and you're twisting history a bit too much. At least make sure it's not ironic, next time.

presentation 2y ago

That’s cool and all but the Israelis are in Israel already, there’s no turning back the clock on Zionism without the mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to. Palestinians have a legitimate historical claim and so do Israelis. They’re exactly that, historical. If both sides can’t let those be history, it’s either eternal conflict or the elimination of one of them.

neoromantique 2y ago
>mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to. What? They should just go back to Poland! /s

pron 2y ago

Ethnocentric racism is never good and it is, indeed, rampant in Israel, but it's hard to compare European colonialism to Zionism for a few reasons. The cultural and historical affinity of Jews, including Jews residing in Europe, was nothing like that of Europeans to the Americas, Africa, or East Asia. For well over a millennium Jews were praying for a return to Zion three times a day, even after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its later conquest (from the Byzantine Empire) by the Arab Islamic Empire, there have been many (small) migrations of Jews to the area [1], there has been an uninterrupted (small) presence of Jews there, and Jews in Europe were considered "racially" oriental "semites". Unlike European-style settler- or exploitation colonialism, there wasn't any metropole to Zionism, in the name of which colonisation was taking place. Finally, the bigger migration by modern Zionism in the time of the Ottoman Empire (that is when this conflict started, not under the Brits, who came into the picture -- after Tel Aviv was a city), came as a result of difficulties the Jews experienced in Europe and the Russian Empire, and certainly not on behalf of those powers. That's not to say that Israel (like all countries in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand) isn't a form of settler colonialism [1], sometimes openly and consciously so, but it is different from European colonialism (and in some respects it can be different for the worse, at least compared to some specific European colonies). So yes, some things are simple, but your comparisons to things that were quite different actually shows how other things are not so simple. But it is precisely because history is often complex and almost never easily generalisable that I hate using it either as moral justification or condemnation of present events. I don't think that the fact both Arabs and Jews came to the Levant through migration and conquest (even according to both culture's own national mythology) has any bearing on present moral responsibility. In the end, as you say, ethnocentric nationalism is just wrong. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judaism_in_the_Land_of_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism

crabbone 2y ago

What a pile of nonsense... Whose colony is Israel? Do you even understand what this word means? You are just parroting some propaganda lines that you don't understand. The propaganda lines that were specifically constructed to appeal to emotions (by referencing European colonialism that started with exploring Africa and India with subsequent conquest, which did result in many bad things, but has nothing to do with what happened in Israel beyond some superficial similarity). Colonialism was bad because the colonial powers took freedoms away from the local population, siphoned their wealth to the country-colonizer while devastating the colony's inhabitants. Israel did nothing of sorts. It never wanted to have anything to do with the local population. In fact, one of the major sources of conflict was that Jewish population that came to replace the Turks who owned the land worked by the locals didn't want the locals to work that land anymore. And the landless peasants thus became unemployed / unemployable. So, Arabs living in Israel used to be servants to the Turks, but once Jews replaced the Turks, and "freed" the Arabs, the later discovered themselves to be useless and without means of sustaining themselves. Not a good spot to be in, but hey, at least now they were "free" (I do use this ironically, I don't think they wanted that kind of freedom). Arabs, of course, thought about former Turkish land as their own (because they used to work it), but it's no more theirs than it is Jewish or whoever else inhabited that area historically. Bottom line, claiming land based on some historical past that was cancelled by more recent historical events is a road to nowhere. And if you try to follow it, Jews probably have a better claim to that territory than Arabs, who invaded and occupied that territory later. But, more importantly, today, the conflict isn't even about the land at all. All major players would be willing to make territorial concessions, if the core of the problem was addressed. And people are at the core of the problem, not the land. Something needs to be done with the Arabs inhabiting the occupied territories: they need to get some kind of a political status with an eye to permanency. Either completely abandon the program of building an independent state and join some other country, or the opposite. But neither seems likely. And so the conflict will go on for as long as this issue isn't solved.

kgwgk 2y ago

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weatherlite 2y ago

It's a 120 year old feud, quite a lot, and even with a one sided extremist view such as your own I would at least hope anti semitism, pogroms, the holocaust and the right for self determination would make you see there's at least a bit of complexity here. Also - even if this take was true , what's your end game - all states based on past colonialism need to be abolished ? Or is that the right solution only for Israel. E.g if Mexico starts bombing the U.S to get back Mexico, parts of Texas etc, we should all support them right?

kaba0 2y ago

[flagged]

dmos62 2y ago

It is easy to say it's complicated, but you've inadvertently illustrated just how easy it is to say that it's simple too.