Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs
haaretz.com
haaretz.com
Though I'm not Jewish myself I fancy myself a big supporter of their plight to have a safe country where they can live without fearing expulsions or genocide.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this. Are you suggesting the people of that region are inherently violent? Are we talking about the violence caused by Western countries starting several wars there in the last few decades? Are we talking about the colonial powers' exploitation of Shia/Sunni divides to further their interests?
Also, the guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
So they say. In the meanwhile, Israel has taken almost all the land. It's a very convenient racist and sectarian hatred this of the Palestinians, it has a return measurable in square kms, hundreds of thousands of low price houses, arable land and water resources. For the Israelis, of course.
Problems are always infinitely complicated in the words of those who profit from keeping them unsolved.
I typically hate counterfactuals with a passion, but at some point pragmatism becomes worth considering.
Not that I'm in their context and capable of making that call, mind you.
Where are you getting your information from if I may ask? There are literally millions of anecdata for the contrary.
Is Liban an arab country?
You can justify many things if you go digging through history this way.
For example, what you would call an ethnostate, I would call a reconstitution of the Kingdom of Israel, after the Nation of Israel fell into exile 3000 years ago, and its people scattered into a global diaspora. The Jewish people are already a nation, and this is why the Law of Return exists. Plus, how can a state be an ethnostate if Jews come from Yemen, Iran, Morrocco, Argentina, Spain, Germany, etc?
What you see as a complex and nuanced affair, I see as thousands of years of misled believers of Abraham and Ishmael carrying out fulfillment of myths and legends by committing violence upon each other, with this latest installment of violence originating in precisely the mid-40s relocation efforts that the article is detailing and critiquing.
The history of Jews isn't them committing violence against others, but of violence being committed onto them. The Jews in the diaspora weren't going around stealing people's land and possessions, they were merely trying to live in peace, integrate into whichever nation they were a part of, and suffered pograms, massacres, and blood libel for trying. The violence in 20th centruy started to defend their nation from a second Holocaust, once the lesson had been learned that integration into another nation was impossible. Your impression of Jews as violent people is horribly misguided.
The entire history of the region [0] is worth examining, but I'll highlight one sample which is both indicative of the era and also happens to show Israelites conquering and subjugating their neighbors: The Mesha Stele [1] tells of a time when the Moabites were occupied by Omri (or one of his family), a biblical king of Israel. In more modern times, I can point to the Six Day War [2], the conflict which serves as the capstone to the era of Israel's history covered in the original article, and in which Israel achieved a stunning and decisive military victory over its neighbors.
The history of everybody is committing violence against others, and having violence done to them in turn. It's up to us as humans to choose to do better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ancient_Israel_and_...
No, they lived in Palestine.
In hindsight, having been the Palestinians pushed away from their lands, first through mass immigration, then by the generous gift made by Europe of those lands to the immigrants, and finally through ethnic cleansing and land grabbing, in hindsight their violence towards the newcomers was perfectly justified. How can you blame them if they saw in advance what was happening?
After last time the Jews (Israeli) lived there those areas went from being Roman to Turkish to British to being split into mostly Jordan and Israel. Jordan was the big part - for the Palestinian Arabs - and Israel was about the about 30 % that was left for Palestinian Jews.
At no point in time however before the Oslo process has there been a Palestinian country, only Arabs and Jews living in Palestine, better known as Israel until that massive propaganda effort last century.
Quite a ridiculous statement. The entire region that spans today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine "Israel" was known as Bilad Al-Sham. There were no individual countries with today's borders under the Rashidun Caliphate, to the Ummayads and all the way to the Ottoman empires, just regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilad_al-Sham
Your home and the city you live in, probably your entire region, were never a nation. Does that authorise someone else to come and throw you out? Of course not. Let's stop playing with words.
Especially when these arguments come from people who are all recent immigrants to a country that never existed in the past 2000 years and who have changed their surnames from Polish or Russian to made up Hebrew ones.
The Jews and Palestinians could have lived in peace. The land was settled legally, and the Arabs never controlled it. They chose war instead of peace, when they could have chosen to live together as two nations.
Zionist lies.
No it's not. It's Zionist occupiers vs. the natives.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/hs69hs/jewi...
Ps Ben Gurion’s treatment of diaspora Jews, ruppin’s race pyramid and eugenics plan for the Jews, and other “anecdotes” are beyond the scope of this discussion, but should be remembered. There’s nothing saintly about pre-state Israel, nor innocent.
> Ps Ben Gurion’s treatment of diaspora Jews, ruppin’s race pyramid and eugenics plan for the Jews, and other “anecdotes” are beyond the scope of this discussion, but should be remembered.
Thanks, I'll look that up.
> There’s nothing saintly about pre-state Israel, nor innocent.
Which the current regime of course denies and tries to rewrite history to say otherwise.
In principal, Western Jews like Hertzl himself did not plan to go anywhere. They saw themselves as Europeans were already emancipated since the first half of the 19th century and integrated (which led to growing anti-Semitism in Western Europe, but that's a different story).
Hertzl was secular and agnostic. Very different circumstances to those in the southern part of the Russian Empire (Pale of Settlement).
BTW, WHAT DO YOU call it when Arab leaders like AL-ASAD and AL-SISI, to name a few, kill and torture thousands of their own people, and people like you still find the energy to only reach their keyboard to criticize Israel? Is it fatigue (since you wasted so much time on Israel) or hypocrisy?
And who said we support Assad or Sisi? We're well aware that their regimes are murderous as well. It's not mutually exclusive to speak out against the Israeli occupation.
We’ve long passed “Hagana” and other myths. At least you didn’t link the Hebrew Wikipedia which has been taken over by a nationalistic club of one who’s busy rewriting Israel’s history.
About bedouins, you were talking about the end of the 19th century. At this stage there wasn’t a Palestinian national movement as such. When there was one and following the failed uprise in the 1930s, Palestinians in fact clashed with there own elite, in what was a civil war between the established leadership and a mob. Jews just happened to be in the way.
There was no "Israel" in 1880.
> and a holy war.
No it's not.
How about the 12 Million South Asians displaced in the partition of India & Pakistan? How many Hindus/Sikhs do you see asking for their lands back? the Indus Valley (modern day Pakistan) is the cradle of Indian civilization.
Mind you, both these events happened at the same time (1945-50) as the founding of Israel. Somehow they all seem to have moved on with their lives, and yet the Palestinians seem to be the only one fixated on "our lands" and indulging in self-flagellation.
IMHO the The Palestinians just need to get over it and move on with building a new life in some Arab countries. This idea of condemning generations to oppression and racism, and living in that hell hole of Gaza/West Bank, in the vain hope of winning it all back, is utter insanity.
That's not a silver lining, that just means the bar is waaaay too low. Raise it.
"BREAKING: Egyptian government is corrupt. In other news, water is wet."
On the other hand, there are perhaps many Israelis who believe the false narrative that the Palestinians sold their lands and left, but changed their minds and started the aggression.
I don't have a specific example, but my expectation would be that this holds the same in many countries including the United States. The worry, of course, for all of us is that in times of stress citizens are much more vulnerable. Citizens can be compelled to act against or be silenced from expressing their opinions. The hope, in some cases, is that foreign correspondents are less susceptible to this. On the other hand, I suppose the counter-point to relying on foreign correspondents is that they can be coerced by their own country.
Maybe we can only trust that which both our peers and enemies agree on, though I suppose Oceania and Eurasia could both agree that they have always been at war with each other and we are none the wiser.
> But isn’t concealing documents based on footnotes in books an attempt to lock the barn door after the horses have bolted?
> “I gave you an example that this needn’t be the case. If someone writes that the horse is black, if the horse isn’t outside the barn, you can’t prove that it’s really black.”
For additional context, this is with regards to the scholarship of Benny Morris[0]. Plenty of liberal democracies use and abuse the concept of state secrets, but to abuse it in such a petty and transparent way feels...counterproductive?
This somehow slips everyones minds as those were successfully integrated and not set aside in refugee camps to be played as a pawn in the western media guilt and shame game.