Again, I agree that the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians is abhorrent. That's not an anti-Semitic opinion! Claiming that Jews are not native to the Middle East and are an attempt to replace Palestinians is factually wrong, though, and does rely on anti-Semitic tropes.
(I am Jewish, but I do not support the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians.)
You stuck an 'and' between two ideas there. Native? Sure. Not an attempt to replace Palestinians? That's an uphill argument you've carved off for yourself that runs counter to all observable facts.
May as well just fall back on the classic "it was our land first" and have done with, since honestly you're not going to come up with any moral justification that holds up any better.
It's actually quite rare to see genuine antisemitism these days. Most of what we see claimed as "antisemitism" is just vague insinuations and associations, or inventing supposed "antisemitic tropes" in what people have said.
In fact it's got to the point now where if someone is accused of antisemitism, it's best just to assume it's a malicious accusation with no substance behind it.
I mean, when you have the Zionists accusing people like Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders of antisemitism, you just know it's a bad faith exercise.
Most moderns Jewish inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael came via Aliyah no?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Pales... (you can argue about the title, but just focus on the numbers)
By the way, I am part Jew myself and I don't agree with how Zionism was implemented. In your perspective, does that mean I am against myself?
Prior to the British occupation, the entire region was part of the Ottoman Empire and had been for hundreds of years; the modern borders and boundaries of various countries were largely invented during the 20th century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Allied Powers. When Israel was founded, most Mizrahi Jews moved to Israel due to extreme persecution in the Muslim-majority countries, which were mostly also all new countries carved up from the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to the borders of the 20th century, these Jews were citizens of the Ottoman Empire just like everyone else in the region, and were native to the Middle East. (The Ottoman empire did have provinces, but they don't match the British borders or the post-British borders.)
Mizrahi Jews make up 3.2 million of Israel's Jewish inhabitants [1]. Israel's total Jewish population is 6.7 million [2], so they're about half.
Edit: Since this is frequently a contentious topic, I want to reiterate that I do not support the Israeli government's treatment of Palestinians. Israel's treatment of Palestinians is terrible. This post is meant to counter anti-Semitism, not criticism of Israel. In most of my posts in this thread I have also criticized Israel for its treatment of Palestinians. The fact that many Jews are native to the Middle East does not justify depriving Palestinians of land or self-determination. However, I think it's useful in these discussions to not rely on anti-Semitic tropes e.g. the idea that Jews are non-natives and of Jewish replacement. Jews are in fact natives of the Middle East and have been so longer than anyone else (well, ethnic Lebanese people actually give Jews a run for their money, but those are the two longest-dwelling ethnic groups in the region).
Edit 2: Since it looks like you're getting downvoted — FYI I didn't downvote you and I think your question was legitimate and wasn't ill-intentioned.
A choice quote, of which there are many: "On 1 March 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husseini said: 'Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.'"
Note that the calls for genocide started well before 1948. He was fomenting genocide the entire time. His messages during WWII were extremely popular in the Arab world and upon his return to Palestine after the war "Arab leaders rushed to greet him ... and the masses accorded him an enthusiastic reception."
I’m not sure how I could have phrased this better to make sure I steer clear of any potential offense.
There you go. Rationalizing an intent to subject people to ethnic based displacement. (People who at this point are of mixed descent of every Jewish community, including those displaced INTO Israel from the Arab world)
Your comment seemed to differentiate "Jews" and a "native population," with the non-native Jews having "displaced" the natives. If that's not a distinction you intended to draw, then I think your intentions were totally fine — although your phrasing was easily misinterpreted. If that is the intention you meant to convey, I believe you are in a large part incorrect — the largest subgroup of Israeli Jews are native to the Middle East and have been for thousands of years — and your initial comment (hopefully unintentionally) drew on anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish interlopers and replacers, which are about as old as Western society, on the basis of largely arbitrary, briefly enforced territorial lines drawn up by a European colonial power that had little reflection of the people it attempted and failed to rule.
Again, none of this excuses Israeli treatment of their former neighbors. It's atrocious and deserves to be called out. I just want to avoid anti-Semitism when we do so (as I have tried to also do in this thread).
That's not quite what I said. Palestine was a British colony on a fractured sliver of a former empire that existed for less than 30 years. Unless you consider native status to be determined by where you lived for a 30 year period, there's no "historical Palestine" for someone to be native to: Palestine was not a region in the empire that preceded the brief British rule, and people's identity was not distinguished on the basis of Palestinian borders. They would have been considered Jewish or Muslim or Christian, and lived in one city or another in nearby areas, but wouldn't consider someone to be an "immigrant" if they moved cities, as you've previously described Jews in Israel: some of whom are in fact literal natives and have lived within those borders for hundreds or thousands of years, and some of whom lived in nearby cities but not technically within the boundaries of Palestine (which again, at the time, didn't exist as a meaningful concept).
What would you say if a bunch of bedouins from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula decided in 1948 that they were sick of the desert and went to conquer Palestine
Um, first of all, the British mandate of Palestine was in large part a desert. So, bad move on their part if they were "sick of the desert." Second of all, the Bedouins do currently live in the deserts of Israel, as they also have for thousands of years; they are not confined to the Arabian Peninsula as it seems you're claiming (they do in some sense come from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Palestinians do — although in fact the Bedouins arrived thousands of years before the Palestinians did). So I'm not sure where you're going with this; they were also inhabitants and would not be some non-native interlopers, as you're claiming they would be? And as you're claiming Jews are?
Jews, like Bedouins, have been native to the region for thousands of years. They were also native to the region you call Palestine — there are synagogues hundreds of years old in Safed, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities — but the boundaries of that region were not historically meaningful, and they were spread out throughout the surrounding area as well, as a small but meaningful minority. After WWI they faced massive repression in the new Muslim countries and consolidated in the boundaries of what is now Israel, but previously was also not meaningfully separated from the surrounding countries. Referring to them as "immigrants" is disingenuous: there was no country they were "immigrating" from or to that existed for more than a handful of years, and the previous longstanding country was one they were already citizens of and had been for its entire existence; they were native to it, and to the region it occupied. They predated almost anyone in the region by millennia.
And also, while I’m here, we don’t define “historical Palestine” by some maps. We can define it very clearly by a
Jews were native to the Middle East! Nobody is disputing that. What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco to parents born and raised in Morocco has the right to displace some Palestinian villagers just because he thinks his ancient homeland is from the time of after Joseph and Moses because of his ancestors.
By the way, for your information, my friends tell me that in their neighborhood they had a “harat al sumarah” which is translated neighborhood of the simarians. These people never accepted Israel and refused to move. My friends also tell me the IDF hate them because they both resist the occupation and are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them. That is just what I hear from them, but I bring it up so you know that there are some people of ancient Jewish lineage who are still living in Palestine alongside Palestinians.
Ok, I think you are very misinformed by Biblical quotes from thousands of years ago, when the climate of Mesopotamia was very different. Israel is considerably more than 50% desert or "arid steppe." The rest is either dry, temperate, and hot, or dry, temperate, and warm (with a tiny mountain peak defined as dry, temperate, and cold). [1] Rain does not fall at all for over half of the year. There is only a single major source of above-ground freshwater, the Kineret lake (also called the "Sea of Galilee"), which wasn't even fully in Israel until 1967, is at "dangerously low levels at times," and which continues to exist in part thanks to Israel pumping freshwater from its seawater desalination plants into the lake to refill it since 2018. [2][3]
The Negev desert [4] covers over half of the state of Israel. The Negev Bedouins live in the Negev. [5]
I am not joking, and hopefully these Wikipedia links can convince you that you have been misinformed.
What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco
Not all Mizrahi Jews are from Morocco, and you have chosen the farthest point in the Ottoman Empire to make your point. Morocco is not even in the Middle East, which is the region we're talking about. While perhaps one could view Moroccan Jews migrating to Israel as immigration, I think it is much more nuanced in the parts of the former Ottoman Empire that were actually in the Middle East. The Jewish communities of Cairo, for example, were about as far from the modern state of Israel as Boston is to New York. The distance from Damascus, the home of another large Mizrahi Jewish community, to the modern state of Israel is half that. They were part of the same country, and were in cities that were extremely close to each other, in the same region. I don't dispute that the Israelis had no right to kick out Palestinian villagers, but I do dispute your definition of Jews as non-natives due to borders that existed for less than 30 years and were imposed by the British (and which some Jews fell inside anyway, e.g. in Jerusalem.)
[The Samaritans] are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them.
There are no laws in Israel that I know of that determine whether or not the IDF can kill someone based on their religion. It would be helpful if you could cite some sources here.
(I think your friends mean that they hold Israeli citizenship? Which probably means they can more easily pass border checkpoints traveling to and from the Palestinian territories and Israel. There are a group of Samaritans that hold dual Israeli/Palestinian citizenship that live in Qiryat Luza. For reference, there are also millions of Muslim Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship and live inside Israel; what is unique about that group of Samaritans is they hold both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship, whereas the Israeli Arabs are simply Israeli and not Palestinian. The situation in Palestine is super messed up either way and I don't condone the Israeli government's actions towards the Palestinians, though.)
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Israel#/media/Fil...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee
You know, I wish that a reality can be realized where everyone coexists happily. But when a people have been harmed so directly and for so long acknowledging these points is the only way towards that reality. If we keep arguing then things will never change.
The fundamental fact is hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were wronged. Today millions are victims. We can’t just ignore that or marginalize it via debate.
I would also add to that that IMO the specific criticism of Jewish people borders on antisemitism. There are very few people on this planet who live on land that was not taken by force from someone at some point, sometimes in very recent history (is there a statue of limitation on this stuff?). There are also many people who immigrated in recent history from one place to another. At the same time there's certainly much to be critical of. I would also say the characterization above of "turned into colonies" is factually wrong. Even if we look at it solely from the Palestinian narrative I think you want to tread pretty carefully, especially if you want someone to listen to your position/argument and maybe change their minds.
All that said, we have to move forward (both in Israel and the rest of the world) through some sort of reconciliation that can acknowledge the wrongs and make amends while at the same time realizing we can't turn the clock backwards. Clearly (to me) there are win-win solutions that are much preferable to the ongoing conflict.
EDIT: I find this story very inspirational and something that hopefully can show everyone that despite all the challenges it is possible to move forward to a better place.
In my opinion, it is one thing to say we that should move on from what happened centuries ago to indigenous populations in the Americas and another thing entirely to say let’s ignore a settler colonial movement which operates in the modern era.
Regarding what you mentioned on the anti-semitism of criticizing Jewish people: what should the approach be for good-faith critics? Say I want to criticize the modern day policies of the Israeli military/government which create a reality of Jewish supremacy in the occupied territories, how do I do it? This is the unfortunate reality of today and we should be able to speak out against it without being labeled as anti-semites.
That said, if one's focus is 100% on "things that Jews do wrong" .. maybe that's something else.
Also indigenous populations in the Americas are still being wronged today!
(I think you are possibly misunderstanding what "Mizrahi" refers to. Mizrahi Jews are native to the Middle East and never left and were living there at the time of Israel's founding, as they had been for thousands of years.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Palestine_riots#Jewish_co...
You've probably never been to Israel or Gaza.
I've very happy to read the story of this woman getting a job in Silicon Valley, and of the success of the people in Gaza.
Now, 70 years later, does she hate the polish, or the russians, for what happened? Of course not.
I totally get and appreciate why you have strong feelings on the topic. But we can't have comments breaking the rules like that here.
Sure, some Jews immigrated to Palestine/Israel as we think of immigration. But many did not.
For example: I had a great-great uncle who was originally from Poland. Fearing the Germans, he escape Poland (on foot, alone, as a young teenager) shortly after the German invasion to live with his family in Ukraine (my direct ancestors). They survived together in Evacuation [1]. After the war, he decided to go back to Poland. What happened to him there, in 1946, was that he was forcefully removed from the country by his neighbors [2], who were pleased that Jews had been removed from their society and did not want them to return. He ended up in a DP camp, and with nowhere else to go, went to Palestine.
Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself? In his story I see a plight not very different from Syrian refugees in Europe or Guatemalan refugees in the United States. I think his story is hardly unique, and explains largely why Israel exists in the first place. If you view the presence of Jews in Palestine as European Colonialism, I think your perspective has a very limited and selective in scope.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union
Those were not the only two options. You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians. You are turning a sad story into a propaganda piece which helps no-one. Just like my Syrian friend, who now owns a restaurant he started with local help, one could become part of israel without being part of the forced displacement programs.
The displacement of Palestinian Arabs occurred as the result of a civil war that took place between them an Palestinian Jews in 1948. Prior to that, there was no displacement, at least nothing like what happened in 1948. Yes, the dynamic with Syrians in Europe is different, because they can't possibly engage in a civil war with the local population. But the Civil War between Jews and Arabs in Palestine occurred, and the result was mass displacement of Arabs as the Jews won. Had the Civil War not occurred, Arabs would have been part of the Jewish state as partitioned by the United Nations in 1947. Many Arabs are, in fact, Israeli Citizens (with a Covid vaccination rate roughly as high as Ultra Orthodox Jews).*
What I am saying is: Yes, there were aggressive Zionists who came to Palestine to fight fight fight**. But the majority of refugees who came to Palestine just wanted to be left alone, and were forced into a fight by their ethnic alignment that was decided for them at birth, the same ethnic alignment that forced them to Palestine in the first place.
[*] And why are these Arabs citizens of Israel? More often than not, because their ancestors who were alive in 1948 had a history of peaceful enough co-existence with Jews, or their village was location geographically such that they did not pose a perceived threat during the civil war. As bad as population displacement is, the Jews by and large did not arbitrarily displace people in 1948. The perspective was at the time that either a strategic foothold is established, or the opposing Arab armies will finish Hitler's job, which would have certainly been the case.
[**] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze'ev_Jabotinsky
I once met a Lebanese whose friend growing up was Jewish. Later he grew up and moved to Israel only to come back to Lebanon as a military commander. He saw him at a military checkpoint in the city they grew up in.
I appreciate your perspective that the Jewish people who were born and live in Palestine now have a right to be there, but I am not sure that this is a commonly held perspective among Palestinians. To be honest, as much as I want there to be peace, I don't expect Palestinian Arabs to give up on Palestine, because why would they? In their perspective, it's their land, and 5-6 million foreign Jews are living on it. They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state, but they did not. Had they done this, the military occupation of the West Bank would have ended 10-20 years ago. The military occupation of Gaza ended in 2006, and the territory is now under blockade by Egypt, The Palestinian Authority and Israel, due to the ruling party's perspective that with enough time and dedication they can liberate the rest of Palestine. Perhaps they will! I sincerely wish them the best in this endeavor, because you must admire tenacity, however self-destructive it may seem today.
> outside its legally recognized borders
It is also valuable to recognize that beyond its borders with Egypt and Jordan, Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders. Many entities (countries, international courts) have proclaimed Israel's borders to be this or that, but aside from settlements resulting from their formal peace treaties, Israel's "borders" today are actually war zones buffers established and governed by ceasefire agreements.
Let's start from this. Israel has a legally recognized border with Syria which doesn't include the Golan Heights. It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line, and which doesn't include East Jerusalem. It's that simple. The reason these borders are called "disputed" or unclear, is that Israel refuses to give up illegally annexed territories or- in the case of the West Bank- because the lack of a border allows Israel to keep expanding without officially invading a different country. In other words, the lack of borders is not a bug: it's a feature.
What I expect from Israel as a necessary sign of good will, is to relinquish most of the annexed territories and to declare, once and for all, what are its borders. So that not a single Israeli soldier or citizen could cross them without authorization from the state on the other side of the border.
> They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state
No they didn't, for the reasons I stated above. In fact, at the present, Israel's government is opposing by all means the possibility of an international recognition of a Palestinian State. Why? Because that would establish a border, and with it the end of Israel's expansion in the West Bank. Since Israel removed a few thousand settlers from Gaza, it has installed hundreds of thousands in the West Bank, creating a de-facto annexation that will be almost impossible to revert.
It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line.
No, it doesn't. The GP is correct. The "Green Line" is not a legal border. It was a de facto border established along armistice lines between the armies of Israel on one side, and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria on the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(Israel)
There was also no country called "the West Bank" on the other side of the line. The other side of the western portion of the line in 1949 was Jordan, and it ruled there until 1967 when Israel captured the territory in the Six Day War. Jordan presently makes no claims on the West Bank and agrees its border with Israel runs along the Jordan river.
It has a legally recognized border with Syria.
Again, it doesn't. You are (perhaps unknowingly) once again referring to the Green Line, as per that same Wikipedia link. The border with Syria was a de facto border established by war. To quote Wikipedia:
The 1949 Armistice Agreements were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent borders. The Egyptian–Israeli agreement, for example, stated that "the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." Similar provisions are contained in the Armistice Agreements with Jordan and Syria.
Notably the border with Lebanon was the only border in 1949 that didn't include those terms, and was established as the official international borders of the State of Israel and Lebanon. Although Lebanon and Israel have gone to war since, Israel has not tried to annex territory from beyond the Lebanese/Israeli border line agreed to in 1949.
Why? Because that would establish a border
I think your present misconception as to why Israel and the Palestinians have yet to reach peace is due to your misconceptions about borders, since you believe Israel is anti-border in general and that it has repeatedly violated legal borders in the past. The GP is correct that the borders you've claimed Israel has violated were never legal borders, and were merely de facto borders established by war, which both sides agreed were not to be considered valid. When Israel has established treaties that create international borders, such as it did with Lebanon in 1949, Egypt in 1979 (in which Israel returned massive amounts of land, equivalent to larger than the entire remaining state of Israel, in exchange for a peace treaty), and Jordan in 1994, it has not sought to annex territory beyond those borders.
The root issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is... complicated, and a lot more complex than "Israel does not want any borders." One of the core issues that in part torpedoed the Oslo Peace Process is that both relatively-mainstream Israeli Jews and relative-mainstream Palestinian Muslims view an agreement that gives Jerusalem to the other side as a religious heresy that neither is willing to cross, and they both also have refused to share it. But it's not just as simple as that, either. The extreme religious right of Israel (e.g. the Shas political party) views any peace treaty that returns land from the original Jewish kingdom as religious heresy, and the extreme religious right on the Palestinian side (e.g. Hamas) views the entirety of Israel as an Islamic waqf [holy possession] that cannot be owned by any non-Muslim.
The Palestinians signed the Oslo accords in 1993. What has happened since? Israel has strengthened its grip on the West Bank and more than doubled the settler population. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world recognizes that transferring your civilian population to occupied territory is a war crime. Why? Because Israel is run by supremacists and religious nuts who think that their holy book gives then an eternal and inviolable right to "Eretz Israel". In fact, they refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria" to underscore their view that the territory belongs to the them.
Assimilate.
However, the problem of Jewish assimilation in Europe was much more complicated than you might imagine. Prior to the United States, not many places in history really let Jews assimilate. A notable example is China, where Jews moved over the last few thousand years only to always vanish due to assimilation. Non-religious Jews (ie. those willing to assimilate) are vanishing in the United States, too, because the local population is not particularly intolerant of assimilation.
In Europe, however, assimilation was largely not an option, even for Jews willing to assimilate, and even after WWII. This very topic is what spurred Theodore Herzl to become a Zionist, after initially rejecting it for many years. There's a whole book about it: Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism [1], but if you search the web you can find plenty of information about it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-Assimilation-Zionism-Li...
But to respond to what I can, yeah, exactly. Your great-great uncle could try to assimilate in a non-Jewish country and hope they trust him, which they may or may not given the history of organized Judaism, or he could colonize Palestine and screw them over. He chose the latter, now some people (not me, I'm not Palestinian) hate him for it. Given human history he certainly knew there would be attempts at further expansion in the future, so they hate him for that, too. Why is any of this surprising? I feel like if you believe your great-great uncle deserves a pass you must believe that Palestinians were either uneducated or grossly immoral and bigoted for wanting to keep their land because that would have meant possible death for Jews. And if you do believe that then that could be a really interesting discussion.
Overall though it just seems easier to me to accept that he screwed someone over to get something good. My ancestors have done that plenty of times.