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Comment by nullserver | Hacker News Reader

Israel is fighting for its existence.

Iran leadership routinely makes threats to destroy America and Israel. This often get ignored or dismissed. But like waving a gun in a cops face. Well bad things happen.

One nuke will piss America off.

One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.

From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.

Pushed hard enough they may just so that.

However it’s a massive gamble if surrounding counties would eliminate Israel afterwards

These hack jobs, assassinations, etc are all half measures to prevent a full scale war.

Life is hard when much of the world wants you dead.

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You started an utterly hellish flamewar with this comment and perpetuated it downthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26799318). That is seriously not cool. We've had to warn you about this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363306. If you continue to abuse HN like this, we will ban you.

Please read the rules and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means no more flamewar comments.

There's no indication that Iran is any less deterrable than every other nuclear power.

We didn't start WWIII when Kruschev banged his shoe at the UN like a maniac, it would also be a bad idea to do it over Iran's posturing.

The US killed their national hero last year and we got a measured, proportionate response rather than lighting Iraq on fire.

Trying to pre-emptively "bomb Iran into the stone age" would not only be barbaric, it would result in a hail of scuds hitting Tel Aviv. You don't want that.

A 'hail of scuds' would be temporary and mild in comparison to a 'real' nuclear threat from Iran.

Of course - nobody has any intention of actually dropping nukes on anyone.

It's about power and leverage, and Iran's ability to project their dominance towards destabilizing and overthrowing House of Saud, and maybe disrupting/overthrowing Israel some day as well.

Since House of Saud actually has nukes (they paid for Pakistani program so that 'in a time of need' nukes will magically appear in their arsenal) all of this is bad for everyone.

In the 'balance of power' it actually makes a tiny bit of sense that 'small actor surrounded by 10 enemies', Israel, has 'secret nukes' because from a strategic perspective, it would be suicidal for them to use in anything other than an existential scenario of defence. If they were not building homes in Occupied Territories, I think more people would probably more readily acknowledge their defensive requirements. Also of course the fact that most people alive today don't have living memory of the many times Israel was invaded/fought wars with direct neighbours, many times bigger than it, and the outcomes were never going to be clear.

It would be better for everyone if Iran just gave up it's nuclear ambitions - there is zero chance anyone is going to invade them, they could join the rest of the world and start using their Oil dollars to buy plastic junk from China and software from the US, and physical gear from Germany - just like the rest of us - their people can be much wealthier, and we could all get along.

I think granting a "right of return" based on what ethnic group you happen to be a part of is bullshit and out of step with the modern world.

Definitely would improve their international stature if they stopped occupying, but they are still a state organized around an ethnic group.

EDIT: Ignore this post. I misunderstood OP. The rest of this is just here to preserve what I originally wrote.

---

Serious question: at what point is it no longer rational to return land wrongfully taken? To displace millions of people and remove their right to self-govern? Practically every nation in existence came to be by taking land from someone at some point.

I agree that the "right of return" thing was BS. But it happened. I think the best course of action now is figure out how to move forward without wronging even more people.

Okay, but Israel still has a right of return. Should that right not be granted to displaced Palestinians? Laws making it more difficult for people of Arab descent to get citizenship were passed in 2003.

This is not about long-ago occurences, this is about active steps Israel is taking now to maintain their status as an ethnostate.

Sorry, I misunderstood what you were referencing.

First we feared the godless communists having the bomb because they were not held to a higher moral authority.

Now we fear the theocratic muslims because their fanaticism is stronger than their sense of self preservation.

It turns out this is all propaganda, no state is keen on destroying the world, and it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.

> it's entirely rational for a country under constant threat like Iran (or Israel) to want nuclear weapons.

No, it's really not. It's akin to citizens wanting to walk around with ARs in case they need to defend themselves. No, worse, because at least an AR wont annihilate everyone around you after you're already dead.

The value in having nuclear weapons is the threat that you could spitefully take your opponents out with you. The danger in having nuclear weapons is that some day it could actually happen.

Mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent. It's an eventuality - one which we should be vigilantly protecting against.

Libya wanted nukes. They were convinced not to. Now see where they are and compare with North Korea. This is why Iran wants nukes and it is very logical.

I'm not convinced every country without nukes is destined to end up like Libya. World politics are a bit more complicated than that.

> There's no indication that Iran is any less deterrable than every other nuclear power.

Unlike other nuclear states, Iran is governed by religious zealots.

> Iran is governed by religious zealots.

In that case their highest religious authority has issued a fatwa against weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, and since they're religious zealots they would honour that fatwa.

So they're either very religious, and should pose no danger because of that, or they're not very religious, in which case they would pose no danger.

> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.

    Area of Hiroshima: 350.1 square miles
    Area of Israel: 8,019 square miles

Yeah I'd say [citation needed] for that.

> From Israel standpoint the logical step is to bomb Iran military into the Stone Age.

This really isn't helping you, because if you're an Iranian and your government says "That country over there says their only logical choice is to bomb us into the stone age!" well what do you expect to happen?

Of course, predictably, both countries can (and will) play the same game, distracting people from actual issues like corruption. In the end, both governments win, while people loses everywhere.

Nukes are way more powerful than they were at the end of WW2, and most of southern israel is not populated. I'm pretty sure an H-bomb to Tel Aviv would kill >20% of Israel's population. So yeah, not exactly "One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely", but still "one nuke and 1/5 of the population is gone, and countless more injured"

Depends on yield. Doesn't seem like any nuke used/tested had a yield higher than the Tsar Bomba. Not sure about untested/unused stockpile.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Doesn't look like even that would wipe out Israel in one go

It's humbling to see just how powerful the largest nukes are. https://i.imgur.com/FXmpY0t.png

(permalink: https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=100000&lat=32.062921...)

You're technically right -- the blast radius isn't covering all of Israel -- but third degree burns across ~50% of the entire landmass would be hell.

Your argument would be stronger if you added up the area of the inhabited areas of Israel rather than the total area, but yea, one nuke wouldn't take out a country unless the country was just a single city like Singapore.

you can use more than one nuke. also, a Hiroshima-level blast on Tel Aviv would be pretty catastrophic even if it doesn't obliterate everything.

hydrogen bombs are where things really get scarier though.

Didn't the Hiroshima bomb have a much smaller effect radius than modern nuclear weapons?

In this hypothetical the bomb is constructed by Iran who has never made one before. So it prob wouldn’t match the best performance possible.

> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.

What? How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver? Tsar Bomba could take out a major city, and had a blast radius roughly comparable with Tel Aviv. This is horrific to even contemplate; I've got friends who live there. But it's nowhere even close to the entirety of Israel; and you can bet your ass that their nukes are distributed well enough to prevent a single point of failure. If Iran got a single nuke off, Israel would still be capable of a disproportionate response.

> How big of a nuke do you think they can deliver?

Agreed. This is the key phrase here. "Deliver". Building a nuclear weapon is only part of the equation. Delivering it such that it gets somewhere that evades defenses and detonates in a place and manner in which it's effective is hard.

Tsar Bomba, since it was mentioned, was an impressive device, but utterly impractical as a weapon. It was of enormous weight and required unreasonable engineering just to drop it.

You're also quite right in that nuclear weapons, while powerful, are not necessarily the "end all" that they're often made out to be. Israel's geography does complicate this somewhat; there's little strategic depth and much of the population is concentrated along the coast which makes the impacts disproportionately larger against Israeli national assets.

>Israel is fighting for its existence.

A Palestinian might find that statement ironic but either way I'd disagree with it. Threaten as they might I don't believe Iran to be suicidal.

>One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.

Do you think they're building a bigger tsar bomba or something?

>Pushed hard enough they may just so that.

Somehow I think starting an almost unwinnable war that'll probably lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths isn't going to improve Israels security situation.

> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.

lolwut? Absolute nonsense. A 60kt nuke, size of the largest India has ever tested, wouldn't even dose like half of Tel-Aviv's land area, let alone the whole country.

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

This is a hilarious position to take. Israel should relax because losing 5% of its population (and another 5% due to later side effects), which includes most of its export and good portions of its youth, technically wouldn't destroy every part of the country.

Sorry, but I didn't say that. OP ludicrously exaggerated for rhetorical purposes the destructive power posed by a single nuke and I corrected it.

https://www.geonames.org/IL/largest-cities-in-israel.html

Sorry I didn’t do a full break down on on how to eliminate all life in a country. Others have certainly made efforts to exterminate Jews. Perhaps you would care to study how that went.

Only a few big cities. So maybe a dozen nukes would be sufficient.

> Iran leadership routinely makes threats to destroy America and Israel

So do North Korea and used to do Cuba. For at least some part, that’s for internal politics. Also, it’s typically the weaker party that makes such explicit threats (if the weaker party knows they’re the weaker one, the stronger party doesn’t need to be so explicit)

> One nuke will piss America off.

> One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely.

One nuke on Israel likely will piss America off, too, and rapidly will lead to the end of the Iranian regime.

I think Iran won’t launch a nuke at Israel because they know that, even if Israel cannot retaliate, the USA will.

Some people say Iran, having seen what happened to Iraq, simply wants to have the deterrent of nuclear weapons, just as Israel does. I think there’s at least some truth in that.

I assume it's also jailing kids for peace, and stirring the hornet's nest doesn't sound very peaceful when there are peace talks coming up on the same subject.

They might have the better PR team, but for sure looking at actions rather than just words, it's clear who's the bad guy putting aside the whole typical "our ally" narrative.

>One nuke and Israel will just be gone, completely. Iran is probably capable of this, or close.

It's not clear that they could actually deliver a nuclear weapon, of course. And certainly not all the way to America.

Not yet, but eventually they will. North Korea has intercontinental missiles. This is 1950s technology: if a country wants it badly enough they'll get it.

It doesn't have to be on a warhead but smuggled somehow. It would certainly be traced back to them so I don't think they will ever target America directly.

While this is possible, it's clear that this would be a deterrence first. The point would be that minor strikes or political actions would not have a much higher cost. For example, North Korea does not want to nuke the US. They want to possess nukes such that US actions are more constrained. It's a very unfortunate incentive.

While I agree that the main point is deterrence, the rules have changed in the last 50 year and it's not always a country vs country. Israel created their nuclear program to deter an all out war that could lead to Israel destruction but today Israel isn't fighting their direct neighbors in a conventional warfare. Nukes in the hands of North Korea are bad no matter what, don't underestimate a mad man and their cult followings.

? Target anyone at all with a nuke and you are getting invaded by an international coalition at minimum and quite likely nuked yourself.

Maybe, maybe not. Once you have shown you have the capabilities it's a different story, but then again you don't have to directly do it, just leak it to your "friendly" neighborhood terrorist group and let them take the blame. Maybe Iran is a different story but what if a dirty bomb was made from India's or China's nuclear materials for example, would an international coalition invade them? I doubt it.

They could push for the nuclear agreement to come back and get the IAEA inspectors in. Long term these clandestine operations won't work. If Iran gets a nuke, it won't be too long before Saudi also has one. Saudi did pay for Pakistans nuclear bomb. There is probably a knowledge and materials sharing agreement in place. Having a nuclear states in one of the most volatile areas in the world seems like a huge global issue.

I think the main reason Iran wants the bomb is the same reason North Korea wanted the bomb and in fact all other countries wanted the bomb: National security.

Nuclear weapons are not offensive weapons, certainly not when you're small enough so that any such attack on your part would only result in you being completely annihilated in retaliation. Nuclear weapons are an insurance policy against others deciding that you're ripe for "regime change" and/or invasion.

From what we know Israel also has the bomb and for the exact same reason.

Yes, precisely this. Nuclear is essentially the right to have an opinion.

What a nasty world we live in.

Completely off-topic, but I really dislike the writing style of your comment: short, isolated sentences stated as facts, like many religious texts.

It reminds me of Hemingway, with the difference that he was able to write full paragraphs.

Israel routinely attacks Iran but Israel is the one that feels threatened? How many threats has Israel made against Iran?

...and Iran routinely attacks Israel. Most recent attacks have targeted Israel's water supply, a civilian ship, funding Hezbollah to fire rockets on their behalf, training guerillas in Syria and Lebanon...

Gone are the days where threatening to wipe jews off the planet was considered rhetoric. Play stupid games win stupid prizes.

>Gone are the days where threatening to wipe jews off the planet was considered rhetoric.

I'm not going to defend the current iranian gouverment, but aren't jews in Iran a recognized minority and have a seat in parliament?

So it seems they don't have anything against the religion per se.

Even "wipe Israel off the map" is false Israeli propaganda. Here's an explanation https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/did-a...

It’s not, I posted these in another thread but check these out:

https://static2.rokna.net/thumbnail/SkVEB41uf6ga/NS2RJzVApQ3...

https://cdn.yjc.ir/files/fa/news/1396/4/5/6417989_951.jpg

https://newsmedia.tasnimnews.com/Tasnim/Uploaded/Image/1396/...

https://www.google.com/search?q=%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B2%D8%B4%D9%...

these counters are installed in every city in Iran.

If the US genuinely wanted to prevent Iranian weapons research, they wouldn't have simply walked away from the deal regulating it. The Trump administrations goals were complicated (and largely self-contradictory, and in most cases just poorly-informed), but they were not motivated by a practical desire to prevent proliferation.

This is what everyone knew was going to happen. The interesting question is if "this" (an unstable persian geopolitics) is what they wanted or just an accident.

"they wouldn't have simply walked away from the deal regulating it."

The deal did not 'regulate' Iran - is the argument being made.

Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough, and that Iran would effectively pursue nukes along with economic liberalism.

This is my understanding as well, although I disagree with it. I know I'm not the first one questioning if sanctions even work most of the time, or if an economically crippled country is better for the long term health in a region known for its extremists versus one where its economy is not held back in any antagonistic manner, even if it has a nuke.

> Many people feel that the oversight requirements were not stringent enough

This might be true! But it was replaced with a situation where there are no requirements at all. And here we are. If you have a better policy idea you need to implement the better policy and not just take your toys and go home.

Let's be honest though, had Iran carried out such attack we would have called it a terrorist attack. I know you're about to go on about how awful Iranian regime is and they SAY they want Israel gone. But remember, Israel actually DOES carry out associations.

Terror attacks are against civilian targets - hence terrorizing civilians.

An attack like this is military - which could be carried out by terrorists or a govt.

The difference is important.

Are nuclear scientists civilians? Would it be acceptable for Iran to assassinate Israeli nuclear scientists in Israel?

Nuclear scientists are not civilians, unless their work is entirely theoretical, without connection to actually building something.

> Would it be acceptable for Iran to assassinate Israeli nuclear scientists in Israel?

Acceptable? No. Terrorism? Also no.

A military attack is a thing you know. Not everything is terrorism.

I think it's a little murky given that they're not officially at war.

Anti-terrorism conventions define terrorism as explicitly including unlawful killings with the intent to intimidate a population, or to compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.

Terrorism always involves an attack on civilians. An attack on a military facility could be an act of war, but never terrorism.

The scientist I'm referring to (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh) was not killed as part of a legitimate strike on a military facility, he was killed in his car with his wife sitting in the seat next to him, on a road with many civilians around.

I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.

> The scientist I'm referring to (Mohsen Fakhrizadeh) was not killed as part of a legitimate strike on a military facility, he was killed in his car with his wife sitting in the seat next to him, on a road with many civilians around.

What are you talking about "facility"? The human, named Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was a military target, since he was the head of the nuclear weapons program in Iran.

I'm unclear what the relevance of "many civilians around". Do you imagine military targets are always isolated with never any civilians near them?

> I am doubtful that Iranian agents doing these same actions to scientists in the US or Israel on the street would be considered a legitimate military action and not terrorism.

A scientist in the US or Israel working on developing a nuclear weapon would be a military target. Why does this surprise you?

There's a reason you don't know the names of any scientists in the US or Israel working on nuclear weapons: They would instantly become targets.

Do you imagine war is some kind of game where everyone is like "it's my turn now", and there's a referee?

You have a long history of posting flamewar comments to HN. Would you please stop doing that? I've banned a whole bunch of accounts on both sides of this hellish thread, and it's dismaying to see a long-established account like yours getting in there and dragging things deeper into hell along with all the trolls. This is not what HN is supposed to be for. Surely you know that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What about the assassinations of Iranian scientists? Are they also "military" targets?

Yes absolutely.

Like your mental gymnastics. If Iran carries out such attacks on Israeli installations, who do have nuclear weapons. We would be framing it as terrorist attack. I think the narrative build that Iran is evil and Israel is devine only allows one side to do what they want till full blown out war breaks out.

Both Iran and Israel carry out rogue bombing and assassinations targeting civilians.

This is in contrast to the MO of most of Europe and even the United States.

Huh? I don't know how an attack on a military base could be less of a terrorist attack.

The 2001 attack on the Pentagon is usually cast as a terrorist attack in the West. Words change: terrorism is now really more about who committs the attacks, and how much you like them, than the mode of attack or the target.

Pretty sure that is more due to conflation with the WTC than it is a double standard.

I assume you mean "assassinations".

Iran funds and supports groups who have declared, and continue to make war on Israel as a proxy for themselves doing it. They are happy to expend every single one of their proxy armies and munitions if they can avoid the direct consequences of action.

The groups that Iran supports carry out assassinations. Kidnappings. Mass murder. Direct attacks on non-combatant populations, aka war crimes. They cyber attack where they can. They physically attack where they can get their cannon fodder to do the wet work.

So, what's your point? That Israel is "evil" for demonstrating dangerous teeth behind its deterrence?

I'm not defending iran.im just saying we build a narrative against one side. Look at your comment, everything you said about Iran usa, Britain and Israel does too. But you highlighted Iran's evil while we excuse "our own" side awful actions.

"your own side" is quite revealing.

There's a game siblings sometimes play. One hits another. The injured party responds in kind. The first, the aggressor, calls their parents and complains that the second hit the first and was the aggressor. The second is then punished by the parent for aggression.

This has been the rhetorical, and effectively actual history of the conflicts since prior to the founding of Israel. Iran was a "friend" until they ... changed direction ... in 1979.

Israel is defending itself, actively, against existential threats. If the act of defending itself and its people causes you to label it as evil, that's your business.

Iran is not defending itself against existential threats. It is actively on the offense along multiple fronts. Its activities directly and indirectly cause death of non-combatants. That is, IMO, a very basic and simple definition of evil. This isn't defense. This is offense. For the express purpose of achieving the goals they have enthusiastically repeated for decades.

If you don't think that is evil, that is your business as well.

So Iran SAYS "Israel should be wiped out of the map", and that makes all ACTIONS (including boarder line terrorism) by Israel justified. Our way of buying into narratives and pushing them allows justifications for wars so easy. Just look at Iraq war. Narrative build and bought by us was that Sadam is bad and has bar weapons so let's go to war. Again I'm not defending Iran. In fact I really hate the regime. I'm just saying what's wrong is wrong no matter who does it.

Flamewar is not what this site is for. We've banned this account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As I noted, it's not what each say. It's what they do.

If you find yourself arguing against the entity that is the victim of the aggressor entity, I think you have some deep internal reflecting to do. Because such a position, is advocating against defending against actual attacks. Which the aggressor entity has done, in the open, through proxies, as well as in secret. Israel is not the aggressor entity.

If this is what you support, or cannot bring yourself to accept, and insist that this is "narrative" ...

Again, best thing to do is lots of internal reflection.

If much of the world wants you dead (your words, not mine) then maybe it's time to look in a mirror.

Edit: HN commenters are so thick. First of all GP says everyone hate Israel. So that must include you the reader of this comment. If you actually take that shit serious and then have a problem with my comment instead all I can say is that you should look in a mirror too. It's a fat lie. Not everyone hates Israel. Actually most on HN loves Israel and always heavily upvote pro-israel stories.

Flamewar comments will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: actually, you've posted so many of these that I've gone ahead and banned you. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Elaborate on what you think they should see in the mirror.

Please don't respond to flamewar comments by perpetuating the flamewar. That just damages this place even further, and the site guidelines specifically ask you not do:

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If one person thinks you're an asshole they might simply be wrong about you. If everyone in the world thinks you're an asshole then you, almost by definiton, are one.

There's a reason why there's a separate word in most languages for "anti-semitism" but not for "anti-italianism" or "anti-brasilianism".

We've banned this account. You can't do this here, and we've warned you before. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Eesh, I am not a fan of the modern Israeli state, which I consider to be pseudo-apartheid, but this is straight up anti-semitism.

Surprised to see that here.

I'm unfortunately not surprised - there is a strange "intellectual dark web" bent among the HN crowd, despite it being transparently pseudo-intellectual garbage.

I see you are not even pretending not to be antisemitic. Most antisemites hide under cover of "anti-zionisim".

And to other people reading this, this poster seriously thinks that antisemitism is because "all Jews are assholes". I'm truly shocked to see such things on this site, although maybe I should expect that.

grabs popcorn

Please don't do this here.

Right... , blacks in US also should look in the mirror. All the police brutality, racism is all their fault. Dont you get it? /s

Woooooosh.

Israel is a democracy, has human rights, conducts elections, has free trade and great tech scene, currency is stable and they've got one of the best intelligence agencies. Israel's population is some 9 million which is half of Beijing city and little bit larger than SF Bay Area.

Let's contrast it with fundamentalist Iranian islamic government, hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's, hanging their journalists and publicly executing dissidents.

I am not sure there is a shred of doubt who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here.

Iran is a danger, but Saudi Arabia isn't?

Israel is occupying Palestine, mobility controlled by checkpoints and passes a la South Africa, and actively takes actions to ensure that non-jewish people do not gain a majority in the country.

Israel extends a "right of return" only to displaced people who are of a certain ethnicity.

When did I bring up Saudi Arabia?

> hell bent on developing nuclear weapons despite of non-proliferation treaty signed by the whole world in 1960's

I have no ideea why you think this is relevant to your otherwise valid point. Iran and Israel are very similar here, one never signed the NPT and other signed it but is in non-compliance with the terms. Both states essentially don't care about what the other countries think of their nuclear activities - as is their right under international law.

Israel is not a democracy. It is a country ruled by religious fanatics, basically. If you are not a Jew, you do not profess Judaism you are denied some of the civil rights, maybe not officially, but practicaly. Think of all the Palestinians there.

It's all blah blah blah to me. The point is that GP is full of crap. Not everyone hates Israel as you yourself have just proven. Yet posts like it are seen multiple times at every thread that mention Israel.

>Life is hard when much of the world wants you dead. Well why is that?

Because people are anti-semitic. In this particular case, you have a muslim majority country on one side of the equation.

In case you really need this much of a primer: (some) Muslims don't like Jews because they're following Muhammad's lead. Specifically, Muhammad had this to say about Jews in one of the Hadith:

> The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Only the Gharkad tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews.

Of course the Jews (for their part) say that Muhammad was a false prophet. On balance though, they also say this about Jesus.

I think it is hard to say that it is entirely anti-semitism and unrelated to what happened in Mandatory Palestine.

Attacks on Jews by Muslims LONG predate Mandatory Palestine.

LONG predate? Sure, instances of Muslims attacking Jews certainly do, just as instances of Jews attacking Muslims certainly predates Mandatory Palestine by thousands of years.

But in the centuries preceding Mandatory Palestine, there was not a sizable Jewish population in the area.

> Jews attacking Muslims certainly predates Mandatory Palestine by thousands of years.

Probably not, since Islam is not thousands of years old.

Thousand*, my fault for making it plural.

A mostly pointless nitpick on my part.

Regardless though, I'm not sure "Jews weren't being attacked because there weren't many Jews to attack" is much of an argument.

"The Nakba is not the reason for animosity against Israel because there were attacks against Jews prior to the Nakba" doesn't strike me as a solid argument either.

Really? If Muslims were attacking Jews for being Jews before the Nakba, then obviously Muslims disliking Jews does not lie at the feet of the Nakba. That is like the most solid argument I've ever heard.

Attacks by Christians against Muslims long predate 9/11, but that doesn’t mean that attacks by certain specific predominantly Christian groups against certain specific Muslims, particularly in and around Central and South Asia starting shortly after 9/11 were not motivated by the 9/11 attacks by al-Qaeda.

If you can accept that, the same thing with “events related to Mandatory Palestine” in place of 9/11, Muslims in place of Christians, and Jews in place of Muslims should not be much of a stretch.

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