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Comment by cheese_van | Hacker News Reader

I've lived in various ME countries, as well as Israel. I've tried to understand the core issue and frankly, failed. Both arguments about this historical conflict between Israel and the Palestinians seem as close to being morally equivalent as I could imagine. I have sympathies but I keep them to myself. I don't feel as though I have a right to take a particular side: I am not existentially threatened on a daily basis as both peoples feel they are. I have no history of being both threatened and abandoned by the world as both side feel. I have no experience of living as a people whose every political choice is one of zero-sum cultural survival. Who lives, who dies? Who prospers, who does not? I have no moral expertise on this subject to pick a team.

So on this topic, when pressed, I say I have no right to comment. The irony of course, is that in many circles, one is attacked for being too bewildered to form an opinion.

It's daft.

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I think it's a mistake to understand this (or most) conflicts in terms of an argument about ideology, or history. Those play a role, but it isn't a philosophical debate. It's a war.

Palestinians and Israelis are not on the Palestinian or Israeli side because they are convinced by the arguments of Edward Said or Ehad Haam. Its because they are Palestinian and Israeli. That's what war is, for the most part. They (we.. I am Israeli) are not going to read the others' literature and adopt their position. Ideologies, philosophies, political takes and such came about to make sense of the reality that exists, not the other way around.

If you talked politics with locals, I assume you encountered a great variety of views.

Honestly, I appreciate your honest bewilderment. It is quite disturbing to me when tourists and foreigners take extreme, unyielding, anti-comromise positions... including (especially) pro Israeli ones. I am quite certain that many Israelis, Palestinians & Jordanians feel the same way. I cannot speak for other arab countries, as I have never been.

Thanks for summing up how I feel about this so succinctly. I have tried to understand the history and the issues between these two groups and there is honestly there is so much that each side can victim claim for and be pointed out as an aggressor on its really hard to make any judgement on a particular side being right or wrong. And with the history on this going back thousands of years and my admittedly complete lack of understanding of cultural context on both sides (and to be honest its so complex I am not sure anyone can understand this unless you have been living it) I just freely admit I am too ignorant on the subject to have an opinion- which is still quite problematic- despite having never been to the Middle East, I live in NYC and have lots of Jewish friends who claim that anything less than supporting Israel is anti-semitism.

But even when my wife, who knows I read news and books an order of magnitude more than her, asked me to kind of distill it down for her in whatever terms I understood it after the recent flare up, and I was just like I really can't... aside from there just being an inherent inability to share their ancient homelands.

look to see who is using 5th generation multi role attack fighters and who is using rockets made from the water pipes of the buildings destroyed by the air assault.

which side, forgotten by the world, receives almost four billion dollars a year in military aid from the global imperial hegemon?

it’s not that hard

> I've tried to understand the core issue and frankly, failed

It's quite straight forward. Up until WWI, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in Palestine, which it and other areas of Arabia and North Africa were under Ottoman rule. During WWI, Sykes–Picot divided up the Muslim lands into arbitrary borders to make them easier to occupy. Syria was occupied by the French, Libya by the Italians, etc. Palestine was under British rule. Post WWII, the Zionists convinced Britain to give them Palestine, so they moved in and formed an illegal government, which ironically applied similar tactics the Nazis applied to the Jews in WWII (ethnic cleansing, killing discriminately, etc.). The conflict continues to this day until the Palestinians get back their rightful land.n

Edit: changed WWII to WWI.

You're mixing up history. The Sykes–Picot Agreement was made in 1916. The Ottoman Empire was no more long before WWII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement

I meant WWI. I'll edit my post. The point remains however.

…and how exactly are they supposed to “get back their rightful land”?

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