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Comment by stormdennis | Hacker News Reader

Western meddling in the ME is the cause of much/most of the instability there, not least Britain's enabling of the settler colonisation of Palestine by European Jews. Today America is supplying the munitions for Israel to indiscriminately bomb the people earlier displaced by that colonisation. Yes, thanks a bunch America.

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I don't buy that. Without western intervention, after eliminating Israel, the arabs would just continue fighting amongst themselves with more Iran and Saudi funded proxy wars.

Iran isn't Arab and anyway what gives America the right to decide who rules where?

The "mission accomplished" afterwards. That how history is written (for the dumb).

But Iran is funding the Houthis who are

I'm not sure why/when "anti colonialism" became a free pass to kidnap, rape, and slaughter innocent civilians, but if that's what it means now, I'd prefer it to even be a British colony than whatever the "anti colonialists" want.

That'll be because it hasn't become a free pass for that. Happy to help.

What's your solution then? Almost 75% of Jews live in Israel, formerly a British Territory, formerly Ottoman Empire, formerly Mamluks, Mongols, battlefield for Christians and Muslims in the crusades, Arab Muslim rule, Byzantine Christian rule, the Roman Republic, etc.

During much of this unstable history Jews occupied this land and for some of it were killed or enslaved en masse.

There never was a coherent Palestinian state, it was completely understandable for Jews to want their own state here after one of the more successful attempts at genocide orchestrated by Hitler and the third Reich, and many if not most Jews would gladly live in peace alongside Palestinians, while they elect Hamas, who according to their own charter will not stop until Israel is destroyed:

"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."

To be clear, it is an absolute tragedy what innocent Palestinians are suffering as a result of the terrorists in charge are doing. Those monsters livestreamed their war crimes and hold innocent Palestinians hostage as human shields. They teach their children to hate Jews and shoot AK-47s. They divert international aid money from their poor to build tunnels.

If Hamas stops there is peace. If Israel stops there is no Israel.

You need to brush up on your facts as well as your timelines and stop parroting Zionist slogans. Jews formed a very small proportion of the Palestine in the 19th century. It was also never a "British" territory as such. Britain simply had the League Of Nations mandate to prepare it for independence, elections etc. The locals were supposed to have a say in which Great Power was given the mandate and they most certainly didn't want it to be Britain, being aware of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Britain, in cahoots with France, brushed all that aside at the time to get the mandate and have the aims of the Balfour Declaration incorporated into the mandate. Britain's goal was to have a Jewish client state in a sea of Arabs to guard the Suez Canal, the passage to its Indian Empire. For that reason no elections were ever held as Balfour stated that Britain wasn't going to even pretend to consult the native population, let alone give them a real say, while Churchill was happy to see an inferior civilisation replaced by a superior one. During the mandate period the proportion of Jews rose from a few percent to almost a third, against the wishes of the indigenous population. This finally resulted in a uprising by the Arabs in the 1936 to 1939 period which was brutally suppressed by Britain and its Jewish armed militias leaving the Arabs rudderless. After the war the Jews, being aware of the weakness of the Arabs couldn't wait for the British to depart, to the extent of waging a terrorist war against their former patrons to hurry them up. Finally the Arabs (Palestinians) having no diaspora to lobby for them in the West were done up like a kipper at the UN.

I contest the use of the word "native" in that regard.

People have immigrated constantly throughout history from place to place. Many palestinians bare the names of their 19th-18th century origins. Last names such as "Al-Masri" (The Egyptian), "Halabi" (Of the city of Haleb in Syria) are very common, to name a few.

The tragedy here, is the continued refusal of the palestinian leadership during the 1940s to accept any partition of the land, which led to a catastrophic result on their part. Had they accepted the 1947 partition plan, Israel and Palestine could have been a free, peaceful countries.

Aah, the Palestinians never existed argument, the successor to the long discredited land without people for a people with land one and just as derisory. The actual tragedy here is that Western Powers facilitated settler colonisation to create a Jewish State which by definition required the expulsion of the people already living there. Further, the Zionists never had any intention of sticking to the share of Palestine "gifted" to them by the the UN. They had prepared detailed plans for the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine. The only reason they didn't take the West Bank in 1948 was that there, they were up against the British-trained Arab Legion.

Would love to see evidence for such a "plan" for ethnic cleansing.

It would be a rather absurd plan to cleanse a territory in which you are not only a minority, but also surrounded by Arab countries which were pretty adamant about refusing to accept the jewish state.

In practice, what had happened is that the jews accepted the partition plan. The reason the arabs didn't accept it, is because they simply wanted it all to themselves, not because they feared ethnic cleansing.

Using the term "settler" or "Colonializm" to characterize jewish immigration to Israel is racist and antisemite. As I mentioned, Arabs immigrated en-masse to the land of Israel throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, yet you refer to them as natives.

The antisemite slur now, is it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet

Did you actually read the article? " ... The issue is subject to much controversy, with some historians asserting that it was defensive, while other historians assert that the plan aimed at the expulsion, sometimes called an ethnic cleansing, on the grounds that this was an integral part of a planned strategy."

"Other historians assert... " is hardly an evidence. More like an opinion. In truth, Israel today has more than 2 million Arab citizens.

I've read books on it. The 2 million Arabs are the descendants of the 20% of Palestinians who were internally rather than externally displaced, ie the ethnic cleansing was only 80% effective.

Bibi had all the power to stop Hamas, but a secular Gaza isn't in his political interests.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

Now do the likud charter.

The moral equivalence argument is not compelling. Israel is home to most of the world's Jewish population, and is a country which upholds Western values.

"[Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."

Compared to Hamas:

"The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"

Do you really wish for Islamic terrorists to succeed in their stated goal of Jewish genocide? If you were a woman or ethnic/religious minority, which country in the Middle East would be more hospitable than Israel?

I wish for genocide and occupation not to happen, no matter if I agree with their values or if who writes stuff more eloquently.

>Israel [..] is a country which upholds Western values.

Such as genocide? Like, actually murdering 15 thousand civilians, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham...? How many did the “terrorists” kill?

Someone was pre-trained with the Lukid charter!

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