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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Arabs got the vast majority of the land, which became Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Revolt.

The reason Arabs supported the British against the Ottomans was because they wanted to create a unified Arab nation: https://awayfromthewesternfront.org/campaigns/egypt-palestin.... And Arabs got the overwhelming majority of the territory they wanted (notwithstanding the many minority groups they had conquered in the Levant), with the exception of what became Israel. Put differently, you could say that Arabs got 0% of Israel, and that’s technically true. But it’s not an accurate description of what they got in comparison to what they actually wanted.

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This argument completely ignores both the cultural distinctions between the different areas of the former Ottoman empire, and the fact that a person's home is not interchangeable with any other place. Nobody would expect a Polish person in 1939 to say "well, we Slavs have the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia so I guess it's fine that German settlers took my farm at gunpoint and forced me to leave".

The implicit assumption is that any place with a majority of "Arabs" would ethnically cleanse all the Jews or become an Islamic theocracy, so we must view everything through the lens of competing ethno-states. It's important to challenge this assumption. Ethno-states are inherently violent because every population is a mixture of different ethnicities, and an ethno-state needs to maintain a majority of a certain population. If the "wrong" group's population grows in an ethno-state, it becomes a "demographic problem" that the government needs to "solve". This is why carving up the world into such states is never a lasting solution for peace.

Aside: "Arab" and "Jew" are not mutually exclusive. You can be an Arab Jew in the same way you can be a Hispanic Jew - Arab is a distinction based on one's mother language not one's religion. This is why the Arab League includes countries in north Africa where most people aren't descended from ancestral Arabians. The history of and literature of Judeo-Arabic is an interesting rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Jews

Most of the world is competing ethnostates, including most if not all Arab states. (I’m certainly glad my parent’s generation secured our ethnostate, at great cost.) Whether there is a better way is an open question. But anybody would be an idiot to sacrifice their ethnostate for that experiment. It’s never ended well.

> Anybody would be an idiot to sacrifice their ethnostate

I'm sure Hamas feels the same way! I'm not going to say whether one or two-state solution is best, that's for Palestinians and Israelis to decide, but something's gotta give.

The only workable solution is two states, and Arabs giving up the idea of retaking Jerusalem and rebuilding the caliphate. They got to keep nearly all their territorial gains from their conquest of the Levant, that should be good enough.

> The only workable solution is two states, and Arabs giving up the idea of retaking Jerusalem and rebuilding the caliphate.

Yes, I don't think Palestinian Christians would love the idea of a caliphate in any case…

> Territorial gains from their conquest of the Levant

Again, for the daily life of the average resident of Gaza or the West Bank, this matters not a whit.

> Most of the world is competing ethnostates, including most if not all Arab states.

This is simply not true. Almost none of the world is ethnostates.

Countries like China and Japan are de facto ethnostates. There's also countries with religious majorities like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and India, many of which are associated with an ethnicity. Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs. You could make the argument that many European states have dominant ethnic groups like the French, though they are nominally secular nations.

The biggest cosmopolitan countries are the United States and Brazil if I remember correctly. Maybe Canada too. Europe is moving in that direction. Countries that have a diverse citizenry are more of an exception though. Not that I disagree with your probable view that we should all live in diverse secular democracies, I just think your claim that almost none of the world is ethnostates is somewhat suspect.

I agree with the idea that Israel would ideally be a single secular state, but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go would be an enormous challenge. The situation sucks and resists simple answers.

Good analysis. Any ideas on solutions?

Not a fucking clue man. These people hate each other and they both have reason to. Maybe you need a solution administered by a third party like the UN but no solution is going to leave everyone happy, and the UN itself is pretty flawed. There's plenty of insane people on both sides including Hamas.

I don't really see what the UN can do. Even if you had a solution that no one likes how do you force it on both parties?

The UN doesn't have the firepower to force Israel to do anything it doesn't want to do, and doesn't have the desire to force Palestine to do anything it doesn't want to do.

I suppose one approach is just sanction/isolate the entire region, until both sides reach their own solution. But… unlikely the entire world would unite in that, resulting in incomplete sanctions and messy alliance networks, with probably new enemies for each in the aftermath, and sadly perhaps new “scores to settle” against those who sanctioned them.

As an outsider to this feud, perhaps the best thing for me to do is not to judge either of them. I think it’s human to want to pick a side, but they’re not making it easy either way, by now. War is ugly, and I feel sad about and disappointed in that region for reminding me how bad people can be…

I wish they would stop fighting and dying but i got no power to change that. If that’s what they wanna do, it’s up to them.

I was really looking forward to a trip to Israel this year but now i guess that’s on hold…too dangerous

I would love to say I shouldn't have an opinion on this. Unfortunately my government is giving our tax dollars to one side so it can bomb the other. If they would prefer I didn't have an opinion, maybe they can stop taking our money to buy bombs.

Yeah, I like your thinking. It's tricky. Inextricable government-citizen stuff. I'm more of a global citizen right now, I don't really feel that. But I get it. Must be tough. Democracy...whaddayagonnado?

One issue with that is we only provide a small portion of their military budget and use a lot of that influence to persuade them to treat the Palestinians better.

I'm assuming you're American and on this basis, it's safe to point out this expenditure is primarily defensive, funding the iron dome. You don't hear about the iron dome in the news much as it would get boring reading day in, day out of the same defences against "exploratory" missiles fired into Israel. These defensive missiles are really expensive.

De-facto seems to be doing a lot of work there. Which of these countries have things like this?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-adopts-divisive-la...

Or this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaization_of_the_Galilee

These are simply not normal things for a country to do in the 21st century. That doesn't mean I don't have massive problems with what these other countries are doing, or what the US is doing, but to say they're ethno-states like Israel in my view is a false equivalency.

> but navigating that transition while preserving it as the safest place the Jews of the world can go

Is it though? I know Jewish folks in the US with family in Israel, and it doesn't seem like they'd feel safer in Israel. These policies don't seem to be making Jews safer.

> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs.

nit: It's named after Arabia which is a geographic region that's been named after the Arabs for centuries. The disturbing part of the name Saudi Arabia is that it's named after a specific family of despots, not that it refers to Arabia. But even being named after an ethnic group doesn't make your country an ethno-state.

> These policies don't seem to be making Jews safer.

I agree.

And I'm not saying that any countries are better or worse at being an ethnostate than Israel, just that there are many countries where racial identity is prominent. China as an ethnostate is complicated (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Dream for some examples), but 91% of people in China are Han Chinese. That culture is predominant and the Chinese state has an official language associated with that identity. Likewise, foreigners make up just about 2% of the population in Japan (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Japan). Japan is known to be an insular country that has a reputation for xenophobia. That's what I meant by de facto. Both countries have a dominant culture in a more pronounced way than the United States, for example. China also practices ethnic clensing with things like the Uyghur cultural genocide, which could be compared to some of the policies you linked.

Right. Asian countries that aren’t technically ethnostates are effectively such, by way of something that functions like an ethnic identity. E.g. nearly everyone assimilating into Han ethnic identity in China. Similarly, Arab identity.

Most European countries historically functioned like ethnostates. They’re trying to change that, but not successfully.

I don’t believe diverse countries are sustainable in the long run. Look at what happened to Jews in Europe. They were living in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years, and then their neighbors turned on them and massacred them.

"They were living in peace with their neighbors for hundreds of years, and then their neighbors turned on them and massacred them."

Progroms were not exactly a new thing in europe, but frequently happened over the centuries. The 19. and beginning of the 20. century was rather a quite peaceful episode, with jews getting equal citizen rights etc. but the hate did not go away, as can be seen, once the Nazis took over.

Wait what? China as an ethnic state? That would require a pretty large stretch. Europe is populated by Europeans, but saying it's an ethnic state is not very useful. China is a huge country with many ethnic groups with their own identities. The Han may dominate but the country functions more like a colonial empire.

Calling France an ethnic state is saying the Normans are the same group as the Provençal. It's like doing the same in Spain; a sure way to lose new friends. France and Spain are also old empires.

Japan is something else. The description makes sense there. Maybe also for the Nordic countries of Europe.

> The Han may dominate but the country functions more like a colonial empire.

At the level of spoken language, Han natively speak several mutually unintelligible languages; even at the written level, most of the mutually intelligibility only exists in the more formal registers. Are Han really one ethnic group then? Or more like a family of closely related ethnic groups?

> Japan is something else. The description makes sense there

Are Ryukyuans the same ethnic group as Yamato Japanese?

> You could make the argument that many European states have dominant ethnic groups like the French, though they are nominally secular nations.

France officially rejects the idea of French ethnic nationalism. France’s nationalism is civic and linguistic - the French nation is defined in terms of citizenship and language, not in terms of ethnic ancestry - in fact, the French government does not even know the ethnic/racial composition of their country, since they refuse to collect statistics on it. So I disagree with the suggestion that France is an “ethnostate”

> Saudi Arabia is named after the Arabs

Both the Saudi royal family and the Saudi religious establishment have always opposed Arab nationalism; the only significant Arab nationalist force in Saudi politics was the outlawed Arab Socialist Action Party opposition, which was mostly crushed by the Saudi regime in the 1980s, and by 1991 or so was extinct.

Every nation in that area is an Islamic theocracy, monarchy, a failed state or a military dictatorship.

If we waived a magic wand and made Palestine and Israel one country we wouldn't have peace. We'd have a a bloody civil war that makes the current conflict look like childs play.

Exactly. Show me an Arab country where Jews live as equals and prosper. There isn’t one. There’s just a few thousand Jews in the Arab countries. Less than 100 in Syria and Lebanon, about 100 in Egypt. Five in Iraq. Officially, zero in Saudi.

Ethnostates are still highly relevant today, especially for Jews.

In my country, the US, many people once believed that slavery was morally wrong, but still argued against freeing the slaves because they might try to take revenge on the rest of the population. Those fears were, in fact, confirmed on several occasions. And even today, areas with a high population of descendants of slaves fare far worse by almost every economic and social measure.

Freeing the slaves (a task which required us to fight the deadliest war in our history) was still the right and necessary thing to do. "You broke it, you bought it."

The Israelis are not just going to dissolve Israel and give it to the Palestinians just like the US won't dissolve itself and give itself back to the Native Americans.

> dissolve Israel and give it to the Palestinians

That's not what I'm asking for. In the US, Native Americans and descendants of slaves have full legal and political rights (in fact, Native Americans have extra political rights not granted to other citizens). Israel also can give Palestinians full legal and political rights, either in a separate state or as part of a one-state solution, without compromising its continued existence.

A statement like that unfortunately muddies the waters, it takes two to tango. Sadly things have deteriorated but at one stage there was a path to citizenship of Israel also there were offers of a state.

If native Americans made up 60% of the population and voted hamas into power the last time they had an election it would have been a much tougher choice for the us to give them voting rights.

What has American slavery to do with Arab imperialism?

> Arabs got the vast majority of the land

I was (obviously) referring to their share of the population of Mandatory Palestine specifically.

Mandatory Palestine was an artificial creation of the British, which existed less than 30 years. For the 400 years before that, it was part of a single Ottoman province along with what is now Syria and Jordan (except for Jerusalem which was split off into a separate distinct in 1872).

Talking about “how much of Mandatory Palestine the Arabs got” is contrived, when it was just a part of a much larger Arab territory under the Ottomans, and was planned to be part of a much larger Arab territory after the Ottomans.

Yes, what really mattered to the ordinary people on the ground wasn't the borders on a map; it was "my family has lived in this house and farmed this land for generations, but now men with guns say the house belongs to them and we have to leave."

You think a forced expulsion from their homes is what drove the 1948 war?

Is it not though? The expulsion started immediately after UN partition recommendation of Nov 1947, the Arab-Israeli war started in May 1948, that is only 6 months later

The war started the day after the UN resolution, in November 20 1947. The war wasn’t caused by the expulsion of Arabs. The Arab states refusing to recognize the creation of a Jewish state caused the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestine_war

> The war had two main phases, the first being the 1947–1948 civil war, which began on 30 November 1947,[19] a day after the United Nations voted to adopt the Partition Plan for Palestine, which divided the territory into Jewish and Arab sovereign states, and an international Jerusalem (UN Resolution 181). Partition was accepted by the Jewish leadership, but rejected by Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states.

Yes, exactly, Arabs rejected a partition plan that would expel them from their homes.

The partition plan wouldn’t have expelled anyone from their homes. Most of the land that became Israel belonged to the Ottoman Empire itself. Part of it was purchased by Jews over decades. Arabs weren’t to be expelled from the remainder, they would just become part of the new Jewish state. And, of course, it never would’ve affected Arabs in Syria, Jordan, etc.

> purchased by Jews

Many of these purchases were from wealthy Ottoman landowners who had in many cases never seen the land they owned. The peasant families that actually lived on the land for generations had no say in the matter. I'm not faulting the purchasers for conducting legal business transactions, if anything the fault belongs to the feudal system of the Ottoman Empire—but none of that matters to someone who has suddenly lost their home and livelihood.

> Arabs weren’t to be expelled from the remainder

I don't think the historical record bears that out. Why did Israel not let the civilians it displaced return once the war ended, if the displacements were merely a temporary military necessity? And certainly massacres like Deir Yassin were not military necessities, though they did scare many Palestinians into fleeing.

You’re mixing up two different things.

The question we were talking about above is: What caused the Arabs to attack Israel the day after the UN Declaration? Note: it was not just Arabs in Mandatory Palestine, it was Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. All of them attacked Israel. Why? It wasn’t Arabs in Palestine being forced to leave their land. That wasn’t part of the partition plan, and hadn’t happened yet. The Israeli Declaration of Independence specifically asks Arabs to stay and become equal citizens.

As to why Israel hasn’t allowed Arabs who fled to return, I suspect it’s because the Arab countries tried to kill Israel in its crib, and then expelled a million Jews from their own lands.

> That wasn’t part of the partition plan, and hadn’t happened yet.

I must admit I don't know as much as I would like about this, so please correct me if I say something stupid (and share reading recommendations), but: my understanding is, "Israel" at this point was composed of several factions who disagreed greatly about methods. Probably Ben-Gurion did not have ethnic cleansing in mind, but Irgun and Lehi did, which was enough—the most radical factions were also most willing to fight, which gave them outsize power. (Though even Ben-Gurion did not intend to stay only within the borders allotted by the UN, he intended to take control of even Jewish settlements outside the partition borders.)

As for the war: the invasion by the Arab countries upon Israel's declaration of independence was an expansion of a civil war within Palestine that had already been going on for more than 5 months, and that the Palestinians were decisively losing. The Arab states hoped mostly to save face and to stop the flood of Palestinian refugees that would result if the current trajectory continued.

My aunt lives in Tel Aviv from 1933 to 1952. She told me they actually started shelling the city that night, not the next day.

As well, there was fighting in the streets. They had to turn off the lights at night and hide in the basement to avoid raids. There was a sniper who was shooting at their apt from a nearby mosque and they would find shells on their balcony. They lived on Ben Yahuda St.

Just thought readers might appreciate a first hand account of what it was like to be a Jewish Israeli at the time.

I was discussing 1948 with a Palestinian and he insisted on downplaying the Arab attacks, saying they were weak, their attacks were not serious etc. I've found that in online discussions as well including people telling me that Arab countries didn't even exist at the time. The Egyptian Air Force bombed Tel Aviv that night.

We live in a post truth era and not sure what can be done about that. You'd think that with the Internet and access to information people can do research but research is hard. There are many, sometimes conflicting accounts of historical events. It's so easy to be sucked into echo chambers. Any thesis you have can be easily supported.

Thank you for sharing. Unfortunately, Israel lost the war on this decades ago. Not just Arabs, but the entire Muslim world has bought a particular narrative, and nothing will convince them otherwise. I’m from a non-Arab Muslim country, and they actually have a lot of conflict with Arabs (exporting Wahhabism, etc). But when it comes to Israel and Palestine, it’s a unified front.

Unfortunately, it’s part of a larger victimhood narrative that has become an important part of Muslim identity. “Our once proud civilization has been oppressed by the west, including ripping away our holy city of Jerusalem and giving it to the Jews.” And because the Muslim world was an important participant in the worldwide socialist movement, that narrative has taken hold among European leftists who otherwise wouldn’t have a horse in the race.

100% this.

I'd say your focus on what happened in other areas of Ottoman control is contrived. It seems obvious that what should have mattered to the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine is the disposition of Mandatory Palestine - it doesn't help them at all to say "well, these other guys over there got a whole country."

You’re projecting western individualism onto the situation. The correct analysis is to look at how the territory was partitioned between Arabs and Jews. Thats how Arabs themselves viewed it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War. Why did Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi, and Yemen all attack Israel the moment it was created, and several times after that?

Why do the Arab countries care so much about Palestine? It’s not like they go around spending their blood and treasure to protect other oppressed groups. Saudi just bombed the shit out of Yemen. The reason they want to get rid of Israel is because they view this as a matter of Arab territorial integrity.

My Bangladesh family is posting the paratrooper meme on my FB. Why? Because they view the existence of Israel as an affront to territorial integrity of the Islamic world. You cannot understand the situation Israel is in from a western secular point of view.

> Why did Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi, and Yemen all attack Israel the moment it was created, and several times after that?

Since after Israel's founding, the Arab states have initiated war against it exactly once: the 1973 Yom Kippur war. (Technically, I guess you could count Iraq's 1991 rocket attacks as a second time?) In all other cases, either Israel attacked first, or Israel's opponent was not a recognized state actor.

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