Comment by wayfinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wayfinder | Hacker News Reader

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Hmm I think you’re skipping some major parts of world history.

Jewish immigration to Palestine was not particularly great. Jewish people were not really heavily trying to move to the Middle East where people didn’t like them.

What happened is that Great Britain, following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the division of that region between itself and France, decided to make the Israel state, make it official through the League of Nations, and then encourage Jewish people to move there. It was the ultimate solution to the several century old “Jewish Question” that Europeans had. Of course people started moving to a territory controlled and sanctioned by none other but the British Empire.

By sending them to the Middle East, Europe could get rid of the Jews and Britian can get an ally. Win win for Europe. Jews, Palestinians, Arabs and everyone else be damned.

Of course, after hell obviously broke loose, Britain realized that their mandate was not working and they pulled out of a problem that they created.

…And nooowww we’re here.

There are several factual inaccuracies in your account.

Historically, Jews faced widespread animosity in Europe. The Roman Empire's destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD is a notable early example. Jews were wrongly blamed for the Black Death, leading to widespread pogroms and massacres. During the Crusades, particularly the capture of Jerusalem, both Jews and Muslims were massacred. In 1492, the Spanish Inquisition resulted in the expulsion of Jews from Spain, which had one of the most significant Jewish communities in Europe. Many of these expelled Jews found refuge in Palestine. The history of Jewish persecution also includes severe instances in Russia and Poland, and the situation in Germany is widely known.

By the 1900s, Jews and Palestinians were coexisting relatively peacefully in the region now known as Israel and the Palestinian territories, even though Jews constituted only about 3% of the population. However, relations began to deteriorate with the onset of mass Jewish migration, which saw the Jewish population in Palestine increase to 30% within a few decades. Tensions escalated dramatically following the British decision to allocate over half of Palestinian land to this minority population.

It is also misleading to suggest that there wasn't a significant effort by Jewish people to relocate to the Middle East. The choice of Palestine was intrinsically linked to Jewish historical, religious, and cultural identity. For the Zionist leadership, any location other than Jerusalem was unacceptable.

In essence, this was a chiefly European problem outsourced to the Middle East.

I don’t see how anything you said contradicts anything I said, which was just a more general summary.

And there is a significant effort by a lot of people to split California into two or more two states but it’s all talk.

The Jewish relocation happened because of the British Empire.

Discussing the historical context is important, but what's happening now matters even more.

And what's happening now that I think you might be missing is the complete and total subjugation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government despite it being universally condemned by 95%+ of the Earth.

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