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Comment by gravisultra | Hacker News Reader

That's not true at all. The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud. It was very much caused by the deliberate provocation and importation of European settlers via Zionism. It's easy to wave our hands and say "it's so complicated!" or "they've been doing this for thousands of years!" but it's not complicated, much like apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not complicated. Colonialism and ethno-centric racism are never good.

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The plurality of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (aka, Jews who never left the Middle East), at 45% of the population [1]. This isn't about Europeans, or even "race": Mizrahi Jews and their Palestinian neighbors are racially indistinguishable.

Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews. [2] Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism, Ashkenazi Jews are firmly within the Middle Eastern/Levantine clade and are more closely related to Palestinians than they are any European group. [3]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews_in_Israel

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jews_in_Israel

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_of_Jews

> Although if you're dead-set on racial essentialism and blood-and-soil nationalism

You're reading things OP didn't even write; and addressing a historical assertion with present-day facts.

OP posits that European settlers coming in during the Ottoman era (establishing Hebrew-only areas & businesses, only to later demand a Jewish State, in opposition to the local majority [0]) is what kickstarted the current conflict. It isn't a 1000 year old feud.

Mizrahis, save for Yemenis, migrated en masse after the conflict was irreversibly set in motion by Imperial Britain & various Arab states.

[0] https://www.pbs.org/video/1913-seeds-conflict-establishing-r...

That's a high quality comment but nothing at all like the comment it is defending whose main thrust is that the conflict is simple to understand and one side is just wrong.

Apartheid, oppression, occupation, genocide, and ethno-nationalist supremacy are "just wrong", and not all that complex once you get past the lie that they don't exist.

Also, the comment's "main thrust" was in response to the claim that the area is 'just always like that', for 'thousands of years', which is categorically untrue; a deliberate thought-terminating lie. Israel's terror campaign and colonialist brutality of the last 80 years is something quite new and different, based as it is on brutal British and American colonial strategies.

Prior to modern day Israel, there was 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid - the caliphate, in the form of the Islamic Empire and then the Ottoman Empire.

Not saying that this justifies anything, but the bloodshed for the past 100 years needs to be put into context of 1200 years of systemic oppression.

And yes, 100 years. The modern middle east should be looked at from 1920/1924 when the caliphate, one of the worlds largest, most powerful, and most impactful empires, was finally defeated. 1948 was just one of the significant events since that time.

How is this different than the Muslims currently pouring into Europe today? Whatever happened to "refugees welcome"?

It should be noted in context that in 1856 the Ottomans, after their war with Prussia, actively invited all peoples - not only Muslims - to come and settle the sparsely populated Holy Land specifically in order to collect more taxes. Jews and Arabs happily took up the offer. The last Jerusalem census to show a Muslim majority in that city was 1876, and the 50 years preceding it were neck and neck for Jews and Arabs majority.

> in order to collect more taxes.

Non-Muslims were taxed more so of course they were welcomed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Ottoman_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya

Muslims have not asked for a majority Muslim state in Europe or started a terror campaign in support of that goal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_political_violence

It's not about race, but it is about the invention of a country that relies on specific demographics to exist (majority Jewish) which necessitate keeping millions of people stateless yet under the full control of an elite ethnicity who actually have the votes and the control.

And no matter where Jewish people are from, they are that privileged ethnicity. The Arabs in Israel get token rights (but you and I both know if they were a demographic threat in Israel those rights would be revoked). And the Arabs in Palestine get no rights in Israel but are fully controlled and blockaded by Israel. That's the ultimate source of the conflict. It's not thousands of years old, and it is partly about race (if you consider Jewish a race, as the nation of Israel does).

> The Arabs in Israel get token rights.

That's just false. The Arab minority in Israel has right to vote, the right to establish political parties, freedom of expression, freedom of association, free press, religious autonomy, separate educational systems, legal rights, etc.

Yes there are differences, but claiming that Arab israelis only receive "token rights" is a far cry from the truth. Of course this doesn't mean theres' no racism, but that's a different issue.

They don't have a right to own land in 90% of the country. You literally have to be Jewish to buy land. Also Jewish people started burning down buildings full of Arabs during the war. They can get evicted from their houses. They are discriminated against. And I don't think you're a full citizen if you can't even buy and keep property.

> Also Jewish people started burning down buildings full of Arabs during the war.

Citation needed.

> You literally have to be Jewish to buy land

False.

> They don't have a right to own land in 90% of the country.

False. It's true only to 13% of the land which is owned by JNF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel#Land_ownershi...

Looked into this and yes I think I was mixing up the 90% of land owned buy the ILA with the 13% owned by the JNF: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2008/iopt0308/4.htm#_ftn53

In the case of the ILA, you can buy it if you have full citizenship, but not if you are an Arab with a residence permit but not full citizenship. You can however buy land if you are Jewish and not a citizen. I find this somewhat racist still. Moreover, according to the above source from Human Rights Watch, Arabs still are de facto prevented from leasing 80% of the land. So my figure is not that far off. You also didn't dispute the fact that they have been evicted and contained. Which is also mentioned here.

They have also been steadily changing the rights of Arab Israelis over the course of 2024, as if their collective punishment of Palestinians needs to extend even to their own citizens, just in case: https://www.ft.com/content/3d57cf7c-a097-4e86-8f39-0f7720508...

Edit: archive link here https://archive.is/gvke5

I cannot find a source about the exact incident I was citing about arson perpetuated on Arab Israelis. It was a long time ago I read about that. So I will concede that seeing as I think my other points hold strongly. There are several incidents of arson and increased unpoliced violence in East Jeruselam and the West Bank though. I find this as clear evidence that the war crimes going on in Gaza are not just about retaliation to Hamas, but are part of a larger racist issue, since Palestinians in the West Bank logically do not deserve punishment for things Hamas did, but are being killed at far higher rates since this war. I say higher because children were always being killed every week in the West Bank, increasingly so in 2023.

> seeing as I think my other points hold strongly.

But they aren't. The initial claim was about Arabs in israel (aka israeli arabs), not Palestinians in the west bank / east Jerusalem which is a different topic.

Now don't get me wrong, i'm not gonna protect Israel's treatment to it's arab population, but let's get some facts straight. In terms of human rights you're still better off being arab israeli than being an arab citizen in most of the arab countries.

Bro when I said my other comments, I was speaking about the points ABOVE that statement. The ones I provided sources for. Both of which are about Arab Israeli citizens. Most of what I provided was specifically about Arab Israeli citizens. Are you being purposefully dense? I said I don't have evidence about the burning of Arab Israeli buildings BUT I have provided other points pertaining to Arab Israeli citizens that do hold up.

Anyway, saying "there's human rights violations but other countries have more human rights violations" is stupid and doesn't prove the point that Zionists are trying to make, that they are the victims in this situation and are not racists with an intent to genocide. Go say to black Americans in 20th century fighting for full civil rights "well at least you're not still in Africa, you'd probably be starving so you should really be grateful for this wonderful fair country". Those are two seperate issues.

> Both of which are about Arab Israeli citizens.

> Most of what I provided was specifically about Arab Israeli citizens

Palestinians in the west bank are not citizens. So again, Israeli arabs have much more than "token rights", they have all the rights i listed before.

As someone who was defintely pro-palestinian and now changed his stance to "eeeeh it's complicated", I want to thank you for taking the time to rebutt falsehoods and to call out exaggerations rather than engaging with ready-made partisan talking points. I know doing that sometimes feels like pissing in the wind but in my case, it really helped question what I thought I knew and to admit that I was probably more ignorant than I thought.

I'm baffled by how you've changed your stance in such a way. I sympathise with the Israeli people for thinking it's complicated and I understand that we need to consider them and their livelihoods and trauma when talking about the situation, but at the end of the day, what Zionist project requires genocide and thier government subsquently is quite happy to slaughter people like dogs. No amount of "the other side did some bad things too" justifies that when the Israeli's are the only ones who have the power to stop it.

You are trying to get me to engage to the claims you are making, I will not do that. Instead I will tell you about my stance change assuming you care. This is not about "the other sides did some bad things too", it's about the claims made by the pro-palestinians and the reality of it, which I think this thread illustrates quite well. On one side you have someone who cares about understanding the situation before making any claims and one the other hand you have someone (you) who is on his morality horse kinda saying that the facts, details in your eyes, don't really matter since you are on the side of the opressed. Attempting to dumb down the situation to an oppressor/opressed schema might be true in present day at an abstract level but does not help anyone. It's easy to be right, just make a broad abstract claim, it's much harder to be relevant. I know how you feel, I felt just the same, you are high on your emotion : It seems like for once it's a clear oppressor/oppressed situation, like the one you have read in History books but ask yourself "Why doesn't everyone see it like I do ?". Is it only because of the undeniable Israeli state propaganda directed at the western world and everyone is blind to it ? Or is it because people much smarter than us have tried to solve the situation, and failed ? Also do you care at all about a solution that would work for both parties ? Or do you only care that one party is right and the other, more powerful one, should vanish into thin air because they are wrong ?

I dunno man I've had a lot of people accuse me of being blinded by emotion on this but I am the only person who gave sources in this conversation. I've done a lot of reading, including of pro-Israel sources. The facts of the matter hold up. Israel is in the wrong. Again, the other side obviously did bad things but Israel is the one trying to create an ethnostate and then is acting surprised by the adverse consequences of that. Israel also is the only side with the power to stop this.

Anyway, I'll go back to being overly emotional by citing sources while the other side cites zero sources but is 'reasonable' because of their aesthetic of conservatism.

Edit: Also in terms of why do I think other people think differently, there are a lot of reasons. One is the genuine trauma of the holocaust. I totally understand why Jewish people felt like they could no longer conscience living anywhere other than a Jewish state after hundreds of years of pogroms leading to the holocaust. I also understand why they see anyone who is against them as antisemetic. There's lots of overlap between antisemitism and antizionism even if they are definitely not equivalent. I also understand that many people are scared of the instability in the region that be caused by the loss of a friendly westernised state and the possible formation of yet another total disaster of an Arab government. I also understand that it is not the choice of people who are grandchildren of settlers to have been born there and it is naive of me to dismiss the trauma of living in such a war torn place even from the more privileged side. None of these things makes it right to ethnically cleanse a people. That's the bottom line. And until we get Israel to admit that, we can't move forward, because the Palestinians cannot be gaslit out of their day to day experience of brutal military occupation and racist apartheid. They cannot be gaslit out of believing in the corpses around them.

Of course I don't believe we just dispose of Israelis for the sins of their forefathers. I believe they either need to give up a lot of land or they need to concede to having a multi ethnic state. Maybe the first one and then a plan towards the second so that neither side feels contained. This is easier said than done but it is what has to be done. Just like how South Africans had to forgive each other and the Irish and the English had to forgive each other, just on a more extreme scale. It's obviously a crazy thing to have to do, but you know what's worse? Continuing with a system that necessitates genocide.

I find it quite insulting that you see someone having the pro-Palestinian view and you think "oh yeah you're probably all for genociding the Israeli's to get your way"

That's unfair to your interlocutor who politely engaged with your point and tried give his source once, especially since you started with a false statement that you backed away from (with sources, to your credit).

I don't think you are blinded by emotions but "high" on them btw. I do not negate the fact that you are an intelligent, reasoning being. And it's fine, we all get emotional about things. I understand how appearing reasonable is part of the aesthetics of conservatism but I still wouldn't trust someone who seem engaged in overtly motivated reasoning to get to the truth of something, and I am speaking of both sides here. If you don't show me your own doubts, I will doubt you.

Edit:

You show a lot of understanding and I think that's a prerequisite for any serious conversation but you also see how it is not very practical for any online conversation to have a wall of "I understand that..."

> I find it quite insulting that you see someone having the pro-Palestinian view and you think "oh yeah you're probably all for genociding the Israeli's to get your way"

Well you see the problem, like any dispute in any relationship, it's an endless chain of "I feel insulted that..." unless you have a strict framework for discussion where everyone feels heard. Of course I don't see pro-Palestinians as having genocidal intent (and I take offence that you think I do :). I was one and I did not, but I also understand that an israeli person would be concerned about violent reprisals and wouldn't trust high on reighteouness pro-palestinians who would absolve themselves saying "Well they reap what they sow". That's why peace is hard, it takes a saint-like dedication to dialogue and gandhi-like refusal of revenge.

I agree that a "they reap what they sow" attitude can be tempting but is totally unproductive. You're absolutely right that we need real empathetic dialogue from gandhi-like figures. That was what I was trying to say in my last response. If the Israelis can admit that their genocidal actions have been wrong and that they have to concede some of their land for paece and the Palestinians can acknowledge the Isrealis generational trauma, welcome their need for sanctuary and disband Hamas then we could get somewhere. What I object to is that most of the world seems to believe that the Israelis should not have to admit to their own faults and concede anything. Hamas is a necessary resistance force in the eyes of the Palestinians if the Israelis continue to beleive that genocidal action is justified. I say in the eyes of the Palestinians because this may seem ludicrous to some of us, but that really doesn't matter. What matters is dealing with the greivances of the people in the area once and for all.

> Or is it because people much smarter than us have tried to solve the situation, and failed ?

There are also a lot of people much smarter than us saying that the core parts of the Palestinian narrative are true (Nakba, land theft, apartheid and occupation, and yes, genocide, not talking about the religious Islamist stuff). E.g. the heads if pretty much all UN orgs and aid agencies.

Yeah its really not that people smarter than us have tried to solve the situation. It's that people much smarter than us with selfish motives (Israel and US) have engineered the fucked up situation we see now. And the people who are smart and want to fix the situation (UN, leftist Israeli academics, Palestinian leaders) are shut down immediately by Israel and the US, therefore blocking any progress.

> Yes there are differences, but claiming that Arab israelis only receive "token rights" is a far cry from the truth

Aren't the rights only subject to them being an ethnic minority in Israel? According to nation-state law, they could not be allowed to retain those rights if they became the ethnic majority

This is well summarised. It could end very easily.

Inform us to your simple solution:

Keep things the same with Palestinians as wards of the state: Iran and others fund Hamas to continue the conflict.

Palestinians get an armed state: in 5 years Palestinians attack Israel and are utterly wiped out by complete military defeat and carpet bombing

Palestinians get an unarmed state.: lol like they have now? Smuggled arms, terrorism, eventual war, carpet bombing.

The essential geopolitical issue is that the Palestinians have never functionally accepted being defeated. So they never moved on and accepted peace in defeat like literally thousands of other ethnic groups historically in the history of ethnic conflict in the world.

Granted their only source of economic support is being funded to not accept peace by Iran and the Arab world for 70 years. That's four generations of Palestinians only existing to be thorns in the side of Israel and as useful fools.

At this point there is no good outcome for Palestinians. All roads lead to devastating military defeat politically. The economic basis of their existence (oil money) is rapidly fading. Old allies are now aligned with Israel (Sunni Arabs), impotent (Russia/Syria), or regionally deflated (Iran). Global warming is worsening. And they have increased their population 10 fold over 70 years with ZERO agricultural or economic ability to support themselves. Their political leadership is corrupt and paid to be militaristic and have authoritarian control. The West wont give them headline prominence anymore. The US is becoming insular, and we are entering an era of conflict and a fall in international diplomatic idealism

If you are a Palestinian and have any way to get out, get the effing hell out of there.

I could grant the Palestinians every moral high ground and argument. It won't change anything geopolitically and the Palestinians are utterly screwed.

Their only (impossible) chance is to reject Hamas, live in whisper quiet peace with Israel, develop tourism or some other economic basis to support their population.

And we all know reading that paragraph how impossible that is.

The best outcome would be that Israelis collectively decide that ethnic hierarchy isn't right as a state and commit to ending it. What you are saying is basically that black slaves couldn't be freed because all they'd do is try another ill-fated Nat Turner rebellion.

The Palestinians don't have to "accept defeat" if the Israelis can "accept ethnic equality". The same way the IRA and the PA (who renounced violence as an overture to Israel) never "accepted defeat" either.

Black slaves weren't funded, radicalized, and armed with military weapons and missiles with a stated goal of its leadership to kill all white people.

There are Palestinians that will get along with Israel. Newsflash, there are a ton of Palestinians living in Israel peacefully. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab.

The Palestinians need to lay down arms for a looooong time before kumbaya peace is on the table. Stop with the bullshit that West bank and Gaza just want peace. Gaza continued to politically elect Hamas.

Likewise Israeli right wingers are in charge of Israel, like if the southern states had a lock on the US government.

Peace was closest when Yassir Arafat walked away from an agreement that included a Palestinian state. He was probably paid to do by the Iranians, Arafat died worth hundreds of millions.

Finally,the Palestinians dug their own mass graves by increasing population by a factor of ten when they had no economy and lived off of world relief and Arab oil money.

That's why they will never make peace. They only way they get money to live is to fight Israel. If they don't fight Israel, the aid dries up and they starve. If they fight Israel, Israel unleashes military force and blockaded and they starve.

Geopolitically the Israeli right wing have won. The world doesn't care about mortality. The UN will probably even stop passing their paper resolutions, because the world has way bigger issues like Russia NATO Ukraine, China Taiwan, and Trump vs everyone, brewing trade wars, and the fact that Israel is allied with Sunni Arabs, and Iran lost all its proxies.

The Palestinians are losing their funders, losing practical military access, lost Egypt a long time ago.

Global warming will be kicking into gear, so that means widespread population movements and other issues that will take all aid from the Palestinians.

That's why it's so critical for the Palestinians to find a way to some sort of peaceful state with an economic basis. That is the very narrow historic window for their survival. There is no Israeli kumbaya moment. There is no UN intervention force.

The fact you say "they don't have to accept defeat" is utterly nuts. And it's why that brief path to some survival by the Palestinians in Gaza is virtually impossible.

The West bank has a slightly better chance.

> Black slaves weren't funded, radicalized, and armed with military weapons and missiles with a stated goal of its leadership to kill all white people.

They were actually all of those things... Do you not know what the Nat Turner Rebellion was?

> Newsflash, there are a ton of Palestinians living in Israel peacefully. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab.

No one ever answers this follow up. What would happen if those Arabs were a demographic threat to the Jewish majority of Israel? Would they still retain their voting rights past 50%? Be honest.

> Stop with the bullshit that West bank and Gaza just want peace.

I never said that. I said that when Israelis decide that ethnic hierarchy is wrong and commit to ending it, this conflict can end.

> Peace was closest when Yassir Arafat walked away from an agreement that included a Palestinian state. He was probably paid to do by the Iranians, Arafat died worth hundreds of millions.

Oh so we just throw out lies now? My comment could have been a lot shorter. What happened to Arafat's counterpart, btw?

> Finally,the Palestinians dug their own mass graves by increasing population by a factor of ten when they had no economy

Advocacy of collective punishment. Nice!

> They only way they get money to live is to fight Israel. If they don't fight Israel, the aid dries up and they starve. If they fight Israel, Israel unleashes military force and blockaded and they starve.

Well, like I said earlier, they could get money if Israelis decided to collectively end the policies of ethnic hierarchy... You know Gaza had an international airport, it had a luxury hotel. It was building an economy. Constant war makes that hard. And as long as millions of people in Palestine don't have citizenship in any country, much less in the country that controls their lives, strife is inevitable.

> There is no Israeli kumbaya moment.

I don't agree. The people of Israel have a collective consciousness that will prevail. Ultimately, whites decided to end slavery in the US. Ultimately whites decided to end apartheid in South Africa. Ultimately Israelis will decide to end their ethnic hierarchy as well. It doesn't have to happen, but I believe it will.

> The fact you say "they don't have to accept defeat" is utterly nuts.

It's not nuts. It's a factual statement. The IRA did not admit defeat even after its prominent members were all jailed. The ANC did not admit defeat even after its prominently members were jailed. History shows they don't have to admit defeat. Many here might say it would be better for them and the Palestinians. But there's understandable mistrust of both sides that making a step forward is difficult. The last time steps forward were made, the PA renounced violence only to have more and more of the West Bank stolen. Rabin welcomed talks towards Palestinian statehood only to get a bullet in return. We went from the highs of Oslo to the lows of the Second Intifada. That kind of backstabbing makes it hard for one side to back down, but there is agency on both sides. The US decided to end racial hierarchy, and it was painful, but worth it in the long run. I firmly believe Israel can do the same.

Nat Turner: a sideshow of American history. Also, armed only with muskets, not missiles explosives and automatic assault rifles, and not able to travel the world and enact terrorism.

50% Arab voting rights: let me get this straight, you admit Israel will never allow Arabs to gain majority voting, an ethnic racial hierarchy, but are arguing that Israel... Can stop apply a racial hierarchy for West bank and Gaza? So you're admitting that your "just do this" is impossible.

The IRA (I'm assuming you mean the Irish) were white vs white, and Christian. Palestinian "problem" is both ethnic and religious divide.

South Africa was probably related to the death of imperialism and the fall of British empire in particular. The whites were way outnumbered and required implicit world support to maintain that long term. The whites either relented or eventually would get the guillotine. Blacks had implicit power in numbers and surrounding countries. That's a totally different power dynamic.

Palestinian population problem isn't laying blame. It's the facts of the situation to highlight how precarious and vulnerable they are, and how little actual power they have. They can't sustain their population without aid, and that aid is implicitly dependent on them being a thorn in Israels side. No thorn, no food. So peace no food, war ... Blockade no food.

I respect your idealism, but I'm in my fifties (not Israeli, Arab, or religious, I have no skin in this game) and ... Look, the Palestinians have worked the moral argument for 74 years. During a time when geopolitics was reasonably quiet between the cold war and the post cold war unipower system. When there was still attempts at the UN, court of international justice, and other idealism internationally.

That era is coming to an end worldwide. Free trade is ending, America is turning insular/isolationist, global warming is in the rise, China is saber rattling, Xi is nuts, Russia is threatening NATO, the EU and NATO are fraying, right wing nationalism is on the rise.

The world is going to abandon the Palestinians. Egypt won't save them, Israel sure as hell won't. You call for impossible idealism, and I call for impossible realism.

Nat Turner had military technology of the time. You are just shifting the goalposts now to exclude everything that isn't exactly this situation to avoid discussing the reality that ethnic hierarchy is bad even in the face of valid security threats it shouldn't exist.

> let me get this straight, you admit Israel will never allow Arabs to gain majority voting, an ethnic racial hierarchy, but are arguing that Israel... Can stop apply a racial hierarchy for West bank and Gaza?

No, you admit that Israel would never allow Arabs to gain majority voting. That proves it is an ethnic hierarchy. Rights are not equal for each population. One ethnicity has the power and the other can never have it. That is what's wrong, and what I say should end. The Americans ended racial hierarchy. The Europeans ended racial hierarchy. The South Africans ended racial hierarchy. Israel must, and will end it as well.

> The whites were way outnumbered and required implicit world support to maintain that long term.

Just like Israel

> The world is going to abandon the Palestinians.

No it won't. Dictatorships like Egypt and Saudi might. But the people will never forget them. Even the Israelis have not forgotten them. Israelis themselves are some of the most vocal about their plight. And it's that spark that will lead them to freedom. You don't have faith in the people. You don't believe the people make change possible. I do. Call it idealistic, but every ethnic hierarchy has ended except this one. I think I'm just following the stats.

Ethnic hierarchies are a fact of history and geopolitics, especially where guns and hatred are involved.

Nat Turner was not financed to the tune of billions of dollars (inflation adjustment necessary) and employed by France to foment and continue fighting. He was not financed to torpedo any real resolution of slavery because it would mean the personal money train ends. Nat Turner did not have a Mafia authoritarian government oppressing a couple million people of his own kind.

The slaves didn't want collectively to fight and kill and jihad on their white masters. They just wanted freedom. They got reconstruction and segregation.

Slavery was only resolved with the bloody civil war. A civil war that America has the luxury of engaging in because it has no geopolitical enemies on its borders.

Does Israel want to kill a couple million of its people to resolve this in a civil war internally? When a dozen enemies would leap at the chance to attack them when they are weakened?

Look, you are dealing with more hatred, more barriers, more meddling external powers, more dangerous enemies.

Every ethnic hierarchy has ended? Us is still ethnically split along the echoes of slavery. The native Americans would also like to point out their situation. Russia is still the Rus at the core and subordinate ethnic stans, just like 1000 years ago. China is an ethnic hierarchy with the Han at the top. Turkey can't wait to reestablish a caliphate. South Africa has worse divisions than the US post apartheid.

The US native American population is basically the Palestinians. That is your analogue. Confined to reservations and poor. I don't want to hold them up as a model of "living as defeated people" but they exist, they have freedom to move in the US, and they aren't viewed by Americans as terrorists and periodically blown up. They have some economic determinism (casinos). That is the model the Palestinians need.

Again with Nat Turner you are just shifting the goal posts of course he didn't have billions but he did successfully kill a lot of whites and was feared and put up as an example of the dangers of ending slavery. Ethnic hierarchies by law with legally different rights based on one's ethnicity have all ended except in Israel. All what you are talking about are not legally encoded hierarchies. You're kind of just floundering so I'll leave you to it. Like I said before, and you didn't respond to, I believe in the people of Israel. They will not let their legacy be one of legally encoded ethnic hierarchy. They don't want to be China or Russia, they want to be America, where even the ethnically cleansed Native Americans are equal citizens (to use your own analogy) with equal voting rights and all

Yes and the reason many of the Mizrahi are in Israel and not in all the other places is the Zionists.

I'm fairly certain it's because they were ethnically cleansed from and/or simply murdered in the rest of the Middle East by the surrounding Arab countries. For example, Egypt tortured and dispossessed its Jews, forcing them out at gunpoint while holding their family members hostage so they wouldn't speak to the press [1]. Syria made it illegal for Jews to buy property, own a telephone, or even drive, and then seized all the property they already owned and froze their bank accounts, killing them if they fled [2].

Blaming this on "the Zionists" is like saying America wasn't at fault for seizing the property of Japanese-Americans during WW2 and forcing them into internment camps — it was Japan's fault for attacking Pearl Harbor, whipping Americans into an unavoidable frenzy that can't be condemned. Only it's more absurd, because Israel didn't start the war with those countries — they invaded Israel in 1948 simply for existing!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Egypt

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Syria

There is a difference between moral responsibility and factual causality. If you engage in colonialism and ethnic cleansing, its not surprising that both sides do it.

Its of course also true that Jews and other minority would have had lots of issue in Arab country with Arab nationalism on the rise. But Zionism clearly played a large role as well.

It was attack by various Zionist groups that result in Britain no longer wanting to control the area because they knew in any resulting deal and/or struggle they had a good chance of coming out ahead, and they were right.

I see: so ethnic cleansing is understandable if the other side started it first. Well then, perhaps you can answer a question for me: which side first tried to ethnically cleanse the other? Was it the Jaffa riots in 1929? The Kfar Sirkin ambush in 1947 after the U.N. partition plan? Which was the first act of violence in which one side tried to drive the other out, since in your opinion, "if you engage in ethnic cleansing, it's not surprising that both sides do it," and thus it's actually Zionism's fault for Arab countries ethnically cleansing their Jews?

You seem to be obsessed with finding one side to blame and then blaming it all on that side. And spend a lot of time point out the crimes of one side while not mentioning the reverse.

Sorry to disappoint, but I don't, both sides can be a morally wrong.

Zionism is colonialist and bad and was always going to lead to multiple forms of response and that is not surprising.

> Ashkenazi Jews — that is, Jews who lived in Europe during the Diaspora — make up less than a third of Israeli Jews.

This isn't true, and the link you posted in support of it contradicts it in the third sentence. 'less than a third of Israeli Jews' excludes Jews who migrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, or from the post-Soviet Union countries. In fact around 20% of the population of Jewish people in Israel arrived during the wave of migration which happened in the 90s and early 2000s.

> In fact around 20% of the population of Jewish people in Israel arrived during the wave of migration which happened in the 90s and early 2000s.

any idea where the millions of Jews from around the middle east disappeared to around the same time?

Also, if you were a European Jew in the late 1940s after the fall of the Nazis, you were still faced with the prospect of living under the local governance of Nazi collaborators, continued pogroms [0] and antisemitism, and potentially Joseph Stalin's USSR. It's not like everything immediately went back to normal, either in real terms or psychological ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom

It's unsurprising that many wouldn't want to reintegrate with that society after what they experienced, even if they managed to avoid the camps (and especially if they didn't).

It is easy to say it's complicated, but you've inadvertently illustrated just how easy it is to say that it's simple too.

Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?

Zionism is a colonial ideology created by Europeans in the late 1800s.

It was more about local residents becoming Arabs than Arabs migrating in large numbers. Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from ancient Canaanites. More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age. Most conquerors just replaced or took over the old elites. Many people died in the process, and the survivors would often adopt a new culture, language, and/or religion.

> More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age.

This type of claims only shows lack of understanding of history as a science. It is actually impossible right now to make claims about this with any significant degree of confidence.

Arab is not a race. Most Arabs never arrived from anywhere, they were locals who adopted (often violently, sometimes not) large parts of Arab culture for long enough to consider themselves Arabs.

The Arabians never had the resources or population to engage in settler colonialism you are thinking of. Even if they wanted to (and perhaps they did), they just couldn't go around replacing anyone. So from the start the conception of Arab is about peoples slowly becoming Arab, not being replaced by arriving Arabs, in large part.

This is true of most old empires. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, early Ottomans generally don't setttle areas they conquer. They don't engage in industrial extraction either. They form a ruling class and collect taxes. Any cultural influence that have was because of longevity rather than any interest in forced conversion. People project their impressions of more modern empires to pre-industrial ones that didn't have the same aspirations or even institutions to accomplish those aspirations.

That's really not true, e.g. the wikipedia page on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[1]. This dates way back to the Assyrian and Persian empries explicitly moving conquered peoples around in their empires in order to safeguard their rule. This book on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[2] explicitly states, with references, that the Ottomans habits were inherited from the steppe Turks, the Byzantines (=the Romans) and the Arabs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Population_transf... [2] https://websites.umich.edu/~gocek/Work/ja/Gocek.Muge.ja.popu...

There were of course population transfers, but there mathematically could not move enough people from the Arabian Peninsula into conquered regions.

there are several flaws in your typical zionist argument:

1. jews as a minority have lived in the lands of Filistine and Jerusalem peacefully and coexisted just fine for millennia, before the zionist project.

2. the fact that small minority of jews lived there does not give an excuse to ethnically cleanse the local population of arabs.

3. the claim that modern european jews from Rhine and pale of settlement (AshkeNazi) have any connection to ancient Israelites from 2000+ years ago is laughable. Most genetic analysis proved that it is Palestinians, Jordanian Christians are native to the land, not european settlers from Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine with last names like Mileikowsky (Bibi's actual name), Mabovitch (golda's name) etc.

4. Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.

5. All studies have shown that Israel/zionism is a colonial settler project created by Brits to secure Suez Canal from the ottomans. Later it would become American "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the middle east to bomb and murder oil rich countries in the middle east

Everything else about this aside: the reason most European Jews have Europeanized last names is because they were forced to adopt them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries[1].

(Also, why spell it “AshkeNazi”? That seems inflammatory with no connection to reality, since the root is Ashkenaz.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_surname

I would argue there is connection to nazi regime:

1. ICC and ICJ's accusations of genocide by israel

2. israeli government led by Kahanite leaders like bezalel smotrich and ben gvir. Kahanism was recognized by USA and EU as a terrorist organization with fascist ideology and is named after terrorist meir kahane

3. public announcements by israeli leaders and journalists about "Israel needs Lebensraum"[a], dreams of conquering greater israel from Nile to Euphrates[b] stealing land from 6 other countries

There are way too many similarities between nazi germany and the zionist regime

a. https://archive.ph/NGnNv#selection-1153.44-1153.113

b. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241120-smotrich-has-conf...

There’s no connection between Nazism and the word Ashkenazi itself. Ashkenazi just means “someone from Ashkenaz,” which is what early medieval Jews called Germany.

(It’s almost impossible to engage with this comment, because of how ridiculous it is: for one, the majority of Ashkenazi Jews don’t even live in Israel. For another, intentionally using an ethnic identity as a stand-in for Nazism is cartoonishly offensive.)

> ICC and ICJ's accusations of genocide by israel

The ICC has not accused Israel (or any Israeli leader) of criminal genocide. They have accused them of some other things, many serious,but not genocide.

The ICJ hasn't ruled on the south africa case, so i think its wrong to say they have accused Israel. South Africa has accused, the ICJ is in the process of deciding if their accusation has merit but hasn't ruled yet.

Arabs like Syria's Assad have murdered half a million people but it would still be incredibly racist to call all Arabs "ArabNazis" on that basis.

> Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.

Read about the granada massacre.

Oy vey, granada is in Spain, you just proved my point that antisemitic pogroms are purely european thing.

Iraqi jews did not even want to migrate to Israel and leave Iraq. Mossad had to organize several bombings and false flags to scare the Iraqi jews and force them to migrate[1]

in other arab states, Ben Gurion paid money to encourage jews to immigrate and settle Filistine. Moroccan king begged jewish community to stay and not to immigrate

1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4283249?seq=1

Granada in 1066 wasn't Spain, it was the Taifa of Granada in Al-Andalus. That part of the peninsula was fully invaded and governed by muslims. Already for two centuries. The massacre perpetrators were a muslim mob.

You're being presented with perfectly valid arguments, clearly proving that your point is false, and still insisting on ignoring them because they don't agree with your narrative.

You're in bad faith.

The grand point still stands: when compared to Europe, Arab world largely coexisted and lived peacefully with jewish community. Until zionist settlers showed up.

Antisemitism is purely european concept, and some might argue that expulsion of jewish people from Europe to Middle East was the original Final Solution by Hitler (before he decided to just kill everyone).

So all that Zionists have achieved is just realized the dreams of Adolf Hitler

The Hebron, Mufti of Jerusalem and arab nationalism. The recent synagogue attacks, the examples are so countless that we even have an extra word for it. Oy vey, indeed, if you think that underlines your point.

When you ethnically cleanse a population, that population tends to go down. The opposite has happened to Arabs living in and around Israel.

I agree that it's not ethnic cleansing, but that's an awful support. Just because you're bad at evil doesn't make you not evil. Like, I assume Israel's population has gone up since October 7, which doesn't make it any less attempted genocide.

In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.

The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD. Even from this population, there is a bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago where the population was down to 350 individuals [1].

By and large very very few Jews in Palestine/Israel are able to claim Levantine/Semitic genetic ancestry.

Many Palestinians and other Levantine people in Palestine who now practice Islam are far more likely have to have ancestors that were once Jewish that actually lived in historical kingdom of Israel prior to 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian crushed a revolt there.

The ancestors of these folks that today practice Islam in Palestine likely converted to Islam sometime after 637 AD when Arabs started to settle in Palestine.

It's pretty commonly accepted all over the world since basically forever that ownership is bequeathed from parents to children. This means that those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land than folks who have no genetic ancestry to the Kingdom of Israel and instead have ancestry with no genetic relationship that converted to Judaism about 1105 to 1285 years ago.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-descend-from-35...

> those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land

Broadly speaking, any philosophy that rests on an oldest-claims-first metric are guaranteed to cause violence.

Information degrades the further we go back; you’re prioritising the wishy-washiest sources of truth. And the nature of human migration and interbreeding means the further you go back, the less likely you are to find genetic ancestors of the people who currently control the land. The people alive on the land you want them off. People with guns.

(The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong. Immigrants to America have less claim than white Americans, who have less claim than natives, except for all the natives who were conquered each other because they moved around too.)

> Information degrades the further we go back

Exactly. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything since we all share the same ancestry, going back to the same primates or something[0]. We should focus on the issues at hand and work to avoid making the situation worse. Forcing all Israelites or Palestinians to leave is not a feasible solution. The problem needs to be addressed through peaceful negotiations and immediate support for those in need.

[0]: Dumbed down on purpose.

It's not about the certainty of the information. The fact is that humans have always and will always migrate in large numbers for a vast number of reasons, and these migration movements are the main sources of cultural and linguistic change. So, any ideology with historical justification, based on how people in a region lived a long time ago is going to create wars because other groups lived there at other times, and ethnic and linguistic groups constantly change and evolve. Named regions, ethnic group boundaries, countries, and their delimitations change over time.

> The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong.

There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits. Genetic analysis can reveal indications of regions and ethnic origins but these are barely linked to phenotypical traits and cannot be inferred from the latter. Linguistic communities are the bearers of a shared culture, not anything related to the bogus and outdated concept of "human races." It's also worth pointing out that the claim that "racial migration is wrong" does not follow from any of the other considerations, nor is it needed to support them in any way. I suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong? Otherwise I don't get the final remark.

> There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits

Race is a social construct. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. The constructs of “Israeli” and “Palestinian” are as real and deadly as the geographical boundaries they each draw.

> suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong

If one’s ancestors define legitimate claims to where one can live, then one cannot legitimately live where one’s ancestors were not. In a weird way, the historical returners do a full swing to the xenophobic anti-immigrant types. (There are people who I’ve heard seriously argue that accepting Palestinian refugees is literally genocide.)

> The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi

Wrong, Mizrahi are the majority.

> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria

I don't know hope you did it, but wrong again, DNA studies show Ashkenazim have a large Canaanite DNA component. The other part is largely Italian due to admixture within the Roman Empire which forcibly annexed Judea.

if you trust DNA study, you should know that the same DNA studies show that Palestinians are the ones who are native to the land of Palestine, not ashkenazi!

They're both native to the land.

you cannot claim to be native to the land, just based on some fairy tale non-scientific religious book, and stuff that happened some 2000+ years ago.

even if you decide to trust the religious book, you should know that jewish exile is a G-d's punishment for sins and a gift - so that jewish people can be a light to other nations and build a better world for everyone

> DNA studies

Thanks for the correction.

> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD

Probably not worth reading your comment past this sentence.

You’re confusing something…

They are from Eastern Europe through the way of Germany and probably Italy (where they likely did quite a bit of mixing with the local before becoming mostly genetically isolated) prior to that.

leading jewish scholars in Israel have published research in support of Khazarian theory, for example Shlomo Sand: Invention of jewish people

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...

If I started claiming that the Welsh are refugees from Atlantis would that make me a leading Celtic scholar?

You argument is against zionism

The Khazar hypothesis is b.s. peddled by a white supremacist (Ernest Renan).

Genetic studies have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews.

False, there is a lot of wiggle room open for interpretation in your “DNa studies”.

I need to tell Israeli professor of history Sholomo Sand from Tel-Aviv University that he is a white supremacist antisemite for pushing his Khazarian theory and bringing all the receipts in his book

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...

Yes, genetics studies are open to interpretation, but not the interpretation that Ashkenazi are completely unrelated to other Jews. The evidence simply does not support that.

Sholomo Sand is not a geneticist nor was his hypothesis based on genetics. The fact that he's a Israeli history professor doesn't mean much here. The man didn't want to be a Jew, religiously or ethnically, and found the most complete way to accomplish it.

No, the claim of ashkenazi as being native to the Filistine while completely ignoring arabs who have vastly more native component of DNA by any measure.

Also jewish DNA is closest to northeastern anatolian component that is being suppressed as non politically convenient

Sand's book is coauthored by Eran Elhaik a geneticist and bioinformaticion.

Eran's analysis backed up Sand's theory of jewish nation based on DNA

>The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi.

That's simply untrue.

https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic...

Genealogical research shows the strongest link between the ancient Canaanites and the current middle east population is with the Palestinians and Lebanese. There are some genetic links between Palestinians and the ancient Israelites with this theory that many converted to Islam after the invasion.

However, you are correct in that many historians describe the population was added to, and never replaced. Supporting the DNA links.

From this I would conclude that the Palestinians are indigenous through the pre-colonial link. Most Jews in Israel are not indigenous but they share cultural links and lets not forget the wars they won in 1948 and 1967.

What is bizarre, is the ban on genetic testing for Palestinians and this pseudo-history in Israel that Palestinians never existed. Something distorted is being taught in Israel at many levels.

You’re conflating two theories: one widespread, and one fringe. The theory that the Ashkenazi population experienced a bottleneck is widely accepted; claiming that Ashkenazim are actually a remnant of the Khazar Khanganate[1] is both fringe and typically associated with antisemitic conspiracies.

(Note that I say antisemitic, and not in a manner that involves conflation with Zionism: going against the overwhelming majority of generic evidence to make a claim about a Jewish ethnic group that doesn’t even majority reside in Israel reeks of a blood-and-boden anger against Jews because of who they are.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi...

Fair enough. I didn't realize that the Khazar hypothesis was fringe. I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.

What is still fair to say is that many Jews in Israel do not actually have a continued occupation of that land going back thousands of years as was claimed by the person I was originally responding to.

4% in 1872 is a very low number. Absent the mass immigration that diluted the local population and a Nakba that expulsed many, that 4% population there in 1872 would still be about 4% of the population today give or take a few percentage points assuming the fertility rate of that 4% and the 96% percent that were not Jewish were comparable.

Many of the Jews that are in Israel today are of European descent (i.e. no thousands of years of continued occupation of Palestine) and many of the Jews that are in Israel today that are of Arabic descent are there due to Zionist terrorism from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah prior to 1948 and the mass migration from around the Arab-Israeli war. For example, Avi Shlaim from Oxford University has given numerous interviews on the terrorism committed by Zionists in Iraq to coerce the Middle Eastern Jewish populations to concentrate in Palestine as part of the Zionist project.

What is indisputable is that the claim of a continued presence of Israel/Palestine by Jews going back thousands of years really only applies to a very small percent of Jews in Israel. The reality is that that number is most certainly dwarfed by the quantity of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that can claim to have "lived there for thousands and thousands of years" per the person I was replying to.

> I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.

Where?

I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop. Israeli Jews shouldn't use them to justify continuing to displace Palestinian Arabs, and Palestinian Arabs shouldn't use them to justify displacing the millions of Jews who live there now.

To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups, with both Southern European (Roman period) and Northern European (medieval onwards) admixtures. Some people use this to make irredentist arguments, which leads to ridiculous (and antisemitic) responses like the Khazar hypothesis. But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.

> Where?

Can't think of any particular sources off the top of my head. It shows up from time to time in different places.

> I think blood-and-boden arguments for territory are bad, full stop.

I generally agree. I generally argue for reciprocity and even handedness. If someone else claims a certain argument as legitimate, then it's fair to use that same argument for counterclaims. In this case, the person I was replying to was making the "blood-and-boden argument", which means it is fair to apply that same argument to the counterclaim for those against whom they feel entitled to the same territory.

Me? I have no dog in this fight as my ancestry is so far removed that I can't claim it. My take is that if you go back in your ancestry and you can't point to a single named ancestor in your family tree (unbroken. you have to know everyone between you and that person), then you really can't claim connection to a place as you can't physically place a specific ancestor in a specific community (town, city, village), much less a controlling interest or other form of ownership. I've researched my family tree back to about the 1500s. That's about as far back as 99% of people can claim because written records largely dry up in the 1500s, with the exception of some folks with ties to nobility.

In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?

> To the best of my knowledge, the overwhelming scientific consensus considers Ashkenazi Jews descendants of Levantine ethnic groups.

A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry. Pretty much all Europeans have paternal and maternal haploproups whose origin is in the Middle East. In fact, I would reckon that the only individuals in Europe today that don't claim ancestry to the Middle East would be folks whose ancestors migrated directly from Africa to Europe. Almost everyone else from Europe is going to be able to claim the Middle East. https://vimeo.com/50531435

> But the solution is to observe that irredentism is wrong full stop, not to attempt the erasure of Ashkenazi ethnic identity.

Makes sense. I'm going to incorporate that into my understanding here. Thanks for the corrections.

As a followup, I just did some googling and it looks like Ashkenazi Canaanite ancestry likely originated around 1000 BC.

According to Wikipedia, it looks like the Northern Kingdom of Israel was established around 900 BC and the Kingdom of Judah existed around 850 BC.

Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).

That all said, I'm still with you that blood-and-boden arguments are bad, but if folks are going to make that claim it's still worth asking questions about whether that claim is any stronger than the blood-and-boden arguments presented by others.

> In your opinion, what is a good argument for territory?

If I had one, I would be a moderately successful philosopher instead of a moderately successful software engineer :-)

I don't think there's a good "just" definition for control of territory: claims of original or ancestral ownership are hard to verify (and subject to this kind of hell-in-a-cell irredentism), while "working" definitions uniformly favor the most ruthless or powerful party.

Instead of arguing for rightful possession on lines of originality or power, I often think counterfactually: who would, all things being equal, be the ideal stewards of a piece of land? Under that framing the answer is almost always a secular, liberal democracy where national ties are more significant than ethnic or religious ones.

Very few of those exist, and the ones that do are strikingly imperfect.

> A question I have there is how far back to do you have to go to reach that ancestry.

It really depends on what you mean by "reach." As noted above, the Ashkenazim had a significant population bottleneck event, and are genetically distinguishable from other peoples living in Central and Northern Europe. Whether that makes them "closer" to Levantine ancestry or not depends on your perspective: you could argue that they admixed relatively little given their isolation from their original ethnic group, or you could argue that the admixture that occurred was proportionately significant.

> Correct me if I'm making a logical error here, but this would suggest that Ashkenazis likely originate from a voluntary diaspora and not a involuntary diaspora (like in 70 AD), if they share genetic ancestry to the region from around or just before the Kingdom of Israel and Judah were established (unless they were expelled by their own. i.e. the equivalent of different denominations and ideological schisms).

I don't know if it's a logical error or not, but it's an incomplete picture:

* The Jews that became Ashkenazim left the Levant in multiple waves, for multiple reasons (anthropologists will say things like "push and pull factors," which really just means "some were pushed out by hardships, and others were pulled away by opportunities, etc.").

* The likely ancestry of Ashkenazim dates back to ~900-1000BC, but this doesn't itself represent a date range for when they left the Levant. To make it intuitive: there's no distinction between someone living in the Levant in 300 BC with that ancestry and someone living outside the Levant with that same ancestry: they'd look the same in terms of the genetic record.

* Historical records aren't very detailed for the period, but a significant record of Jewish Levant-Europe migration comes from the decades following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Josephus (who is Jewish, but is writing as a Roman citizen) records around 100,000 enslaved on just one occasion among several[1]. These slaves were likely transported further into the empire for labor in both Greece and Italy, which in turn is a likely explanation for the Southern European genetic component within the Ashkenazim.

TL;DR: There's more than one factor that explains the flight of Jews from the Levant. However, our strongest historical record for large scale migration strongly suggests that the bulk of what became the Ashenazim arrived in Southern Europe in the first and second centuries, and then moved further into Central and Northern Europe during the Late Empire and Early Medieval periods. That migration was in turn primarily caused by "push" factors (mass enslavement and murder following the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt), followed by subsequent "pull" factors (subsequent normalization of Jewish status in the Roman empire, stable lives outside of a post-temple Levant, etc.).

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2850/2850-h/2850-h.htm#link6...

> In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.

Where's the issue ? I thought you Woke people wanted to see more diversity and empowerment of minority groups in the world

I think you're confusing me with other folks on HN. I value cohesive high trust societies so I'm personally in favor of assimilation and much more gradual changes to any culture.

I think a change from 96% to 67% in 76 years is a catastrophe for culture indigenous to a region, and it's not a surprise that the Nakba followed such a rapid change without assimilation. The rate should be one where outsiders coming into a society become part of that society instead of splintering the society.

In chemistry terms, it's the difference between a solution, emulsions, suspensions and mixtures. In my mind, the goal should be cultural "solutions". If the rate of change is such that you end up with enclaves that resist mixing, then that leads to decline of trust and civic engagement. You end up with a society that is highly political and fragmented and liable to balkanize and potentially engage in armed civil conflict.

Let me break this down in terms you can understand.

The DEIsraelis are doing a genocide.

Do you see the problem now?

I don't think this "claim to land" works in the modern age.

Countries were established and fought for in blood all thorough history, and the winners kept their land. End of story.

Unless we are talking about some remote village, every single country was funded on blood and violence, and after a certain point it just makes no sense to track it.

Fair enough. With that in mind, at what point does it no longer make sense to track it?

There must be some principled position where you can argue when it does and or does not make sense. In the case of this conflict, we're talking about a conflict where a few folks that directly experienced it are still alive and that many folks whose parents experienced it are still alive.

The Nakba is more recent than the Holocaust by a few years. Should it get the same treatment? Countries like Germany are still paying reparations.

In the US, we constantly have discussions about the institution of slavery in the US that ended in 1865. Jim Crow laws are more recent injustice however and only ended in 1865.

The Ukraine likewise had the Holodomor. There's actually a fascinating video of Abe Foxman of the ADL speaking with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, telling him that it would be unproductive to talk about "your genocide, our genocide", but at the end of the day that's what we have here and it only seems fair to give comparable treatment for comparable catastrophes.

Speaking of catastrophe, I've always found it somewhat ironic that the word Nakba and the word Shoah (the original vernacular used to describe the Holocaust before it was replaced in the late 60s) both have the same meaning. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe and Shoah is the Yiddish word for catastrophe.

I'm not saying where that line should or should not be, but it only seems fair that if we're going to draw a line that victims of different but comparable injustices should be given comparable treatment.

Minor correction, Shoah is Hebrew. See eg Yom HaShoah (literally: day of the catastrophe), Israel's Holocaust Memorial Day.

By that logic, the claim that the land is exclusively(!) Jewish because this used to be the territory of the Jewish state ~2000 years ago works even less though.

They are one and the same people. Only through the lens of ethnocentric histories is any distinction made.

That’s cool and all but the Israelis are in Israel already, there’s no turning back the clock on Zionism without the mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to.

Palestinians have a legitimate historical claim and so do Israelis. They’re exactly that, historical. If both sides can’t let those be history, it’s either eternal conflict or the elimination of one of them.

>mass expulsion of Jews who have no other home to go to.

What? They should just go back to Poland! /s

Ethnocentric racism is never good and it is, indeed, rampant in Israel, but it's hard to compare European colonialism to Zionism for a few reasons. The cultural and historical affinity of Jews, including Jews residing in Europe, was nothing like that of Europeans to the Americas, Africa, or East Asia. For well over a millennium Jews were praying for a return to Zion three times a day, even after the collapse of the Roman Empire and its later conquest (from the Byzantine Empire) by the Arab Islamic Empire, there have been many (small) migrations of Jews to the area [1], there has been an uninterrupted (small) presence of Jews there, and Jews in Europe were considered "racially" oriental "semites". Unlike European-style settler- or exploitation colonialism, there wasn't any metropole to Zionism, in the name of which colonisation was taking place. Finally, the bigger migration by modern Zionism in the time of the Ottoman Empire (that is when this conflict started, not under the Brits, who came into the picture -- after Tel Aviv was a city), came as a result of difficulties the Jews experienced in Europe and the Russian Empire, and certainly not on behalf of those powers.

That's not to say that Israel (like all countries in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand) isn't a form of settler colonialism [1], sometimes openly and consciously so, but it is different from European colonialism (and in some respects it can be different for the worse, at least compared to some specific European colonies).

So yes, some things are simple, but your comparisons to things that were quite different actually shows how other things are not so simple. But it is precisely because history is often complex and almost never easily generalisable that I hate using it either as moral justification or condemnation of present events. I don't think that the fact both Arabs and Jews came to the Levant through migration and conquest (even according to both culture's own national mythology) has any bearing on present moral responsibility. In the end, as you say, ethnocentric nationalism is just wrong.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_and_Judais...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism

That is wrong. There were conflicts before, the Hebron massacre (1929) for example. There was an Arab nationalism and the Mufti of Jerusalem met with Hitler and planned a middle-eastern Holocaust.

Also, Jews were expelled from surrounding nations when Israel was founded, even more than Palestinians were driven from what now is Israel. There never was any compensation or talk about their right to return and these are not Jews with European ancestry.

Frankly, I think not a single statement of yours is true.

What a pile of nonsense...

Whose colony is Israel? Do you even understand what this word means?

You are just parroting some propaganda lines that you don't understand. The propaganda lines that were specifically constructed to appeal to emotions (by referencing European colonialism that started with exploring Africa and India with subsequent conquest, which did result in many bad things, but has nothing to do with what happened in Israel beyond some superficial similarity).

Colonialism was bad because the colonial powers took freedoms away from the local population, siphoned their wealth to the country-colonizer while devastating the colony's inhabitants. Israel did nothing of sorts. It never wanted to have anything to do with the local population. In fact, one of the major sources of conflict was that Jewish population that came to replace the Turks who owned the land worked by the locals didn't want the locals to work that land anymore. And the landless peasants thus became unemployed / unemployable.

So, Arabs living in Israel used to be servants to the Turks, but once Jews replaced the Turks, and "freed" the Arabs, the later discovered themselves to be useless and without means of sustaining themselves. Not a good spot to be in, but hey, at least now they were "free" (I do use this ironically, I don't think they wanted that kind of freedom). Arabs, of course, thought about former Turkish land as their own (because they used to work it), but it's no more theirs than it is Jewish or whoever else inhabited that area historically.

Bottom line, claiming land based on some historical past that was cancelled by more recent historical events is a road to nowhere. And if you try to follow it, Jews probably have a better claim to that territory than Arabs, who invaded and occupied that territory later.

But, more importantly, today, the conflict isn't even about the land at all. All major players would be willing to make territorial concessions, if the core of the problem was addressed. And people are at the core of the problem, not the land. Something needs to be done with the Arabs inhabiting the occupied territories: they need to get some kind of a political status with an eye to permanency. Either completely abandon the program of building an independent state and join some other country, or the opposite. But neither seems likely. And so the conflict will go on for as long as this issue isn't solved.

True, but Israel could be seen as just the latest Crusade.

It's 'not complicated' if one is lazy. The comment is missing a lot of mitigating pieces of information:

- the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent

- the lack of options for Jews facing persecution, pograms and a holocaust given immigration policies of nations around the world

- the many Jews in Israel formerly from middle-eastern nations

- the complication to the birth-right citizenship argument that all Jews have Israeli ancestry (albeit very distant, in many cases)

- the UN Partition Plan for Palestine

The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right. It's not the Palestinians' fault that their land was least bad refuge for Jews, but it probably was.

>The problem with the conflict is that both sides are right.

So true on a theoretical basis, and at the same time both sides are wrong for fighting on that same basis.

Leaving the only sensible participants those who are committed to complete non-violence for a few generations, no-one else could possibly have beneficial actionable input without making things worse.

>the empires that governed the land before '48 and how that affects consent

You have my upvote but I consider this a fairly weak argument from all sides.

After WWII there were only three kinds of people remaining on my home planet:

1. Those that won WWII.

2. Those that lost WWII.

3. Those that were saved by the ones that won WWII.

Everyone else was killed.

Sure, it's a fresh start, but pretty gloomy when you think about it.

The winners rightly would be expected to take the lead from that point on, drawing lines of co-operation highly focused on preventing any more worldwide conflict in any predictable way. Definitely for the foreseeable future at the time, and it has proven to work more effectively than any other peace initiative in human history. Relative to the overall threat.

Anyone who was saved by the winners of WWII and was not completely delighted with the outcome has certainly never had legitimate grounds for complaint considering the alternative. How quickly some people can forget.

Then again religious hatred and/or superstition can misguide some otherwise intelligent people from just about anywhere, and this is nothing new since cave men were all there was.

Of course it's been quite a while since prehistoric times, so too late now, nothing that happened before WWII will ever be a reason for further conflict ever. They'd have to be a complete moron.

Looks like the world had settled into its most peaceful time by about 1950.

Realistically the only major war that remained was a cold one after that, and regardless of whether you were unappreciatively saved by the winners of WWII, or happened to be disgruntled losers, the only way to change it was to start WWIII. At one time everybody knew that.

Which "everyone" also knew would take one hell of a suicidal maniac, but if it happened it would probably be dealt with along the lines of how Kamikaze tactics were proven to be overcome when the scale reached world-threatening proportions.

It was already the 20th century with worldwide communication and everything, and the century was only halfway along. Naturally with such a worldwide war brought to conclusion without complete destruction everywhere, previous conflict up until that time had been made as equally prehistoric as in 19,500 BC ever since.

How could people forget so easily? Who would possibly be suicidal enough to let that kind of bloodthirsty hatred rule again?

I think my wording was a bit vague there. By 'two empires', I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948 (ie: the Ottoman, and then the British).

When zionism came about, Palestinian arabs were not in power and could not determine policy.

Zionist jews spend years wrangling (sometimes violently) promises and concessions from the British, and finally from the UN, who, at the time, seemed like the legitimate bodies to grant them.

In retrospect, 'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?' but that's with the benefit of hindsight.

Not that either side is evil... it's a complicated conflict.

>I meant the two who governed Palestine prior to 1948

That's the kind of thing I think people should be able to disregard altogether.

Not just because it's ancient history of the Middle East, but the whole world went through so much.

After all that, it was not supposed to matter any more what happened before.

Almost all the lucky survivors could move forward and there was maximum worldwide consensus that non-violence was the way to go.

Even some of the absolute losers of the war moved forward non-violently to a better outcome than any other way.

The Hatfields & McCoys were never going to stop feuding either, until they declared multi-generational peace, that's the amount of time it takes for co-existence to eventually give way to constructive interaction, rather than destructive interaction.

>'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?'

Exactly what I mean, doesn't matter what anybody anywhere did before the war.

It was only after the war when the British came out on the winning side, that made them an arbiter of these kind of things. If the Germans would have won it surely would have been much worse, with an entire political party focused primarily on spreading hatred and oppression as a growth tactic.

No traditional business or inherent right to govern was responsible for British decisions that were capable of shaping destiny.

The Crown just happened to already be there actually keeping the peace before the war, until the British empire was threatened across the entire world, and peace completely lost on the planet. I like to keep in mind that you could have spent the war years in isolated communities on a number of continents and had no knowledge whatsoever that a war had even taken place. You were still saved by the ones that won WWII, there's no getting around it.

Even though the British had gotten there in the first place because of their own misguided war-like efforts of conquest, that didn't give them legitimate rights to anything.

Their empire was actively reversing all kinds of war-like tendencies like never before, along with every other person no matter what their religion or culture, that a peaceful world was suitable for. And withdrawing from an occupation that was quite painful itself.

You know, reversing like the Hatfields & McCoys. Remember if a hateful violent culture develops, and generations go by without resolution it never really matters any more what they are fighting for. Nope. Never. Really. Matters. And it can get a lot worse when the population grows with each generation because pretty soon there are not enough mountains for everybody.

Things were pretty simple with only 3 kinds of people for a while, but since prehistoric times there's often been some violence-prone contingent that would not be compatible with world peace without major change in attitude & behavior.

The world-wide window of opportunity for complete non-violence that opened after the war will never close until WWIII.

It's what you do with it that matters until then.

For those few that failed to quit shooting you could say that it's like the war never ended for them so they're stuck in a historical impasse. But the day the war ended it pushed any continuing conflicts right into the "prehistoric" category along with all the ancient stuff that would best be non-glorified if not completely forgotten because that's what's proven to work so well.

Once it was proven that almost the entire world could become deathly hateful of their adversaries, then stop shooting and rapidly turn it around for unprecedented co-operation, then anybody can do it, and those who failed to heed the example have only worsened their own outcomes.

Just like my hillbilly ancestors did for so many generations. Nobody who actually had academic schools could have taught the lessons of WWII until it was over anyway. Even those with academic traditions going back millennia, if they didn't stop teaching anything that could lead to violence after that, then they have failed worse than the most illiterate hillbilly. Lots of those mountain dwellers didn't even get schools until the 20th century.

The feuding parties were as hateful and uneducated as people can get. You don't want to be like them any more, you want to learn how not to be like them so you don't get stuck in permanent hate. If that means forgetting the past, maybe that's the only way to learn sometimes. To some extent it could have been easier to declare peace without very much tradition of formal indoctrination.

The most effective teaching could turn out to be teaching how to forget.

The first thing that always needs to be done is to stop shooting, who knew?

>it's a complicated conflict.

It stays complicated, even after the shooting stops.

But even a hillbilly can do it.

That deserves a proper response, but I find its length too intimidating to come up with a suitable one.

If we view the conflict from such a high level, I also have a take. My take is basically 'utilitarian': nobody anywhere in the world has a right to live anywhere outside of what other people accept (or other people tolerate, at least).

From my point of view, it's a waste of time to argue over who has a 'right' to the land based on birth-right, history, religion, etc; both sides make sound arguments to those ends.

What matters, in my view, is only what arrangement will placate all the parties involved (jews, muslims, and other).

  'what business did the Ottomans or British have to allow foreign zionists to take over Palestine?'

Ouch: it's too late to correct, but the word 'turks' should be substituted for 'ottomans'. As a noun, 'ottoman' means only 'foot stool'

It's a 120 year old feud, quite a lot, and even with a one sided extremist view such as your own I would at least hope anti semitism, pogroms, the holocaust and the right for self determination would make you see there's at least a bit of complexity here.

Also - even if this take was true , what's your end game - all states based on past colonialism need to be abolished ? Or is that the right solution only for Israel. E.g if Mexico starts bombing the U.S to get back Mexico, parts of Texas etc, we should all support them right?

"The current conflict isn't some thousand year old feud"

Well, actually, it is.

There were 1200 years of war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide and apartheid up until the caliphate was defeated and broken up in 1920/1924. For 1200 years, non-muslims lived under apartheid (Dhimmi). Up until that point, Islamic supremacism was as firmly established as white supremacism was in America.

I suppose if America (which itself was built on war, conquest, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid) was defeated in WWI, broken up into various nations, and some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ? After all, at that time, Native Americans accounted for only .25% of the population. Since there were so few of them it would make no sense for them to have their own nation.

Wars have consequences. Many ethnic groups lost their lands due to the expansion of the caliphate over 1200 years. The caliphate was then defeated, and things have changed.

"... ethno-centric racism are never good".

While in no way saying that this supports the idea that "ethno-centric racism" is good, you should read the constitutions of the 22 Arab countries in the Arab League. They have, as their basic principals that they are Arab/Muslim countries, and have Islam/Sharia as their law. So, are all of these countries also illegitimate ? Or, just Israel ? Or maybe America should change its constitution to declare that America is a white European country based on Christian law ?

> some land was made available to the Native Americans to build their own sovereign nation, you would be against that ?

You know that would have been great. But who are the native Americans in your example? Majority of Zionists that established Israel and their groups arrived by ships from Europe. Wouldn't that more resemble England and Spain colonization expeditions in your example? Weird.. like the story almost matches exactly to the how colonies were established

Such an ironic example to give voluntarily.

Let's take a look at the background of Israel's founding fathers and where did they came from:

- David Ben-Gurion - Poland

- Aharon Zisling - Belarus

- David Remez - Russia

- Pinchas Rosen - Germany

- Moshe Sharett - Ukraine

- Haim-Moshe Shapira - Belarus

- Yehuda Leib Maimon - Moldova

- Mordechai Bentov - Russia

- ...

Case in point, most weren't natives who lived there under "apartheid" but actually left Europe looking for a new land, backed by... England and the US (Sorry Spain, not this time).

If you're struggling to use the real events in history and have to resort to a "hypothesis", it's a sign something is off and you're twisting history a bit too much. At least make sure it's not ironic, next time.

There is nothing made up about 1200 years of oppression by an empire that was built on conquest, numerous forms of slavers, ethnic cleaning, and genocide.

This is not something that happened thousands of years ago, it ended 100 years ago, and is directly relevant to what is going on today.

The fact that some of the founders of Israel were the descendants of those who fled their native lands due to oppression does not change anything, any more than Palestinians who are born in different countries would no longer have ties to their homeland in the Middle East.

And yes, I firmly believe that the Palestinians have a right to a country of their own, but not at the cost of eliminating Israel and imposing sharia law

> The fact that some of the founders of Israel were the descendants of those who fled their native lands

Only some founders were foreigners? Do you want the full list? Literally none, 0%, were "native", born in the region or anywhere near it, here's the full list of people who signed it and where they came from:

- David Ben-Gurion (Poland)

- Daniel Auster (Ukraine)

- Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (Ukraine)

- Mordechai Bentov (Poland)

- Eliyahu Berligne (Belarus)

- Fritz Bernstein (Germany)

- Rachel Cohen-Kagan (Ukraine)

- Eliyahu Dobkin (Belarus)

- Yehuda Leib Fishman (Moldova)

- Wolf Gold (Poland)

- Meir Grabovsky (Moldova)

- Avraham Granovsky (Moldova)

- Yitzhak Gruenbaum (Poland)

- Kalman Kahana (Poland)

- Eliezer Kaplan (Belarus)

- Avraham Katznelson (Belarus)

- Saadia Kobashi (Yemen)

- Moshe Kolodny (Belarus)

- Yitzhak-Meir Levin (Poland)

- Meir David Loewenstein (Denmark)

- Zvi Luria (Poland)

- Golda Meyerson (Ukraine)

- Nahum Nir (Poland)

- David-Zvi Pinkas (Hungary)

- Felix Rosenblueth (aka Pinchas Rosen) (Germany)

- David Remez (Belarus)

- Berl Repetur (Ukraine)

- Zvi Segal (Poland)

- Mordechai Shatner (Ukraine)

- Ben-Zion Sternberg (Ukraine)

- Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit (Morocco)

- Haim-Moshe Shapira (Belarus)

- Moshe Shertok (Ukraine)

- Herzl Vardi (Lithuania)

- Meir Vilner (Lithuania)

- Zerach Warhaftig (Belarus)

- Aharon Zisling (Belarus)

37 signatories, and not a single one were from that land or had any clear links to it whatsoever. You act like it was to protect the locals but not a single one was present? How much clearer do you want to it to be? It was a land grab from the very beginning

If you were a European Jew in the late 1940s after the fall of the Nazis, you were still faced with the prospect of living under the local governance of Nazi collaborators, continued pogroms [0] and antisemitism, and potentially Joseph Stalin's USSR. It's not like everything immediately went back to normal, either in real terms or psychological ones. Even if you survived your friends, family and neighbors are GONE.

It's unsurprising that many wouldn't want to reintegrate with that society after what they experienced, even if they managed to avoid the camps (and especially if they didn't).

It is ridiculous to just throw them into the same category with the English and Spanish colonists searching for riches in the New World.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom

Migrating to Palestine and living in that land is not an issue in itself. I wish them prosperity much like everyone else. The problem is the crimes that were committed by the Zionist militias such as Irgun who were viewed as terrorists orgs even under UK mandate, in additions to the settlements and establishing an apartheid state later:

1. Kicking millions of Palestinians out of their homes and villages and building illegal settlements

2. Massacres committed with no accountability (soldiers posing and documenting it, not fog of war)

Both of these practices are STILL ONGOING and have been for almost a century.

Then regular civilians come from all over the world to live in those illegal settlements and justify it or claim they have nothing to do with the atrocities when they're a major support for it and why the suffering continues.

Many more problems were results of Israel being built on ethno-religious foundations:

3. Giving refuge to pedophiles (wanted by US and INTERPOL) because they're Jewish? WTF? [1]

4. The recent rape and sexual harassment of prisoners [2]. Israeli protestors went to the streets and even rioted to defend the soldiers accused of it and were proud of their actions. Tell me how should I feel when I see them doing that?

5. The attack on World Central Kitchen convoy? [3] Killing 7 aid workers in multiple clearly marked vehicles on a coordinated mission with the IDF. What came of it? They just laid off a couple of people like the commander Nochi Mandel who oversaw the attack. The same commander signed an open letter to block humanitarian aid. So what is the punishment for killing 7 innocent aid workers? You move to the private sector it seems with higher pay grade.

Fuck me! Any group that commit such crimes and act proud with no shame are lunatics and should be held accountable but this doesn't seem to happen in Israel. Even the citizens seem to take pride in it. [4]

My problem isn't with specific group. I'm referring to Israel as a state. I don't care about the religion of its people or what land they live on as long it's lawful and they're no committing war crimes. I'd feel the same about crimes in Ukraine, Afghanistan, or Africa.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-jewish-american-pedophiles-...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2024/08/09/israel-prison-sde-teiman...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68727828

[4] https://truthout.org/articles/israeli-militants-riot-over-in...

Doesn't the Torah count for something? It works slower than fiber optics but is massively parallel.

No, that's mythology. Actual history is The Balfour Declaration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfour_Declaration

And Nakba: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba

The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to.

> The land claims of the territory both come from the Torah, in the end. Its just that the Jews and Muslims disagree on who God was referring to.

What? Palestinians don't claim the land based on a promise by God. They claim it because they hold the legal documents going back for centuries. Even those expelled in 1948, still have the fucking keys covered with their grandparents blood after the Nakba ethnic cleansing.

You know what? let's forget about legal documents, about who is native to the land by DNA, since it's you know "complicated", right?

1. Zionists today (not a story in the past) continue to put outposts in Palestinians farms to snatch more and more land.

2. Israeli troops and settlers killed 171 Palestinian children in the west bank (an area smaller than Delaware) in 2024 alone [1].

3. They continue building illegal settlements on Palestinians land that's illegal even by US admission.

4. Israel is taking advantage of the power vacuum in Syria and advancing deeper inside Syria borders while taking more and more cities. It's literally provoking and asking for another war where they will claim they were victims.

5. The blood of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza is still fresh [2] and more crimes in the past with no one held accountable, soldiers are literally posing and filming their war crimes with no accountability. Many humanitarian orgs believe the number of those killed is actually undercounted as many are still undocumented.

They celebrates killing babies (who they claim will be terrorists of course) so soldiers are praised and incentivized to annex entire blood line like savages.

Here's a challenge for you: Emit labels like "Palestinians" and "Israelis" and ask someone with no prejudice, hearing it for the first time, "who is in the wrong?" If you are honest and not manipulative you'll get your answer.

But nah let's stick to the theory that the entire world is against us and respond to any other theory that it's "complicated" while continue committing war crimes openly admitted by our soldiers ever since Israel was established.[3]

Do you agree that everyone who was involved in war crimes to be held responsible, no matter what ethnicity, religion, or passport they hold? That is the core of the problem, Israeli have done more terrible things than the side they claim as terrorists.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/19/west-bank-chil...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...

[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/

Hamas makes the claim from God; perhaps not the PA but they're barely a government anyway.

Before the Balfour Declaration, the British promised the region to the Arabs if they helped fight against the Ottoman Empire via the McMahon–Hussein correspondence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMahon%E2%80%93Hussein_corres...

Basically, the region was double promised to both sides during WWI, Arabs in the region being promised it first. This crucial detail is somehow often left out of any discussion regarding the Balfour Declaration even though it preceded it.

You truly fail to realize that there were people living there, and it wasn't an empty plot of land that could get promised by the British to one group or the other?

Even ignoring well-known Wikipedia bias in this issue, it is rarely a good source for "actual history"

I think the Israeli and Palestinian authorities would let atheists decide their problems as long as they agree with what they want, baring that, your argument probably isn't going to land with any of them on its merits, especially if it calls their religions "mythology."

TIL that Balfour déclaration created the jewish people, and maintained it through history

I think there's some more you can learn today. The Jewish people have been around well before Christ or Muhammad - some where around 1000 BCE not since the Balfour declaration. That doesn't mean anything regarding this comment thread but that you should know the difference between Jewish people and Israel the state.

> Doesn't the Torah count for something?

No, absolutely not.

If I try to use ancient religions to justify violently forcing a claim to your house and land, then you're entirely within your right to defend yourself by any means necessary. That's not a thing any more. This might help you understand: [0]

And, many Jewish people decry Zionism as a perversion.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3qp21N4qI

This is a lot of buzzwords but no content.

The background behind the current conflict goes something like this:

Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down. The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British. The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it. The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them. They lose. The Jews gain more territory. The Arab parts of Palestine get annexed into Jordan and Egypt.

Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less.

Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area. Even during the Ottoman Era. In fact, Zionism started during the Ottoman Era. Also relatively few people lived in Palestine, less than a million total in 1922. And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs (plenty of Jews lived all over the middle east).

You completely left out the Nakba. Which you would have to to even attempt to make this point.

> The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them.

I assume you're talking about the "Arab Invasion" of 1948? So, that would be after the Nakba started. In fact, Deir Yassin occured only a month before Israel was founded.

You're very obviously leaving out facts not in an attempt to be succinct but to obscure the actual history.

The Nakba is not without prior history either.

It's simply the most complex sociopolitical issue on Earth today, if not ever in human history, it can't be "summed up" in some hot take.

>Muslims, Christians and Jews all lived in Palestine during the Ottoman era. Jews discovered Europe was pretty hostile, Zionism was born. Many move to Palestine, buy land and settle down.

It's wrong to reduce Zionism as solely a reaction to european hostility, such narrative simplifies the origins of Zionism by framing it purely as a reaction to European anti-Semitism, ignoring other cultural, religious, and political factors. Zionism also emerged from a broader context of national self-determination movements in Europe. Those European Zionists were also quite racist and did describe the native population of Palestine with the hebrew N-word "kushim" which had to be ethnically cleansed:

"Neither Zangwill nor Weizmann intended these demographic assessments in a literal fashion. They did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway. In this connection, a comment by Weizmann to Arthur Ruppin, the head of the colonization department of the Jewish Agency, is particularly revealing. When asked by Ruppin about the Palestinian Arabs, Weizmann replied: "The British told us that there are there some hundred thousands negroes [Kushim] and for those there is no value.” quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.

>The Ottomans lose WWI, lose Palestine to the British.

Palestine was occupied by the British, which even the Zionists themselves classified as such. That's why Zionists also bombed the King-David Hotel full of British officers whom they regarded as occupiers of Palestine: https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

>The British Empire started fracturing, they realised they couldn't hold it together, they decide they'll leave Palestine and create a plan to partition it.

That's is just historic revisionism, the British left due to "the sophistication of Zionist terrorists" -https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...

> The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends. The Arabs invite all the nations around them to attack the Jews with them.

That is brazen zionist propaganda that reframes the zionist colonial project as some poor damsel in distress that was just innocently trying to take over Palestine when the natives just tried to attack the poor jews for no reason. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy56Q1a0Flc]

David Ben-Gurion has also recorded in his writings that the partition was just a starting point and that they would ultimately expand anyway. Most explicitly, he states: "My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning." -https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2013/04/06/the-ben-gurio...

>Then, when all the Arab states fought Israel again, Jordan loses the west bank, Egypt loses Gaza and all of Sinai (!!). Israel gave Sinai back for peace, eventually both Egypt and Jordan renounced their claim on Gaza and the West Bank. And that's how we ended up here, more or less.

Again a reductive and zionist summary that is ahistoric and misleading. A more detailed and substantiated account is provided here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dy56Q1a0Flc

>Now, as for the colonialism part, Jews have always lived in the area.

After the initial Crusader conquest, many Jews who survived the massacres either fled or were expelled. In 1187, Saladin, the Muslim leader of the Ayyubid dynasty, recaptured Jerusalem. He allowed Jews and Muslims to return to the city. This marked a significant restoration of the Jewish community in Jerusalem and other parts of the Holy Land. Either way, your narrative tries to deny that Zionism is a colonial project but that attempt is in vain, since there is simply too much evidence for that. Zionists also made no secret that it was a colonial project until colonialism became a bad word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Jewish_Colonization_...

> And the Jews who did move to Israel after it's establishment, largely moved there as a result of persecution by Arabs

Another blatant attempt at rewriting of history that omits crucial parts to paint a false narrative. While there was a portion of hostility towards jews as a reaction to the crimes committed by jews in Palestine the main driver were a multitude of reasons such as:

Organized efforts, such as Aliyah Bet, focused on helping Jews immigrate to Israel, often in defiance of British immigration restrictions during the Mandate period.

Zionist organizations conducted educational campaigns to foster a sense of identity and urgency about moving to Israel, emphasizing the need for a national homeland.

In countries like Iraq and Yemen, Zionist emissaries used social and economic pressures to encourage Jews to leave for Israel. This included highlighting the dangers of staying in increasingly hostile environments and emphasizing the opportunities in Israel.

In Iraq, a series of false-flag bombings targeted Jewish sites. Researchers and historians have proven that these attacks were false flag operations carried out by Zionist agents to create a sense of urgency and fear, prompting Jews to emigrate.

The infamous "Lavon Affair" in 1954 involved a failed Israeli covert operation intending to destabilize Egypt by planting bombs in Egyptian, American, and British-owned targets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair

Operations like "Magic Carpet" (Yemen) and "Ezra and Nehemiah" (Iraq) were launched to bring Jewish communities to Israel. These operations were often portrayed as rescue missions from adverse conditions while the real reason was that they were needed to help with the colonization of Palestine.

>persecution by Arabs

Finally, the zionist attempt to rewrite history regarding the relationship of Muslims with Jews is also dishonest and deceptive. Anyone with basic education in history will see through it:

"David Wasserstein (Vanderbilt University),”How Islam Saved the Jews”

By the early seventh century Judaism was in crisis. In the Mediterranean basin it was battered by legal, social, and religious pressure, weak in numbers and culturally almost non-existent. It was also largely cut off from the Jewry of the Persian empire, in Babylon, present-day Iraq. The future seemed clear: extinction in the west, decline to obscurity in the east. Salvation came from Arabia. Islam conquered the entire Persian empire and most of the Mediterranean world. Uniting virtually all the world’s Jews in a single state, it gave them legal and religious respectability, economic and social freedoms, and linguistic and cultural conditions that made possible a major renaissance of Judaism and the Jews. The significance of Islam for Jewry has been interpreted very variously since the middle ages and is a source of controversy to this day."

https://middleeast.stanford.edu/events/david-wasserstein-how...

The fact Jews emigrated to the Muslim world is an indictment of the Christian one, not praiseworthy for them. If we're killed every Tuesday in Europe but every other Tuesday in the Islamic world and move there it does not mean they were good to us.

Yeah those bad Muslims the "only" thing they ever did was save jewry from extinction and help them flourish and in return we rewarded them with colonization and genocide /s

"First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity...

Had Islam not come along, the conflict with Persia would have continued. The separation between western Judaism, that of Christendom, and Babylonian Judaism, that of Mesopotamia, would have intensified. Jewry in the west would have declined to disappearance in many areas. And Jewry in the east would have become just another oriental cult.

But this was all prevented by the rise of Islam. The Islamic conquests of the seventh century changed the world, and did so with dramatic, wide-ranging and permanent effect for the Jews." - https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/so-what-did-the-muslims-do-f...

> The Jews abide by the plan, declare Israel when the British mandate ends.

There is a lot to say about this part, but just one point: the plan included the establishment of a Palestinian state which Israel has blocked since its inception. So no, they did not abide by the plan. The plan has never been implemented.

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