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Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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

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