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> Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation.

According to the New York Times, Netanhayu was propping up Hamas in the weeks and months before the current conflict ( https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q... ). This has been happening since the beginning of Hamas.

The government over there has been supporting Hamas since the beginning, because they don't want to deal with Fatah going to the UN. Everything recently is the result of that. So don't come around talking about Hamas. Especially since Netanyahu and his US counterparts are trying to sideline Fatah, and are persecuting secular Palestinians like Samidoun and the PFLP more than Hamas. The US, Canada, Germany etc. crack down on the seculat, left-leaning Samidoun so that only Hamas is left standing in Gaza.

All that doesn't make them any less terrorist.

I think it's wise to separate the future of both Israel and Palestine from their present. In 100 years there will be surviving Israelis and surviving Palestinians and they'll have a view of the present generation.

"The antisemite does not accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence."

Although I laud your unassailable argument highlighting yet another instance of double standards against Jews, ultimately there is little upside in engaging with the "no, no, technically there is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism" crowd. I am sad that Hacker News is rife with this kind of bigotry, but I don't see the tide of this battle turning anytime soon.

In case, dear reader, you are one of the intellectually curious ones who holds the opposing viewpoint, ask yourself why you demand that only the Jews lack the right to self determination?

I'll bite.

Most demands for self-determination were for self-rule on land already inhabited by the group in question.

Zionism was unique in that it demanded self-determination on land inhabited almost 100% by a different group of people.

Given that the Jews were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Romans, by definition, any Jewish self-determination would need to take place in a land that is at least partially[0] already inhabited. You now have two choices:

1. Deny Jews the right to self-determination altogether, continuing the dispossession of an actively persecuted people, indeed, the same one that was about to face the Holocaust in Europe, thereby punishing them for their own historical victimization, or

2. Acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, even if it takes root in their historical homeland and entails negotiating with and sharing the land with other peoples, thereby accepting that historical justice often requires grappling with imperfect realities, and that two national claims can coexist without one invalidating the other.

Or are you arguing that self-determination only applies to groups of people who haven't been exiled from their homeland (i.e. the people that need self determination the least)?

[0] Before Zionism, the population of Mandatory Palestine was 98% smaller than the same region today. Even the Arab population has increased 26-fold. So, yes, technically it was inhabited, but dramatically less developed. And even then, Jerusalem was 60% Jewish.

> Given that the Jews were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Romans

2000 years ago.

You're saying that events from millennia in the past mean that the Palestinians should have had to cede the land they lived on to a group of outsiders from Europe.

People can make of that what they may (I think it's ridiculous), but you at least have to admit that it completely invalidates your argument that Zionism is just like any other demand for self-determination. We're talking about a demand for other people's land, based on appeals to events from thousands of years ago.

You're changing the topic. Nobody is talking about ceding land, we're talking about re-establishing a nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. And besides, no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway, since all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers.

So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination? Or are you saying that because they were expelled from their homeland so long ago, they forfeited the legitimate claim to self determination?

> Nobody is talking about ceding land, we're talking about re-establishing a nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people

You're saying the same thing with different words. In order to "re-establish" that nation, they had to take over control of Palestine, against the will of the people who actually lived there.

> no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway

That's not true at all. The entire point of Zionism was to take over political control of Palestine and found a Jewish state there. The mainstream Zionist movement wanted all of Palestine, and the radical right wing of Zionism (the "Revisionists," who eventually became Likud, Netanyahu's party) even wanted what is now Jordan.

> all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers

That's formally correct before 1947, but the goal was to take over all of Palestine. The leadership of the Jewish Agency (the Zionist quasi-government in British-run Palestine until early 1948) knew that ultimately, it would come down to war with the Arabs, and they prepared for it. They were also very interested in forced "population transfer" (which today would be called "ethnic cleansing"), which they hoped the major powers would agree to.

Even the land purchases were extremely predatory. Imagine the worst aspects of gentrification, but at the scale of a country and enacted for explicitly racist reasons. The Zionists bought up land from landlords who didn't even live in Palestine, and then forcibly removed the Palestinian farmers who lived on the land.

Even so, they never purchased more than about 6% of Palestine, before they forcibly took most of the rest in 1947-48.

> So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination?

First, the obvious question, as I've said, is "where?" Is easy and relatively harmless to say in the abstract that "this group of people is a nation and deserves self-determination." But when you start laying claims to other people's lands, that becomes a problem.

I don't really want to get into who is "a people," but I'll just point out that what you're saying implies that American Jews are just Israelis who happen to live abroad. I think that's incredibly wrong. Jews belong to many different nationalities.

It sounds like you're against the idea of national self determination altogether. Can you think of an example of a successful assertion of the right to self determinism which didn't involve a national entity asserting sovereignty over a body of land populated by a diverse group of people?

As we have already established, the population in the land of the historical mandate has exploded, including a manifold increase of Arabs (living peacefully within the borders of modern Israel as equal citizens, I might add), so clearly it is possible to accommodate this diverse population in a Jewish state.

Are you against all national self determination? Or is there some threshold of homogeneous concentration of one people after which it becomes legitimate? If the Zionist pioneers had managed to achieve a 99% majority of Jewish population in Palestine through legal immigration before asserting sovereignty, would that pass your test?

Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms?

> If the Zionist pioneers had managed to achieve a 99% majority of Jewish population in Palestine through legal immigration before asserting sovereignty, would that pass your test?

The whole enterprise was illegitimate, because it was carried out against the will of the population of Palestine. The population did not want a foreign group of people to come in, settle the land and take over. The British colonial rulers forced Zionism on the Palestinian population undemocratically.

You keep on appealing to self-determination, but you completely ignore the Palestinians' right to self-determination on the land they had inhabited for centuries.

> Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms?

The way to avert the Holocaust would have been to prevent the rise of fascism in Europe. The vast majority of Jews were anti-Zionist, and did not want to leave their home countries. The idea that Polish Jews would have all left Poland for the Middle East before WWII is just fanciful. Only a small percentage of them wanted to pack up and go to Palestine, a far-away place they knew nothing about.

This isn't a serious argument. You want the Jews to have self determination if and only if they can conjure into existence a magical fairy land free of compromise or can will into existence powers like militarily defeating the Nazis despite lacking even a basic police force.

> Only a small percentage of them wanted to pack up and go to Palestine, a far-away place they knew nothing about.

And pray tell, what happened to the ones who stayed?

> You want the Jews to have self determination if and only if they can conjure into existence a magical fairy land free of compromise

I think it's much more serious than arguing that they had the right to take over land already inhabited by another group of people, because of events from 2000 years ago. It just doesn't seem to occur to you that the Palestinians also have rights, and shouldn't have been forced to give up their land.

> or can will into existence powers like militarily defeating the Nazis despite lacking even a basic police force.

You're supposing that Jews would have left Europe en masse for Palestine. They wouldn't have. Most Jews before WWII did not accept Zionism. For example, in Poland, the dominant Jewish political movement was the Jewish Labour Bund, which was hostile to Zionism and which strove for Jewish civil rights inside the Polish Republic. In the real world, the only way the Jews of Europe could have been saved would have been by preventing the rise of fascism.

To get back to your original point, you still haven't acknowledged that Zionism was fundamentally different from other movements for self-determination. It was a movement for self-determination on land that the group in question did not inhabit, and which an entirely different group of people already inhabited. When Zionism succeeded, it created a massive refugee population (the previous inhabitants of the land the Zionists wanted for their own "self-determination") and sparked a conflict that has been going on for nearly a century now.

No, you're dodging the point. You're basically saying Jews deserved self-determination only if they could pull off the impossible: either magically prevent fascism, or create a homeland without upsetting anyone. That's not how history works. Zionism wasn't a luxury ideology, it was a response to existential threat. Jews didn't have the option to stay in Europe: Europe made that brutally clear. And yes, the land was inhabited, but so what? Every nationalist movement has had to contend with messy realities. The alternative you're proposing amounts to telling the Jews: stay stateless, stay vulnerable, or wait for miracles. That's not a serious moral position; at best it's an abdication, at worst a double standard against the Jews (i.e. antisemitism).

Actually, I've never said that Jews deserved self-determination in a separate country specifically created for Jews. Jews lived (and still live today) in many countries. They deserve equal rights in their home countries.

> The alternative you're proposing amounts to telling the Jews: stay stateless, stay vulnerable

Jews were not stateless. They were Polish, German, French, Russian, English, American, etc. You mean to say that there was no Jewish state, which is something entirely different from being stateless. American Jews today, for example, are "stateless" by your loose terminology, but arguably have more rights than and are safer than Israeli Jews.

> Jews didn't have the option to stay in Europe: Europe made that brutally clear.

Without the rise of Hitler, Jews would have been able to remain in Europe. The rise of fascism and WWII were a catastrophe for civilization, which could have been averted.

> magically prevent fascism

There's nothing magic about it. For example, if the Social Democrats and Communists had coordinated against fascism, they might have been able to prevent Hilter's rise. If France and Britain had decided to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938 or prevent the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936, there may very well have been no WWII and no Holocaust. However, one thing I can tell you for certain is that the chance that most Jews would have decided to move to the Middle East is basically zero. They weren't Zionists and didn't want to leave their home countries.

> Every nationalist movement has had to contend with messy realities.

You're hiding a lot behind that phrase, "messy realities."

I have yet to see you acknowledge the Palestinians and their rights in any way. You're asserting the right of Jews to take over control of Palestine, depriving the Palestinians not only of the right of self-determination, but taking their land and expelling them. You've now justified this in two completely different ways: first by an appeal to ancient history, and then by an appeal to the Holocaust.

> That's not a serious moral position; at best it's an abdication, at worst a double standard against the Jews (i.e. antisemitism).

I was wondering how long it would take you to explicity come out and start accusing me of antisemitism. But if you really want to choose the right insult, you should call me a "self-hating Jew."

Let me just summarize your position: European Jews, facing extermination, should have tried harder to stop Hitler, trusted the same governments that sold them out, stayed put in countries that were turning into slaughterhouses and politely avoided seeking refuge in the only place in the world that would take them just because it might offend your sensibilities. And now, after a few of them survived the industrial attempt to wipe them out, you want to tell them they were wrong to have escaped.

You dress up your objection to Zionism behind a pseudomoralistic veneer of Palestinian rights, but your real position is that Jewish survival was a problem because it confuses your personal narrative of Palestinian nationalism. That’s not a serious moral argument. That’s historical cruelty crudely disguised as moral purity.

And no, I never insulted you, but the position that European Jews should have just tried harder against the Nazis is a laughably sadistic viewpoint regardless of who holds it.

You did a terrible job of summarizing my position.

> the position that European Jews should have just tried harder against the Nazis

If you think I wrote anything like that, you have a serious lack of reading comprehension.

> your real position is that Jewish survival was a problem because it confuses your personal narrative of Palestinian nationalism.

Oh gee, thanks for informing me that my "real" position is that I shouldn't survive.

I'll bite as well.

There is a difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. The former is condemning a land-grab because of some 2000 year old claim. The latter is hating Jews because they are Jews. There is a world of difference there.

The forefathers of everyone in Europe, with very few exceptions, occupied a different strip of land 2000 years ago and were driven out by romans, goths, huns, germans or whomever. Most pieces of land changed hands a dozen times or more. Should we now rearrange all the maps and revert to our 2000 year old original national lands and identities? Why 2000 years, why not 500, 5000 or 10000? The maps looked different in those periods as well.

Set aside the 2000 year old history for a moment. Given that the Jews were a persecuted minority across Europe - and indeed faced the a campaign of extermination far worse than early Zionists feared - one can see the moral necessity for their self determination.

Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it declares that no, it is preferable for Jews to continue to face the Holocaust and other attempts at their genocide than to concede their right to self defense as a people.

There are different things here that you are glossing over and conflating.

Yes, there is a moral right and necessity for self-determination and self-defense for the Jews after the Holocaust. But there is no necessity or justification for that to happen in Palestine, especially when this means displacing and slaughtering the Palestinians who have lived there for quite a few centuries. And indeed Palestinians do have a moral right of self-determination and self-defense as well. So the essence of Zionism, which is the idea of taking over Palestine for a Jewish state, is deeply immoral because of that. And this immorality doesn't simply disappear because of the wrongs that were done to the Jews by non-Palestinians. And because of that, anti-Zionism is a moral imperative, because it aims to correct an immorality. Whereas antisemitism is something completely different.

> Anti-Zionism is antisemitic because it declares that no, it is preferable for Jews to continue to face the Holocaust and other attempts at their genocide than to concede their right to self defense as a people.

Which means that you think the only possible way to avoid a genocide of Jews and for Jews to defend themselves is to settle in Palestine? Nothing else would have done? Given that there were quite a few wars around the establishment of Israel which could have very well wiped Israel off the map that is quite a bold statement.

I rather think this idea of self-defense and self-determination of the Jewish people being only possible in Israel/Palestine is a religiously derived idea, nothing that has any basis in political and military facts or morals. It was just a "wouldn't it be nice to do this in Gods Promised Land?" kind of thing, current inhabitants be damned...

Got it, so you only specifically object to the Jews settling in their ancestral homeland which they immigrated to legally and was 98% less populated than today, because the Nazi-aligned mufti of Jerusalem objected to their presence.

Care to suggest a superior choice of venue for Jewish sovereignty where the Jews had a better claim to the land, and the locals were prepared to welcome their national project?

A few issues:

- "The democratically elected government of Gaza-Palestine is the Hamas" Hamas is not a democratic government, period. Elections you're talking about were almost 20 years ago. It's like calling Trumpistan 20 years from now a democracy, if Trump today declares he'll live forever, and that there will be no more elections, and enough MAGA Americans help him persevering.

- Israel's struggle is the Zionist dream of creating a Jewish state by any means. Means have been pretty violent and treacherous, from international terrorism, assassinations of diplomats, to mass killings and violent displacement of 100s of thousands of indigenous people, unilateral declaration of statehood over someone else's land, etc. Indigenous people have been revolting against this since way before Hamas even existed. It's quite something to bothside this, or even invert this, and call indigenous people terrorists, while violent immigrant invaders and land thieves are somehow legitimate state.

- Martyr != terrorist, it's anyone killed in some manner in relation to the above political context. If a child is shot in the head by Israel's soldiers, it will be called a martyr. Executed ICRC workers were called martyrs, etc.

The Hamas government isn't democratic, but it was democratically elected. And voters knew whom they were voting for, Hamas didn't change, they were a terrorist organization back then as well. Voters democratically elect all kinds of dictatorships. Still their fault.

Indigenous people (legitimately imho) started a war over that territory and lost it. Started a few more and lost those as well, together with some neighboring states. If you lost the war for that land, it isn't your land anymore. Simple as that. And terrorism isn't an acceptable means of warfare.

I'm pretty sure the violent colonizers who implemented a pre-meditated plan of conquest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet are those who started the war in this case. "Right of conquest" was not part of international law anymore at that time.

They did not really win either, given that indigenous people, and their descendants, did not yet settle for their complete submission. Unless you call victory as having to hide behind walls and running to shelters every once in a while, and constantly making new enemies by bombing shit out of everyone around you.

As to the fault of the voters for what happened after elections. Yeah, that's easily debatable, given the massive foreign interference into the post-election Palestine's politics and society from occupation, and third countries, and attempts to coopt oposition for violent overthrow of elected government. Also Palestinians did not vote for terrorism, but for "change and reform" at the time http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4606482.stm

It literally doesn't matter.

What Hamas did or does, doesn't give any right to Israel to ethnically cleanse, forcibly displace, massacre 100+ people every day and commit a genocide in Gaza. 100 people, most of them kids!

These are people with lives, families, hope and compassion. Just imagine if the Ukrainian war came even close to this. People are not numbers.

And these are WARCRIMES, the entire global system was built to stop such things from happening, letting the occupation do whatever it wants while making a joke of any and every concept of the "international rule based order" will come back to bite the west, hard.

If this is allowed to happen, what's different about Taiwan and Ukraine then? Let the stronger one win right?

As we are currently seeing in international relations, the "international rule based order" needs someone to impose order, otherwise it won't work. Putin called the bluff and he seems to win that hand.

So as in all the other areas of life, rules are for the small, puny ones, not for the big or well-connected ones. If you are big or have big supporters, might makes right. Morals and rules are then only relevant for propaganda, not for actual behavior