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Comment by Newtonip | Hacker News Reader

It's a state founded on ethnic cleansing. People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.

In late 1947, their militias begun a campaign of massacring and expelling Palestinians from mostly defenseless villages. These refuges pouring into neighboring Arab countries is what prompted the 1948 war. When the war ended, they murdered any civilians trying to return to their homes.

Gaza was originally a refugee camp created for receiving these expelled people.

The ethnic cleansing and denial of rights has continued ever since. The current Gaza war is not when the crimes against humanity started. Israel has been commiting crimes against humanity throughout its entire existence.

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> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves

Including a sizeable Jewish minority.

The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region. But it’s a continuation of outsiders (in particular Westerners, though the Iranians also bought this settler-colonialist nonsense which led to their recent miscalculations) with no connection to the land drawing up broad moral claims for how the Middle East should be divided up.

There's plenty of videos of orthodox Jewish people getting brutalized in public by Israeli government thugs. There are many Jewish voices that oppose the genocide. Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism, even though the latter uses the former cynically as a "human shield".

> Please don't conflate Judaism with a violent project of political extremism

I’m not. I’m arguing that one can oppose what’s happening in Gaza without careening into counterproductiveness and calling for the destruction of Israel.

A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact. There are also Jewish communities that live peacefully with dignity in Iran.

> A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact.

Whatever else you think, this is some massive misunderstanding of history.

Historically, the lack of a state for Jews was one of the main reasons Jews experienced the Holocaust, which originated the term Genocide. Half of the Jewish population, making up (iirc) 90% of the population of Europe, died, because they had nowhere else to go.

And of the ones that survived, they still had nowhere else to go, no one wanted to take them in. The only place they could go, and what was agreed to worldwide, was to go to then-Palestine. Then, the hundreds of thousands of Jews "living peacefully" in Arab countries were ethnically cleansed from their countries, which they'd lived in for generations, and also largely had nowhere to go except Palestine.

There are Jewish communities within Iran, yes. But peacefully?

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/2025-06-27/ty-... (archive: https://archive.is/0qEg9)

One could blame this crackdown on Israel, sure. But that absolves the countries perpetuating persecution of Jews from their own share of responsibility in it. After all, when the American Government interned all those Japanese-Americans - did we blame Japan for it, or did we rightfully blame the American government?

I do not seek to defend Israel's actions against the Palestinian people, but to say that the Jews live "peacefully and with dignity" in places where they often are scapegoated, persecuted, and killed out of hand is not the way. Look at what happened to the Jewish populations of the region between the 40s and now, and you will see a grim picture of persecution, killings, and exodus.

nettanyahu has tried to bribe iranian jews to come to israel. they've chosen not to so I can't imagine its that bad for them there. additionally, iranian jews have positionsof power in government and mandated representation. it would be a very easy argument to make that iranian jews in iran are treated much better than non jewish palestinians have ever been treated in israel.

source?

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews

" In July 2007, Iran's Jewish community rejected financial emigration incentives to leave Iran. Offers ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 British pounds, financed by a wealthy expatriate Jew with the support of the Israeli government, were turned down by Iran's Jewish leaders.[90][106][107] To place the incentives in perspective, the sums offered were up to 3 times or more than the average annual income for an Iranian.[108] However, in late 2007 at least forty Iranian Jews accepted financial incentives offered by Jewish charities for immigrating to Israel.[109]"

Israel literally bombed their own jews in Iraq to force them to relocate to israel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950%E2%80%931951_Baghdad_bo...

“Those who assign responsibility for the bombings to an Israeli or Iraqi Zionist underground movement suggest the motive was to encourage Iraqi Jews to immigrate to Israel.”

You’re stating a supposition as a fact.

While most Iranian Jews left Iran and are currently in Israel, 200k compared to 9k left in Iran, so the numbers don't really support your statement

> A state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere. In fact, it appears to be the opposite, based on historical fact

That's not my take from 2000 years of Jewish prosecution, in muslim countries or europe

> state named "Israel" is not a prerequisite for Jewish people to live peacefully anywhere

Sort of irrelevant. The state of Israel exists. Israelis who call that land their home exist.

Those calling for the destruction of Israel are advocating for a holy war in the Levant. A war that would lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of casualties.

> Including a sizeable Jewish minority.

There was a Jewish community in Palestine (mostly centered around Jerusalem) but they did not come up with the Zionist project. Actually, many were opposed and some of their descendants still do so to this day.

> The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region

The (European) architects of the Zionist project literally called it colonialism.

"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews … How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial." -Theodor Herzl

Ze'ev Jabotinsky literally compared the Zionist project to other colonial projects when arguing the people living there would fight back against their colonizers and the need for numbers and strength to counter them.

> Ze'ev Jabotinsky literally compared the Zionist project to other colonial projects

The Zionist Project is comparable to colonialism. That doesn’t make it settler-colonialism. (And Jabotinsky isn’t the final word on anything other than himself.)

[flagged]

Sure. I can find terrible people opining on the case for a Palestinian state, too. That isn’t really an argument about what it is.

The whole notion of settling outside borders is marketing for annexation but has total support from Western Governments, yet those same governments are absolutely against the annexation of Ukraine.

… fuck I hate politics :(

There's a class of people who don't actually have moral principles but pretend to in order to justify selfishness. Their stated principles can turn on a dime because they don't actually believe them. Almost all politicians are in this group.

Having a sizeable minority of some kind does not really justify or excuse kicking out other ethnicities and religions to form a new state based on the primacy of that group. The mental gymnastics to think that expelling people living there while bringing in a population from Europe to displace them--literally to the point of having them move into homes vacated by Arabs who were expelled--is something other than a settler-colonialist is pretty astounding.

And the ambivalence and opposition of the Jews of Palestine to the Zionist project is fairly well-documented.

Rabbi Yakov Shapiro talks a lot about that, I think Gabor Mate does to some extent as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7POk0hVsgM

Some people seem to have the idea that most of the people are European Jews, when in reality, it was more Arab jews, in large part due to the Nazis. The standardized language even reflects this, closet to the local pronounciation of hebrew than the "accents" in Europe. Or even Jiddish

> how the Middle East should be divided up

Given how every group claims it is a holy place, I'd expect each group would want it held in a state of peace, prosperity, and reverence for the benefits of creation. Instead they all seem bent on holding their holy lands in states of violence, discord, and waste.

You're not wrong that there is deep external interference but wouldn't holy peoples rise above any of that to do better from every side?

> The ethnic cleansing/settler-colonialist paradigm is easy for outsiders to project on the region.

"Outsiders" like the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association that funded Zionist settlement in Palestine? The problem with folks who try to claim that this is ahistorical is that contemporary Zionists talked all the time about colonizing Palestine.

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

In 1920 (the year when British took over Palestine from the Ottomans) the jewish population was less than 10% Jewish and represented less than 1% of global Jewry. By 1948, after the British flooded in Jewish migrants mainly from Europe and the Americas, the population became about ~65% + arab and 35+% Jewish. Zionism was always predicated on Ethnic cleansing from the start and the founders of zionists were always aware of that fact.

“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” - Theodore Herzl , Father of Zionism in 1895.

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]. I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." - David Ben Gurion, Father of Israel.

"the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. … Hitler – as odious as he is to us – has given this idea a good name in the world." - Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Founder of Revisionist Zionism, 1940.

Zionism is textbook settler-colonialism. I dont see it worth even arguing the point.

> People were already living there when settlers came to create an ethno-state for themselves.

Isn't that just history repeating itself? Even in the old testament, they had to clear the current inhabitants of their promised land after wander the desert for 40 years.

Archeology suggests biblical Israel was actually a federation of tribes, some of which were enemies in early parts of the Bible. For example, the philistines which became one of the 12 tribes and also are the origin of the term Palestinian.

They never became an Israeli tribe, they were a people of a foreign origin, probably greek. They have disappeared from history after they were exiled by the babylonians, like most people of the area of that time.

Many states were "founded on ethnic cleansing". They are widely considered to posses a right of existence, and even expected to defend their citizens.

(excuse me for ignoring the history trolling)

A right to exist doesn't justify a million other things that are completely unacceptable about the Israeli state.

> Many states were "founded on ethnic cleansing".

So what? I don't get your point.

Israel has continuously been oppressing the Palestinians for almost 80 years. That is immoral. Israel is in the wrong.

> They are widely considered to posses a right of existence, and even expected to defend their citizens.

You are just jumping to a different topic. I said nothing about its right to exist.

Really? Is this why the world does not recognize the north part of Cyprus despite Turkish Cypriots not butchering any Greeks south of the border since 1974, when they unilaterally declared independence?

Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us. And please don't include previously warring peoples whose leaders agreed on a population exchange and imposed that mandatory trauma on their own people.

Palestine, Cyprus, and India had the unenviable luck of being long-term victims of a last gasp British empire's farewell divide-and-conquer gambit.

(and excuse me for ignoring the deflection trolling)

> Please name some other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing" and embraced by the international community and educate the rest of us

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

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

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istrian%E2%80%93Dalmatian_exod...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_expulsion_of_Italians_fro...

It was quite common and very accepted method in the 1940s, hell, expelling 15 million germans, some living there for hundreds of years, was proposed by Churchill.

The reason you never heard about the rest of these is because the people were resettled, not kept in a state of permanent inheritable refugee state financed by the UN with financial incentives to be kept that way.

>Please name some of other countries post-WW2 that were "founded by ethnic cleansing"

(proceeds to list examples of countries which were already founded before the ethnic cleansing events they mention or events I already alluded to)

It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to list Libyans expelling italians as a comparable example, when Libya was a colony of Italy. Ditto Germans, a people of belonging to the aggressor country. Bulgaria declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1908. And you have to explain why you included the pakistan link, as I already mentioned it in my post.

Palestinians can be arguably labeled as the aggressor country if that's how you want to spin the narrative. As Jews were peacefully buying lands when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.

Most germans were living in their respected newly founded Communist Poland and Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years if not more when expelled.

Italians, even if they were colonialists, were expelled from their homes, by people who previously have been colonialists themselves, some when arriving with the arab conquests.

Bulgaria expelled the turks in the 1950s, and the partition of india, forming pakistan and india, were two newly formed countries around the time of israel and palestine, included ethnic cleansing from both sides

Do you think that these examples of ethnic cleansing post ww2 are irrelevant when no new country was formed?

> when the massacres and ethnic cleansing started at 1929.

Violent conflicts between Jewish settlers and local Arab populations have started long before that, pretty much as soon as the initial settlement began in the 19th century. Nor was it some kind of isolated incidents - Jabotinsky wrote https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot in 1923, and he wasn't alone in such views:

> There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ... Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of "Palestine" into the "Land of Israel."

And you can gather from your own quote that Jabotinsky's view was very unpopular at the time. The mainstream jewish opinion is that living in peace is possible. That's why there were no real attempts at creating a capable militia force until violence has started from the Palestinian side

You seem to quote him to prove the Palestinians had no choice but to do what the laws of history has ordained for them. But even though you don't quote the extreme or moderate Palestinians of the time, there were both views and as humans capable of agency they had a choice, and they repeatedly chose war until they had created a Jewish force much more capable than they were

Look, it's not expelling some imperial troops. but peaceful citizens, who sometimes had lived there for centuries.

The idea that people of different ethnicities live, unmixed, divided by neat borders of nation-states is pretty recent. This was the case neither in Europe, nor in Middle East for a very long time before the advent of state-based nationalism in the 19th century. It was quite normal for people of different ethnicities, languages, and even faiths to live intermixed in certain regions, especially areas of intense trade, which the entire Mediterranean coast used to be. Borders were more about economic and political control than ethnic identity.

(The ethnic unity purportedly achieved by nation-states formed in 19th and early 20th centuries is also often more by fiat: look at the variety of German or Italian languages prior to unification of Germany or Italy, for instance, to say nothing about India.)

What, like it's happened elsewhere so it's OK now? How do you think that kind of defense argument goes down in court?

It's not a defense argument rather than reality. People seem to think this conflict is special, but usually due to ignoring similarities to their own countries and their own moralities.

Regarding court, there is a very valid defense in court called selective enforcement, and this is exactly for situations when someone is scape goated

The only thing special about this conflict is that it's far more "televised" than any other genocide in history, due to the proliferation of internet access and social media, and that the US is directly funding it.

I think it makes a lot of sense to be more incensed about the genocide in Palestine vs. the Myanmar civil war if you're an American citizen. Americans are struggling and the government is sending billions of our tax dollars to war criminals overseas.

Except that it's not a genocide, claiming Israel is out to destroy the Palestinian people after two years of war with precision bombs is hilariously incorrect and highly misrepresented.

There's a reason that your example includes mass civilian executions, rapes, ethnic cleansing and burning villages, largely hamas' tactics, rather than precision bombs and evacuation calls in different channels.

Because Israeli tactics are extremely counterproductive for a genocide. There's reasons why genocide is usually done by concentrating populations rather than dispersing, and why aerial bombing can't be used, as victims would flee, or why the victims aren't forewarned..

It seems this entire popular argument rests solely on propaganda and redefining words without any shred of critical thinking

They've been out to destroy them for decades. The last 2 years is a drop in the bucket compared to the suffering they've imposed on Palestinians through apartheid.

What's going on now IS a genocide and it's not being done by bombs but by starvation, which tracks exactly with what you said about "concentrating" people.

Do you have statistics as to how many people have died by starvation in Gaza? How is it related to concentration and how is it working to destroy the entire population of Gaza? (as in death rates vs birth rates)

No but when someone says "Israel is uniquely evil and must be destroyed because of [reason that also applies to dozens of other countries whose destruction they're not demanding]" it implies either ignorance or bad faith.

I don't think it's possible to understand the whole issue without taking into account how people fled into Israel, both because of genocide in Europe as well as prosecution in multi-ethnic yet predominantly Arab states. Germany being in an awkward position of being an economically dominant state but also having contributed to the whole misery. Also the US is far from neutral probably due to deeper ties that are just part of reality. You cannot undo the past but I don't think it's possible to unroll the whole problem without properly confronting it. The increasingly horrific escalations have obviously completely detached from any reason

They fled into Palestine*, and later established the state of Israel. Saying they fled into Israel assumes there was an Israel to begin with, but there wasn't.

Yes, it was a British colony... Either way, the vast majority moved there after the state was established. And yes, most suffered prosecution around the world including Arab countries. Pogroms against Jews are documented since centuries.

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