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Comment by tovej | Hacker News Reader

The Palestinians did not start the war. Israel has started every war against the Palestinians, including the 1948 one.

Israelis are not indigenous (there are rare exceptions of Mizrahis or Jerusalem Palestinians with some form of citizenship), they are colonists.

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Arabs stared the war when they rejected the UN offer of a sovereign internationally recognized Palastinian state and tried to destroy Israel instead. They lost. In retrospect this was very stupid.

It doesn't matter if Israelis are indigenous or not because 7 million people are not going to leave.

What is plan Dalet? Rejecting the establishment on your land is also not a declaration of war. Israel was the one who started the hostilities

Jews legally migrated to the area and bought land starting 1882 driven by the rise of the Zionist movement and pogroms in Eastern Europe. If the Arabs had won the war they would have forced every last Jew out of the area and Israel would never have existed. When the Jordanian Arab Legion took control of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, the ancient synagogues were destroyed, and the entire Jewish population was expelled or taken prisoner. The same happened in the Gush Etzion bloc. If the combined Arab armies had won the war, the Jewish state would have been dismantled, and the Jewish population would have been expelled or killed.They lost but have rather pathetically refused to accept this for 78 years now.

> rare exceptions of Mizrahis

It's not rare at all, the majority of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi.

That's not true, it's not a majority. It is true that Mizrahi are ~40-45% of Jews in the country, but all Mizrahim are not all indigenous to Palestine. I was referring to the subset of Mizrahi who are Palestinian.

What do you mean by “Palestinian”? They’re Palestinian by the classic definition of “those who live in the region of Palestine”.

If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.

If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.

By Palestinian Mizrahi, I mean Mizrahi who are culturally Palestinian. Who have some ties to Palestine. Someone you could call native.

Any Jew certainly has cultural ties to Palestine, if we're talking about the region rather than the modern national identity with the same name.

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