Israel-Gaza war

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Quite the opposite, that's exactly my point.  Israel and the Jews didn't do anything to the Ugandans, but Uganda, a landlocked central African country the size of Nevada, which has absolutely nothing to do with Israel and lies 5000km away, for some reason looked at Britain taking 12% of Mandatory Palestine/Transjordan and denoting it for a Jewish state, and said "this is a horrible thing that affects us, and we're going to get really really mad about it.  So mad that we're going to aid a terrorist group that hijacks an airplane and takes 100+ hostages."

Why do we just accept this as some inevitable thing?  Why should we have to pretend this is a reasonable opinion for a state to hold?  Is it not utterly bizarre and horrible?  Why should Uganda care at all about which Levantine ethnic groups get land claims in the British section of the former Ottoman Empire?

So Uganda, which is 5000km from Israel, is "bizarre and horrible" for supporting Palestinian terrorists but America, which is 10000km from Israel, is perfectly justified in supporting a regime that intentionally provoked political instability through terrorism in Egypt, bombed Iraqi synagogues to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate and created a front terrorist group in Lebanon which killed hundreds of innocent people and tried to assassinate the (Jewish!) American ambassador

I get what you're saying though, to the Arabs of the region it has the appearance of a bunch of Europeans coming in and saying, this is our land now.  But that's not even what happened.  The Jews legally purchased land under the laws of the Ottoman Empire.  They're no different than any other immigrant group.  When Irish-Americans came to America, legally under our immigration laws, and purchased land here (also legally), was that imperialism?  Was that colonialism?  No, it was just some people who wanted to live in America finding a legal way to do it, en masse.  The Ashkenazi Jews of the early 20th century, legally immigrating to a barren desert in the outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, were no different.

Could you remind me of the part where Irish Americans engaged in decades of terrorism after immigrating to demand their own country be carved out of the Northeast, won the acknowledgement of their sovereignty from a foreign body that had literally just been created and used said acknowledgement as a justification to start deporting or even slaughtering non-Irish people who had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of the arbitrary line? Then over the following decades conquering the rest of America and turning everyone there into occupied subjects without basic human rights? Because that's the part most people have a problem with. If Ihud has won out and the Zionists had settled for a "Jewish homeland" within a secular state then it would be a whole different story.

This is putting aside the fact that, again, these were not just a bunch of random European dudes, they were the diaspora of a people who were native to the land thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled.  That doesn't directly give them the right to be there, but even if they had not come there legally, it would not be colonialism.

I guess the Rhodesians should have said they were "the diaspora of a people who were native to the land (hundreds of) thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled"

Israel's attacks on Egypt were because Egypt threatened Israel with annihilation.  Israel saw these attacks as a proactive form of self-defense.  Both the Suez Crisis and the Six-Days War were preceded by large arms build-ups and mobilizations on the Egyptian side, rhetoric promising the conquest and annihilation of Israel, and Egyptian actions to restrict Israeli trade.  If Egypt hadn't done these things I doubt Israel would have attacked Egypt.  Yet you blame Israel for the conflicts.  This is what always happens with Israel!  The Arabs are held to absolutely no standard whatsoever, while all the consequences of violence that Israel is forced into get blamed on Israel.

The projection on display here is incredible.

First off, as usual, you're fighting a strawman. Nobody here is saying that the inept and corrupt Arab states - whose borders and leadership were pretty much uniformly imposed on them by the colonial powers - were blameless.

But you really are acting like Israel is entirely blameless! You talk about peaceful immigration and ignore the terrorism and ethnic cleansing, you talk about Egyptian rhetoric and completely ignore the Israeli connections to their former colonial overlords or the terrorism perpetrated by Mossad (and these days even the Israelis don't deny the Lavon Affair) or the fact that in reality as opposed to rhetoric the Israelis started the war both times.

The Arabs were held to the standard that Israel can do whatever it wants and expect nearly unlimited Western support and protection. In 1947 a third of the population of Mandatory Palestine was granted more than half of the territory and a few decades later they wound up conquering nearly all of it. They didn't even have to worry about the demographic consequences like the South Africans or Rhodesians did because unlike literally every other country on Earth they were allowed to keep the Palestinians in a state of legal limbo where they didn't have the rights of Israelis but they also didn't have a state of their own.

By the 90s the negotiations were so one sided that they were about whether the Palestinians would be allowed a state in just 22% of what had been Palestine. Yet even then, the most generous Israeli offers would have still taken land out of this 22% for settlements and left the Palestinians with a Bantustan that didn't control its own borders, didn't control its own airspace and didn't have its own army. Of course the Israelis have had little pressure to change the status quo because they effectively control 100% of the territory while providing none of the rights or services that states are typically expected to provide to their citizens (in fact, the Israeli state is so one sidedly extractive of Palestinians that they literally ban Palestinians from collecting rainwater).

Israel is a country that's literally never had to deal with the consequences of its actions, that's why they're completely humiliating Biden and using his unconditional military aid and UN veto to starve the population of Gaza to death despite Biden's empty promises of restraint and the ICJ's rulings. Decades of protection from consequences have created the likes of Ben Gvir and Smotrich, men who believe that Israel's success is entirely self made, that brutality always works, that they can fight the whole world at once and that God is on their side. The only question now is whether they've actually gone far enough to break the dam of unconditional American protection.

[Silent Hunter]

There appears to have been actual progress towards a ceasefire deal in Paris.

From the multiple sources I've read, Hamas has softened some of there demands. Most importantly: the amount of prisoners they want released and a full IDF withdrawal.

Let's hope for a peaceful Ramadan and beyond that, a peaceful Passover in April.

The casualties from an assault on Rafah would be pretty big on both sides, I'd imagine and diplomatic pressure from the West is possibly having an influence too.

[Birdish]

There appears to have been actual progress towards a ceasefire deal in Paris.

From the multiple sources I've read, Hamas has softened some of there demands. Most importantly: the amount of prisoners they want released and a full IDF withdrawal.

Let's hope for a peaceful Ramadan and beyond that, a peaceful Passover in April.

The casualties from an assault on Rafah would be pretty big on both sides, I'd imagine and diplomatic pressure from the West is possibly having an influence too.

It doesn't hurt that The White House has been so open about how disastrous it would be. When the world is screaming at you what a terrible idea something is, you'd hope someone in Netanyahu's bubble might notice.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

BTW, if we want to play the percentage game, how much of the former Ottoman Empire became Arab and how much became Jewish?  100% of the French influence zone became Arab or Turkish (most of modern-day Syria and Lebanon).  Britain had Mandatory Palestine and Mandatory Mesopotamia.  The latter became Iraq, the former mostly became Jordan, except for the small sliver between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which was divided between Jews and Arabs.  And this is on top of the entire Arabian peninsula and Egypt becoming independent Arab states.

Pretending like Israel got some giant chunk of the post-war partition is a malicious, intentionally misleading manipulation of numbers, scoping the denominator of "land that should have been Arab" down as far as you possibly can to try and have it cover only areas that became Jewish.  The Arabs got like 99.9% of the Middle East after the World Wars, and then spent the next 75 years bitching and moaning and basing their entire personality on how that other 0.1% went to the survivors of the Holocaust.

[Horus]

bombed Iraqi synagogues to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate

But AltorBotox told me there was just no way Israelis could in any way be responsible for antisemitic incidents overseas. Never mind the Israeli kid who just a few years ago called in bomb threats to like 50 American JCCs causing a nationwide panic.

Yet Israel doesn't benefit from antisemitism. Sure. Their entire MO is being a "safe space" for the world's Jews. The more inhospitable the rest of the world appears to Jewish people, the more Israel benefits.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

bombed Iraqi synagogues to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate

But AltorBotox told me there was just no way Israelis could in any way be responsible for antisemitic incidents overseas. Never mind the Israeli kid who just a few years ago called in bomb threats to like 50 American JCCs causing a nationwide panic.

Yet Israel doesn't benefit from antisemitism. Sure. Their entire MO is being a "safe space" for the world's Jews. The more inhospitable the rest of the world appears to Jewish people, the more Israel benefits.

I mean, this Israeli government had nothing to do with that terrorist attack, so I'm not really sure what your point is...

[Stand With Israel. Crush Hamas]

bombed Iraqi synagogues to force Iraqi Jews to emigrate

But AltorBotox told me there was just no way Israelis could in any way be responsible for antisemitic incidents overseas. Never mind the Israeli kid who just a few years ago called in bomb threats to like 50 American JCCs causing a nationwide panic.

Yet Israel doesn't benefit from antisemitism. Sure. Their entire MO is being a "safe space" for the world's Jews. The more inhospitable the rest of the world appears to Jewish people, the more Israel benefits.

I mean, this Israeli government had nothing to do with that terrorist attack, so I'm not really sure what your point is...

Also, the very article he links to states that it's never been proven Israel was behind it!

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I get what you're saying though, to the Arabs of the region it has the appearance of a bunch of Europeans coming in and saying, this is our land now.  But that's not even what happened.  The Jews legally purchased land under the laws of the Ottoman Empire.  They're no different than any other immigrant group.  When Irish-Americans came to America, legally under our immigration laws, and purchased land here (also legally), was that imperialism?  Was that colonialism?  No, it was just some people who wanted to live in America finding a legal way to do it, en masse.  The Ashkenazi Jews of the early 20th century, legally immigrating to a barren desert in the outreaches of the Ottoman Empire, were no different.

Again, this is not how it was seen by ordinary people on the ground.

Most rural Palestinians did not own the land they lived on, even if they had lived there their whole lives and their family had lived there for multiple generations. They paid rent (in the form of money or a share of crops or livestock) to their landlord, who often did not live in the village and may not have lived in Palestine or even been Palestinian at all (many were wealthy Arab families that lived in Beirut and Damascus who had acquired or been granted the land at various times during the Ottoman era).

Many of those landowners opted to sell the land to Jewish immigrants (if antisemitism is so inherently deepseated and inextricable, why would they have done that?). The problem was that the new owners had no interest in letting the existing tenants stay there. They wanted to live on and develop the land themselves, so the tenants had to go. When Palestinians talk about land being "stolen" or being "pushed out", it's because they found themselves undergoing something analogous to the consolidation of farmland and the demise of the tenant and smallholder farmers in the 18th-19th century West. But while in that case, those displaced farmers could move to cities and get jobs in factories (not an easy transition but an available one), Palestinians did not have that option. They were simply forced onto the smaller remaining portions of Arab-owned land in a game of musical chairs. You had people with fundamentally modern Western notions of land and property and what it means to live somewhere or be from somewhere coming into contact with people who had much older, more reciprocal and communitarian notions.

This is putting aside the fact that, again, these were not just a bunch of random European dudes, they were the diaspora of a people who were native to the land thousands of years ago and had been forcibly, violently exiled.  That doesn't directly give them the right to be there, but even if they had not come there legally, it would not be colonialism.

When does the clock stop on that? Do you have an unconditional right to move to a place where an ancestor of yours lived thousands of years ago? Do I? Was European conquest of subsaharan Africa not really colonialism because all of our ancestors emerged from Africa at some point?

Would you be all right with the descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of Washington State coming back there and claiming they had more of a "right" to be there than you do? Of course you wouldn't. So I don't know why you would expect the Palestinians who were living there in the early 20th century and whose ancestors had indisputably been living there for at least hundreds of years to grant any more consideration to people arriving from Europe than literally any other group of people anywhere in the world would grant to people trying to use similar claims. The people of Central Asia would not be receptive to Hungarians attempting to move "back" there.

Consider that even if the Egyptian people had chosen to simply ignore the events of 1947-1949, Israel joined forces with Britain and France to invade their country in 1956. You don't think that wouldn't be incentive enough for them to dislike Israel? The framing of Israel as a symbol of imperialism alongside actual imperial powers couldn't have been clearer.

Israel's attacks on Egypt were because Egypt threatened Israel with annihilation.  Israel saw these attacks as a proactive form of self-defense.  Both the Suez Crisis and the Six-Days War were preceded by large arms build-ups and mobilizations on the Egyptian side, rhetoric promising the conquest and annihilation of Israel, and Egyptian actions to restrict Israeli trade.  If Egypt hadn't done these things I doubt Israel would have attacked Egypt.  Yet you blame Israel for the conflicts.  This is what always happens with Israel!  The Arabs are held to absolutely no standard whatsoever, while all the consequences of violence that Israel is forced into get blamed on Israel.

Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and the Egyptian public saw it as finally "taking back" their country after years of British influence in the region going back to the late 19th century. Britain and France wanted it back and Israel chose to participate in a joint action with them. From the Egyptian perspective, Israel was acting as an "imperial" power alongside France and the UK, and ultimately many people in other African countries saw those events similarly.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

BTW, if we want to play the percentage game, how much of the former Ottoman Empire became Arab and how much became Jewish?  100% of the French influence zone became Arab or Turkish (most of modern-day Syria and Lebanon).  Britain had Mandatory Palestine and Mandatory Mesopotamia.  The latter became Iraq, the former mostly became Jordan, except for the small sliver between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which was divided between Jews and Arabs.  And this is on top of the entire Arabian peninsula and Egypt becoming independent Arab states.

Pretending like Israel got some giant chunk of the post-war partition is a malicious, intentionally misleading manipulation of numbers, scoping the denominator of "land that should have been Arab" down as far as you possibly can to try and have it cover only areas that became Jewish.  The Arabs got like 99.9% of the Middle East after the World Wars, and then spent the next 75 years bitching and moaning and basing their entire personality on how that other 0.1% went to the survivors of the Holocaust.

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust.

Palestinians did not conduct pogroms in the Russian Empire.

Palestinians did not confine Jews to ghettos in Europe for centuries.

And yet you want Palestinians to bear 100% of the burden for things other people did and that they had no control over. Why is that their problem? Why don't you take it up with Germany?

Furthermore, most Jews in Israel are not descendants of Holocaust survivors. It was wrong for countries like Iraq and Tunisia to throw them out, but, again, Palestinians did not do that. Iraqis and Tunisians did that. It's their problem, not the Palestinians' problem. And it is honestly quite offensive to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust to think merely being deported from a country is morally equivalent to that. By that logic, the Hindus and Muslims who were deported from Pakistan and India in the late 1940s underwent a "Holocaust" which is simply absurd.

"Arabs" are not a singular people. They are literally just people who speak Arabic, in the same way that Hispanics are people who speak Spanish. If you put a Mauritanian and a Lebanese in a room together, they could barely carry on a basic conversation with each other. This is why various attempts to create "Pan-Arab" movements in the 20th century failed miserably.

Your comparison is as ridiculous as if for some reason a Jewish homeland had been established in Honduras, the native Hondurans had been pushed out, and you said, "Well the Hispanics have all the rest of Central and South America. Hondurans should just go live in another Hispanic country."

[Devils30]

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

BTW, if we want to play the percentage game, how much of the former Ottoman Empire became Arab and how much became Jewish?  100% of the French influence zone became Arab or Turkish (most of modern-day Syria and Lebanon).  Britain had Mandatory Palestine and Mandatory Mesopotamia.  The latter became Iraq, the former mostly became Jordan, except for the small sliver between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which was divided between Jews and Arabs.  And this is on top of the entire Arabian peninsula and Egypt becoming independent Arab states.

Pretending like Israel got some giant chunk of the post-war partition is a malicious, intentionally misleading manipulation of numbers, scoping the denominator of "land that should have been Arab" down as far as you possibly can to try and have it cover only areas that became Jewish.  The Arabs got like 99.9% of the Middle East after the World Wars, and then spent the next 75 years bitching and moaning and basing their entire personality on how that other 0.1% went to the survivors of the Holocaust.

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust.

Palestinians did not conduct pogroms in the Russian Empire.

Palestinians did not confine Jews to ghettos in Europe for centuries.

And yet you want Palestinians to bear 100% of the burden for things other people did and that they had no control over. Why is that their problem? Why don't you take it up with Germany?

Furthermore, most Jews in Israel are not descendants of Holocaust survivors. It was wrong for countries like Iraq and Tunisia to throw them out, but, again, Palestinians did not do that. Iraqis and Tunisians did that. It's their problem, not the Palestinians' problem. And it is honestly quite offensive to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust to think merely being deported from a country is morally equivalent to that. By that logic, the Hindus and Muslims who were deported from Pakistan and India in the late 1940s underwent a "Holocaust" which is simply absurd.

"Arabs" are not a singular people. They are literally just people who speak Arabic, in the same way that Hispanics are people who speak Spanish. If you put a Mauritanian and a Lebanese in a room together, they could barely carry on a basic conversation with each other. This is why various attempts to create "Pan-Arab" movements in the 20th century failed miserably.

Your comparison is as ridiculous as if for some reason a Jewish homeland had been established in Honduras, the native Hondurans had been pushed out, and you said, "Well the Hispanics have all the rest of Central and South America. Hondurans should just go live in another Hispanic country."

Well the Jews were expelled from Arab countries after Israel was created in 1948. This event was not unrelated to Israel’s establishment. Do you honestly think it’s a good idea to try to undo everything from then? A lot of leftists don’t even have a Wikipedia level understanding of why Israel exists and seem to think we’ll just naturally create a harmonious democracy with a binational government. Plenty of Arabs sympathized with Hitler in the 1940s and none of these Arab countries today respect religious minorities at all. Islamism as an ideology is completely toxic and would have 7 figure body counts if it had the capacity. Any solution where Israel receives anything less than its 1967 borders and no right to return for Palestinians is not happening. Of course the settlements should be removed in any fair peace treaty but dictating Israel’s immigration policy to allow it to be destroyed ain’t happening.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Again, the case for Israel is not that a bunch of Jews showed up in Palestine and claimed it was their land thousands of years ago so it should be their land now, and thus it became their land.  That is simply not what happened.

There was no Palestine, there was simply the Ottoman Empire.  Jews began legally purchasing land, thus they acquired the legal right to say they lived there.  After the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War 1, parts of its lands were given to the Arabs and Turks right away, and other parts were held by the British and French, who attempted to partition the lands based on ethnic, geographic, resource and political considerations.

The British cut off a small chunk of land for the Jews, because the Jews were an ethnic group residing in the region who deserved consideration.  Their presence in the region was lawful and legitimate -- independent of any historical or religious claim to be the rightful indigenous peoples of the land.

Were the British influenced in this decision by the political maneuverings of Zionists, the horrors of the Holocaust, a sympathy towards a biblical historical narrative of the levant, or even in some cases violence and extortion?  Yes they were.  But those circumstances and arguments are not the basis of the case for why Israel exists.  Israel exists for the same reason the states of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria exist.  Because after the Ottoman Empire fell, everyone on the winning side agreed that Britain and France could decide what to do with its remains, and every state that was subsequently created has been widely recognized as legitimate.  Except for Israel.

Would you be all right with the descendants of the original indigenous inhabitants of Washington State coming back there and claiming they had more of a "right" to be there than you do? Of course you wouldn't.

If the United States was defeated in a war and eliminated as a national concept, and its lands were broken up and divided administratively between Canada and Mexico, and Canada decided that, as part of their carving up of our lands into new countries, they were going to create a country specifically out of the lands where the Salish peoples represented a majority of residents, I would not have a problem with that.

[Lord Halifax]

The British cut off a small chunk of land for the Jews, because the Jews were an ethnic group residing in the region who deserved consideration.  Their presence in the region was lawful and legitimate -- independent of any historical or religious claim to be the rightful indigenous peoples of the land.

Were the British influenced in this decision by the political maneuverings of Zionists, the horrors of the Holocaust, a sympathy towards a biblical historical narrative of the levant, or even in some cases violence and extortion?  Yes they were.  But those circumstances and arguments are not the basis of the case for why Israel exists.  Israel exists for the same reason the states of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria exist.  Because after the Ottoman Empire fell, everyone on the winning side agreed that Britain and France could decide what to do with its remains, and every state that was subsequently created has been widely recognized as legitimate.  Except for Israel.

that would be true if Israel (a Jewish homeland in Palestine) had been created after WW1 as promised in the Balfour declaration, and if so it would almost certainly have been viewed as a normal country today (and far more Jews would have survived the holocaust), but unfortunately it wasn't, the Arab population had increased a lot by the late 1940s, a lot of blood had been spilled and the international situation was entirely different (Cold War, post-colonialism, United Nations with a General Assembly soon to be dominated by "the Third World" etc.).

[afleitch]

Initial Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine was inter-war. There was an Arab revolt, mostly under the auspices of a national strike, from 1936 to 1939 due to increased migration and land purchases/transfers from farmers to Jewish settlement groups leading to poor harvests, displacement and violence.

Arab farmers effectively became landless labour for hire.

The British restricted Jewish migration and buying out Arab land in response. Which then elicited attacks on British forces and Arabs by militia.

[Lord Halifax]

Initial Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine was inter-war.

about 40k migrated before the war, from the 1880s onwards.

[afleitch]

Initial Jewish migration to Mandatory Palestine was inter-war.

about 40k migrated before the war, from the 1880s onwards.

That's why I said Mandatory Palestine as that was a distinctive phase as the result of the Balfour Declaration.

[Samof94]

Imo what's needed isn't less Israeli involvement in Gaza, it's better Israeli involvement. Israeli quasi-withdrawal was a step backwards despite it having some positive effects. Israel defeating Hamas now would be good but not at the cost of 80% of it demolished without replacement and/or the settler faction that is actually the biggest existential risk to the State of Israel becoming more powerful.

Ultimately what is needed is a willing partner in the Palestinians.

Israel is not going to allow Gaza to become a modern, advanced, self-sufficient state if they have good reason to believe the Palestinians would immediately turn around and make use of that generosity to try, once again, to exterminate the Jews.

The most likely scenario is that Israel turns Gaza into a heavily-restricted police state just like the West Bank, where violent conspiracies are quickly snuffed out and military groups have no real hope of organizing themselves to the extent necessary to mount even a symbolic attack.

It's nice to think that with a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance, the Gazans might come around to the idea that actually the Jews are alright.  But there's also a very real chance that a long period of peaceful coexistence and tolerance is actually just Israel giving them the chance to organize, fortify and re-arm.  Especially given that the hatred is as much cultural as it is contextual.  After all, the Jews never even did anything to Uganda, but that didn't stop Idi Amin from assisting with the Air France highjacking (Bibi's origin story is that his older brother was killed leading the rescue operation), and saying "Hitler was right to burn six million Jews."  It just goes to show that even when the Jews are as nice as humanly possible to their neighbors, those neighbors will still decide to hate and kill them.  It has happened over and over again throughout history, which is why "Never Again" is Israel's modern unofficial state motto.

In other words, the police state will continue as long as paramilitary organizations threaten to fester the instant Israel lets up.  It's not Israel's fault the Palestinians are addicted to hatred and violence.  It's incumbent upon the Palestinians to knock it off and find a way to assure Israel that they genuinely intend to peacefully coexist.  This is Palestine's responsibility, not Israel's.

I don't think you fully appreciate the extent to which the establishment of Israel in 1948 was seen as a humiliation and an international embarrassment to the Muslim world and to an extent to the Third World/Non-Aligned World as it would come to be constructed in the ensuing years.

Regardless of what Israel's demographic makeup now is or where more recent immigrants came from, the country was indisputably conceived by and established by people from Europe. Theodore Herzl was born in Hungary; Chaim Weizmann was born in Belarus and spent much of his early life in Germany and the UK; David Ben Gurion was born in Poland. The country's early alliance with the West cemented that image. Consider that even if the Egyptian people had chosen to simply ignore the events of 1947-1949, Israel joined forces with Britain and France to invade their country in 1956. You don't think that wouldn't be incentive enough for them to dislike Israel? The framing of Israel as a symbol of imperialism alongside actual imperial powers couldn't have been clearer.

This framing works for both Muslim countries and for Marxist-Leninist ones.

[Silent Hunter]

about 40k migrated before the war, from the 1880s onwards.

It was very hard for German Jews to leave Germany - they had to go through a lot of bureaucracy and pay massive exit taxes to leave, even if they could get someone to issue a visa... because they'd given up most of their wealth, they needed a sponsor.

[CumbrianLefty]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Yes, the justice of the Israeli War on Hamas is immutable, in spite of the fact that it's the deplorable cretin Bibi Netanyahu holding the reins.  Just like the U.S. War on ISIS was just and righteous, a fact that did not change when leadership of the war transitioned from Obama to the deplorable cretin Donald Trump.

[GeneralMacArthur]

The British cut off a small chunk of land for the Jews, because the Jews were an ethnic group residing in the region who deserved consideration.  Their presence in the region was lawful and legitimate -- independent of any historical or religious claim to be the rightful indigenous peoples of the land.

Were the British influenced in this decision by the political maneuverings of Zionists, the horrors of the Holocaust, a sympathy towards a biblical historical narrative of the levant, or even in some cases violence and extortion?  Yes they were.  But those circumstances and arguments are not the basis of the case for why Israel exists.  Israel exists for the same reason the states of Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria exist.  Because after the Ottoman Empire fell, everyone on the winning side agreed that Britain and France could decide what to do with its remains, and every state that was subsequently created has been widely recognized as legitimate.  Except for Israel.

that would be true if Israel (a Jewish homeland in Palestine) had been created after WW1 as promised in the Balfour declaration, and if so it would almost certainly have been viewed as a normal country today (and far more Jews would have survived the holocaust), but unfortunately it wasn't, the Arab population had increased a lot by the late 1940s, a lot of blood had been spilled and the international situation was entirely different (Cold War, post-colonialism, United Nations with a General Assembly soon to be dominated by "the Third World" etc.).

Most of the Arab migration to Israel occurred to cities where there were Jewish majorities.  Very little of it was to places that were Arab-dominated and would eventually become the proposal for a "Palestinian" state.

Here is a snippet from Jewish Virtual Library.  Obviously this is a biased source, but the numbers are not debatable.  It is up to you to decide whether you agree with their conclusion that contemporary evidence implies Arab migration to Palestine was because Jewish immigrants dramatically improved quality of life and economic opportunities.

Even a leading Arab nationalist believed the return of the Jews to their homeland would help resuscitate the country. According to Sherif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic Holy Places in Arabia:

"The resources of the country are still virgin soil and will be developed by the Jewish immigrants. One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering over the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine from Russia, Germany, Austria, Spain, America. The cause of causes could not escape those who had a gift of deeper insight. They knew that the country was for its original sons (abna’ihi­l­asliyin), for all their differences, a sacred and beloved homeland. The return of these exiles (jaliya) to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren who are with them in the fields, factories, trades and in all things connected with toil and labor."

As Hussein foresaw, the regeneration of Palestine, and the growth of its population, came only after Jews returned in massive numbers. The Jewish population increased by 470,000 between World War I and World War II while the non-Jewish population rose by 588,000. In fact, the permanent Arab population increased 120 percent between 1922 and 1947 to more than 1.3 million.

This rapid growth was a result of several factors. One was immigration from neighboring states – constituting 37 percent of the total immigration to pre-state Israel – by Arabs who wanted to take advantage of the higher standard of living the Jews had made possible. The Arab population also grew because of the improved living conditions created by the Jews as they drained malarial swamps and brought improved sanitation and health care to the region. Thus, for example, the Muslim infant mortality rate fell from 201 per thousand in 1925 to 94 per thousand in 1945 and life expectancy rose from 37 years in 1926 to 49 in 1943.

The Arab population increased the most in cities with large Jewish populations that had created new economic opportunities. From 1922-­1947, the non-Jewish population increased 290 percent in Haifa, 131 percent in Jerusalem, and 158 percent in Jaffa. The growth in Arab towns was more modest: 42 percent in Nablus, 78 percent in Jenin and 37 percent in Bethlehem.

The point is that this undercuts the notion that the Arab population of pre-state Israel was an indigenous population being displaced by the Jews, and that the dramatic increase in the Arab population between 1918 and 1948 represented a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous Arabs whose presence on the land made the creation of Israel unjust.

In actuality, most of the Arabs in pre-state Israel were not indigenous at all, they were Syrian or Lebanese or Jordanians who saw that there was good land and good economic opportunity in this newly-transformed land being developed by the Jews, and migrated (often illegally) to take advantage of it.  Then once they were in the country, in 1948, they declared that they were indigenous peoples who had a right to a state and that it was a horrible crime to push them out of their homes or force them to live under Israeli law.

You can still see this in effect today.  Arabs who actually live in Israel are mostly content and have no desire to dismantle the state or kill the Jews.  Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank come to Israel seeking economic opportunity and the modern society the Jews created.  These same Arabs who teach their children that Jews are murderous, baby-killing monsters will turn around and beg to take advantage of the Jewish economic and technologically innovations that make the land habitable and capable of sustaining a high living standard today.

Even the notion of an "indigenous Palestinian" is nonsense.  Palestine was just an empty pass-through wasteland of a region under Arab/Ottoman rule, an empty desert full of ruins and the occasional olive grove.  Between 1918 and 1948, its Arab population more than doubled.  The Arabs who lived in Palestine by 1948 were mostly from Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, etc. and had no unifying distinction other than the fact that they happened to live in Palestine on the date when the state of Israel was created.  It's an identity whose entire unifying factor is grievance and hatred of Israel.  If Israel had never existed and Palestine had just been the western 1/4 of Jordan, nobody would call themselves a "Palestinian."

[Ⓐnarchy in the ☭☭☭P!]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid, protecting him from international sanctions for war crimes in the UN, defending him from military intervention from his neighbours and doing everything possible to allow him to extend the war for no clear benefit to anyone except himself

As they say, actions speak louder than words

The point is that this undercuts the notion that the Arab population of pre-state Israel was an indigenous population being displaced by the Jews, and that the dramatic increase in the Arab population between 1918 and 1948 represented a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous Arabs whose presence on the land made the creation of Israel unjust.

In actuality, most of the Arabs in pre-state Israel were not indigenous at all, they were Syrian or Lebanese or Jordanians who saw that there was good land and good economic opportunity in this newly-transformed land being developed by the Jews, and migrated (often illegally) to take advantage of it.  Then once they were in the country, in 1948, they declared that they were indigenous peoples who had a right to a state and that it was a horrible crime to push them out of their homes or force them to live under Israeli law.

Yes, this is the Benny Morris narrative, it's also obviously absurd if you bother to actually look at the statistics.

Specifically, what was the Jewish proportion of the population in the Palestinian Mandate in 1900? How about 1920? Presumably they'd be a shrinking majority at the time if the "mass Arab migration" story was true, right?

and yes, it is a horrible crime to force people out of their homes on the basis that their presence is inconvenient for a demographic majority in a given area. Would you support President David Duke forcibly deporting Latinos to restore the demographic balance America had back in 1965?

If you want to write a long post and expect me to respond to all of it you're going to have to come up with something better than a lame whataboutism and the absurd notion that Israel was the aggressor in the multiple wars of extermination that the Arabs waged against them.

1956:

Israel invaded on 29 October

1967:

On 5 June 1967, as the UNEF was in the process of leaving the zone, Israel launched a series of preemptive airstrikes against Egyptian airfields and other facilities, launching its war effort.[28] Egyptian forces were caught by surprise, and nearly all of Egypt's military aerial assets were destroyed, giving Israel air supremacy. Simultaneously, the Israeli military launched a ground offensive into Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip

What's absurd is how you accuse us of being one-sided when you literally refuse to acknowledge the most basic facts of the conflict. Those of us on the "pro-Palestinian" side have all acknowledged that Hamas engages in terrorism yet you refuse to acknowledge that Irgun, the Haganah and other Zionist groups engaged in terrorism prior to 1947. You won't say it explicitly but you act like Israel is literally blameless and refuse to engage with their long history of aggression and terrorism.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Those of us on the "pro-Palestinian" side have all acknowledged that Hamas engages in terrorism yet you refuse to acknowledge that Irgun, the Haganah and other Zionist groups engaged in terrorism prior to 1947. You won't say it explicitly but you act like Israel is literally blameless and refuse to engage with their long history of aggression and terrorism.

When have I ever defended the Irgun?  I think they were bad dudes.  But that does not delegitimize the reality of the creation of the state of Israel and the authenticity of its right to exist, any moreso than the existence of the Sons of Liberty delegitimizes the American Revolution or America's right to exist.

What do you want me to do about the Irgun?  Nothing, they stopped existing 75 years ago.  Hamas does exist and I want them killed.  You want me to denounce the Irgun?  Fine, I denounce them.  Got any other ancient history you want to dredge up to try and shift away from the horror your Hamas buddies inflict on their victims, both Palestinians and Jews?

I know exactly what you are doing here, you are trying to create a false equivalence between a terrorist group from 75 years ago and a terrorist group that exists today, so you can try and use whataboutisms to defend the 10/7 attack.  It's sickening and disgraceful.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid, protecting him from international sanctions for war crimes in the UN, defending him from military intervention from his neighbours and doing everything possible to allow him to extend the war for no clear benefit to anyone except himself

As they say, actions speak louder than words

What a stupid thing to say.  Should we have cut off funding for the War against ISIS after Donald Trump became president?  And if not, that means we secretly supported Trump?

You are just trolling, even you do not believe that these are good arguments.  Even you do not believe the conclusions you expect other people to draw from the things you're typing.  You're just wasting space on the thread using stupid arguments to start fights with everyone.

[Horus]

Palestinians did not perpetrate the Holocaust

Netanyahu has of course claimed they did, pretty much.

This isn’t the gotcha you guys seem to think it is.  Almost no one in this thread supports Netanyahu and most of the folks who support Israel in its war on Hamas have been criticizing his policies longer than anyone else in the thread.

You don't say you support Netanyahu, you just support sending him unlimited military aid, protecting him from international sanctions for war crimes in the UN, defending him from military intervention from his neighbours and doing everything possible to allow him to extend the war for no clear benefit to anyone except himself

As they say, actions speak louder than words

What a stupid thing to say.  Should we have cut off funding for the War against ISIS after Donald Trump became president?  And if not, that means we secretly supported Trump?

You are just trolling, even you do not believe that these are good arguments.  Even you do not believe the conclusions you expect other people to draw from the things you're typing.  You're just wasting space on the thread using stupid arguments to start fights with everyone.

"Waaah your arguments are stupid"

You sound like such a child. Just expecting everyone to view the world exactly your way. MBD provides receipts for everything he posts. You just argue off of emotion and campism.

What's really weird is that you complain his posts are too long, and then make posts that are even longer (though unlike him you don't link to any sources, it's just walls of rage). Do you think you're the only person "worthy" of making essay length posts?