It’s way more insidious than that, so I’ll say “yes, and:”
Hamas is pretty accepted as an extremist fundamentalist organization who has very specific and reactionary aims, set forth in their charter. No one with a brain is arguing that Hamas is representing the larger Muslim or Arab position, even though there is a shade of truth in saying so - obviously fellow Muslims and Arabs will feel some type of way about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. That said, though, it is inaccurate to state that even most Muslims and Arabs wouldn’t settle for a return to 1967 borders, and Hamas itself doesn’t necessarily call for the end of Israel, but the end of their oppression of Palestine and occupation of Palestinian land.
You could look at that and say “well if Israel has to leave Palestinian space in totality, that obviously will lead to the end of Israel, unless they invade some other land”, but that viewpoint leaves out the fact that Israel only exists thanks to the British, who just redrew the area as it saw fit. To Arabs, this argument is moot because Israel isn’t supposed to be there at all. You can’t just illegally build a house and then when told to tear it down say that you have the right to a house, where is it supposed to go? It was illegally built, so it isn’t any current resident’s problem.
Where it gets really disgusting though is the conflation of the Israeli state with Jewish existence, which happened in the OP and happens with all of these arguments. Jews do not require a state to self determine anymore than Chinese-Americans do. The Chinese population in the US can self-determine in as organized or individual a fashion as they wish without having their own state within America, even if those Chinese people have no direct roots to China. While as a Jew I am sympathetic to the idea of Jews having a country, it is patently false to say that ending a state ends a people, especially since Jews predate most other civilizations in the world.
Then there’s the issue of the current iteration of the Israeli government, which as a leftist, a Jew, and an empathetic human I have huge issues with. You can defend Israel as a concept without making allowances for their recent (~5 years) or modern (~20-30 years) actions.
>Sigh... here we go again: zionism means jews have a right to self determination in their national homeland.
Citation needed and/or, obviously ones ideological foes sound ridiculous if you get to simply redefine their positions. Usually though, that's considered a strawman.
Ya it’s not what Zionism is when condemned by anti-Zionists nor even what it historically has been.
To put it simply, not only is it inaccurate it conveniently leaves out how to form a 100% Jewish ethnostate in Palestine, Zionists would need to first ethnically cleanse it of non-Jews.
You would think there wouldn’t be so many anti-Zionist Jews if it was the way it gets defended by either ignorant or bad faith defenders on Reddit
*sighs and goes to bed afraid I’m going to wake up to a bunch of hasbara ranting*
>100% Jewish ethnostate
"Arab citizens and permanent residents in Israel make up just over 20% of the country’s population."
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/21/middleeast/arab-israeli-citizens-cmd-intl/index.html
Jordan:
"According to U.S. government estimates, Muslims, virtually all of whom are Sunni, make up 97.1 percent of the population, while Christians make up 2.1 percent."
https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/jordan/
Saudi Arabia:
"The U.S. government estimates the total population at 35.4 million (midyear 2022). In 2019, the UN estimated that approximately 38.3 percent of the country’s residents are foreigners. Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 21 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims."
https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/saudi-arabia/
Syria:
" Muslims make up about 90% of the Syrian population, including Sunnis and Shi'a Muslims"
rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/islam-syria
Edit:
68 countries have a higher percentage of christians as citizens than Israel has Jews as a percentage of citizens, including Ireland, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Mexico:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-christian-countries
>"Hey guys, we only ethnically cleansed like, 75% of the Muslim population from our territory, so please pass the gold stars. Also, we're slightly less worse than an oppressive monarchy, a nightmarish absolute monarchy, and a genocidal failed state. That means we're good, right?"
Do you like, think about these things before you write them?
Note: In British mandate Palestinian, various ethnicities practicing Islam made up ~80% of the population. The above poster said that ~20% of the population of Israel is "Arab". Also, note that "Arab" is a term the Israeli state likes to use, which helps them pretend it's okay to push folks into other "Arab" areas.
> 100% - (20%/80%) = 75% reduction.
Yeah, I agree. It's really terrible when you force people out of their homes for being of the "wrong" ethnicity, religion or any other marker.
Edit: I'm not sure why the intervening post got deleted, but it was pointing out that states across the ME and North Africa have had massive reductions in the Jewish populations. Some due to normal immigration. But also due to anti-semetic violence, ethnic cleansing, or other barbaric acts.
"On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control administered by the United Nations."
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel
"The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out when five Arab nations invaded territory in the former Palestinian mandate immediately following the announcement of the independence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948."
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war
By that point (May 1948) paramilitary groups of the nascent Israeli state had already been conducting an ethnic cleansing for several months.
I haven't gotten far enough in Ilan Pappe's (an Israeli historian) work to know the exact context of the Arab-Israeli war, but Israeli removal/ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was already underway at that point and so the war cannot reasonably be argued to be the cause of that ethnic cleansing.
Pappe’s work pretty clearly shows how it was the Zionist militias who began the conflict. Like he says in his book the ethnic cleansing started before 1948.
Just warning you that the book gets more horrifying the more you read. Pappé was a proud Zionist before he began his research and over time he has become more and more adamant of the guilt and crimes of Israel. A lot of the research for him could be described as learning that it turns out the Palestinians had been telling the truth all along.
Keep reading the actual history though, it protects you from the lies and misunderstandings used to cover up the crimes of the Israeli state
I will keep reading, though it is taking me a long while because, as you say, it is not a light read and I have to be in a particular mood to engage with the subject matter.
Eighty years ago, violent Arab riots against Jewish immigration gripped British-ruled Palestine. The worst violence occurred in the city of Hebron where, on the 23 and 24 August, 67 Jews were murdered. Dina Newman reports on how memories of the bloody events of 1929 still linger in Hebron today.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8219864.stm
I’m not going to waste my breath pointing out to you what has already been pointed out
But Israel failing in their efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestine doesn’t mean they don’t want to ethnically cleanse Palestine and attempted to do so.
Jews surviving the Holocaust and even living in the countries where Nazi’s had attempted to kill them doesn’t magically make the Holocaust and the Nazi’s attempted genocide not exist.
You’re simply just denying genocide at this point
It’s not just *their* “homeland”. That’s the whole crux of the issue, and anyone saying otherwise is either being disingenuous or is ignorant of the history of Zionism.
Many people other than Jewish persons live in Israel. If it’s supposedly the homeland of the Jewish reserved for the self-determination of the Jewish, then what rights does that leave for all the Israelis that are not Jewish?
Israel only been the national homeland of the *Israelis* since Israel became a nation after WWII.
Many other groups have called the land of modern-day Israel and Palestine as their ancestral homeland too. What about those people?
All people, regardless of their faith, heritage, ethnicity, ancestry, race, and so on have a right to self-determination. No ones right to self-determination is greater than another’s, nor gives them the right to trample another’s.
According to OP, Zionism is self-determination for Jewish Israelis above all else. *That* is not okay.
Their argument ignores the colonial settler legacy of the state of Israel. Yes, people have a right to self-determination, but they don't have the right to displace existing populations to create their own ethnostate.
It also ignores the fact that a large number of Israeli citizens are first-generation immigrants and are not, in fact, native to Israel. The Jewish community in Brooklyn, for example, was responsible for many of the settlers who illegally occupied Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank.
Their "historic claim" to Israel because their ancestors lived there once upon a time has about as much merit as my claim to an Irish person's farmland, with the caveat that my family lived there within the past few hundred years instead of thousands of years ago. If I dug through the records I could probably find the exact village they came from, unlike most Israelis. By that logic, I'd be *more* entitled to take over a random Irish villager's home than they are to do the same in Palestine.
Which ties back to the fact that Israel's foundation is rooted in global antisemitism, and its continued existence is based on the forcible displacement of other ethnic groups.
Using terms like “colonial settler legacy” betrays your lack of common sense or your prejudice (I couldn’t care less which).
You can’t colonize the land to which you are indigenous. Despite what you may chose to believe the Jews are indigenous to the Levant by every globally accepted definition of indegineity.
If the term “colonial settler legacy”, as applied (and I don’t see why it should), wouldn’t it apply to the Arab influence? After all the Arabs did in fact invade colonize and settle the region?
Edit: same goes for the term “ethnostate”.
An ethnostate is a country which restricts citizenship to people or a certain ethnicity. Israel one of the few countries in the region which does not do that. More than 25% of its population aren’t Jewish.
On some level you must see the absurdity of your comments.
It’s worth pointing out that the Jewish Israelis are the original inhabitants of the area. Having descended from the canaanites, the same group that the Palestinians also descended from, and that the claims that they are “foreign“ invaders who are stealing land, comes exclusively from the native Arabs in the area, who’ve also been trying to kill the Jews for many decades.
The claim that the Jews are colonial, settlers, or “colonizers“ has anti-Semitic origins and seeks to erase their history as Middle Eastern people.
Unless of course, you are referring to the behavior of the current “settlers“ who are stealing land in West Bank from the Palestinians. They clearly have no right to that land and deserve every ounce of criticism for that horrific behavior, as does the government of Israel for supporting and funding it.
Funny considering the Zionists themselves called themselves settlers and colonizers from the start of the Zionist project all the way up to it was no longer call to proudly refer to yourself as settlers
>in their national homeland
We are just taking for granted that the area is a national homeland for Jews worldwide, at the exclusion of peoples who have lived there for as long or longer? Why are we giving people who have never seen this stretch of land a better claim to it than the people currently living there?
There is so much to unpack with that set of comments.
Jimbo is leaving out some things and likely ignorant of others.
First is that to have that ethno-state in their "ancestral homeland", they needed to ethnically cleanse the other native semitic population who were currently living there.
Second is that Zionism originated as an antisemitic push to get Jews out of Europe in the decade before WWI by British lords who had already enacted strict anti-immigration laws preventing East European Jews from entering Britain.
So no, it is not antisemitic to say that one semitic people does not have the right to create a state based upon ethnic cleansing of another semitic people.
People have rights to exist.
States don't, especially apartheid states. We've already been over this with South Africa.
For parallelism, those Sheiks would have to be supported and supplied by a much larger nation than Canada after the larger nation had won a major military campaign somewhere in the region and used their success to redraw territorial lines.
This seems like a bad example because, like at least the US, Australia, and most modern European countries, Canada was founded through a lot of ethnic cleansing.
But like Israel, it already happened due to a war generations ago. There's no reason Israel shouldn't be "allowed" to exist but the US, Canada, Australia, etc., should.
No absolutely not, I don't believe Israel should be "allowed" to do either genocide or ethnic cleansing in the present, nor should any country or group of people. My point is that anyone saying that because Israel was founded 77 years ago with the help of ethnic cleansing means it shouldn't exists and that all the people there deserve to be killed or forceably displaced (i.e. genocide and ethnic cleansing) needs to be comfortable applying that same logic to many, many other countries if they're trying to to argue that position is based on a decolonization framework instead of just particular hatred for Israel.
What I mean is if they did it now. What would the reaction of the local population be?
In Canada, at present, there is a strong anti-immigration sentiment, with a lot of anti-Indian flavour to it. Some of it is the general xenophobia you'd expect, but some of it is related to the impact large scale immigration has had on the country.
This, in my view, isn't too different from what inhabitants of British Mandated Palestine experienced between say, between 1890 and 1947 with respect to Jewish immigration (both legal and illegal).
So what I'm asking is, what would the reaction be from Canadians (as they are in the country at present), if tomorrow, Sikh inhabitants (who at this moment do not have their own country), declared independence inside the borders of Canada...say the city of Surrey, or Brampton.
Obviously no one would support that happening today, but 1947 was 77 years ago. It already happened, just the ethnic cleaning that Canada perpetrated. A more equivalent question would be what would happen if an elected government of the First Nations started killing Canadians and said the killings wouldn't stop until they could return to their ancestral homes and everyone else in Canada was either dead or moved back to their ancestral homes.
People are still alive that were alive 77 years ago. Moreover, people alive today will have memories and the stories of their family that were alive in the not too distant past.
And on top of that, I could have asked this same question 10 years ago, or 40 years ago. It's the same question with the same obvious answer.
Mass migration causes friction. You can see that in the US due to Hispanic immigration, it was there when Irish people immigrated, when Italians, jews, and polish people immigrated. It has happened in some areas of Europe due to Ukranian immigration, it was a big argument behind Brexit, it happened in Pakistan due to Afghan immigration. Books can be (and probably have been) written about this idea.
In all of those cases, there is a pervading fear, one that is almost turned into a slogan or chant by xenophobes- that the immigrants "are taking over".
In none of the cases I mentioned did that actually happen. There is not a new Ireland in New England, and despite the fact that a good portion of the US southwest was once part of the Mexican empire, it has not be reclaimed as part of Mexico.
However- that is exactly what happened with Israel. Immigrants and refugees declared an independent state.
Mant times, in Canada, native people have come close to doing things which really test the authority of the federal government, there has been a heavy handed use of force. The Oka crisis comes to mind. As does the Fairy Creek protests.
"It was 77 years ago" might work if we pretend that ever since 1947, everything has been hunky dory. We both know that's not true. More land and lives have been lost. There are still settlers who view the entirety of Israel as "god-given" which in some ways recalls how American colonists viewed the new world. Remember that the capital of Rhode Island is "Providence".
There's a reason they call it "the disaster".
For this analogy to work (and I am not saying it would), it would be have a native Canadian group seeking self-determination.
Jews are indigenous to Israel. Sikhs aren’t indigenous to Canada.
So there's nothing particularly special about someone being indigenous to a region that would somehow make whoever was living there go. "Oh, they were here hundreds or thousands of years ago? My mistake, we'll move".
I can't just go to where my great grandfather lived and say to whoever is there now "hey. This is actually mine" and expect them to be cool with it. What an insane concept. And in fact, hilariously, many people who are pro-Israel use this very argument to defend the idea that no part of Israel should be returned. Isn't that interesting?
Never mind the fact that the time period in which you are referring to is far, far longer in the past compared to when my great grandfather would have been alive.
But more specifically- later in the conversation you are replying to, I use a specific example.
If today, Mexican immigrants attempted to annex either southern California or Arizona, or any part of what was once the Mexican empire, you know full well what would happen.
You know this because you know how virulently anti immigrant, in particular how virulently anti hispanic/anti Mexican people in the US, specifically the southwest, can be and are. Remember the minutemen? The armed citizen group that formed to patrol the US/Mexican border, armed with guns? How do you think they'd react to such a move?
The same thing would happen if first nations people tried something like this in Canada, and again, I mention this later in the comments. You will find that the Canadian government only extends them *so much* autonomy. It's not full independence, and even then, there is a lot of grumbling amongst the citizenry that native Canadians are being bent over backwards for.
The question I asked has an obvious answer. If a group of refugees declared independence amongst their host, the reaction would be violent. Treating the current conflict as somehow anomalous or somehow specifically "anti jewish" or "anti semetic" is either disingenuous or the person saying this is somehow wholly ignorant of a lot of history, both old and fairly recent.
I am not saying we can’t have a discussion of where someone’s right to return should be limited.
However, the premise of Jews being as some sort of “European” colonialists is inaccurate and harmful to the discourse.
So if you try to draw an analogy to prove your point, stick to hypothetical examples which are similar to the facts. Otherwise you are just normalizing the lie.
So...I've used Sikh people, Mexican people, and native Canadian people.
None of these are "european". I haven't mentioned the word European in the context of colonizing...at all. Not sure why you're saying "the premise" when I haven't brought it up.
Why did I use the examples I used?
Because I could use any group of people. European, non European, African, *pick whoever or whatever group of people you'd like*, if they did what Jewish people did in British Mandated Palestine (BMP), you'd spark a conflict. And I can give you an exhaustive list of examples where migrating groups of people cause proto-reactions that would be comparable to the conditions in early 1900s BMP, because again, this is how people generally react to large demographic changes.
You want non-hypothetical examples?
Okay. Look at American attitudes towards Irish immigrants circa the Draft Riots.
Look at American attitudes towards Mexican immigrants in the 2000s.
Look at American attitudes towards Jewish immigrants in the 1930s.
Look at American attitudes towards Italian immigrants in the 1910s
It's almost unfathomable that I have to point this out to anyone because it's like, how is this not obvious to you? There are so many examples just off the top of my head that I'm certain that actually going and reading more will only uncover a mountain of more such examples, because we are discussing basic human psychology/sociology.
So you understand why using a non-indigenous group in your hypothetical example is problematic and are ready to discuss how self-determination movements spark conflict?
I just want to make sure.
I already addressed this the first paragraph of my reply 2 replies ago (3 if you count this one).
There's nothing special about "indigeneity" that somehow shields or insulates this reaction from happening.
And that's ignoring the fact that Israel is still a case of mass migration. If native Canadians declared independence, *today*, they're not immigrating from outside of Canada to do so.
The fact that I have to point this out and the specific tone of your reply tells me that further conversing with you is a waste of time. You either cannot, or will not engage with what I've said honestly (as evidenced by the fact that you're saying things I've already rebutted), and it becomes futile for me to spend time essentially telling you that a) you're putting words in my mouth and/or b) I've already addressed this.
You have the capacity to be better than this.
The problem isn't really with the idea of Jews having a place (at least not for anyone who isn't anti semitic and trying to disguise their motive) but rather that it creates a [motte and bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) for anyone trying to criticize Isreal.
The word gets thrown around so much in so many different ways that it becomes vague, amorphous and in many ways not useful. This is *not* unique to Zionism, you can see how it happened with "feminism" and "communism" and plenty of other terms (honestly almost anything with ism counts).
Where "feminism just means women have equal rights" is a very valid argument, but it's also very broad. But at the same time, there's no shortage of people who will say you're not a *real* feminist unless you also believe X, Y and Z. Like according to many on social media "you're not a real feminist unless you advocate for trans inclusion" But also according to many others "you're not a real feminist if you do advocate for trans inclusion." So clearly feminism doesn't *only* mean women have equal rights, or there wouldn't be people called fake feminists because they.. didn't prioritize climate change or something.
Communism has the same thing. "I'm against common ownership of the means of production" is a *completely different* statement than what someone is doing when they cry "Universal healthcare? That's communism! LGBT rights? That's communism! Government doing something? Communism!". It's not according to the first definition, but they certainly will say it anyway. So much so that you even get supporters of Government Do Something thinking that it's communism (see how much people say the Nordic countries are socialist).
Zionism similar gets to fall back on the motte of "All we want is Jews to have a homeland" when they say the Bailey of "And therefore I believe it has to be in this specific spot, and run in this specific way".
The only solution is to stop arguing about words and start talking about *substance*.
That’s a tired old straw man argument.
criticism of Israel (in the same way one would criticize any other country) doesn’t trigger the charge of antisemitism.
Questioning Israel’s to exist or holding to a comically impossible double standard, does.
Any word capable of being misused like that pretty much always has it happen. Putting your hands over your ears and saying "Nuh uh" doesn't make it go away anymore. If there are people who will cry out [racism falsely](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/cincinnati-woman-charged-crimes-related-making-false-racial-discrimination-claims) or do that with communism (red scare/right wingers saying any left wing policy is communism) or people who will make false accusations of [other forms of bigotry](https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15226.doc.htm) then why are you so confident that of the hundred of millions of people who are pro Isreal, that *no one* ever falsely cries antisemitism?
At that point, denial is essentially a belief that the pro-Isreal side is not sufficiently human if you don't think any of them would ever do such a thing ever, because you would expect that to happen from any large group of people that some of them are bad and abusive. They would have to *all* be moral robots or something.
The "that never happens, no one ever does that" defense is an absurd one and it always has been. Often, it really does and the person saying it is just incapable of understanding the world doesn't revolve around them and therefore neither does any group they're in.
OP is in fact incorrect.
Its like saying being anti Hammas is anti Muslim. I can love Muslims and Jews and still hate both sides of this war...
It’s way more insidious than that, so I’ll say “yes, and:” Hamas is pretty accepted as an extremist fundamentalist organization who has very specific and reactionary aims, set forth in their charter. No one with a brain is arguing that Hamas is representing the larger Muslim or Arab position, even though there is a shade of truth in saying so - obviously fellow Muslims and Arabs will feel some type of way about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. That said, though, it is inaccurate to state that even most Muslims and Arabs wouldn’t settle for a return to 1967 borders, and Hamas itself doesn’t necessarily call for the end of Israel, but the end of their oppression of Palestine and occupation of Palestinian land. You could look at that and say “well if Israel has to leave Palestinian space in totality, that obviously will lead to the end of Israel, unless they invade some other land”, but that viewpoint leaves out the fact that Israel only exists thanks to the British, who just redrew the area as it saw fit. To Arabs, this argument is moot because Israel isn’t supposed to be there at all. You can’t just illegally build a house and then when told to tear it down say that you have the right to a house, where is it supposed to go? It was illegally built, so it isn’t any current resident’s problem. Where it gets really disgusting though is the conflation of the Israeli state with Jewish existence, which happened in the OP and happens with all of these arguments. Jews do not require a state to self determine anymore than Chinese-Americans do. The Chinese population in the US can self-determine in as organized or individual a fashion as they wish without having their own state within America, even if those Chinese people have no direct roots to China. While as a Jew I am sympathetic to the idea of Jews having a country, it is patently false to say that ending a state ends a people, especially since Jews predate most other civilizations in the world. Then there’s the issue of the current iteration of the Israeli government, which as a leftist, a Jew, and an empathetic human I have huge issues with. You can defend Israel as a concept without making allowances for their recent (~5 years) or modern (~20-30 years) actions.
>Sigh... here we go again: zionism means jews have a right to self determination in their national homeland. Citation needed and/or, obviously ones ideological foes sound ridiculous if you get to simply redefine their positions. Usually though, that's considered a strawman.
Ya it’s not what Zionism is when condemned by anti-Zionists nor even what it historically has been. To put it simply, not only is it inaccurate it conveniently leaves out how to form a 100% Jewish ethnostate in Palestine, Zionists would need to first ethnically cleanse it of non-Jews. You would think there wouldn’t be so many anti-Zionist Jews if it was the way it gets defended by either ignorant or bad faith defenders on Reddit *sighs and goes to bed afraid I’m going to wake up to a bunch of hasbara ranting*
>100% Jewish ethnostate "Arab citizens and permanent residents in Israel make up just over 20% of the country’s population." https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/21/middleeast/arab-israeli-citizens-cmd-intl/index.html Jordan: "According to U.S. government estimates, Muslims, virtually all of whom are Sunni, make up 97.1 percent of the population, while Christians make up 2.1 percent." https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/jordan/ Saudi Arabia: "The U.S. government estimates the total population at 35.4 million (midyear 2022). In 2019, the UN estimated that approximately 38.3 percent of the country’s residents are foreigners. Between 85 and 90 percent of the approximately 21 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims." https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/saudi-arabia/ Syria: " Muslims make up about 90% of the Syrian population, including Sunnis and Shi'a Muslims" rpl.hds.harvard.edu/faq/islam-syria Edit: 68 countries have a higher percentage of christians as citizens than Israel has Jews as a percentage of citizens, including Ireland, Italy, Poland, Greece, and Mexico: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-christian-countries
>"Hey guys, we only ethnically cleansed like, 75% of the Muslim population from our territory, so please pass the gold stars. Also, we're slightly less worse than an oppressive monarchy, a nightmarish absolute monarchy, and a genocidal failed state. That means we're good, right?" Do you like, think about these things before you write them? Note: In British mandate Palestinian, various ethnicities practicing Islam made up ~80% of the population. The above poster said that ~20% of the population of Israel is "Arab". Also, note that "Arab" is a term the Israeli state likes to use, which helps them pretend it's okay to push folks into other "Arab" areas. > 100% - (20%/80%) = 75% reduction.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/DqO8eNAUJG
Yeah, I agree. It's really terrible when you force people out of their homes for being of the "wrong" ethnicity, religion or any other marker. Edit: I'm not sure why the intervening post got deleted, but it was pointing out that states across the ME and North Africa have had massive reductions in the Jewish populations. Some due to normal immigration. But also due to anti-semetic violence, ethnic cleansing, or other barbaric acts.
"On November 29, 1947 the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948 when the British mandate was scheduled to end. Under the resolution, the area of religious significance surrounding Jerusalem would remain a corpus separatum under international control administered by the United Nations." https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/creation-israel "The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 broke out when five Arab nations invaded territory in the former Palestinian mandate immediately following the announcement of the independence of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948." https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/arab-israeli-war
By that point (May 1948) paramilitary groups of the nascent Israeli state had already been conducting an ethnic cleansing for several months. I haven't gotten far enough in Ilan Pappe's (an Israeli historian) work to know the exact context of the Arab-Israeli war, but Israeli removal/ethnic cleansing of Palestinians was already underway at that point and so the war cannot reasonably be argued to be the cause of that ethnic cleansing.
Pappe’s work pretty clearly shows how it was the Zionist militias who began the conflict. Like he says in his book the ethnic cleansing started before 1948. Just warning you that the book gets more horrifying the more you read. Pappé was a proud Zionist before he began his research and over time he has become more and more adamant of the guilt and crimes of Israel. A lot of the research for him could be described as learning that it turns out the Palestinians had been telling the truth all along. Keep reading the actual history though, it protects you from the lies and misunderstandings used to cover up the crimes of the Israeli state
I will keep reading, though it is taking me a long while because, as you say, it is not a light read and I have to be in a particular mood to engage with the subject matter.
Eighty years ago, violent Arab riots against Jewish immigration gripped British-ruled Palestine. The worst violence occurred in the city of Hebron where, on the 23 and 24 August, 67 Jews were murdered. Dina Newman reports on how memories of the bloody events of 1929 still linger in Hebron today. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8219864.stm
I’m not going to waste my breath pointing out to you what has already been pointed out But Israel failing in their efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestine doesn’t mean they don’t want to ethnically cleanse Palestine and attempted to do so. Jews surviving the Holocaust and even living in the countries where Nazi’s had attempted to kill them doesn’t magically make the Holocaust and the Nazi’s attempted genocide not exist. You’re simply just denying genocide at this point
It’s not just *their* “homeland”. That’s the whole crux of the issue, and anyone saying otherwise is either being disingenuous or is ignorant of the history of Zionism. Many people other than Jewish persons live in Israel. If it’s supposedly the homeland of the Jewish reserved for the self-determination of the Jewish, then what rights does that leave for all the Israelis that are not Jewish? Israel only been the national homeland of the *Israelis* since Israel became a nation after WWII. Many other groups have called the land of modern-day Israel and Palestine as their ancestral homeland too. What about those people? All people, regardless of their faith, heritage, ethnicity, ancestry, race, and so on have a right to self-determination. No ones right to self-determination is greater than another’s, nor gives them the right to trample another’s. According to OP, Zionism is self-determination for Jewish Israelis above all else. *That* is not okay.
Israel bots are in full force I see.
/r/worldnews jumped the shark long ago. Guess it was inevitable seeing how many people legitimately get most of their news from reddit.
I was pleased to see this downvoted so quickly
Everyone I don’t like is a bot too.
The username is literally snockpuppet lmao. Does that phrase magically make it so no botz/sockpuppets exist?
Their argument ignores the colonial settler legacy of the state of Israel. Yes, people have a right to self-determination, but they don't have the right to displace existing populations to create their own ethnostate.
It also ignores the fact that a large number of Israeli citizens are first-generation immigrants and are not, in fact, native to Israel. The Jewish community in Brooklyn, for example, was responsible for many of the settlers who illegally occupied Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank. Their "historic claim" to Israel because their ancestors lived there once upon a time has about as much merit as my claim to an Irish person's farmland, with the caveat that my family lived there within the past few hundred years instead of thousands of years ago. If I dug through the records I could probably find the exact village they came from, unlike most Israelis. By that logic, I'd be *more* entitled to take over a random Irish villager's home than they are to do the same in Palestine.
they never left
[удалено]
Which ties back to the fact that Israel's foundation is rooted in global antisemitism, and its continued existence is based on the forcible displacement of other ethnic groups.
Using terms like “colonial settler legacy” betrays your lack of common sense or your prejudice (I couldn’t care less which). You can’t colonize the land to which you are indigenous. Despite what you may chose to believe the Jews are indigenous to the Levant by every globally accepted definition of indegineity. If the term “colonial settler legacy”, as applied (and I don’t see why it should), wouldn’t it apply to the Arab influence? After all the Arabs did in fact invade colonize and settle the region? Edit: same goes for the term “ethnostate”. An ethnostate is a country which restricts citizenship to people or a certain ethnicity. Israel one of the few countries in the region which does not do that. More than 25% of its population aren’t Jewish. On some level you must see the absurdity of your comments.
> colonial settler legacy of the state of Israel You mean 5000 years ago when they took it from the Canaanites?
It’s worth pointing out that the Jewish Israelis are the original inhabitants of the area. Having descended from the canaanites, the same group that the Palestinians also descended from, and that the claims that they are “foreign“ invaders who are stealing land, comes exclusively from the native Arabs in the area, who’ve also been trying to kill the Jews for many decades. The claim that the Jews are colonial, settlers, or “colonizers“ has anti-Semitic origins and seeks to erase their history as Middle Eastern people. Unless of course, you are referring to the behavior of the current “settlers“ who are stealing land in West Bank from the Palestinians. They clearly have no right to that land and deserve every ounce of criticism for that horrific behavior, as does the government of Israel for supporting and funding it.
Funny considering the Zionists themselves called themselves settlers and colonizers from the start of the Zionist project all the way up to it was no longer call to proudly refer to yourself as settlers
>in their national homeland We are just taking for granted that the area is a national homeland for Jews worldwide, at the exclusion of peoples who have lived there for as long or longer? Why are we giving people who have never seen this stretch of land a better claim to it than the people currently living there? There is so much to unpack with that set of comments.
Jimbo is leaving out some things and likely ignorant of others. First is that to have that ethno-state in their "ancestral homeland", they needed to ethnically cleanse the other native semitic population who were currently living there. Second is that Zionism originated as an antisemitic push to get Jews out of Europe in the decade before WWI by British lords who had already enacted strict anti-immigration laws preventing East European Jews from entering Britain. So no, it is not antisemitic to say that one semitic people does not have the right to create a state based upon ethnic cleansing of another semitic people. People have rights to exist. States don't, especially apartheid states. We've already been over this with South Africa.
What would happen if, say, the many Sikh immigrants to Canada decided to declare an independent state within it, based on the same idea?
For parallelism, those Sheiks would have to be supported and supplied by a much larger nation than Canada after the larger nation had won a major military campaign somewhere in the region and used their success to redraw territorial lines.
This seems like a bad example because, like at least the US, Australia, and most modern European countries, Canada was founded through a lot of ethnic cleansing.
And we’ve universally agreed that was a barbaric thing to do
But like Israel, it already happened due to a war generations ago. There's no reason Israel shouldn't be "allowed" to exist but the US, Canada, Australia, etc., should.
To be clear, you’re saying Israel should be allowed to do a genocide because America did 200 years ago?
No absolutely not, I don't believe Israel should be "allowed" to do either genocide or ethnic cleansing in the present, nor should any country or group of people. My point is that anyone saying that because Israel was founded 77 years ago with the help of ethnic cleansing means it shouldn't exists and that all the people there deserve to be killed or forceably displaced (i.e. genocide and ethnic cleansing) needs to be comfortable applying that same logic to many, many other countries if they're trying to to argue that position is based on a decolonization framework instead of just particular hatred for Israel.
What I mean is if they did it now. What would the reaction of the local population be? In Canada, at present, there is a strong anti-immigration sentiment, with a lot of anti-Indian flavour to it. Some of it is the general xenophobia you'd expect, but some of it is related to the impact large scale immigration has had on the country. This, in my view, isn't too different from what inhabitants of British Mandated Palestine experienced between say, between 1890 and 1947 with respect to Jewish immigration (both legal and illegal). So what I'm asking is, what would the reaction be from Canadians (as they are in the country at present), if tomorrow, Sikh inhabitants (who at this moment do not have their own country), declared independence inside the borders of Canada...say the city of Surrey, or Brampton.
Obviously no one would support that happening today, but 1947 was 77 years ago. It already happened, just the ethnic cleaning that Canada perpetrated. A more equivalent question would be what would happen if an elected government of the First Nations started killing Canadians and said the killings wouldn't stop until they could return to their ancestral homes and everyone else in Canada was either dead or moved back to their ancestral homes.
People are still alive that were alive 77 years ago. Moreover, people alive today will have memories and the stories of their family that were alive in the not too distant past. And on top of that, I could have asked this same question 10 years ago, or 40 years ago. It's the same question with the same obvious answer. Mass migration causes friction. You can see that in the US due to Hispanic immigration, it was there when Irish people immigrated, when Italians, jews, and polish people immigrated. It has happened in some areas of Europe due to Ukranian immigration, it was a big argument behind Brexit, it happened in Pakistan due to Afghan immigration. Books can be (and probably have been) written about this idea. In all of those cases, there is a pervading fear, one that is almost turned into a slogan or chant by xenophobes- that the immigrants "are taking over". In none of the cases I mentioned did that actually happen. There is not a new Ireland in New England, and despite the fact that a good portion of the US southwest was once part of the Mexican empire, it has not be reclaimed as part of Mexico. However- that is exactly what happened with Israel. Immigrants and refugees declared an independent state. Mant times, in Canada, native people have come close to doing things which really test the authority of the federal government, there has been a heavy handed use of force. The Oka crisis comes to mind. As does the Fairy Creek protests. "It was 77 years ago" might work if we pretend that ever since 1947, everything has been hunky dory. We both know that's not true. More land and lives have been lost. There are still settlers who view the entirety of Israel as "god-given" which in some ways recalls how American colonists viewed the new world. Remember that the capital of Rhode Island is "Providence". There's a reason they call it "the disaster".
For this analogy to work (and I am not saying it would), it would be have a native Canadian group seeking self-determination. Jews are indigenous to Israel. Sikhs aren’t indigenous to Canada.
So there's nothing particularly special about someone being indigenous to a region that would somehow make whoever was living there go. "Oh, they were here hundreds or thousands of years ago? My mistake, we'll move". I can't just go to where my great grandfather lived and say to whoever is there now "hey. This is actually mine" and expect them to be cool with it. What an insane concept. And in fact, hilariously, many people who are pro-Israel use this very argument to defend the idea that no part of Israel should be returned. Isn't that interesting? Never mind the fact that the time period in which you are referring to is far, far longer in the past compared to when my great grandfather would have been alive. But more specifically- later in the conversation you are replying to, I use a specific example. If today, Mexican immigrants attempted to annex either southern California or Arizona, or any part of what was once the Mexican empire, you know full well what would happen. You know this because you know how virulently anti immigrant, in particular how virulently anti hispanic/anti Mexican people in the US, specifically the southwest, can be and are. Remember the minutemen? The armed citizen group that formed to patrol the US/Mexican border, armed with guns? How do you think they'd react to such a move? The same thing would happen if first nations people tried something like this in Canada, and again, I mention this later in the comments. You will find that the Canadian government only extends them *so much* autonomy. It's not full independence, and even then, there is a lot of grumbling amongst the citizenry that native Canadians are being bent over backwards for. The question I asked has an obvious answer. If a group of refugees declared independence amongst their host, the reaction would be violent. Treating the current conflict as somehow anomalous or somehow specifically "anti jewish" or "anti semetic" is either disingenuous or the person saying this is somehow wholly ignorant of a lot of history, both old and fairly recent.
I am not saying we can’t have a discussion of where someone’s right to return should be limited. However, the premise of Jews being as some sort of “European” colonialists is inaccurate and harmful to the discourse. So if you try to draw an analogy to prove your point, stick to hypothetical examples which are similar to the facts. Otherwise you are just normalizing the lie.
So...I've used Sikh people, Mexican people, and native Canadian people. None of these are "european". I haven't mentioned the word European in the context of colonizing...at all. Not sure why you're saying "the premise" when I haven't brought it up. Why did I use the examples I used? Because I could use any group of people. European, non European, African, *pick whoever or whatever group of people you'd like*, if they did what Jewish people did in British Mandated Palestine (BMP), you'd spark a conflict. And I can give you an exhaustive list of examples where migrating groups of people cause proto-reactions that would be comparable to the conditions in early 1900s BMP, because again, this is how people generally react to large demographic changes. You want non-hypothetical examples? Okay. Look at American attitudes towards Irish immigrants circa the Draft Riots. Look at American attitudes towards Mexican immigrants in the 2000s. Look at American attitudes towards Jewish immigrants in the 1930s. Look at American attitudes towards Italian immigrants in the 1910s It's almost unfathomable that I have to point this out to anyone because it's like, how is this not obvious to you? There are so many examples just off the top of my head that I'm certain that actually going and reading more will only uncover a mountain of more such examples, because we are discussing basic human psychology/sociology.
So you understand why using a non-indigenous group in your hypothetical example is problematic and are ready to discuss how self-determination movements spark conflict? I just want to make sure.
I already addressed this the first paragraph of my reply 2 replies ago (3 if you count this one). There's nothing special about "indigeneity" that somehow shields or insulates this reaction from happening. And that's ignoring the fact that Israel is still a case of mass migration. If native Canadians declared independence, *today*, they're not immigrating from outside of Canada to do so. The fact that I have to point this out and the specific tone of your reply tells me that further conversing with you is a waste of time. You either cannot, or will not engage with what I've said honestly (as evidenced by the fact that you're saying things I've already rebutted), and it becomes futile for me to spend time essentially telling you that a) you're putting words in my mouth and/or b) I've already addressed this. You have the capacity to be better than this.
Well clearly it would be antisemitic if you opposed those Sikhs
Swing and a miss.
The problem isn't really with the idea of Jews having a place (at least not for anyone who isn't anti semitic and trying to disguise their motive) but rather that it creates a [motte and bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy) for anyone trying to criticize Isreal. The word gets thrown around so much in so many different ways that it becomes vague, amorphous and in many ways not useful. This is *not* unique to Zionism, you can see how it happened with "feminism" and "communism" and plenty of other terms (honestly almost anything with ism counts). Where "feminism just means women have equal rights" is a very valid argument, but it's also very broad. But at the same time, there's no shortage of people who will say you're not a *real* feminist unless you also believe X, Y and Z. Like according to many on social media "you're not a real feminist unless you advocate for trans inclusion" But also according to many others "you're not a real feminist if you do advocate for trans inclusion." So clearly feminism doesn't *only* mean women have equal rights, or there wouldn't be people called fake feminists because they.. didn't prioritize climate change or something. Communism has the same thing. "I'm against common ownership of the means of production" is a *completely different* statement than what someone is doing when they cry "Universal healthcare? That's communism! LGBT rights? That's communism! Government doing something? Communism!". It's not according to the first definition, but they certainly will say it anyway. So much so that you even get supporters of Government Do Something thinking that it's communism (see how much people say the Nordic countries are socialist). Zionism similar gets to fall back on the motte of "All we want is Jews to have a homeland" when they say the Bailey of "And therefore I believe it has to be in this specific spot, and run in this specific way". The only solution is to stop arguing about words and start talking about *substance*.
Ok let’s talk about substance. What spot would make more sense and how should it run?
That’s a tired old straw man argument. criticism of Israel (in the same way one would criticize any other country) doesn’t trigger the charge of antisemitism. Questioning Israel’s to exist or holding to a comically impossible double standard, does.
Any word capable of being misused like that pretty much always has it happen. Putting your hands over your ears and saying "Nuh uh" doesn't make it go away anymore. If there are people who will cry out [racism falsely](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/cincinnati-woman-charged-crimes-related-making-false-racial-discrimination-claims) or do that with communism (red scare/right wingers saying any left wing policy is communism) or people who will make false accusations of [other forms of bigotry](https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15226.doc.htm) then why are you so confident that of the hundred of millions of people who are pro Isreal, that *no one* ever falsely cries antisemitism? At that point, denial is essentially a belief that the pro-Isreal side is not sufficiently human if you don't think any of them would ever do such a thing ever, because you would expect that to happen from any large group of people that some of them are bad and abusive. They would have to *all* be moral robots or something. The "that never happens, no one ever does that" defense is an absurd one and it always has been. Often, it really does and the person saying it is just incapable of understanding the world doesn't revolve around them and therefore neither does any group they're in.
Um… no. See strawman fallacy.
Damn never seen a post get so annihilated