Lots of countries have similar sorts of histories I think; while I'm sure what you say is part of the equation, I think it doesn't fully explain why Americans are much more likely to support Israel than people in other countries (for instance, Australia.) I think another piece of this puzzle is the popularity of Evangelical Christianity in America, particularly Christian Zionism and the belief that the state of Israel is a necessary precondition for the return of their Messiah. That's the sort of rhetoric I was raised with anyway.

It's rooted in British Israelism [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Israelism

That's an absolutely wild read. I've never heard of this before today, thanks.

It is hard to say Israel has less right to the land it took over than say New Zealand. The main difference is how long ago the settling happened.

In that case Israel should follow New Zealand's example and allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews, stop with the racism and start behaving like the progressive country they pretend to be.

> allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews

If that happened, then Palestinians would outnumber Jews and could dominate the country democratically. I can understand the potential for discrimination.

That's why the two state solution is often considered the only just solution: Both groups each have a country in which they are the majority.

The Israeli right rejects the two state solution, and clearly they reject being a minority, so that only leaves oppression of Palestinians (which is awful and unjust, to avoid any doubt).

> the progressive country they pretend to be

Israel hasn't pretended to be progressive in awhile. Netanyahu and some of his predecessors made no pretenses about it.

>If that happened, then Palestinians would outnumber Jews and could dominate the country democratically

This is only a problem because they want a religious ethnostate, not a secular democracy.

Apartheid south africa wanted the same thing.

> The Israeli right rejects the two state solution, and clearly they reject being a minority, so that only leaves oppression of Palestinians (which is awful and unjust, to avoid any doubt).

Actually I'm fairly sure it could have happened at some point if it hadn't been loudly rejected by Arabs.

> The Israeli right rejects the two state solution

It's the PA who always refused to discuss peace, you should check your facts.

> In that case Israel should follow New Zealand's example and allow all Palestinians to become citizens, with full rights, stop being an ethnostate for Jews,

This would have been somewhat reasonable if it hadn't been for the fact that Jews have been driven out from neighboring countries in larger number than Arabs from Israel.

And it comes down to it: the logic of progressivism inherently demands the end of Israel because it can’t conscience the notion of an ethnostate.

I'm not sure this is the mic drop you think it is, since what you're pushing back on here is the idea that Palestinians living in Israel should be allowed to simultaneously remain in their homes and have full political rights and agency. Which of those two things do you disagree with?

You're excluding the middle a lot in these comments, suggesting that the only two valid perspectives on this conflict are "Israel must be an exclusionary ethnostate" and "Hamas is a legitimate actor". It's possible to disagree with both of those statements. People who stick up for Hamas are dumb. Ethnostates are immoral.

There’s nothing immoral about ethnostates. Not every country needs to be a multiethnic democracy like the US. I agree certain human rights must be respected, but there’s nothing wrong with Israel being structured as a homeland for Jews. To assert otherwise is to elevate notions of non-discrimination above the right to self-determination. My parents’ generation fought a war with Pakistan to have a home for Bangladeshis. (The ethnic group is in the name of the country!) If there was any risk of Bangladeshis losing political control of the country, they’d be entirely within their rights to prevent that.

>Ethnostates are immoral.

Following this logic you may also believe families are immoral.

In fact I do not.

End of Israel _as an entho-state_, which is not necessarily end of Israel as a state.

If Nazi Germany could turn into regular Germany, one of the most progressive nations on Earth, so can anyone else.

> If Nazi Germany could turn into regular Germany,

It didn’t, really; it was destroyed, and the destroyers erected states of their own design on its ruins.

Israel hasn’t picked fights with the right people for it to end up the way Nazi Germany did if it loses.

Israel is an ethnostate. Ending that would mean it’s not Israel.

Perhaps they ought to set up their constitution to have a military pledged to the maintenance of a purely secular state that will overthrow any overtly religious government, no matter the electoral margins they earned when getting installed.

Or they could do what Lebanon does and have some mandatory representation from all ethnic groups in all important public institutions. There are definitely ways to make this work, if there is a true willingness to live in peace.

Lebanon doesn't seem like such an appealing model ...

What are you talking about? Arabs ARE represented in the Knesset.

> a military pledged to the maintenance of a purely secular state that will overthrow any overtly religious government

That's an idea with a very bad history and no political legitimacy: What grounds does a general have to tell their neighbors what to do? Nobody voted for them. What stops the general from arbitrarily wielding that power?

Why vest that power in the military? A civilian institution could make the decision, such as a court interpreting a constitution.

I think you're being naive because the military always has that power, regardless of what people want to pretend. What would make it legitmate is that the people agreed to it ahead of time.

> the military always has that power, regardless of what people want to pretend

Maybe in your fantasies, but not in advanced democracies. Nobody would follow those orders; there's no evidence of it ever happening, in centuries. Technically, the people of Washington DC have the power to overthrow the government if they all rush the seats of power at the same time, but really they don't.

There have been hundreds of coup d'etat and attempts at such in "advanced democracies." And if you're trying to claim they aren't advanced if they haven't had a coup d'etat then there's just no true Scotsman, is there?

When? Where? I suppose it could depend on definitions of 'advanced' democracies, but it ain't happening in the modern US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, S. Korea, Canada, Australia, etc. etc.

No it doesn't.

> In Judaism, "chosenness" is the belief that the Jews, via descent from the ancient Israelites, are the chosen people, i.e. selected to be in a covenant with God.

> This view, however, does not always preclude a belief that God has a relationship with other peoples—rather, Judaism held that God had entered into a covenant with all humankind, and that Jews and non-Jews alike have a relationship with God. Biblical references as well as rabbinic literature support this view: Moses refers to the "God of the spirits of all flesh",[4] and the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) also identifies prophets outside the community of Israel. Based on these statements, some rabbis theorized that, in the words of Nethanel ibn Fayyumi, a Yemenite Jewish theologian of the 12th century, "God permitted to every people something he forbade to others...[and] God sends a prophet to every people according to their own language."(Levine, 1907/1966)

> The Mishnah continues, and states that anyone who kills or saves a single human, not Jewish, life, has done the same (save or kill) to an entire world. The Tosefta, an important supplement to the Mishnah,[5] also states: "Righteous people of all nations have a share in the world to come" (Sanhedrin 105a).

Which part of this is about racial supremacy?

I just want to point out that this nonsense is Islamophobia and should not be tolerated. Muslims are no less people than anyone else. They are not the cartoonish evil character that you believe them to be.

>I just want to point out that this nonsense is Islamophobia and should not be tolerated. Muslims are no less people than anyone else. They are not the cartoonish evil character that you believe them to be.

He said progressive. Progressive doesn't mean "not evil", it means progressive. Can you name a single Muslim-majority country that allows gay marriage?

>Can you name a single Muslim-majority country that allows gay marriage?

I think that's a false dichotomy. The question is not if a country is a Muslim-majority country or a Christian-majority country, but if it's secular enough or not.

Arabs can be full Israeli citizens, many are being one of the main political parties is an Arab party.

Or do you mean citizens in Palestine? Why would Israel make the Palestinians in Gaza full citizens when That’s separate territory from Israel?

> Why would Israel make the Palestinians in Gaza full citizens when That’s separate territory from Israel?

1) most of Palestine and Palestinians are not in Gaza, bug in the West Bank

2) if Palestine is separate territory from Israel, why Israel builds its roads and cities on it?

You never answer my question - why would Israel give full citizenship to people in Gaza and let’s add on top parts (Area C) of the West Bank entirely controlled by the Palestinian Authority?

And the funny part is, the reason Israel control parts of the West Bank is because they were attacked in 3 wars (1948, 1967, 1972) and won.

You are not going to get any answers and your questions/responses will be downvoted and hidden because you are questioning the propaganda

New Zealand is a bad example to use, given that it's one of the few cases where settlement was based on a non-coerced treaty intended to actively integrate the native people as equal citizens with the settlers. While the NZ government later spent about a hundred years ignoring the treaty and treating the Maori badly, the treaty itself, the process that led to it, and the actions of the settler leaders at the time of its signing had a legitimacy that most other cases of colonization and settlement (including that of Israel) have generally lacked.

Israel has a lack of legitimacy?

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

There's a little difference though... There wasn't an English state in New Zealand since about 10th century BCE.

If we say you can claim land your people held in the 10th century the globe is in trouble.

"in" and "since" is somewhat different. Do Chinese have a claim on China? Do Japanese have a claim on Japan? Are Spaniards OK to live in Spain? Are Jews ok to live in Judea?

Looks like for all of these questions the answer is "duh, yes for sure" - except for the last one. I wonder...

The Romans destroyed the Jewish state and renamed the area. I don't celebrate that but I'm sure that there has not been a Jewish state since the 10th century. That is the difference.

Yes, that's correct.

Except Pakeha aren't carpet-bombing Maori in droves.

Do you not realize how dumb this makes you sound?

Hacker News is for a different sort of discussion than this, as the site guidelines make clear: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You can't break them like this, regardless of how dumb something sounds or you feel it sounds. We ban accounts that do that, and since you've already done this at least once elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27642465) I've banned this account.

If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Jews and christians were there before Islam even existed and Arabs invade. Talking about propaganda, indeed the craziest of the world is Pallywood because it's so blunt, using takkia like this will give good points to go to heaven faster.

I'm from Algeria so I could go on all day long and even complain about the Arabs of FLN who stripped my grand parents from their lands.

But instead, I'd rather complain about how silly a lot of people are, eating pallywood propaganda without a single doubt, I mean, it's not like this article was showing the posts in question at all, the mere partial description they made of it are tailored to correspond the propaganda, really is there someone to believe that using the word "resist" online is enough to get an Israeli arrest?

> I will not succumb to the “peaceful solution,”

Yeah, maybe they were arrested for incitation because of the part that was before the "resist" line pointed by this article. So that's some nice takkia right there, all this to get some good points, and y'all fall for it like school kids, that's so cute!

That’s a hilarious assertion. One of the things we found puzzling when we moved here was why Americans spent so much time in school studying all the bad things the country did. Totally bizarre to us, coming from Asia.

Which bad things should we stop studying in school?

Why wouldn't we want to learn from our mistakes? Ignoring past mistakes is a recipe to repeat them.

German students are taught about the Holocaust for the same reason.

I’m making a different point. The idea that Americans whitewash their history is absurd compared how kids are educated in nearly the whole rest of the world.

I don’t have any issues with teaching about American history and things that were done that were wrong (in hindsight or at the time).

But what you might be referring to is this bizarre self-flagellation that has grown in popularity which focuses exclusively on the errors and ignores any of the good things about America.

My personal opinion is it’s because the people doing it want to remake America - throw away the old and create a “more just” society (obviously following their politics).

If you can use this self-criticism to destroy the foundation of America (through association) you can get rid of those pesky ideals preventing you from transforming society. Things like individual freedom, personal responsibility, inalienable rights, judging the individuals by their own actions and not the sins of their ancestors, etc.