It absolutely does. It doesn't deserve to deny the existence of another country, Palestine, though.

Good thing that it doesn't. Palestine became a country with thanks to Israel and Oslo Accords for the first time in history.

Cant they just stop killing each other?

I dont believe in made up books saying "this is your promised land"

I also dont believe in madeup books saying ",kill jews"

Just stop landgrabbing and/or killing each other jeez.

Defending Israel is such an NPC mentality, theres no good guys in that war they both commit atrocities.

That’s a big ask. How disproportionate do you think the US response would be to people launching rockets into our country? My guess is that we would kill the majority of them. I don’t think it’s fair to ask Israel to sit on their hands while they are attacked.

If Native Americans being put into reservations against their will, being evicted from their homes, being treated as second class people, were launching rockets at US civilians, the US would retaliate, sure. But both parties would be in the wrong, same as Israel/Palestine.

> being evicted from their homes

Just FYI, most of evictions Israel is doing are against jewish settlers, not arabs.

> Just stop landgrabbing and/or killing each other jeez.

Both sides think the land belongs to them as both sides inhabited the same land for hundreds* of years. Which side is doing the grabbing then turns into a judgement call.

* - Going by Wikipedia, Muslims Arabs since ~600CE and some form of Israelis since ~1200BCE.

Both sides inhabited the land for hundreds of years is a nice principle.

The reality is that before the EXPLICITLY colonialist movement of Zionism, there was a small Jewish community there. A small amount of people compared to the overwhelmingly Muslim population.

The waste majority of current population has immigrated from Europe and the Soviet Union.

And of course because the Zionists know that they enacted a law that states that basically everybody who is even vaguely Jewish is free to live there and a lot of them are then settled in the West Bank.

At the same time the countless Muslims who actually lived there, in 1948 and their kids have no rights to return at all.

So according to the current Israeli law, a person who has hasn't grown up Jewish but has Jewish grand parent has a right to live their, but the children of the people displaced in 1948 don't.

Ethnically they’re the same group of Semitic peoples that have lived in Canaanite land since the late Neolithic

Can you show some data on that? Because a huge amount of the people there are from Western and Central Europe or the former Soviet Union. Those people might have some traces ethnically with people who were still there, but they lived away from there for almost 2000 years.

The best example are the Mizrahi, who never left Palestine.

The Israelites go back to the Bronze Age. They are from a couple of Semitic cities in the Canaanite levant. The same group that spawned phonecians and a bunch of other Mediterranean peoples who colonized much of northern africa and Southern Europe in addition to Anatolia

I certainty don't deny (as some people do) that there were no Jews anymore in Ottoman Palestine.

Then are you saying that if Israel displaces all of the currently present Palestinians and then holds on to the land for 1400-2000 years, they become the rightful owners of that land?

Yes. If in 4000 a bunch of Palestinians show up that used to live in China and start murdering and oppressing people because of what happened to their ancestors I would be against it.

Specially when essentially all of these Palestinians that lived in China had no intention or interest in ever going back to Palestine.

And then one day a dude shows up, and says, "Hey one could argue based on some not very historical evidence that X place is our homeland, so lets just go there and steal that land".

Just as if a bunch of British people had colonized East Africa with the idea of reconquering their homeland.

Most of the developed world doesn't recognize Palestine.

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

If by most of the developed world you mean western colonists, then no shit

That's a nice fiction to hold on to. The reality is that the West Bank is cut up into zones, its more like a lot of islands with some limited self governments (that are dominated and corrupted by Israel) with Israel controlling all internal travel and Israel is constantly taking more of the land step by step for 40 years.

If its a country, then its boarders are being moved step by step every year.

So it not really a country in any sense other then by a few people who want to claim Israel is not an apartheid state.

Many will argue that settler-colonialist state based on religion does not have automatic right to exist similar to how white Rhodesia or apartheid South Africa (which used to be big friend of Israel) did not have right to exist and do not exist anymore.

What is also true is that jewish, muslim, christian and atheist/other religions living in current territory of Israel and Palestine have right to peacefully live in future state that treat all people equally. With Israeli settlements we are way pass the point of two state solution.

> settler-colonialist state based on religion

Are you referring to Jewish colonialists coming to British ruled Palestine in the early 20th century, Muslim colonialists conquering Byzantine ruled Palestina in the early 7th century, Roman colonialists that exiled Jews and renamed the area Palestina in the early 2nd century after previous conquest, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians or Egyptians?

Or maybe how according to the bible the Israelites conquered the area from the native Canaanites? (Which at least according to Wikipedia is a myth and they actually are those Canaanites)

> With Israeli settlements we are way pass the point of two state solution.

Sadly, English Wikipedia has very little information on the peace agreement that was almost signed at the time of the Annapolis Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Conference compared to the Hebrew entry on the peace talks themselves https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%97%D7%95%D7%AA... Those talks outline the (pretty obvious) path to pece via territory exchange and the fact they were very close to being signed show to me that maybe common ground can be found again.

My personal hope is that the more unreasonable settlements will just be exchanged away and thus won't pose a serious barrier to peace. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

To inject some pessimism, I also don't see how a peace agreement can be signed with Hammas and the PIJ in control as in my mind a peace agreement will probably cause them to implode.

The Israelites are from a couple of the Canaanite cities. They conquered their neighbors who were also canaanites. Many of the cities focused worship on different gods in the Canaanite pantheon. The Israelites had gone to the extreme of denying all deities who weren’t the one they worshiped.

Well we can't do much about what the Romans did. Muslim empires conquered Palestine in the 7th century yes, but they didn't widely displace the population. And even in the case of the roman, there was a large diaspora within the roman empire at the time, but not really a whole lot of systematic population replacment.

The colonists movement called Zionism (that is historically closely interlinked with other colonialist movement and has been ever since) that started after WW1 and hit its peak after WW2 and in 1948 quite clearly and explicitly have the goal of whole sale population replacement of the whole region.

The dominate right wing parties plans as far as we can tell is to import as many 'Jewish' people as they can and hope to decrease the amount of people in the West Bank and Gaza. They have pretty clear and deliberate strategy of long term ethnic cleanings, converting land that they agree in theory was gone be Palestinian and settling Israeli citizens on.

If there were Muslim empires from Persia invading Palestine still today, we should fight against that as well but that is long gone. However Israeli colonialism is still fully active and pushing forward literally every day.

As many people have already noted, Israel has practically made a two state solution impossible. The West Bank has been so carved up and systematically been destroyed as a viable state territory that its really can no longer function as such.

The Annapolis Conference was not close to solving anything, it was just another attempt at pressuring Palestinians to politically give more concessions. Bush and his Neo-Con allies had absolute no interest what so ever in a real Palestinian state. In fact Bush did nothing to prevent massive expansion of settlements during his terms and his presidency ended any series possibility of a real 2 state solution.

Zionism started way before WWI

I understand that but not until WW1 was it really in-acted at any kind of scale.

No, but the initial steps were the hardest, they started the ball rolling. It was the initial early steps showed that the Zionist project in Palestine was viable. Then around WWI jews and arabs started to flock to Palestine.

The boycotts are not to destroy Israel as a country but to stop Israel colonialism and its virtual imprisonment of millions of people in Gaza plus its systematic exploitation and imprisonment of people in the West Bank.

countries are weird things. crafted out of contest, power, emphasis (and cultivation) of differences between groups of people, etc.