> Palestine, which extends from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean in the west and from Ras Al-Naqurah in the north to Umm Al-Rashrash in the south, is an integral territorial unit. It is the land and the home of the Palestinian people. The expulsion and banishment of the Palestinian people from their land and the establishment of the Zionist entity therein do not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land and do not entrench any rights therein for the usurping Zionist entity.

Which in the context of the cited request for 1967 borders and right of return, could read to be an additional call for the right of return of Palestinians to the lands within the Israeli side of the 1967 borders.

The Palestinians and Arabs like to pretend they weren't roundly defeated in the only historical wars that currently matter, the Arab-Israeli wars from mid-20th century.

In terms of international relations and power dynamics, the Palestinians have no real basis for any demands, they only can plead with their "allies" in the UN for some diplomatic influence, but they have no rights to holy sites, territory, supplies, money, infrastructure. They cannot functionally threaten the Israelis militarily. They have no economic purpose or key trade function that would curry them favor with other nations.

The one reason the world cares about them as opposed to the Tigray war or Azerbaijan-Armenia in modern terms (heard about them? No? Wonder why) is that they are in the middle east and the world cares about oil.

But the geopolitical significance of oil is waning, and will dramatically wane in the next decade as vast swathes of transportation infrastructure transition to BEVs.

The world does not care about "blessed sacred land". If Saudi Arabia doesn't care about it, no one else will. The current terrorist action was fomented by Iran to disrupt a fairly formalized Israel-Saudi alliance/alignment, and the Sunni Saudis are bigger blood enemies to the Shia Iranians than the Israelis are.

The Palestinians are a defeated people, and do not seem to realize there is a ticking time bomb that has nothing to do with Israel. They exit almost solely at the gracious of Qatar (humanitarian) and Iran (terrorist funding). If that money dried up, they are in very very very serious straits. They have no infrastructure, a limited economy, no trade, and are surrounded on all sides by Israel (who at a minimum distrusts them) or Egypt (who hate Palestinians from their 25 years of overseeing Gaza in the late 20th century).

The money is going to dry up in the next ten years. They have no infrastructure. No resources. No economy or trade. THEY CAN'T GO ANYWHERE. The Gazas (and Palestinians in general) have been on a 70 year long population explosion (think 6-8 children per female on average) that took them from 500k to 3-5 million people, which takes them from "big but manageable humanitarian crisis" to "unsustainable population in a crisis".

The Palestinians need to wake up that Israel, the enemy, is actually their only friend, and they need to make up with them very quickly. Of course they are paid not to be, so that is like the proverbial flying pigs.

Otherwise, they will starve in a horrifying manner.

I suppose we’re going to take Dan, Beersheba, Gath and Ashkelon out of the Bible now

In 637 the non-urban population of Palestine (incl. Galilee) was still majority Jewish - Justinian had only turfed them out of Jerusalem. There was no genocide in 637.

Furthermore, no one elected Hamas as the restoration of the caliphate and spokesperson for entire Muslim world. They’re actually not Isis.

I didn’t say there was a genocide in 637. But they took over the land, just like they took over large parts of the subcontinent. And it’s whiney for them to act like the victims now. It’s like if Mexico somehow took back Texas and California. How much could we really complain?

In Sindh the Buddhists weren't all ill-disposed to them. I know less about Bengal.

Ones in Bengal were less thrilled, what with all the burning down Buddhist monasteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Bakhtiyar_Khalji

I have no problem with Islam’s wars of conquest and civilization. I just find the victimhood mentality that’s been adopted in the 20th century to be undignified for such a culture.

If you think of the current Israel occupation as the latest colonizer in a long line of colonizers throughout the history of Palestine, then the victimhood makes perfect sense. Colonized people often adopt the religion and sometimes even the language of their colonizers. As an example, the Irish adopted the language of the English during their colonization, and the Albanians adopted Islam when they were colonized by the Ottomans. Likewise the Palestinians adopted both the language and (mostly) the religion of the Arabs when they colonized Palestine in 637.

Now when Israel is their colonizer, things are a bit different. Not only has Israel imposed a new language, culture and religion onto their lands, but they have also severely displaced them. No colonizer has done that to the Palestinians in the past, not even the British.

> Now when Israel is their colonizer, things are a bit different. Not only has Israel imposed a new language, culture and religion onto their lands, but they have also severely displaced them. No colonizer has done that to the Palestinians in the past,

Modern Judaism permits conversion but refuses to promote or encourage it, and sometimes even goes out of its way to make it hard (especially some of the more conservative Orthodox). Hence, there has never been any encouragement for Palestinians to convert. It wasn’t always thus - John Hyrcanus forced the Idumeans to convert to Judaism; but that was over 2000 years ago now.

By contrast, Islamic conquerors always encouraged conquered peoples to convert to Islam, through a mixture of carrots and sticks. The same is true of Christianity.

Possibly, this is part of what sustains the Israel-Palestine conflict; if contemporary Judaism were pro-conversion, many of the Palestinians might have already become Jews by now.

Albanians are not even remotely 100% Muslim

Nor does 100% of the Irish speak English as their first language, nor are Palestinians 100% Muslims. The point is that it is not uncommon for colonized nations to adopt the language or the religion of their colonizers, even if the transition is not always—and indeed quite seldomly—complete.

> If you think of the current Israel occupation as the latest colonizer in a long line of colonizers throughout the history of Palestine, then the victimhood makes perfect sense

The Muslims are the colonizers. Israel is just taking their land back. Who built the Temple Mount the Dome of the Rock is sitting on?

What!? No. You don’t get to decide who is colonizing whom. Palestinians have lived on this land for centuries. Yes they were colonized by muslims in the past, but not displaced. They stayed on their land and converted to Islam.

Israelis are not native to this land. Sharing a religion with one of many religions Palestinians have held in the past does not make the land indigenous to anyone except the Palestinians them selves. Just like Roman Catholics are not indigenous to the Vatican, not even the Roman Catholic minority in Romania.

European Jews have been a very real part of European history for dozens of generations. The history of European Jews is indeed a very rich history. They are a culture of their own, some even speak their own Germanic language (Yiddish). They are as European as me (an Icelander) and are indeed indigenous to Europe, not Palestine. The minority of European Jews who migrated to Palestine and later founded their own state on Palestinian lands did so by establishing a colony. This by definition makes them colonizers.

“Who built the Temple Mount the Dome of the Rock is sitting on?” Palestinians did, back before they converted to Islam, back when majority of Palestinians were still Jewish, and probably called the land Judea. Likewise, the Jews built the Temple Mount, back when they lived in historic Palestine. European Jews can claim that their ancestors built the Temple Mount, and they wouldn’t be wrong. In fact they can be proud of their ancestors. However, claiming that European Jews built the Temple Mount, that would be wrong.

This is no different than the question of “Who built the Pyramids?” Egyptians built the Pyramids. When the Egyptians built the Pyramids they practiced a different religion and spoke a different language. Since then they have been colonized multiple times over, by the Greeks, by the Romans, by the Byzantines, by the Umayyad Caliphate, by the Ottomans, by the French, by the British, etc. The Egyptians that built the Pyramids didn’t call them selves Egyptians and they probably didn’t call their land “Egypt”, It was still the Egyptians that built the Pyramids.

First, half the Jewish people in Israel are from the Middle East and Central Asia. Second, Europeans Jews aren’t converts, like European Christians. They’re the descendants of people displaced from Israel by, among others, Arab invaders. They’re returning to their own land.

Do you think Muslims can ever be considered indigenous to the Indian subcontinent? Can Christians? Should they all pack up and leave?

> They’re returning to their own land.

As a matter of academic interest, when would you say the statute of limitations runs out on the right of displaced peoples to reclaim their ancestral lands? If your answer is "it never runs out," then the descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Midianites, and Amalekites† would like a word ....

† According to the Hebrew Bible, the ancient Israelites violently (and genocidally?) displaced these peoples; see, e.g., Num. 31, Josh. 10:40, 11:15. But it's not clearly established that this actually happened.

I have a question for you. What do you think should be done with the "stranded Biharis" in Bangladesh who never took BD citizenship?

Please don't post in the battle style in this thread, as I explained at the top of the thread. It's particularly important with this painful and volatile topic.

You shouldn't be doing that generally on HN, either, and unfortunately your comments (as I've been attempting to communicate to you) have swung too far in the flamewar direction in recent months (or maybe the last year or two, I'm not sure). You've been a good HN contributor for a long time before that, so if you'd please revert to status quo ante, we'd appreciate it.

Was it the snark in the first sentence?

Yes, that plus the overgeneralization in "The Arabs believe" and the overtones of religious flamewar in "affront to Islam".

“The Arabs” are a group of societies that have a readily ascertainable position on Israel and to whom the Holy Land belongs. Whether individual members of those societies might dissent from that view is neither here nor there. Individuals are irrelevant to what’s happening in Israel and Palestine.

Inflammatory and polemical generalizations about ethnic groups aren't a good idea here. Even if you don't intend them that way, there's way too much surface area to land painfully on.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620568.