[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
Remind yourself, this is the UN: https://youtu.be/narPqy6TXhQ?feature=shared
I’m not even sure what accusation you deny. Quote the accusation I made you have a problem with.
The history books don’t mention the Nakba and civilian casualty statistics in Gaza are dismissed as Hamas propaganda.
And I don’t mean to suggest Israel is unique in this. There are many parallels for instance with American “world police” patriotism.
I think recent events have taught this to Israel without any help from propagandists.
So the combination having to destroy Hamas and the unwillingness of other countries to take refugees is terrible for hapless civilians.
Problem is history shows "temporary" displacement tend to become permanent displacement (AKA Ethnic cleansing) under the current settler-apartheid regime ruling Israel, so other countries understandably refrain to abet ethnic cleansing.
Why should other countries bear the burden and costs for a problem that is overwhelmingly a consequence of the actions of the Israeli state in general, and the current far-right government in particular?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...
I don’t understand why people think this is a good argument. Lots and lots of places shifted in control since 1948. Poland moved half a country to the left, world empires got decolonized, India and Pakistan split and then the latter split once more, all with enormous population movements, the list is nearly endless. “All of that should revert to how it was before, even if at the cost of kicking out or killing everybody who live there” is a pretty extreme revisionist take.
In all these countries, “we should restore our borders to $maximumSizeEver” is widely understood to be a far right take (the Russians want Ukraine, the Greater Hungary people want Transylvania, the Greek neonazis want Trabzon (!), everybody wants Kashmir, etc etc etc). It’s a far right talking point. But for Palestine it’s somehow a mainstream opinion. I don’t get it.
I mean, there’s lots of good arguments to be made for the Palestinian case IMO but I don’t find “they once had more land and therefore they should get it all back no matter the consequences” very compelling.
Karelia is another one. Whether or not such situations are resolvable peacefully is entirely up to the nations involved.
I don't see why revanchism gets a free pass in the specific case of the Palestinians.
Do you also think Lviv should be Polish? And Wrocław German? And Trabzon Greek? No wait I mean Armenian, which do we even pick, seriously everybody wants Trabzon! Should the entire Arabian peninsula be Turkish again?
Where does it stop? Why should Palestine be restored to its one-time borders but not the rest? All this happened in a time when moving populations around at the whim of a few imperialist rulers was considered a super normal thing to do. That doesn't make it right, but the Nakba isn't a particularly unique historical event. Get over it, and focus on the actual current events that are also bad, such as the settlements, decades of effective imprisonment of everybody in Gaza, and so on. There's plenty of good arguments! But "from the river to the sea" is a far right revisionist talking point and in my opinion it does an enormous disservice to the Palestinian case.
There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic prospect of one. Somewhere between 5 and 8 million Palestinians are now condemned to be extremely unwilling subjects of an endless military occupation by a hostile state and reduced to second class status in their own homeland.
_That_ is the crucial difference.
It's really not very nuanced at all - if you want to kill or deport all the Jews, even when formulated in fluffy terms like "give those poor Palestinians their homeland back", you're not really trying to make the world a better place are you? You'd be just like those far right Israelis who seem to want to kill or deport all the Palestinians. It's the exact same vibe, just aimed in the other direction. They're both the baddies. Don't be like them.
woah! dial it back there. I advocated no such thing
please take a few deep breaths and read slowly over the thread making note of who said what. then please reconsider slinging accusations like that around.
I'm in favour of a two state solution.
My main point is that the long term actions of the Israeli state, especially in the West Bank, have made the viability of a Palestinian state (i.e. one in coexistence with Israel) completely impossible.
> When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or controlled militarily
This is advocating for destroying an entire country and deporting or killing the people in it. This is the context in which I read your comment, because you came to their defense. I read your comment as explaining why you thought their comment was a perfectly OK one.
I'm happy to read you don't actually agree on this with them, and I think we pretty much agree.
not to argue, but I want to be really really really clear on this. I did not come to their defense. Please see my direct reply to their comment.
ANYWAY I think you made your point clear and we agree, sorry for messy edit commenting here :)
There was never a real Palestinian state. Locally there were Egypt and Jordan, two states that still exist in the same way that Finland does.
And in fact, the Zionist argument is exactly that one: "because there were some Jews here 2000 years ago, this land must be a Jewish ethnostate". Why is that argument ok, but "there were Arabs here 80 years ago" is not?
Because, in reality, both arguments are stupid and tribal to a level rarely seen after 1950. Both should join modernity and move to a shared state - not based on XIX century racism, but on XXI century respect for democracy, religious equality, etc etc.
Unfortunately, the side with (atomic) power refuses to even countenance the possibility, because of a tribalistic ideology that shames some of their magnificent ancestors. And so we continue with an eye for an eye, like in the darkest of times.
Note: Gaza and West Bank are not Israel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/27/israeli-protests-ca...
This is a huge one too:
They want vampires? That's bold
Zionists were living in the area long before British Mandatory Palestine or the Balfour Declaration - they bought land and legitimately immigrated there while it was under control of the Ottoman Empire. The UN chose to partition the region in 1947 due to ongoing violence on both sides - and the British actually voted against it I believe. The Arab states then chose to go to war against the newly formed Israel - not the other way around, as your comment implies.
This is not an accurate representation. Jewish people were given the legal ability to purchase land in Mandatory Palestine. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were tenant farmers or landless labourers. Jewish land purchases inevitably led to the displacement of these tenants, but this was the lawful outcome of a lawful land sale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_land_purchase_in_Palest...
The issues surrounding occupation of land after the 1948 and 1967 wars are significantly more complex and arguably do involve violations of international law by Israel.
If I sell you my land, does that make it right for you to form a separate state with it? Perhaps I would rethink that decision with the advance knowledge of your intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_the_British_Mandate_for...
The majority of land purchases were made by the Jewish National Fund. Their aspiration to form a state was explicit and overt.
And I can certainly think of some other ethnicity in that region who that ethnicity cleansed from the region according to their own holy book. :)
Deuteronomy 20:16-17 (God telling Joshua, leader of the Israelites, to go to war)
> 16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. 17 Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.
Slightly more seriously (Though only very slightly more seriously :)), IIRC our current understanding of history is that the jews are Canaanites. Quoting from Wikipedia "Ancestors of the Israelites are thought to have included ancient Semitic-speaking peoples native to this area.[59]: 78–79 Modern archaeological accounts suggest that the Israelites and their culture branched out of the Canaanite peoples through the development of a distinct monolatristic—and later monotheistic—religion centered on Yahweh.", so at the very least one of those peoples survived until today :)
That's very much not true.
Compromises are possible and are often the only way. Do I need to start listing examples?
I think you could add assimilation to this list. In this particular instance though, it looks almost entirely unlikely (due to Israel being fundamentally defined as a Jewish state).