I've never understood the argument of Muslim Land or Arab Land. If one were to call Britain White Man's Land and start a terror campaign against African, Asian, and Arab immigrants, would the world community accept that?

Jerusalem was Jewish majority in the time of the Ottoman Empire [1]. How does that become suddenly Muslim Land?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerus...

Yes indeed, if white British people were expelled from their lands and their homes confiscated by anyone, Norse, Germanic or Russian, it'd be considered ethnic cleansing and a war crime.

The jews of Ottoman era were Sephardic and Mizrahi jews of N. Africa, not the Yiddish speaking Ashkenazis of Germany, France and Russia.

Thank you for your support.

After the UN divided the holy land into an Israeli and an Arab state, the Arabs began their ethnic cleaning campaign. That is why there were zero Jews left in Gaza or the West Bank after the war. The war that was started with the stated goal of eliminating the Jews.

And note that despite Arab calls for the Arabs to evacuate the holy land, it remained 20% Arab. And let's not get started on the Jews in the other 20 plus Arab states. What at happened to them?

  > Ashkenazis

A word which literally means "from the Levant", where Ashkenaz (Noah's descendent) had settled.

Like how the Arab countries expelled Jews after Israel was founded? The double standard about Israel and Arab colonization and ethnic cleansing is absurd.

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

> Jerusalem was Jewish majority in the time of the Ottoman Empire [1]

(Links a page that shows the exact opposite)

> If one were to call Britain White Man's Land and start a terror campaign against African, Asian, and Arab immigrants, would the world community accept that?

Isn't that exactly what happened, i.e. Israel declared half of the land "Jewish land" and proceeded to ethnically cleanse 800 thousand palestinians with whom they had been living side by side in the previous decades?

  > Links to a page that shows the exact opposite

This isn't Reddit. Many people here actually do read sources. All the censuses in the decades before the fall of the Ottoman empire show a Jewish majority. And for the century preceding that, the censuses flipped back and forth.

  > Isn't that exactly what happened, i.e. Israel declared half of the land "Jewish land" and proceeded to ethnically cleans 800 thousand palestinians with whom they had been living side by side in the previous decades?

No. The UN designated the malaria-infested marshes Israeli (not Jewish) and the majority of the rest Arab (not Muslim, not Palestinian, and not Egyptian or Jordanian). The Arab states rejected this, and opened a war with the newly formed Israel. Many Israeli leaders pleaded with the Arab residents not to heed the Arab states' calls to evacuate. The situation in Haifa is well documented, I know this from living with Arabs in Haifa two decades ago. They tell how the Haifa mayor pleaded with their families to remain in 1948.

> This isn't Reddit. Many people here actually do read sources.

Exactly. The Ottoman rule of Palestine spans 400 years, and the graph at the top of the page you linked shows that Jews became a majority in Jerusalem only at the very end of it, following zionist immigration at the end of the 19th century.

> The UN designated the malaria-infested marshes Israeli (not Jewish)

The problem is that this isn't reddit and people actually read the sources. This is the text of the Partition Plan:

"Independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem, set forth in Part III of this Plan, shall come into existence..."

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/res181.asp

Why do you have such a problem with Zionist immigration that made Jerusalem a Jewish-majority city? It was legal immigration allowed by Ottoman Empire. Do you see Muslims immigrating to Europe in the same light? Many previously "white" cities in Europe are now Muslim. Should Europeans call it "Muslim occupation of white land"? That sounds pretty racist. Why double standard?

Ah no, I have no problem with it, as much as Palestinians had little problem with the tens, and then hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants to their land.

Of course if the UN were suddenly to declare that half of my country is now assigned to them only to build their, say, Arab state- then I would be quite pissed. Wouldn't you?

"their land."

It wasn't "their" land, it was Ottoman land and they let Jews migrate there because Jews paid for the land.

From Wikipedia:

  > The First Aliyah, also known as the agriculture Aliyah, was a major wave of Jewish immigration (aliyah) to Ottoman Palestine between 1881 and 1903 ... An estimated 25,000 Jews immigrated.

Jerusalem was already Jewish majority before 1881. And the large waves of the movement were towards the end, not towards the beginning.

Yes, as we said, zionist immigration to Palestine began at the end of the 19th century. Nothing to do with the small historical Jewish population of Palestine or Jerusalem.

I actually do know the "Muslim lands" reference. Religious Muslims believe any land ever controlled by Muslims must remain Muslim forever. It's a conquest tactic. It gets slightly reframed to be tolerable for westerners by invoking the idea that they're "indigenous", when they're largely Arabs who committed genocide against the previous peoples.

https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2016/8/12/israel-sau...

> Religious Muslims believe any land ever controlled by Muslims must remain Muslim forever.

What are you basing this on? Are "religious" Muslims some kind of True Scots Muslims? I'm willing to bet that if I speak to any of my Muslim neighbours none of them will agree with this.

> when they're largely Arabs who committed genocide against the previous peoples.

So what area are arabs from? You know there are arab jews and christians right?

The Arab culture, identity, and distinct racial features formed in the Arabian peninsula. After they accepted Islam in the 7th century, they turned to conquest other areas.

This is all well documented in Arab sources, they are very proud of this.

>they accepted Islam in the 7th century

Oh i didn't realize we're going back more than a millennia. Well, in that case every modern nation state is the product of one form of genocide or another - the USA being the worst genocidal state, going back just 500 years.

>The Arab culture, identity, and distinct racial features formed in the Arabian peninsula

Seems silly to me to claim a land that "your people" inhabited centuries and millennia ago, as it honestly seems silly to me talk about "racial features" when talking about humans. Arab culture? Are you telling me an arab jew, muslim, christian, druze and aheist have the same culture by virtue of being of the same "race"?

  > Arab culture? Are you telling me an arab jew, muslim, christian, druze and aheist have the same culture by virtue of being of the same "race"?

Not by virtue of being the same race, but by virtue of being the offspring of parents who are proud of their heritage and teach their children.

Denying the existence of Arab culture, of which the Arabs are (rightly, in my opinion) very proud of, is racism. Not everybody has the same values and customs as you do.

Can you mention one cultural trait that an arab jew, muslim, and atheist would share?

That's like saying there is a european culture, it's nonsense.

"Whilst there are a great number of perspectives that can be taken on the subject, it is impossible to form a single, all-embracing concept of European culture."

Literally the second sentence in that wiki

Do you frequently stop reading articles two sentences in? It's amazing how much knowledge and intelligence you must be missing.

Please do keep reading past. The next sentence (literally sentence #3) gives you: Nonetheless, there are core elements which are generally agreed upon as forming the cultural foundation of modern Europe. One list of these elements given by K. Bochmann includes:

And then a detailed list of shared-culture-related items.

- A common cultural and spiritual heritage derived from Greco-Roman antiquity, Christianity, Judaism, the Renaissance, its Humanism, the political thinking of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the developments of Modernity, including all types of socialism;[5][4]

- A rich and dynamic material culture, parts of which have been extended to the other continents as the result of industrialization and colonialism during the "Great Divergence";[5]

- A specific conception of the individual expressed by the existence of, and respect for, a legality that guarantees human rights and the liberty of the individual;[5]

- A plurality of states with different political orders, which share new ideas with one another.[5]

- Respect for peoples, states, and nations outside Europe.

And then there are 15 categories from Music to Science to History, listing cultural similitudes or shared values.

Well if you go back enough… all english people are actually vikings who committed genocide against the britons.

And all swedish people are steppe barbarians who committed genocide against the local sami people.

Source on Swedes being steppe barbarians? Most historians agree that Vikings originated in Scandinavia. Sami peoples originated in northern Russia and moved to the furthest north regions of Scandinavia. The Vikings were also more concerned with seafaring and raiding to the south and west and all the history I know of is that they coexisted mostly peacefully (Vikings would trade with the Sami). Conflict arose centuries after the Viking age.

> and a fairly even mix of Jews, Christians and Muslims

False. The population in 1800 was ~90% Muslim, ~8% Christian.

> let's not forget that the partition plan for Palestine was proposed by the UN

The UN had no authority to partition other people's land.

Wrong. They were given the authority by general consensus after WW2. Maybe a poor choice, but it's not at all the responsibility of current Israelis to think about what their grandparents did. For a Gen Z Israeli, there's only one country.

If a majority agree to rob you, it is no longer robbery?

If they don't control it, it's not the "other people's" land either.

Land belongs to whoever controls it. That's it. That is all it will ever be.

If there is not some higher power (e.g. the UN, who you say does not have authority), you have no recourse.

No matter what land it is or who they are: nobody currently living was there first. The only claim is always "I was the last to control it". But none of us are the first.

From wikipedia's article on the history of Palestine:

> "Most of Palestine's population, estimated to be around 200,000 in the early years of Ottoman rule, lived in villages. The largest cities were Gaza, Safad and Jerusalem, each with a population of around 5,000–6,000."

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

That's in the 16th century. Almost no Jews at that time either.

> That's in the 16th century.

OP's point was "Under the Ottoman Empire it was (relatively) scarcely populated and a mix of Jews, Christians and Muslims, plus some religious minorities."

What are you trying to dispute here? That the territory of today's Israel was sparsely populated back then, or that the Ottoman Empire existed back then?

> Almost no Jews at that time either.

What a wild claim: almost no Jews in places like Jerusalem? Please cite whatever source you have to make such an extraordinary claim.

> What are you trying to dispute here? That the territory of today's Israel was sparsely populated back then, or that the Ottoman Empire existed back then

Exactly the part that you left out: that the Jewish presence (before zionist immigration began) was of any relevance in the demography of the region.

The censuses were always flip-flopping back and forth, until the 1880s. You cherry picked one nice one, but I could check pick over half a dozen censuses that show Jewish majority during the 19th century - no less than the amount of censuses that promote the other competing narrative. And all the later censuses, after 1880, show Jewish majority. That was over three decades before the fall of the Ottoman empire.

  Source for census data:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem

> And keep in mind Zionism started during the Ottoman era, with Jews simply immigrating there.

Presumably during one of the frequent rounds of forceful expulsion from European states.

So why was it called Palestine Partition Plan, and not Israeli partition plan:

"Palestine Partition Plan" is United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 (II), adopted on November 29, 1947. This resolution, officially titled "Future Government of Palestine," recommended the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states, with Jerusalem and its environs to be placed under a special international regime."

"Palestine" is a term which pre-dates Islam (coming from the Greek "Palaistine"), so I don't think you are making the point you are trying to make.

Yup, Palestine is a name for the land, not the people. It is a Roman era corruption of Phoenician.

No, Philistine (and all the variants) comes from a Greek word for "uncouth" and is a word for the ancient Philistines given by their neighbours; it's unknown what the Philistines called themselves. The Philistines weren't the Phoenicians, they were more recent invaders (possibly some of the "Sea People"). For one, the Philistines were Aegean and the Phoenicians were Semitic. The Philistines also disappeared (either killed or assimilated) while the Phoenicians spawned Carthage (the ones in the Levant probably just assimilated over time as many powers controlled the area after them).

It only became the name for the land after the Bar Kockba revolt, the Romans named it such specifically to spite the Jews. And then it stuck when various powers controlled the land over time (Romans/East Romans aka. Byzantines, Caliphate, Ottomans, British).

Interesting, thank you. TIL.

> Also let's not forget that the partition plan for Palestine was proposed by the UN

Who proposed the Balfour Declaration 30 years prior?

Exactly. Ill intended actors (Soviets, competing European interests, Islamists etc.) even propped up the propaganda fiction about the "evil" Crusaders, while in fact the Crusaders fought against colonization.

The entire north of Africa, as well as the Levante and Asia Minor was still 80-90% Christian when Crusaders came.