Like with Manifest Destiny the problem comes when the area you want to decide to call your own already has people living there. I'd also add that there is no sort of human right to having your own homogeneous country. Most countries in the world have large sects of the population that would like to form their own autonomous states, many with populations substantially larger than that which initially carved out Israel for themselves. Unfortunately we live on a planet in which most of all land that's remotely habitable has been claimed by somebody.

Israel isn't a homogenous country. It is majority jewish, but there are large minorities of Arabs, Druze, levant Christians, etc. These minorities--just under 30% of the population--hold full citizenship and have the same civil rights as any other Israeli.

Zionism is a desire to have a majority-jewish state that is strong enough to protect jews from future pogroms. It is not a quest for a homogenous state.

Yes, and surely these minorities are not treated like second class citizens? What's that? "A 2018 report by the Israeli State Comptroller on the protection of non-Jewish civilians found that 46% of Arab citizens in Israel lack access to adequate shelters, compared to 26% of the general population" In the context of bomb shelters.

Because individual municipalities are the ones who build the bomb shelters, and the Arab municipalities put no effort in that direction.

And before you declare that the existence of Arab municipalities make Israel an apartheid state, all Israeli cities are mixed.

If all Israeli cities are mixed, then what is an Arab municipality? What point exactly are you trying to make?

Arab villages. Villages that start off with Arab inhabitants do not allow Jews to rent or buy property there. It's not a problem. But it makes these villages Arab only.

Likewise, there are Jewish villages. Few of these have Arab inhabitants, but it is not forbidden for them to move in.

You are sharing a warped view of reality. There were already jews living there when arabs decided to start a war against them in 1948. After the arabs lost the war, they were urged to leave by their own arab leaders, and many of them did. At which point, some more land fortunately became available for the targets of the initial violent war who won the war. This is pretty normal when you start a war and lose it; you might lose something like your land or your life. BTW the land is literally called Judea. If people are living there alongside the jews for whom it is an ancestral homeland, and then those people leave after getting violent and losing a war, that was their right to leave but you don't have to blame the jews for the arabs' decision to start a war. Also this starting of violent conflicts is a recurring pattern initiated by one side. It's been happening since way before 1948. There used to be millions of jews in other middle east countries and there has been targeted violence by certain people driving them back to their homeland for many decades before 1948.

I love the phrase "became available" in this paragraph

You’re witnessing extreme levels of cognitive dissonance. This individual isn’t trying to convince anyone. They’re trying to convince themselves. Benign phrasing to avoid calling it a land grab is clear evidence of this in action.

Okay… "land grab" works too. Grabbing back those parts of their ancestral homeland that were abandoned by the aggressors.

when does history stop?

This chapter will stop when the hostages are returned and Hamas is defeated.

>like all other peoples, have an intrinsic human right to self-determination and a state to call their own, and should not live as second class citizens at the whim of the states in which they reside.

All other people except Palestinians then? It sure seems like this is exactly the treatment they have received over the decades.

Yes, Palestinians have a right to self-determination as well. That is not at odds with Zionist beliefs, so long as there is room for BOTH peoples to reach a compromise on a solution that meets the core needs of both Jews and Arabs. That remains elusive.

It really does not seem like this is the actual view of those in control of Israel.

I fail to see the relevance. Zionism is a belief about the primary importance of Jewish self-determination. It is not tied to contemporary Israeli politics, whatever that might be.

Palestinians is a problematic word. Golda Meir was a Palestinian; she said so herself and her proof was that she had a Palestinian passport. Does that mean Palestine was a country? No, it was just a designation for a region that contained places such as Israel and Jordan. Did you mean to say "arab" or "muslim" or "muslim arab"?

The Palestinians you have in mind are getting the treatment they are getting because they have not stopped being violent and holding hostages. This is a pattern that recurs over years and decades, always with the same side instigating violence. Yes the "Palestinians" lost some land after starting wars and losing said wars. That's what happens when you start needless wars against good people. Unfortunately there are some Palestinian and Israeli civilians caught in the middle. Your sympathy seems to be only with those civilians from the side who started the conflict, not with those civilians from the side trying to end it.

My sympathies are with all the civilian population in the area.

By your own logic here, you would suggest that the people killed in the heinous terrorist attack in october 2023 were killed because they did not stop being violent?

Of course that is a ridiculous statement.

Palestinians have been oppressed and attacked and their land taken, by Israel, for many decades. This does not justify terrorist attacks, but neither do the attacks justify what Israel has done.

We can keep in mind that the most promising peace deal was sabotaged by extremists from Israel.

I have no sympathy for terrorists of any nationality or designation, which is why I condemn both Hamas and the current administration of Israel.

> their land taken, by Israel

Some of them stayed peacefully and are now happy citizens of Israel and those ones kept their land.

Others left on their own volition and at the recommendation of their own leaders after their side started a war and lost. And those ones have not been allowed to return and have lost their land. That’s what happens when you start a war and lose.

Others have been given land by Israel in deals where we have seen the result (the new gazans immediately burned to the ground the prosperity-building greenhouses that the Israelis left for them).

> Others left on their own volition

That's a nice euphemism for "they saw the next village massacred, so they ran away when the army approached their village".

Massacres happened on both sides, but one side (the instigators) had leadership telling them to flee, maybe because it wasn't really their homeland to begin with; they were just settlers from all over the region. And the other side stayed, because it was their ancestral homeland.

Have you done a survey, like how many people ran away because of the massacres per se, and how many ran away because their leaders told them to (for reasons unrelated to avoiding a possible massacre)?

You seem to assume that it is 0% of the former and 100% of the latter, which I find dubious.

Because even if it is let's say 50% and 50%, it is no longer true to say that all have left voluntarily.

There is the belief that Palestinians are the ones living in the area of British palestina and that Israel are also considered Palestinians and there should be one state

Almost every country have minorities that have had atrocities done against them, Jews are not special in that regard. The problem is that there was already people living in the area you colonized, and are now geocoding. Your supposed intrinsic human right is butting your boot on a peoples throat.

I am regretfully neither Israeli nor Jewish.

Zionism is the belief that Jews have a right to kill Palestinian children to take their land to build their own private Mediterranean resort homes.

Which part of that is false?

Remember, your own Bible states Jews should kill children to steal their land:

"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[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you." - Deuteronomy 20:16-17

And this is bolstered by the fact that Netanyahu himself recalls the old testament of erasing the memory of Amalek. in the fight to conquer Palestine, so you can't claim that the Old Testament doesn't matter.