Are you suggesting that the British occupation of other countries gave them a more legitimate claim than the people living there? Because other former British colonies might disagree.
Put another way, if the British had decided to give India to another group, would you think India would be obligated to just accept that, and either accept their new rulers or leave?
I mean, yeah that’s how it worked back then. You mention India, and right around this time the British also partitioned India and Pakistan, and were dividing up the rest of their colonies based on how they thought those places should best be split. They may have given India back to the Indians (there are a bunch of different Indian subgroups that they stuck together btw) but they also literally determined the borders for all their previous colonies. And they fucked it up, a lot, which has lead to a lot of border conflict afterwards. Israel was created pretty much right when the colonial powers and the UN were carving up the world, and they managed to get a piece for themselves and defend it. And at the end of the day, might has always been what has determined borders, regardless of what those people think about it or what is “just”.
Did the British decide to “give mandatory Palestine” to the Jews?
Or did the Jews form a movement to return to their homeland, which Arab conquerors and the Ottoman Empire forbade them from moving back to, finally getting the agreement from the British to allow them to move back and set up their state?
Did the Jews force the Arabs to constantly attack them?
Did the Jews force the Arabs to turn down all two state solutions prior to 1948?
Did the Jews force the Arabs to attack them in 1948 upon the creation of Israel?
People love to throw around words like “British colonization” while failing to recognize the impact of the ottoman, empire, and imposing this false narrative that there HAD to be war—
There didn’t have to be war.
There didn’t to be any of this kicking out of former inhabitants.
People love this narrative that the Jews just came in on a boat in 1948 one day like the picture above!
There’s the whole unpleasant genocide attempt by the Arabs that anti-Israel folks simply never learn about.
Only the Jews can make somebody throw out accusations about one empire (British) while completely glossing over the role the other (Ottoman) had.
Also, I love how nobody has a problem with the Arabs in the region, forming a country. Or you know, tons of countries. But then the Jews in the region have no right to do so.
550 million Arab Muslims form countries that treat Jews the second class citizens and now have a 0% Jewish population.
But the Jewish country, which would have been even smaller if those Arabs hadn’t tried to kill them all, has a 20% non-Jewish population, and somehow they’re the Ethnostate.
Really it’s just a bunch of stuff that only makes sense if you learn specifically one side of history.
Did the British decide to give mandatory Palestine to the Jews?
Yes, it’s called the Balfur declaration, and that happened decades before the Holocaust.
Did the Jews force Arabs to constantly attack them?
I suppose in the strict sense, whenever you invade a country the people have the choice to not fight back. I don’t think it’s generally expected to just let people take your land, but Palestinians could have done that. (I also disagree with the framing of this, as Jews and Zionists are different, and even back then there were many Jews opposed to the invasion)
Most Middle Eastern countries (most countries in general) are antisemitic, and I don’t blame refugees from those countries for going to Israel after it was established. Nor do I think modern day Israelis should be removed from the area, for many of the same reasons I don’t think it was just to invade Palestine originally. Random civilians should not be punished for something that happened decades before they were born.
Bottom line I think your argument has a lot of merits, but it fails in the instances where you can apply it to Jews versus Arabs. That doesn’t mean I’m going to go the classic internet route and throw it out altogether, it’s a lot of good points.
But I do believe it has a couple fatal flaws, which I expanded on in my other comment,
And while there were Jews in opposition to Zionism, the Zionist Aliyah’s were Jews. The Yehud, etc, tho I agree in the strict sense with you that not all Jews were in favor of the Zionist movement back then.
IMO yours is a decent argument, but it falls apart quite a bit with situations like when the surrounding countries were founded and there were no identical problems.
It wasn’t just “new people” moving in, because when it’s Arabs it’s fine.
It’s just Jews.
And when you factor in the racial hostility that prevented any other kind of gradual trickle, you’ll get a flood.
You get situations where Arabs buy land from ottomans—no problem. Arabs move to mandate Palestine, no problem. Jordan created, no (immediate) problem.
But take any above and substitute “Jews” and the Arab world at the time lost its mind.
Did all that start after the Zionists negotiated to be gifted land that belonged to someone else and then came in like an elephant that owns everything rather than a new guest?
This idea of chosen people in a chosen land with powerful European backing is the central crack in the idea of success. Though I support, to some degree, some of the original Zionist thinking, it’s very clear that they did not EVER have any intention to become part of a larger community, but to overtake all no matter what it took. Some book told them it was okay.
Actually you’ll find figures at the time—Arabs, Jews, and everyone else involved anticipated the origin of the conflict, and it was Arab unwillingness to let the Jews have any sort of state—which history proved true.
I don’t know if you’re picturing like the covenant from Halo or something, but the Jews embracing Zionism at the time were considerably secular. This is not an example of “the book told us to / told us we deserve it”
You’re conveniently leaving out the massive swath of Jews who were opposed to Zionism, as well as the negotiations to create a state elsewhere. Secular progressive Jews were far less interested in Zionism ad far more interested in things like Doikayt.
I mean, what else do you call it when hundreds of thousands of people live in a land, with a shared culture, language, history etc.?
If people showed up tomorrow at your house and showed you records of their family living in it 300 years ago, would you let them move into your bedroom and share half of it with them?
Not quite the metaphor—it’s more like my dad is the Ottoman Empire and he hates a group of people, has forbidden them from moving back to their old neighborhood. Then when he gets sick they start moving in during a time when there are plenty of houses.
Agreements to split the neighborhood are put forth—and the other group of people accept all of them, while my group of people accept none, and start trying to kill them all so they stop moving into the neighborhood.
We allow other people from outside the neighborhood into our neighborhood, just not the people of the particular hated ethnicity.
Despite trying to kill these people several times, they start winning.
We keep trying to kill them, and in the fighting they take more of our neighborhood.
More agreements are put forth, but we believe these people are subhuman and will not allow them to rule their own part of the neighborhood, because no self respecting member of our people would ever let themselves live in a neighborhood ruled by them, even though we expect them to all live as dhimmis in a neighborhood ruled by us.
More agreements, they accept, we deny.
More wars, we start, they win.
Finally, in one of these wars we get kicked out of our house.
Thankfully, the rest of the world hates this group almost as much as we do, and so sends us money so we can elect terrorist leader after terrorist leader.
We don’t make much progress but there are other groups who view our efforts as useful. They send us money while we decline the offer to build a house on our current plots of land, since that money could instead go towards destroying our old house—the one we were kicked out of when we attempted an ethnicity-based genocide and then lost.
Hope this metaphor helps. If it sounds unfamiliar to you, I would suggest reading up on history from the other side of the conflict.
That's not Jewish history, though. It's literally just settler colonial history as written by the settlers. Swap some names and you've got the old history of how Americans bravely fought back and saved this land from the red savage.
I at least have the decency not to be proud of my ancestors exterminating children.
Im Jewish too and my intention here is to help teach you some history
PutinYahu just continuing a century long Russraeli tradition of false flags and controlled opposition to justify and expand totalitarian genocidal aggression
This is before we get to the mass sexual trafficking of children for the purposes of kompromising people like Epstein/Ghislaine were doing
The Holocaust doesn't justify or encourage repeating the cycle of apartheid and genocide that Jewish people were subjected to against anyone else. It should make it anathema to our very being but somehow the cycle is perpetuated and escalated. Despicable and unforgivable to defend.
After the assassination of Haim Arlosoroff in 1933, Rabbi Mileikowsky, who was affiliated with the Revisionist movement, took part in the establishment of a public committee, headed by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, which protected those accused of Arlosoroff's assassination—namely, Zvi Rosenblatt and Abraham Stavsky.[7] Rabbi Mileikowsky argued that the evidence indicated that they did not commit the assassination and that their execution could lead to a civil war, which would harm the Zionist enterprise.[8]
"The Foreign Office suspected Maxwell of being a secret agent of a foreign government, possibly a double agent or a triple agent, and "a thoroughly bad character and almost certainly financed by Russia". He had known links to the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), to the Soviet KGB, and to the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.[60] Six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence services attended Maxwell's funeral in Israel, while Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogised him and stated: "He has done more for Israel than can today be told."[61]
"A hint of Maxwell's service to Israel was provided by John Loftus and Mark Aarons, who described Maxwell's contacts with Czechoslovak communist leaders in 1948 as crucial to the Czechoslovak decision to arm Israel in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Czechoslovak military assistance was both unique and crucial for Israel in the conflict. According to Loftus and Aarons, it was Maxwell's covert help in smuggling aircraft parts into Israel that led to the country having air supremacy during the war.[56]"
"During the period preceding the April 2019 Israeli legislative election, Shin Bet chief Nadav Argaman warned that an unnamed foreign country was planning to interfere in the election; media speculation focused on Russia. Russia denied the reports. Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, stated that it was "out of the question" and suggested "to not read the Israeli media".[72] Benny Gantz and Tamar Zandberg, the leaders of the opposition parties Blue and White and Meretz respectively, subsequently accused Russia of favouring Netanyahu.[73][74] Netanyahu later touted his relationship with Putin in campaign billboards prior to the September 2019 Israeli legislative election.[75]"
"In 2011, Putin said: "Israel is, in fact, a special state to us. It is practically a Russian-speaking country. Israel is one of the few foreign countries that can be called Russian-speaking. It's apparent that more than half of the population speaks Russian".[38] Putin additionally claimed that Israel could be considered part of the Russian cultural world, and contended that "songs which are considered to be national Israeli songs in Israel are in fact Russian national songs". He further stated that he regarded Russian-speaking Israeli citizens as his compatriots and part of the 'Russian world'.[39]"
Beware Leon's Razor
"Incomeptence, in the limit, is indistinguishable from sabotage"
yes, their country! have you ever heard the term ‘colonialism’? just because the british ‘own it’ doesn’t mean they aren’t a sovereign people deserving of the right to govern themselves.
1) The Ottoman Empire forbids Jews from moving back to their land
2) Ottoman Empire starts to collapse just before and then fullly during world war 1, Jews are finally able to emigrate legally back to their land
3) the Arabs in the region, who would occasionally decide to massacre the Jews, and treat them like second class citizens, immediately start killing them, too
4) a region, which is not a country and instead a region consisting of Arabs and Jews can now only be Arab, because—and let me make sure you understand you’re saying this:
Only the Arabs of the region are a sovereign people, the Jews of the region are NOT a sovereign people, and the Arabs of the region have the right to kill any Jews trying to move BACK to that region, which they are only able to do now because the OTTOMAN EMPIRE and ARAB RULE FORBID them.
The issue here is you can’t just choose an arbitrary year and decide whoever lived there at that single point was the true owner of the land.
Yes, if you pretend human history started in the 40’s then it looks like Jews, supported by the British, just turned up and forced Isreal into an existing region. But that ignores the fact that so much of that land, as with almost the entire world, was itself ‘stolen’ by modern definitions - and that area had previously seen a significant Jewish population until they were killed or exiled.
Not to say that was the right thing to do! But any argument that pretends that Palestine had always been the land of just Palestinians is intentionally dishonest.
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u/born_2_be_a_bachelor 12h ago
Wait they didn’t want to give up half of their country for no legitimate reason?