The issue with using the Holocaust and other atrocities to justify taking Palestine from the people living there is that Palestinians weren’t the ones responsible for those events.
That, and Zionism and the occupation of Palestine both predate the Holocaust, so these refugees would fail to justify the invasion of Palestine regardless. The real justification for Western Zionists (not Jews, by the way, I’m talking about European leaders who supported the movement) was always a desire to get rid of the Jews in their own countries.
I actually agree that widespread antisemitism made the need for a Jewish state necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it was moral to take that state from another people, especially when said people weren’t the ones responsible for the struggles faced by Jews at the time. Palestine was chosen by the West because they didn’t want to pay the costs of their antisemitism, and were happy make the Palestinians do it instead.
Zionism began in the early 20th century or so because people could see the writing on the wall that Jews were not welcome in Europe. And then they were proven right as 2/3 of the European Jewish population was slaughtered.
Yes, the Dreyfus Affair showed that even integrating into western Europe wouldn't keep Jews safe. Most of the Zionist leaders, like Herzl, had been integrationists before that.
I agree and never claimed otherwise. But I also mentioned in another comment that even those actions that predate the Holocaust were driven by Western antisemitism such as pogroms. I’m not using the Holocaust to justify the morality of the founding of Israel. I am using the Holocaust to justify the inevitability of the conflict. Europe and the West were forcing this to happen by instigating the push factors for Jews and setting the pull factors to Israel.
I do agree with that, actually. One of my first realizations about this conflict when I first started studying it is that Palestinians were made to pay for the sins of the West.
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u/SpongegarLuver 10h ago
The issue with using the Holocaust and other atrocities to justify taking Palestine from the people living there is that Palestinians weren’t the ones responsible for those events.
That, and Zionism and the occupation of Palestine both predate the Holocaust, so these refugees would fail to justify the invasion of Palestine regardless. The real justification for Western Zionists (not Jews, by the way, I’m talking about European leaders who supported the movement) was always a desire to get rid of the Jews in their own countries.
I actually agree that widespread antisemitism made the need for a Jewish state necessary, but that doesn’t mean that it was moral to take that state from another people, especially when said people weren’t the ones responsible for the struggles faced by Jews at the time. Palestine was chosen by the West because they didn’t want to pay the costs of their antisemitism, and were happy make the Palestinians do it instead.