I genuinely do not know who the bad guys are. S lot of my leftist friends are against Israel, but from what I know Israel was attacked and is responding and trying to get their hostages back.
Enlighten me. Am I wrong? Why am I wrong?
And dumb it down for me, because apparently I’m an idiot.
Thank you for the detailed timeline. However, it raises a serious question for me. Am I misreading, or does your timeline show that the Jews were systematically oppressed and dislocated from their home land for about 2400 years? If so, wouldn’t that make it understandable why they’re so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home?
Here’s the issue: who’s home is it? Is it the home of people who haven’t lived there for hundreds of years or the home of the people who currently do? Neither of these two groups had anything to do with what happened previously.
Jews had lived in the area for a very long time even after most were expelled. This was relatively peaceful (though not perfect). The current issues started when settlers came, who were not from there, and purchased farms. They later decided they would only hire Jewish workers, despite Muslims traditionally tending it (which hurt production because the Jewish settlers had no idea how to do so, but production wasn’t the goal). Muslims then fought back as their livelihood was being taken from them. The settlers used militias to attack back and used it as justification to take more.
Those militias became the IDF when Israel formed. Israel still uses this tactic of provoking an attack and then using that as an excuse to use more force to take more territory. This has happened many times now and the current fight is just the latest, but not a new event.
There are no “good guys” but there are victims. Anyone just trying to live their lives is a victim. The bad guys are the ones trying to take this away from others.
That’s one interpretation, though I’d disagree with it. I have Jewish heritage - enough that a significant portion of my ancestry was wiped out in the Holocaust, though obviously a few of them were lucky and escaped to the US with the help of a sponsor. I don’t practice Judaism as a religion and don’t really relate much to any of my heritage. Is Israel my homeland? Not at all. The United States is my homeland. Before that, Germany would be my homeland. Before that… well, I’m not sure, but history would suggest it’s highly unlikely it was Israel. I have zero attachment to that land, much like I expect you have zero attachment to the land of your ancestors from millennia ago. (I also have zero attachment to the land of my non-Jewish ancestry. I have no idea what it is from thousands of years ago, but I wouldn’t care if I did.)
Would I and other Jewish people be justified in kicking out Germans, because they spent hundreds of years there? What about the Russians? Poles? The Jewish diaspora has gone all over the place and made just about everything their home. Why should they have claim to land that their great great great great great ancestors once conquered and stole from somebody else?
I would argue Israel wasn’t their home until they moved there over the last hundred or so years. Home isn’t where some of your family lived 3000 years ago. The individuals in question never lived there. Their parents never lived there. Their grandparents never lived there. None of these people had any idea what Israel was even like. Today, there are more Jewish people in the United States than there are in Israel, and they’re happy to call the United States home.
If we’re going to make the argument that people should be allowed to lay claim to land their ancestry owned 3000 years ago, we open up a lot of questions.
First, it’s worth noting that this is also the home of Palestinians. The origins of Palestinians are much less clear than the origins of Jewish people in large part because the Jews have been uniquely good at maintaining their culture, so we have a much better grasp on Jewish people throughout history than we do of Palestinians. But at its core, the fact is Palestinians haven’t ever lived anywhere else. This means they’re also “so hostile to a foreign group that again wants to displace them from their home.”
Second, to be consistent, we’d have to revert a lot of borders to ancient times. Does that mean we should all revert borders to what they were 3000 years ago? Why 3000? Why not 2000? 4000? Regardless, you’re uprooting a lot of people - and you’d have to provide a really good justification for that, and I don’t see it.
Third, even if we agreed the Jews have a right to this land and we should revert to their ancient borders and give them control, that doesn’t mean they have a right to attempt genocide on those living there. The moment they embarked on the Nakba, they should have lost their allies in their mission. Assuming they have a right to the land, they have to humanely displace the people there, ensure they have a new place to live, and give them adequate compensation for the land and the massive inconvenience you’ve caused by uprooting their entire lives. Sort of a “sorry we’re doing this, but we’re trying to make it right.” Instead, they’ve killed millions of people over the decades.
I’m referring to this part of your timeline-
“~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others. ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time). ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let’s just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.”
Maybe I’m misreading it, but it seems to imply that they were, as a people, born from that land, and systemically were persecuted through the course of around 2400 years.
I think there’s a lot of fuzzyness around the idea of “born from that land.” It’s not like they sprouted out of the earth. As with just about any people, there was a lot of rape and murder of warring tribes until some combination of them stopped doing as much rape and as much murder and somewhat arbitrarily called themselves “one people.” If you want to call that “born from that land,” sure, but their ancestry goes back further than that. We’re all just apes.
As you now know, the Zionist project is one by Europeans who colonized and ethnically cleansed large regions of Palestine in the last 120 years or so. Ethnic supremacist myths about stolen Palestinian homes being on Israeli homelands are unacceptable.