cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22035706
Sat 2 Mar 2024
“Alex McDonald’s When They Speak Israel, reviewed here by Steve Grant, explains to all of us how to engage. His basic assumption is that while some Zionists are dyed-in-the-wool racists or ethnonationalists, most are not. They sincerely believe they oppose racism but have been taught that support for Israel is justified — if not a solemn moral duty.”
The main problem with Zionism is trying to create a Jewish homeland by kicking out or killing the people who have been living there for the last few thousand years, the Palestinians. That’s been going on for around 100 years, but really took off in 1947-48, when the state of Israel was created. Mass killings, expulsions, land theft. More in 1967, and now even more in 2023-24.
Doesn’t sound like self-determination to me.
You have just repeated anti-Zionist propaganda.
First, Jews have lived uninterrupted in the region for thousands of years. Jews and Arabs are both indigenous to the land.
Second, Zionism is about a return to our ancestral homeland. It was a spiritual movement with Judaism for thousands of years before it was ever a political movement.
Third, the Jews who migrated to Palestine did not kick our or kill people to establish a homeland. That’s not how Israel was created. They purchased land legally from the Ottoman Empire and absentee Arab landlords. The violence was started by local Arabs reacting to the mass migration and fueled by the Arab Nazi put in charge of Jerusalem by the British, Amin Al-Husseini, in the 1920’s.
Fourth, the war that led to mass displacement of Arabs in 1948 was started the Arabs. Conflict had been going on for decades before that, which is why the British proposed partition, but it was a local conflict. The Arab League rejected partition to establish an Arab state because they preferred to simply destroy Israel. They failed.
Fifth, it might surprise you to know that after Israel re-took Gaza and the West Bank from Egypt and Jordan in 1967 they offered to negotiate a land for peace deal with the PLO. The PLO refused because they adopted the Khartoum Resolution: No recognition of Israel, no peace with Israel, no negotiation with Israel. See a pattern here? So the result was Israel got stuck occupying the two territories full of angry and belligerent Arabs.
Israel has made some terrible mistakes in how they have handled things but the history is kind of important here. Your version of events is a narrative that has been spun by Israel’s enemies to vilify it and garner international sympathy for the anti-Zionist cause (which has worked very, very effectively). Do you know about the genesis of the term ‘Nakba’ for example? It was coined by a Syrian intellectual in reference to the embarrassing loss of the Arab armies to the Jewish state and the “catastrophic” impact that loss would have on pan-Arab nationalism. It had nothing to do with the displacement of Arab Palestinians. It was appropriated for propaganda purposes 20 years later when Arafat and the PLO emerged.
Oh, one more thing. Did you know that the PLO was formed in 1964 and carried out its first terror attack in Israel in 1965? Notice the dates, years before the 1967 war and before Israel came to occupy Gaza and the WB. So it clearly never was about occupation or settlements. It has always been about the mere presence of a Jewish state on Muslim lands. Everything else is propaganda.