“The existence of the state of Israel” and “The existence of the Jewish people” are not synonymous, however much some would like those two statements to be. The trigger for the past 80 years of warfare was carving the modern state of Israel out of land already occupied by other people. I am under no illusion that had the Zionists not created Israel as we know it that the region would be all peace and butterflies - it wouldn’t. Yet it seems to me that many Israelis, and many Jews in the diaspora, fail to grasp that their modern Israel was a product of conquest of other people and that those other people are still pissed off about losing their land and homes. The Jews nurtured their discontent with exile for 1900 years, yet they expect others to forget in less than 90?
It is also true that the dispossession of land is not the only factor in this on-going bloodshed but it should not be puzzling that the Palestinians are unhappy about those who conquered them.
Question (and I mean this as an honest question, which preface I have to add given the hostility I have encountered when asking this in real life): why are they called “Israeli Arabs” and not “Israeli Palestinians” or “Palestinian Israelis”? I was under the impression that the Israeli Arabs were, in fact, predominantly Palestinian.
On that we can agree - it’s a shame we can’t send the homicidal bigots off to permanent exile. Maybe Musk needs people for his proposed Martian colony?
They aren’t synonymous, but the existence of the Jewish people as a stateless people has been a bitter one. Ending the Jewish state may not mean ending the Jewish people, but it does mean returning them to that miserable state of hoping your masters don’t start pogroming again.
The Jews are not trying to impose that terrible fate on the Palestinians. We have offered them their own state, again and again, and been rejected because the people in charge don’t want to share with Jews.
They are ethnically Arab, but they identify with the polity of Israel more than with the polity of Palestine. When the proposal to trade land, giving the Palestinians Arab towns in exchange for settlements, the Israeli Arabs were the loudest voice in opposition, because they don’t want to be under Palestinian rule.
What do you mean when you say that they are “predominantly Palestinian”?
The Marshal plan was a post war recovery program after surrender. Prior to surrender Germany was systematically pounded or incinerated to dust as was Japan. This was done without giving any prior warning and the idea of pausing to give people a break was not a consideration.
This is a war and will end when the Hamas government of Gaza surrenders.
I wish I could believe that, but it seems that there has always been, at least, a very influential faction in Israeli governance for whom a two-state solution was never more than a mirage to dangle in front of Palestinians while Israel in practice solidified its ownership of the Palestinian territory that their state was supposed to be on.
The constant expansion of Israeli West Bank settlements is not something that would have been pursued by anybody actually prepared to endorse a realistic two-state solution, AFAICT.
Look, I’m in full agreement that Hamas needs to be destroyed. But those posts are just saying it has to happen, with nebulous things like “marginalize the extremists” and “give Palestinians a viable path to a future.” Sounds great. How does that happen? How does the pending invasion accomplish those goals?
The stats on that page don’t match my experience but I fully admit that my experience is colored by a self-selected sample of Israeli Arabs (those who chose to engage in cordial conversation with an Israeli person, for one) so I shall defer to the stats.
I think there is a small group of extremists (Ben Gvir is the ideal example) who do not want any kind of peace and want to conquer as much as they can.
I think there is a much larger group that is disillusioned with the idea that the Palestinians will ever accept a two state solution and has grown tired of offering. I think that’s where most Bibi supporters fall (not Netanyahu himself, mind you - I doubt he really has an ideological commitment, he is a political beast who just does whatever fits his immediate agenda).
I don’t think that group has much of a long term plan. The idea was to hide behind Iron Dome and wait for Hamas to mellow out. I hope that this plan has been fully discredited by the events of Oct 7.
Um, if what you’re saying is that Israel is permanently entitled to sovereignty over the West Bank because it is territory conquered in war (although AFAICT that position is contrary to international law on annexation of conquered territory), then that kind of reinforces my point about a genuine two-state solution not really being “on the table”.
From that perspective, Israel can just go on forever and ever saying “We absolutely do own all this ‘Greater Israel’ land because we conquered it, but we might very generously decide to give you some of it if we decide you’re being nice enough to us. Nope, you’re not being nice enough yet. Nope, not yet either… In the meantime, we’ll just go on encouraging more decades of additional settlement on this land by committed Israeli-expansionists, many of whom are convinced that the Deity officially bestowed the whole region on the Jewish people and no take-backsies.”
It is hard to see how any of that adds up to a good-faith readiness on the Israeli government’s part to implement any realistic two-state solution, under any circumstances, that would give Palestinians meaningful rights and sovereignty in any significant part of their ancestral homeland.
“Offering”? Again, the whole “peace process” starting with Oslo seems to have been mostly a long sequence of stalling tactics designed to put the blame on Palestinian objections, and to frame Israeli objections as simply “losing patience” with Palestinian “unreasonableness”.
I certainly don’t think that all Palestinians are blameless in how they’ve reacted to this, and in particular we’ve established that the terror policies of Hamas are infamous and inexcusable. But I’m not persuaded that the Israeli government has ever been willing to seriously approach the two-state solution with the conviction that the Palestinian state has just as much right to exist as the Israeli state does.
The current Israeli government, at least (and Netanyahu’s government has been in power in some form for a long time now) does not want or intend the establishment of a Palestinian state under any circumstances, AFAICT. What they’ve wanted, realistically, is to keep the pre-Oct. 7 status quo of systemic disenfranchisement and endemic conflict to a manageable level. I don’t know whether they currently believe they can get back to that.
This is the sort of nonsense that makes many Israelis feel that peace is impossible. Oslo wasn’t a “stalling tactic”, it was a genuine peace offer that the Palestinians spat on with repeated suicide bombings.
You’re right about Netanyahu, but there’s a reason his government came into power. The left was seen as discredited on this issue by the fact that they offered concessions and the terrorism didn’t even falter.
Hopefully this is the moment where the right is discredited and some of the damage can start to be undone.
If peace is predicated on ‘the right of return’, then get ready for endless violence because that will never, ever happen. Israel would be insane to agree to a situation in which the people who want to kill all the Jews could become a majority in Israel.
It’s either a two-state solution or a continuation of the status quo. And the Palestinians have repeatedly shown that they have no interest in a two state solution.
It seems to me (and I may be wrong), what the main “right” being demanded here is the “right” to wipe all Jews off the face of the earth. Which I disagree with.
Israel did perpetrate ethnic cleansing of the areas that came under their control during the civil war leading up to the 1948 War. They initiated Plan Dalet which saw the complete depolulation and destruction of dozens of Palestinian villages and hamlets such as Dawayima, Saliha, Deir Yassin, etc., during those months. That’s the reason the surrounding Arab states got involved in the conflict, to . Towards the end of the 1948 War Operation Hiram was perpetrated by the Zionists to cleanse the Upper Galilee of its Palestinian population. The Arab flight because of the murdering also contributed to the Arab depopulation of those areas that came under Zionist control. The Zionists ceased the murdering after they realized how successful the campaign was, and the negative publicity it would garner had they continued. They cleansed enough of the areas under their control to achive a managable Arab demographic, a fraction of what it was before the civil war.
There should be one state for all the peoples in Palestine, that benefits them all, settlers included, democratic, pluralistic and egalitarian.
Like all the other states in the middle east that benefit everyone regardless of their race or religion? Don’t make me laugh. A single state Palestine would immediately commence in the extermination of the Jewish population.