The only reason we need for supporting Israel is that it is a liberal western democracy which shares our values and which is imperiled by its neighbors.
Israel is our ally and our friend. It exists because history has shown that the Jews cannot be safe in other countries, including countries in the west - to our shame. That the Israelis can maintain the level of liberalism and tolerance that they continue to show despite the overt hostility shown to them by the U.N, by the non-insignficant number of anti-semites that exist on both the right and the left, and by their neighbors, is a testament to the character of the people of Isreal.
We stand beside Israel because it’s the right thing to do. That doesn’t mean they are perfect, and can’t be criticized. It means that abandoning fundamental support and military alliance with Israel would be a real dick move.
It’s the usual bullshit used by people desperately trying to justify the unjustifiable. Their “logic” is that there were no Palestinians until 50 years ago, because there was no formally defined nation called Palestine. By the same logic, there were no Germans or Italians until the 19th century.
By the way, your google-fu is weak. The area was incorporated into a Roman province called Syria Palaestina in 135 CE, and was referred to by Herodotus as Palaistinê 500 years before that, and by the 20th dynasty Egyptians as Peleset 700 years before that, i.e. 1150 BCE. And that’s just what we have surviving written inscriptions for.
So it’s been referred to as Palestine, allowing for differences in language, for nearly 3200 years that we know of. And since most Americans know little of either secular history or their own sacred scriptures, it’s worth noting that even according to the Hebrew Bible, Jews never ruled Palestine, and ruled Judea (a small region of Palestine) independently for less than 50 of those 3200 years, under the Hasmoneans. The rest of the time, they were the vassals of various empires (Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, Roman, etc.), just as the Palestinians were vassals of the Ottoman and other Muslim empires for centuries.
There was also allegedly another period of about a century before the proto-Jews became Jews, when the Israelite kings Saul, David, and Solomon ruled over a region larger than Judea (the Bible claims that Solomon’s rule extended to the Euphrates), but even most Israeli scholars today acknowledge that to be mythical. In any case, the Bible (II Chron 12) tells us that the kingdom broke up when Solomon died, leaving the small portion of Judea to the proto-Jews, who within five years were conquered by Egypt and became its vassals.
So even if we accept Jewish myths as true, and even if we count independent rule over any part of Palestine as ruling the whole region, and even if we count pre-Jewish Israelites as Jews, we’re talking about a total of 150 years of discontinuous rule over the last 3200 years (or more) as the basis of the present Jewish claim to the entire region.
They’re not exactly safe in Israel, either, so safety is no reason displace Arabs who had nothing to do with the Holocaust. As I said much earlier in this thread, if you want to compensate them for the Holocaust with land, give them a piece of Germany.
Or give them a piece of the US, if you’re so sure that Americans would roll over for it, the way so many in this thread think the Palestinians should.
I can fu Google as well as anyone, thanks. I wasn’t seeking the history of “Palestine” as a geographic name, because that is well known and the specific point I was refuting was the bogus claim that Palestinian nationhood of the Palestinian people (as opposed to provincial status) is no older than 50 years. It arose concurrently with Zionism during the last phase of the Ottoman Empire.
You know what? The middle east is full of artificial borders. I don’t see many people getting worked up about the plight of the Kurds, who were divided up and handed over to three diferent countries. And the plight of the Palestinians only seems to matter with respect to Israel. Palestinians have been kicked out of other Arab countries, and are treated as second-class citizens in others. Palestinians in Lebanon are not allowed to own property, have travel restrictions, and are not allowed to work in many different jobs. And there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in refugee camps outside of Israel who are not allowed citizenship in their host countries and who live in miserable conditions. After the first Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 200,000 Palestinians from that country.
However, it seems that the only time the international community gets upset about the Palestinians is when Israel can be blamed. It makes you wonder if, like in 1947, the Palestinians and their plight are being exploited As a way to attack Isael, and Israel is being exploited as a scapegoat to deflect attention from the miserable treatment of Palestinians in the Arab world.
What do you expect us to do, spend a fortune and risk American lives by protecting them with a no-fly zone for ten years or something? And then spend another trillion dollars and thousands of American lives to depose one of their major oppressors? But you’re right, if we can’t fix the whole world, we shouldn’t care about any of it.
Donald Trump thinks that the US, with all its vast size and resources, can’t afford to even allow 13,000 Syrian refugees to live here temporarily, never mind any discussion of citizenship. Yet you want tiny countries like Lebanon and others to grant full citizenship to “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinian refugees, and you think that if they don’t, they are just as bad as the country that created those hundreds of thousands of refugees by forceful eviction from the land they had been living on for centuries?
Well, yes and no. The extreme anti-Palestinian policy doesn’t perfectly overlap with the ultra-Orthodox. Israelis who migrated from the Soviet Union after 1989, for example (there are quite a lot of them) tend to both be extremely secular and strongly ethnic-nationalist.
The high Jewish fertility is as far as I know mostly but not entirely driven by the ultra-orthodox.
There’s an important difference in that Palestine is not part of any country, in the way that (for example) the Turkish-controlled Kurdish lands are part of Turkey. The Palestinian lands are occupied territory and stateless. Israel is the occupier, so it’s pretty fair to blame them for that fact.
Let me make myself clear. Israel is not perfect. The Jewis State is not a suicide pact. Since the Palestinians show an interest only in a truce to regroup but not peace, Israel cannot simply go back to “1967 borders.”
You’ve made it pretty clear that you think any post that agrees with you is a great post.
I doubt that you do, and I doubt that you speak for anyone else, although I’m used to people conflating opposition to Israeli government policies with anti-Semitism. It’s just something you accept as the price of debating black-and-white “thinkers.”
For the record, I fully oppose discrimination against any ethnic or religious group (but I do not consider forcing them to comply with the same laws as non-believers to be discrimination). I am fully cognizant of the horrors of the Holocaust, having toured a few concentration camps when I was stationed in Europe, and I’ve also read fairly widely about discrimination against Jews throughout history, particularly in Christian countries, and so.I fully support the establishment of a Jewish state on land taken from one of the Christian countries who treated Jews so abominably, preferably Germany,. But I see no justification for taking land from people who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, and who were historically more hospitable to Jews than most Christian countries.
Nor do I see any justification for a Jewish state in Palestine by appealing to the Bible, as many do. I think that the Jewish myths in the Hebrew Bible are almost as ridiculous as the Christian myths in the Christian Bible, and the Muslim myths in the Quran.
If you object to the term “myth,” then we can debate the historicity of any of those scriptures in another thread.
Cynically speaking, the strategic value of a state like Israel depends more on things like combat readiness, nuclear capability, intelligence assets, energy resources, and political and economic stability than the history of Zionism, the Ottoman Empire, and Palestinian nationalism.
I support the state of Israel in principle, because I support the self determination of ethnonational groups and because I’m not a philosophical liberal and have no objection in principle to ethnically based states. That being said, “Israel is a liberal western democracy which shares our values” is just about the worst argument you could give, for reasons I stated above.
Israel is no more liberal, western, or “shares our values” than Poland or Hungary are. It’s a democracy for the time being, but we’ll see how long that lasts.