Carving out a Jewish state anywhere in Europe would be displacing people just as it did with Israel. There’s really no acceptable way to just set up a state somewhere where people are already living.
I get that Jews would want to have an exclusively Jewish territory where they could live autonomously rather than being subject to the government of a host nation, because historically that situation has not worked well for them. Even today, with World War II in living memory, we’re seeing a revival of nationalism and fascism around the world, in addition to occasional anti-Semitic violence by Muslim immigrants to European countries. I deeply understand and empathize with the idea that Jews need their own state, if for no other reason than that it’s a place they can go if they’re persecuted for their religion in countries where they’re a minority (i.e. all of them.) And I think they deserve to have a powerful military with a lot of well-trained soldiers and lots of planes and tanks and missiles and all the other shit countries need to ensure their national defense.
It’s just unfortunate that this state was set up in such a geographically hostile region. I get that it’s part of the mythology of the religion/culture and I get how the Zionist movement was able to use this mythology to motivate people to build a country there, a country that has been very successful in many ways. But I just do not see it being sustainable in the long term. The displaced Palestinians are not just going to go away.
No our dear but you love to adopt contrariness to the presumed position and show the valides
I am sure J is so aware, indeed that he is Orthodox Christian.
It was such a barrier, too, to George Habash who never ever became significant or popular or influential among the Palestians because he was too an Orthodox.
A great arugment by the implication on the religious affilaition.
yes it makes logical sense to go through the bother of the expulsion just to be dicks and totally divorced from influence… but oh yes viewed as a leader of the intefada.
Of course J’s argument is to argument that there is careful action of certain factors of the Israeli security to behead the more threatening segments of the palestian movements, killing at birth developments more threatening to their position.
A few pages up there were some anti-Palestinians (not named Ibn Warraq) accusing that there’s never been a nonviolent Palestinian, nonviolence has never been tried, Palestinians are savages who only understand brute force, etc. It’s important to know the facts that show these accusations to be falsehoods. To expose the hypocrisy of wishing for nonviolent opponents only to get rid of one as soon as he appears, while encouraging the worst, most violent of their opponents.
Ramira has addressed the weakness of IW’s argument effectively. Thanks, R.
Yes, Habash gained a certain amount of influence. For those not aware, Habash was the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was a rather ruthless terrorist/freedom fighter/guerilla(I’ll let people choose). He was very popular among Left-wing radicals in Europe but it was never a big surprise that Fatah was always more popular and why the leaders of the PFLP were almost without exception Christians.
Sadly enough, as we’ve discussed in the past, Arab identity or Arab national consciousness is quite recent and until then people’s primary identification was by their religious affiliation and since the 70s and the breakdown of Arab Nationalism, it has sprung back up.
It’s no surprise that there are issues between Christians and Muslims in Palestine that have grown worse over the past few decades and the Israelis have done nothing to help. There’s a reason there are currently more Palestinian Christians in Chile than in Palestine.
Nor is it just in Palestine that such problems have arisen as people in Egypt and Iraq can testify to.
Heh. I’m reminded of my APME history teacher who’d been in Russia who used to cross out the c and z on people’s papers when they’d referred to the Russian “Czars” and wrote in red “Ts”.
For that matter, I’m reminded of tedious arguments put forth by American college students desperate to show how woke they are about how “it’s Quran not Koran.”
This argument (or observation) I’ve seen a number of times, but I never really understood it.
I can think of many contemporary cases in which one ethnic group was displaced en mass by the creation of some state or other - this sort of thing was horribly common right around the time Israel was created (end of WW2, start of de-colonialism).
The only difference is the existence of long-term displaced persons, unlike (say) the Germans who were driven out of what is now part od Poland - but the displaced Palestinians have, basically, no power. Their ability to actually destroy a middling first-world power, one with a notoriously ferocious army, on their own is essentially zero.
The major Arab-Israeli Wars of the past were caused by friction with neighbouring nation-states. It could well be that the continued existence of aggrieved displaced persons could trigger future conflicts - But the chance of a repeat of that is getting slimmer every year, for a whole host of reasons. Moreover, they weren’t successful even when the Arab world was considerably more united and the Israelis were considerably weaker than they are now.
In short, it is difficult to see how the existence of aggrieved displaced refugees actually threatens to sustainability of the Israeli state.
I know that you are Iranian, and that Ghandi actually is a legit Persian name, so with that existing in the background, you have a bit more of an excuse for misspelling Gandhi than non-Persians who habitually misspell it for no reason at all.
This is not looking at it realistically, from a human perspective.
Think about it. For decades prior to the Holocaust, Jews had already been fleeing persecution by the thousands from Europe to the land that would later become Israel. And then the Holocaust occurs, and hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors are desperate for a safe place to live. Quite reasonably, they follow all those other Jewish survivors of persecution to that same land, and reasonably believe that they have a chance to build a state that can guarantee their safety.
By what miracle do you think there’s any chance that all those Jewish survivors of incredible trauma, who have no reason to trust the international community after it failed to save them from the Holocaust, would voluntarily leave that land and go to some distant place, with no connection to their culture or history? These are just human beings, not moral superheroes – just human beings who have endured incredible trauma. That’s just not how humans behave, especially survivors of trauma. Why would any of them trade the community they and their fellows were in the midst of carving out, for the uncertainty of remote and distant lands with problems of its own?
I don’t know. But we’ve got a real clusterfuck on our hands and much of it is the result of the creation of the state of Israel. I can’t help but think that if the state of Israel was created someplace where the natives were either OK with the creation of the state or someplace where the world would view it equitable to create a state, we wouldn’t be in the same situation.
I don’t think such a place exists. Looking at it from the perspective of the Jews in the late 40s, there was no other option but that land that would become Israel.
That doesn’t justify everything that happened afterwards, but those Jews quite reasonably believed that the only chance Jews had to be safe, long term, was to create their own state, and they quite reasonably believed that the only possible place that state might be located was that land that became Israel.
I guess Birobidzhan was kind of a hard sell, huh? You think? “Hey, chaverim, dig this, they’re gonna ship you to your very own homeland in the ass-end of Siberia! Where you can keep an eye on the Chinese frontier for us, 'cause nobody else wants to go there! Wow, what a bargain!”
I’ve read about Birobidzhan. The thing is, would the environment there be any more hostile than the desert? I think humans, with enough scientific skill and motivation - and the settlers to Israel didn’t lack either - are capable of taming almost any climate and terrain. At least Birobidzhan isn’t surrounded by hostile countries; it’s nearest neighbor is China, and it’s not like the Chinese have ever had anything against the Jews.
The real problem with that territory was that it was associated with Stalin. It’s unsurprising to me that it was a failure, like almost everything else Stalinist Russia tried to do.
You’re spinning “being sandwiched between two authoritarian communist regional superpower countries who fight each other every so often” as a good thing? But yeah, that Stalin association is bad too, i guess.
Everyone here is speaking like Israel was an idea the world spontaneously had in 1946. I’ve said this a thousand times before - there was already a near de-facto Jewish state in mandatory Palestine before World World 2 ever broke out, and it’s very, very likely that Israel would have eventually achieved independence even if the Holocaust had never occurred. There was no need to “find” a state for the Jews, as they already had one.
The “world” didn’t “give” us Israel any more than the “world” gave you the United States of America.
