The Jews who declared the state of Israel already lived there at the time. Yes, they had some help from Europeans who felt guilty about the holocaust, and perhaps wanted a place to send WWII refugees. And yes, they took in a lot of refugees that Britain wanted to keep out. But it would never have happened without local Jews. Yes, some were refugees from far away, who had purchased land in Palestine. Others were refugees from the Ottoman empire. Yet others were basically always there.
I don’t claim any special indigenous status in Israel. I am American. I grew up here. My grandparents immigrated here as babies or small children, from Eastern Europe. But yes, there were indigenous Jews in Palestime.
Quite a lot of them were refugees, of course, not indigenous.
Also, as a grandchild of refugees, and as someone who is active in my temple’s refugee resettlement program, i am generally a fan of helping refugees get established in a new home. I don’t believe they should rot in horrible conditions because “the right answer is for their home country to clean up its act”. That just forces a lot of people to die, or to raise their children in barely viable conditions. And I’m excited that the first family my temple sponsored (Syrian Arabs, for the record) are now established enough to sponsor more of their relatives on their own, to move to the US and become US citizens.
None of this means i support what Israel is doing in Gaza. I don’t. I think it’s horrible, and I’m sceptical that it even helps the Jewish residents of Israel in the short, medium, or long term. But the idea that the grandchildren of those Jewish refugees who helped found Israel, people who live there today, who were born in Israel and grew up in Israel, should be forced out is ALSO wrong, imho.
Basically, i think it’s part of human nature to move from time to time, for a variety of reasons, including being forced off their land. And i don’t think people ought to retain land rights from their ancestors. I think they earn land rights from living in a place. And while i think there’s a place for reparations to people whose ancestors were screwed, i view that as, ideally, a tax on those who indirectly benefited, not as punishment for the sins of your ancestors. (And yeah, my ancestors didn’t keep slaves, and didn’t kill native Americans. But i benefit from those actions. So i don’t feel guilt, but I’m okay paying a tax.)
This rambly answer will likely make me a lot of enemies. Oh well.
Uh, absolutely not? I’m descended from two lines of Jews from opposite sides of the Jewish world, neither of which was in the Levant, and neither of which was allowed to make a home anywhere else; and both lines were involved in the Zionist project and the creation of Israel, long before 1947; but if I accept ASL’s argument that this breaks our connection to our land, then I have no home at all, and I’m not gonna take it while some internet asshole strips me of my homeland because it wins him brownie points in a discussion about a war that he knows nothing about that is completely academic to him. Fuck. That.
The fact that the United States did a more thorough job of genociding the people who lived on what today is US land than our enemies managed to do to us is a horrible tragedy; it shouldn’t be an excuse to deny us our homeland. The extra bit you quoted certainly doesn’t make ASL come across as better.
ISTM that the Jews indigenou to the land now called Israel didn’t so much immigrate but were forcibly deported. Yes I realize there have been Jews who remained in that area, but didn’t the vast majority get dispersed by the Romans?
Oh, and, just to be clear, another reason this is bullshit:
A, as has been established, half of Israel’s population isn’t even European in any way, so ASL is full of shit.
B, I’m all for “carving up” other countries if it means oppressed minorities get their freedom. Elsewhere in the Middle East, it means I strongly support an independent Kurdistan; in the US, I support tribal sovereignty; etc.
And I fully support Palestinians getting their own state; I think that’s a precondition to lasting peace.
All peoples should have the right to self determination.
Would someone please give me the nutshell version of what is being argued concerning the Israelites and the Palestinians. I don’t want to Google a bunch of stuff unless it’s for credit. Thank you for your consideration.
Or you could pretend like I never wrote any of that, not unlike how @puzzlegal stopped short of quoting that text when admonishing me that in fact many modern states have their origins in ethnostates (of which, again, I am not a fan).
I mean, I guess I could be grossly ignorant of history at best and an antisemite at worst… if you don’t actually read what I wrote and instead pretend like I wrote something else entirely (which seems to be a recurring theme here).
Or, possibly, if a lot of people seem to be misreading what you think you are saying, there’s something about what you are actually writing that isn’t quite exactly what you meant to say…
Hmm, that’s hard, since I’m not sure we all agree on what is being argued.
I think that ASL has stated that he dislikes “ethnostates”, and thinks that it was wrong for Israel to have been created in the middle east, because really, the remaining Jews should have been cared for by the European countries that hadn’t quite killed them all.
And if, somehow, despite ethnostates being bad, the Jews ought to have had one, it should have been carved out of a piece of Europe, not the Middle East.
There’s a side argument about the extent to which Jews have any claim to being indigenous in Israel, which Jews, how many, and whether the Jews in Palestine who fought to create Israel were to any extent indigenous there.
(to what extent the Palestinians are indigenous in what is now Israel hasn’t really been discussed, but there’s an undercurrent of that question, as well.)
Who here isn’t?
Doing so via settler colonialism, though, I’m absolutely not a fan of.
I’m not saying they should be forced out. Saying they’re morally wrong is not the same as saying they need to suffer complete removal as a punishment.
I don’t think people should retain land rights at all, so this works for me as well.
As, no doubt, is the fact that Israel didn’t completely manage to do it to them.
Yet.
Although the IOF’s done a way better attempt than they ever have.
Jews were already dispersed throughout the Roman Empire (and the Assyrian and Persian Empires before that) way before the Judean revolts and the Roman response. I mean, Paul the Apostle wasn’t born in Israel, for starters.
Or people are so het up they see what they want to.
That’s a completely shitty reading of what he wrote - “Create an ethnostate in Europe” is not the same as “Cared for by the Europeans that hadn’t killed them yet”
America, the UK and France were actually in a dominant enough place at the time to carve out a Jewish ethnostate in Germany, should they have wanted to. And kept said state safe.
It’s been a long day. I read him as saying that no ethnostate should have been created, because ethnostates are bad. Instead, the nations of Europe should have taken better care of their minorities (not just the Jews.) But if a Jewish ethnostate HAD to be created, it should have been in Europe.
And maybe that would have been a better thing than what happened. But it’s not what happened. And now we have a lot of people who all want the same land. And an awful lot of them were born there to parents who were born there.
You might talk me into that. Land rights clearly lead to a lot of problems.
