Support for Palestine at Glastonbury

These are terrible injustices.
I do understand where the anger is coming from.
And I agree that the settlers do represent the far right government who support their acts.
Palestinian lives are as precious as all our lives.

Ignore the ignorant pea-brains. You are correct, ironically seeing as so many people like to use it as a slur, Palestinians along with the Lebanese have very little "Arab" DNA, 80%+ of their DNA can be traced back 3700 years to where they are. Here is a wonderful Ted Talk by geneticist Nathan Pearson.
https://www.ted.com/talks/nathaniel_pearson_the_splendid_tapestry_how_dna_reveals_truths_ancient_lasting

I'm not sure what's 'unfair' unless he thinks Palestine losing the war it started is 'unfair.' If Israel didn't have such a good defence system and the tens of thousands of missiles Palestine is bombarded it with were getting through there wouldn't be any handwringing.

@Shutupaboutthesun you keep using the term Arabs it has been highlighted to you by a Palestinian that they are Palestinians why are you not calling them Palestinians?

This is true of course. Compromise is needed from both sides.

I think what is hard to take on all sides is the level of compromise that will be needed.
I think everyone is fully aware that compromise is needed but
@Shutupaboutthesun posts are only recommending compromise on one side. That isn't how you negotiate for peace

Very true @SharonEllis

The leftist oppressor/oppressed framework that the stronger party is always to blame and the weaker one is always the victim is something I will never understand. You have to distort the humanity of both peoples to make it make even a little bit of sense.
I agree entirely @Shutupaboutthesun I find it deeply problematic, as if both peoples are not real people at all but projections. There is real racism towards both I think. The simplicity of such sloganeering (going back to the point of the OP) just makes any reasoned engagement with the complexity of the situation impossible.

there are two million Arab citizens of Israel, the vast majority of whom are not violent and most favour coexistence with Jews. There is no need for the Palestinian cause to be as violent and irredentist as it is.

What do you mean by this statement? Because to me it reads that you are suggesting the Palestinians living in Israel are now not violent and that can be achieved for all Palestinians? Are you suggesting all Palestinians are inherently violent? This is racist dehumanising language so I just want to clarify if that is what you meant?

I understand your anger at the racism and oppression the Palestinians have faced but I don’t think the post that offended you was meant to be offensive.

I don’t agree with everything @Shutupaboutthesun is saying but I do think that the reality is some compromises and sacrifices will have to be made for the sake of peace. It will not be possible for all the injustices to be put right and it will not be possible for all the stolen land to be returned.

As @Shutupaboutthesun has said - millions of people were displaced after WW1 and great suffering was caused.
In the end it is better to look forward to a better future rather than backwards at the pain and suffering.
I realise I might sound glib but the past is the past and nothing can be done about it. The children of Palestine deserve a future .

I echo this BibiSuzanne apologies for the Racism and evil, hurtful comments. Supremacist's just can't help it.

Be heartened though, the whole world now sees clearly precisely what Palestinians have had to endure from their occupiers.

Fantasies like that PP are based on the old Status Quo which no longer exists, Gvir and his sorts can wax lyrical about annexing land but they won't be allowed to on any big scale, because that means War in the region, real war fought for the first time in Israel in decades. America does not want that (hence repeatedly sending the CIA director to the region) and is not equipped to fight.
So let the fantasist, fantasise.

@BibiSuzanne I'm sorry you're having to read such awful things. The overwhelming message from Glastonbury has been one of peace, love and support for the innocent people of Palestine.

@shutupaboutthesun there is so much that is wrong in your posts. Just one point, it is absolutely incorrect that the Palestinians did not call themselves that and instead just used the term 'Arab'. That is simply put, just part of the fierce propaganda used by those who attemp to erase and re-write the Palestinian identity. What do you think the Jerusalem Post was called before it changed it's name? Golda Meir was a Jewish Palestinian. Before the state of Israel was created, whether you were Jewish, Christian or Muslim, anyone who lived there was considered a Palestinian.

@BibiSuzanne just ignore the attempted revisionist propaganda.

poshsnobtwit I don't share your view that the Palestinians have no agency and the Jews are the only rational empowered actors in the conflict. That isn't victim blaming, it's assigning equal moral weight to Arab actions as I would to those of Jews, while understanding that both peoples are trapped to large extent by tragic historical forces that they did not create.

For instance, pre-October 7, Gaza had not been under occupation since 2005. Israel and Egypt did introduce a blockade after Hamas was elected in 2007, but imposing a blockade on a hostile territory that is firing rockets at your civilian population is not an occupation. Hamas had total control of the Gaza strip, suffice to say that if the Israelis were actually occupying it, there's no way Hamas would have been able to build 500km of tunnels there, let alone assemble a 40,000 strong Iranian-armed military force that is bigger than many European armies. Turning the first bit of territory they actually controlled into a base from which to attack Israel was a decision taken by Palestinians. Building their military installations under schools, hospitals and mosques so as to deliberately turn the civilian population of Gaza into military targets was a decision taken by Palestinians - a particularly diabolical one that I'm shocked the world has not formalised as a war crime in itself. Let's hope that insurgent groups and amoral regimes the world over do not copy this tactic.

People who think that the Israelis are responsible for their own actions AND also responsible for the Palestinians' actions have a very skewed view of the conflict, IMO. Every barbarous action of the Palestinians is simply further proof in their eyes of how bad the Jews are. Look at them, what truly terrible people they must be, to provoke the Palestinians into doing such terrible things to them. The leftist oppressor/oppressed framework that the stronger party is always to blame and the weaker one is always the victim is something I will never understand. You have to distort the humanity of both peoples to make it make even a little bit of sense.

In any case it seems clear the Palestinians don't see themselves as the weaker party, not really. Temporarily weaker militarily, but zoom out and you'll see the conflict as the Palestinians see it: as a contest between 7 million Jews and 450 million Arabs. That's why they say stuff like 'the end of the Zionist entity is a mathematical certainty'. That's why they have never felt the need to compromise on their demand for the whole of the land.

To many people it seems, the extreme savagery of the October 7 massacre, the sexual violence, the beheadings with blunt implements, the targeting of even infants and the elderly, was an expression of the desperation of the Palestinians and further confirmation of their extreme oppression. To me, it is an example of what Arab Muslims have been doing to their enemies for centuries, which is part of the reason why Arab Muslims now dominate the entire MENA region despite being indigenous to only a small part of it (the Arabian Peninsula). The Palestinian cause as expressed by Hamas seems to be essentially an extension of the Arab conquest (in spite of the fact that many Palestinians have Jewish and Samaritan ancestry), and again, I don't get what is progressive about this. Obviously supporting the Palestinians as people deserving of life and human rights is not the same as supporting their IMO currently indefensible political goals, but you don't hear Pro-Palestine supporters saying that, do you? Most can't even bring themselves to condemn Hamas's actions, let alone critique Hamas's ideology as part of the problem.

@10UsernamesNotAvailableTryAnotherOne
"Well said! I would also like to see it work both ways. If we couldn't mention the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians without condemning Hamas/ October 7th, then Israel supporters shouldn't be able mention October 7th without also condemning the IDF, acknowledging the 40,000 (at least) dead Palestinians in Gaza AND the 76 years of brutal occupation the Palestinians have suffered. Fair is fair."

I completely agree and I'm so sorry for what you and your family are having to go through @BibiSuzanne.

I had one mumsnetter tell me that my family moved into the West Bank, like all occupied Palestinians, from 'Arabia' in 1967 once we saw how the Israelis made the land flourish???? And that we only called ourselves Palestinians because Yasser Arafat 'coined the phrase'

I'm sorry you've had to put up with such ignorance OP.

Your people in Gaza. Sorry for the typo. Of course I can't edit it now, lol!

Arabs is not what we described ourselves at the time. Yes we came under Greater Syria and the Ottoman Empire. But that was how it was in the Middle East. But we were a people living there calling ourselves Palestinians. Do not lie about that. Just because we didn't have an official state does not take away the fact we owned and farmed land and owned and built houses on land that we had lived on for centuries. Some of us may come from the original canaanites, philistines, Jews, Romans whatever ( my DNA results place me in that region). So we have every right to be there.
I had one mumsnetter tell me that my family moved into the West Bank, like all occupied Palestinians, from 'Arabia' in 1967 once we saw how the Israelis made the land flourish???? And that we only called ourselves Palestinians because Yasser Arafat 'coined the phrase'

I think what is hard to take on all sides is the level of compromise that will be needed. Sometimes those are short term compromises which might feel really really painful, like ceding land in one area for land in another, for longer term peace and security.

Except that there are huge numbers of Palestinians who do want to destroy Israel. And, crucially, they are backed by Iran who want to destroy Israel. Regardless of the rights & wrongs of the past the creation of a Palestinian state will happen in that context. The people who do want to destroy Israel wont suddenly play nice (why do you think they spent the last 20 years building those tunnels?). @Shutupaboutthesun may or may not be right but they are talking far more realistically than anyone else about the sort of processes and strategic relationships that will be necessary for this to happen.

What is it you want the occupied Palestinians to do? Give up?

Yes, I expect them to give up their dream of destroying Israel and accept a two-state solution, which has been on offer several times in the past and will hopefully be on offer again someday, once the Palestinians show that their political aspirations are best represented by someone other than a racist, murderous organisation like Hamas. No other people who started a war and then lost it are allowed to keep endlessly re-prosecuting that same war. No other people who were displaced in the geopolitical upheavals that followed the Second World War have inherited refugee status passed down from their great-grandparents (! ) The ethnic Germans who were expelled from what became Czechslovakia were expected to get on with it, as were the millions of refugees created by the partition of India and Pakistan. Not to mention the 800,000 Jews who were forced to leave Arab-majority countries.

The original UN partition plan was IMO a reasonable deal for the Arabs of Palestine, given that they had no exisiting state there nor any system of governance. (Arabs is how they described themselves at the time, 'Palestinians', a linguistic flex which implies that all of Mandatory Palestine rightfully belonged to them, came later). It wasn't a great deal, perhaps, but it offered them the chance of sovereignty for the first time ever, and was a lot more than what was offered to some of the other populations who were also agitating for a piece of the former Ottoman Empire (the Assyrians and the Kurds got nothing). And above that, it was a solution designed to prevent massive bloodshed, given that the leaders of the Arabs had told the Peel Commission in 1937 that they were not prepared to tolerate 400,000 Jews living within any putative 'one-state solution'. The British genuinely feared that, based on events like the Hebron massacre and the 1936 Arab Revolt, once they left, there would be mass ethnic slaughter, most of it directed by the Arab majority against the Jewish minority. (The Peel Commission explicitly referenced the recent massacres and expulsions of the Assyrians by the Arabs in Iraq, stating that they feared this would happen to the Jews in an Arab-majority state in Palestine.) Hence, the two-state solution.

The Arabs (acting as a five-army, pan-Arab force) rejected the partition plan and invaded the newly formed Israel because they believed they could easily defeat the Jews and get the whole land for themselves. That turned out to be a miscalculation and lead to huge numbers of Arabs fleeing Israel and becoming refugees. It's a tragedy and their descendants are justified in feeling aggrieved about it and the atrocities committed during the war by some Jewish militias, but the fact remains that the Palestinian refugee crisis was a direct result of a war that was started by the Arabs with the express intent of killing or expelling all the Jews. Sorry, I just don't agree with the Palestinian narrative that the whole land was rightfully theirs and they are only ever the victims, nor with the anti-Zionist view that Jews alone among all Levantine peoples had no right to establish any sovereignty in the Levant.

In any case, Israel exists now, and can only be dismantled by way of a devastating war that would probably turn nuclear, so I can't understand how so many people are so single-mindedly convinced that the destruction of Israel, rather than the establishment of a Palestine state beside Israel, is the righteous path to pursue. If the Palestinian cause were focused on protesting the land-theft via settlements and establishing a sovereign state in the West Bank, I think most of the world would be behind them, and so would many Israelis. But even 'peaceful' Palestinian movements like BDS refuse to work with Israeli groups like Standing Together who oppose the settlements in the West Bank, saying this amounts to 'normalisation'. Well yeah. What's wrong with normalising working across ethnic and religious lines in pursuit of a common goal? Unless your real goal is not stopping or dismantling the settlements, but the long-awaited conquest of the people you are refusing to 'normalise' with.

BibiSuzanne- I am so sorry you have to deal with so much racism here. It's horrific how you have to deal with this on-top of the oppression inflicted on you/your people and the genocide against the your in Gaza. 🫂

I'm so sorry this has happened to your people and I really pray for an end to the occupation and suffering and wish that the Palestinians can self determine, free from oppression.

This is a disgusting post. Victim blaming, "It doesn't need to be this way, it's a choice....". Have you forgotten these "violent" people are under a brutal occupation? That children are dying of starvation every day, being shot in the head for being the wrong ethnicity? The idea that if they simply stopped being violent then there would be peace is laughable. Please wake up and allow yourself to acknowledge what is happening.