Israel invades Lebanon

Quaid Farhan Alkadi was shot and taken hostage by Hamas because he refused to lead them to any Israeli Jews. He says so himself in his interview.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-819071

@SugarandSpiceandAllThingsNaice

The formation of nation states is a relatively new evolution in human society so this isn’t proof that Jewish people were in the region before Palestinians.

It is when we know that Jewish DNA to this day is closest to that of other Levantine populations, such as the Druze, and Samaritans, indicating that Jews today are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews and Israelites. 3000 years’ worth of archeological findings also conclusively demonstrate Jewish ancestral ties to the Land of Israel.

One Kingdom was the Kingdom of Canaan. Which as you know, the Israelites invaded and conquered. But the point is that when this happened, the entire region of these city states and petty kingdoms was being referred to as Filistin (Palestine) by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

Over time, yes different empires conquered the region, including the Kingdom of Judea which replaced the Kingdom of Canaan, but the name of the larger region as Palestine (in different permutations) endured for over 4,000 years.

Historians have long debated the origins of the name “Palestine.” Most believe that the word derives from the Hebrew and Egyptian word “peleshet,” meaning “migratory.” “Peleshet” was used to describe the Philistines, who settled on the Mediterranean coastline above Egypt, in parts of what is now Israel and Gaza. The Philistines were a seafaring people of Greek origin; in other words, today’s Palestinians are unrelated to the Philistines. In fact, as a people they were completely destroyed during the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, it is clear that no modern nation comes from them, including the Palestinians.

The first use of the word “Palestine” to describe a geographic region was in the 5th century BCE, at least 700 years after the use of the word “Israel.” Like the Land of Israel, “Palestine” was a loose region, describing the coastal strip that runs from Egypt to Lebanon.

Another, newer theory asserts that “Palestine” derives from the Greek word “Palaistes,” meaning “wrestler”; as you might know, the term “Israel” means “one who wrestles with G-d.” According to this theory, the word “Palestine” is a direct, Greek translation of the word “Israel.”

Between 132 CE-136 CE, when the Romans ruled over the Land of Israel (then known as the province of “Judea,” which, as I said, is where the term “Jew” derives from), the Jewish population revolted for the third time against the foreign rulers. This revolt, known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt, ended in complete catastrophe, with 600,000-one million Jews murdered in an act of genocide or sold into slavery. Following the revolt, Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to “Syria-Palestina,” marking the first time that “Palestine” was used as the official, legal name of the region. Historians have long argued that Hadrian did this to sever all Jewish ties to the land, though like nearly everything about Israel-Palestine, other historians dispute this assertion.

It’s important to note, however, that Palestine wasn’t known as Palestine from 136 CE. Its name changed periodically depending on those in power. As recently as the Ottoman period (1517-1917), the residents of what is now Israel-Palestine commonly called themselves “southern Syrians.”"Palestine" was revived as a political name under the British Mandate (1920-1948).

Language spoken as a result of conquest and colonisation do not turn inhabitants into the ethnicity that conquered and colonised them. There are plenty of Palestinian Israeli citizens that do speak Hebrew today right now. Yes, there was an Islamic empire in the region from 600-1920 CE or so but there is no evidence this was accompanied by ethnic cleansing such that the inhabitants were entirely replaced by waves of Arabic peoples.

First of all, The Arab conquerors did not peacefully and naturally integrate with the Indigenous populations; they both committed ethnic cleansing and physical genocide (for example, the 1012 Hakim Edict) as well as forcefully imposed their religion, language, customs, and identity upon the original inhabitants, thus de-Indigenizing them. Those who converted to Islam and Arabized assimilated into the identity of the colonizer and thus acquired the privilege that came with such an identity, at the expense of those who preserved their ancestral Indigenous customs and peoplehood (i.e. Jews and Samaritans).

So yes: Arabs did replace the Indigenous populations. And that is quite literally what settler colonialism is.

So not all people who identify as Arab today literally originated in the Arabian Peninsula; instead, many are people whose ancestors were Arabised through conquest and today speak Arabic and whose culture is Arab culture.

But how did Arabic become the dominant language in all these countries? Just as English became the dominant language in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand through colonialism, Arabic became the dominant language in the Middle East and North Africa through imperialism.

“Language death” is a term that describes when a language loses its last native speaker. “Language extinction” is when a language is no longer spoken by anyone, including second language speakers.
“Linguicide” refers to the extermination of a language; that is, language death that is caused by human intervention (e.g. colonialism, imperialism, language discrimination) as opposed to natural causes (e.g. natural disasters that decimate communities). It is considered a form of cultural genocide.

Hebrew has experienced language death in the past, but it never experienced language extinction. Like other Indigenous language deaths, the language death of Hebrew was caused by imperialism and colonialism; that is, it was caused by human intervention.

The first wave of decline came during the period of the Babylonian Captivity, when, in 587/6 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered and exiled about 25 percent of the citizens of the Kingdom of Judah. Jews then began adopting Aramaic — the language spoken among the Babylonians. However, Hebrew remained in use as a liturgical tongue.

By 200 BCE — around the time period of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire -- everyday colloquial Hebrew became almost fully extinct.

Then in another wave of linguicide took place during the period of the Arab colonisation of the Levant. Ancient Hebrew names for places (such as Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in Hebrew) were replaced with Arabic names. By the ninth century, Arabic fully replaced Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. This was not an evolution of language, it was done by force.

Surnames are no indicator as these are often modified into the new official language rather than kept original.

My family anglicised their Irish surname to an English version at the turn of 20th C when they emigrated to Britain. That’s not what is going on here, though.

As of 1850, between 200,000-300,000 people lived in Israel-Palestine. By 1900, just 50 years later, the population of Israel-Palestine had doubled (or tripled, depending on the statistics) to around 600,000. Just around 25,000-35,000 new Jewish immigrants arrived during this period, and it’s estimated that only 15,000 stayed, due to harsh conditions. In other words, in addition to natural population growth, Arab immigration to Israel-Palestine from elsewhere was a significant factor in the drastic population increase. This is in stark contrast to the population of Israel-Palestine in the 18th and early 19th centuries, which showed virtually no growth.

Most immigrants to Israel-Palestine during this period were Egyptian Arabs. This wave of immigration started in 1829, after thousands of peasants fled harsh labor laws imposed by the Egyptian ruler, Mehmmet Ali Pasha. Travellers during this period wrote that Bedouin tribes accompanied the peasants as well. In 1831, Egypt invaded Israel-Palestine. Over 6000 Egyptian peasants crossed into Israel-Palestine during the invasion; various Bedouin tribes also arrived with the Egyptian army. Others fled to Israel- Palestine as a result of blood feuds between different clans. Many Egyptian soldiers and administrators also chose to stay in Israel-Palestine.

By the late 19th century, the city of Jaffa had Egyptian neighborhoods all over town.
The British invasion of Egypt in 1882 prompted many Egyptians to flee to Israel-Palestine. A news report from the time stated: “Many of the people come here from Egypt to wait until the danger passes.” Very few actually returned to Egypt.
Today, the third most common last name in the Palestinian territories is “El Masry” (or al-Masry), meaning, quite literally, “the Egyptian.”

Then in the 20th C, Between 60,000-100,000 Arabs immigrated to Israel-Palestine between the two world wars. There are numerous reasons for this migration, most of all, new economic opportunities. It was also during this interwar period that a cohesive Palestinian national identity emerged.

In the early 20th C, many Egyptian peasants came to Palestine to build railroads. In March 1926, a railroad from Egypt to Israel-Palestine was completed, which prompted many young people to leave by train to seek employment in Israel-Palestine. In the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the coastal plain between Gaza and Jaffa, as well as the area between Gedara and Ness Ziona, Ramle, and Lod became densely populated with Egyptian immigrants.

During World War II, when Jewish immigration was essentially quashed, the British brought Syrian and Lebanese labourers to Israel-Palestine. Civilians also employed foreign contractors, many of whom came to Israel-Palestine without the legal paperwork. Around 2046 foreign contractors were employed in Jewish farms and kibbutzim, of which 14.5-38.3% were Egyptians and Sudanese. Government records from this period state that there were some 14,000 Egyptian and Lebanese labourers. The population increase along the southern coastal plain during this period was almost completely due to Arab immigration.

In fact DNA studies and archaeological evidence have proven consistently that Jewish Israelites and Muslim/Christian Palestinians are both descended from the original Semitic peoples of the Levant.

Both are indigenous, which is why a two state solution where the region is shared is the most just solution to the returning Jewish and the never left Palestinians.

No, you are wrong. Your claim here simply isn’t credible. Where is the 3000+ years’ worth of archeology, DNA science, historical record for those that identify as Palestinian today? It doesn’t exist. Instead, as I explained previously (see above), we have the census and migration records of the previous two centuries which underlines how the sudden population boom between 1850 and 1900 (and later) did not come from natural population growth of people already living there, but from Arab immigration. In the preceding centuries before this period, the population of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories had remained stagnant. Travelers at the time described Israel-Palestine as an abandoned backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. That’s not to say that it was empty or that nobody lived there, of course, but it was sparsely populated, according to the official Ottoman censuses.

Thank you @BillySnuz that was very interesting especially about the migrant railway workers more recently.

I think this was fascinating too - ending with a reminder of Cain and Abel:

Haaretz science article 2015 ( without links)

Blood Brothers: Palestinians and Jews Share Genetic Roots

Jews break down into three genetic groups, all of which have Middle Eastern origins – which are shared with the Palestinians and Druze.

Confronted by the violence sweeping over Israel, it can be easy to overlook the things that Jews and Palestinians share: a deep attachment to the same sliver of contested land, a shared appetite for hummus, a common tradition of descent from the patriarch Abraham, and, as scientific research shows - a common genetic ancestry, as well.

Several major studies published in the past five years attest to these ancient hereditary links. At the forefront of these efforts are two researchers: Harry Ostrer, professor of pediatrics and pathology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, New York, and Karl Skorecki, director of medical and research development at the Rambam Health Care Campus in Haifa. Back in June 2010, and within two days of each other, the two scientists and their research teams published extensive analyses of the genetic origins of the Jewish people and their Near East ancestry.

“The closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish groups were the Palestinians, Israeli Bedouins, and Druze in addition to the Southern Europeans, including Cypriots,” as Ostrer and Skorecki wrote in a review of their findings that they co-authored in the journal Human Genetics in October 2012.

“Karl and I are good friends,” Ostrer told Haaretz by telephone from New York. “We used somewhat different analytical methods—there’s no claim there for superiority, or one side versus the other.” In their results, as well, “there was really very little difference at all.”

Ostrer’s research on “Abraham’s Children in the Genome Era” published in The American Journal of Human Genetics, sampled 652,000 gene variants from each of 237 unrelated individuals from seven Jewish populations: Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi. These sequences were then compared with reference samples from non-Jews drawn from The Human Genome Diversity Project, a global database of genetic information gathered from populations across the world.

Each of the Jewish populations, they found, “formed its own distinctive cluster,” indicating their shared ancestry and “relative genetic isolation.”
Ostrer’s team also identified two major groups of Jews: Middle Eastern Jews (Iranian and Iraqi) and European/Syrian Jews. The split between these two groups of Jews occurred some 2,500 years ago.

Cousins with the Druze and French

Both groups of Jews shared ancestry with contemporary Middle Eastern and Southern European populations. The closest genetic relatives of the Middle Eastern Jews are Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians. The closest genetic relatives of the European group of Jews are Northern Italians, followed by Sardinians and French.

In a 2012 study, Ostrer identified North African Jews as a third major group. In Skorecki’s study on the genome -wide structure of the Jewish people published in the journal Nature, he and his fellow researchers sampled tens of thousands of genetic variants from the genomes of 121 individuals hailing from 14 Jewish Diaspora communities, and compared these variants with samples drawn from 1,166 individuals from 69 Old World non-Jewish populations.

They found that Jews from the Caucasus (Azerbaijan and Georgia), the Middle East (Iran and Iraq) North Africa (Morocco) and Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities, as well as Samaritans, form a “tight cluster” that overlaps with Israeli Druze.

This, the authors write, “is consistent with an ancestral Levantine contribution to much of contemporary Jewry.”

In addition, a “compact cluster” of Yemenite Jews “overlaps primarily with Bedouins but also with Saudi individuals.” Ethiopian and Indian Jews are more closely related to their own neighboring, host populations.

Middle East origins in European Jews

Further evidence for the Middle Eastern origins of Ashjenazi Jews came from a study published in 2014: In that research, which appeared in Nature Communications, a team led by Shai Carmi of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sequenced the complete genomes of 128 people of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Their analysis revealed that the Ashkenazi Jewish population is “an even mix” of European and Middle Eastern ancestral populations—suggesting, as Carmi writes on the web site of The Ashkenazi Genome Consortium (TAGC), “a sex-biased process, where, say, Middle-Eastern Jewish men married European non-Jewish women.”

Are these genetic ties between Jews, Palestinians, Bedouin, and Druze important in a contemporary context? “It doesn’t matter to me personally,” Skorecki says, “since I think that global human identity supersedes all other considerations.”

“We want to know who we are and where we came from,” Ostrer, who is now studying cancer risks among Ashkenazi Jews and Northern Israeli Druze populations, sums up. Even so, shared ancestry doesn’t necessarily imply a special bond. As Ostrer notes, citing the Biblical tale of Cain and Abel, “the fact that people are related to one another doesn’t prevent their developing extreme hostility to one another.”

@SugarandSpiceandAllThingsNaice

The formation of nation states is a relatively new evolution in human society so this isn’t proof that Jewish people were in the region before Palestinians.

It is when we know that Jewish DNA to this day is closest to that of other Levantine populations, such as the Druze, and Samaritans, indicating that Jews today are the direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews and Israelites. 3000 years’ worth of archeological findings also conclusively demonstrate Jewish ancestral ties to the Land of Israel.

One Kingdom was the Kingdom of Canaan. Which as you know, the Israelites invaded and conquered. But the point is that when this happened, the entire region of these city states and petty kingdoms was being referred to as Filistin (Palestine) by the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.

Over time, yes different empires conquered the region, including the Kingdom of Judea which replaced the Kingdom of Canaan, but the name of the larger region as Palestine (in different permutations) endured for over 4,000 years.

Historians have long debated the origins of the name “Palestine.” Most believe that the word derives from the Hebrew and Egyptian word “peleshet,” meaning “migratory.” “Peleshet” was used to describe the Philistines, who settled on the Mediterranean coastline above Egypt, in parts of what is now Israel and Gaza. The Philistines were a seafaring people of Greek origin; in other words, today’s Palestinians are unrelated to the Philistines. In fact, as a people they were completely destroyed during the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, it is clear that no modern nation comes from them, including the Palestinians.

The first use of the word “Palestine” to describe a geographic region was in the 5th century BCE, at least 700 years after the use of the word “Israel.” Like the Land of Israel, “Palestine” was a loose region, describing the coastal strip that runs from Egypt to Lebanon.

Another, newer theory asserts that “Palestine” derives from the Greek word “Palaistes,” meaning “wrestler”; as you might know, the term “Israel” means “one who wrestles with G-d.” According to this theory, the word “Palestine” is a direct, Greek translation of the word “Israel.”

Between 132 CE-136 CE, when the Romans ruled over the Land of Israel (then known as the province of “Judea,” which, as I said, is where the term “Jew” derives from), the Jewish population revolted for the third time against the foreign rulers. This revolt, known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt, ended in complete catastrophe, with 600,000-one million Jews murdered in an act of genocide or sold into slavery. Following the revolt, Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea to “Syria-Palestina,” marking the first time that “Palestine” was used as the official, legal name of the region. Historians have long argued that Hadrian did this to sever all Jewish ties to the land, though like nearly everything about Israel-Palestine, other historians dispute this assertion.

It’s important to note, however, that Palestine wasn’t known as Palestine from 136 CE. Its name changed periodically depending on those in power. As recently as the Ottoman period (1517-1917), the residents of what is now Israel-Palestine commonly called themselves “southern Syrians.”"Palestine" was revived as a political name under the British Mandate (1920-1948).

Language spoken as a result of conquest and colonisation do not turn inhabitants into the ethnicity that conquered and colonised them. There are plenty of Palestinian Israeli citizens that do speak Hebrew today right now. Yes, there was an Islamic empire in the region from 600-1920 CE or so but there is no evidence this was accompanied by ethnic cleansing such that the inhabitants were entirely replaced by waves of Arabic peoples.

First of all, The Arab conquerors did not peacefully and naturally integrate with the Indigenous populations; they both committed ethnic cleansing and physical genocide (for example, the 1012 Hakim Edict) as well as forcefully imposed their religion, language, customs, and identity upon the original inhabitants, thus de-Indigenizing them. Those who converted to Islam and Arabized assimilated into the identity of the colonizer and thus acquired the privilege that came with such an identity, at the expense of those who preserved their ancestral Indigenous customs and peoplehood (i.e. Jews and Samaritans).

So yes: Arabs did replace the Indigenous populations. And that is quite literally what settler colonialism is.

So not all people who identify as Arab today literally originated in the Arabian Peninsula; instead, many are people whose ancestors were Arabised through conquest and today speak Arabic and whose culture is Arab culture.

But how did Arabic become the dominant language in all these countries? Just as English became the dominant language in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand through colonialism, Arabic became the dominant language in the Middle East and North Africa through imperialism.

“Language death” is a term that describes when a language loses its last native speaker. “Language extinction” is when a language is no longer spoken by anyone, including second language speakers.
“Linguicide” refers to the extermination of a language; that is, language death that is caused by human intervention (e.g. colonialism, imperialism, language discrimination) as opposed to natural causes (e.g. natural disasters that decimate communities). It is considered a form of cultural genocide.

Hebrew has experienced language death in the past, but it never experienced language extinction. Like other Indigenous language deaths, the language death of Hebrew was caused by imperialism and colonialism; that is, it was caused by human intervention.

The first wave of decline came during the period of the Babylonian Captivity, when, in 587/6 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire conquered and exiled about 25 percent of the citizens of the Kingdom of Judah. Jews then began adopting Aramaic — the language spoken among the Babylonians. However, Hebrew remained in use as a liturgical tongue.

By 200 BCE — around the time period of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire -- everyday colloquial Hebrew became almost fully extinct.

Then in another wave of linguicide took place during the period of the Arab colonisation of the Levant. Ancient Hebrew names for places (such as Jerusalem, or Yerushalayim in Hebrew) were replaced with Arabic names. By the ninth century, Arabic fully replaced Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew. This was not an evolution of language, it was done by force.

Surnames are no indicator as these are often modified into the new official language rather than kept original.

My family anglicised their Irish surname to an English version at the turn of 20th C when they emigrated to Britain. That’s not what is going on here, though.

As of 1850, between 200,000-300,000 people lived in Israel-Palestine. By 1900, just 50 years later, the population of Israel-Palestine had doubled (or tripled, depending on the statistics) to around 600,000. Just around 25,000-35,000 new Jewish immigrants arrived during this period, and it’s estimated that only 15,000 stayed, due to harsh conditions. In other words, in addition to natural population growth, Arab immigration to Israel-Palestine from elsewhere was a significant factor in the drastic population increase. This is in stark contrast to the population of Israel-Palestine in the 18th and early 19th centuries, which showed virtually no growth.

Most immigrants to Israel-Palestine during this period were Egyptian Arabs. This wave of immigration started in 1829, after thousands of peasants fled harsh labor laws imposed by the Egyptian ruler, Mehmmet Ali Pasha. Travellers during this period wrote that Bedouin tribes accompanied the peasants as well. In 1831, Egypt invaded Israel-Palestine. Over 6000 Egyptian peasants crossed into Israel-Palestine during the invasion; various Bedouin tribes also arrived with the Egyptian army. Others fled to Israel- Palestine as a result of blood feuds between different clans. Many Egyptian soldiers and administrators also chose to stay in Israel-Palestine.

By the late 19th century, the city of Jaffa had Egyptian neighborhoods all over town.
The British invasion of Egypt in 1882 prompted many Egyptians to flee to Israel-Palestine. A news report from the time stated: “Many of the people come here from Egypt to wait until the danger passes.” Very few actually returned to Egypt.
Today, the third most common last name in the Palestinian territories is “El Masry” (or al-Masry), meaning, quite literally, “the Egyptian.”

Then in the 20th C, Between 60,000-100,000 Arabs immigrated to Israel-Palestine between the two world wars. There are numerous reasons for this migration, most of all, new economic opportunities. It was also during this interwar period that a cohesive Palestinian national identity emerged.

In the early 20th C, many Egyptian peasants came to Palestine to build railroads. In March 1926, a railroad from Egypt to Israel-Palestine was completed, which prompted many young people to leave by train to seek employment in Israel-Palestine. In the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the coastal plain between Gaza and Jaffa, as well as the area between Gedara and Ness Ziona, Ramle, and Lod became densely populated with Egyptian immigrants.

During World War II, when Jewish immigration was essentially quashed, the British brought Syrian and Lebanese labourers to Israel-Palestine. Civilians also employed foreign contractors, many of whom came to Israel-Palestine without the legal paperwork. Around 2046 foreign contractors were employed in Jewish farms and kibbutzim, of which 14.5-38.3% were Egyptians and Sudanese. Government records from this period state that there were some 14,000 Egyptian and Lebanese labourers. The population increase along the southern coastal plain during this period was almost completely due to Arab immigration.

In fact DNA studies and archaeological evidence have proven consistently that Jewish Israelites and Muslim/Christian Palestinians are both descended from the original Semitic peoples of the Levant.

Both are indigenous, which is why a two state solution where the region is shared is the most just solution to the returning Jewish and the never left Palestinians.

No, you are wrong. Your claim here simply isn’t credible. Where is the 3000+ years’ worth of archeology, DNA science, historical record for those that identify as Palestinian today? It doesn’t exist. Instead, as I explained previously (see above), we have the census and migration records of the previous two centuries which underlines how the sudden population boom between 1850 and 1900 (and later) did not come from natural population growth of people already living there, but from Arab immigration. In the preceding centuries before this period, the population of what is now Israel and the Palestinian Territories had remained stagnant. Travelers at the time described Israel-Palestine as an abandoned backwater province of the Ottoman Empire. That’s not to say that it was empty or that nobody lived there, of course, but it was sparsely populated, according to the official Ottoman censuses.

Palestine as a nation and ‘population’ is relatively recent construct.

1960s you say?
The text of the Sana’a Stele,…:
“I subdued from the bank of the Euphrates, the land of Hatti, the land of Amurru in its entirety, the land of Tyre, the land of Sidon, the land of Humri, the land of Edom, the land of Palstu, as far as the great sea of the setting Sun. I imposed tax and tribute on them.” ~ 800 BC

“The Palestinians are also mentioned in the Nimrud Letters..dated c. 735 BC:
“….I spoke to them in these terms:’Bring down lumber, do your work on it, do not deliver it to the Egyptians or Palestinians or I shall not let you go up in the mountains.” (Concerning getting lumber from the mountain forests of what is now Lebanon)

These are just two examples.

Twenty-eight health workers in Lebanon have been killed in the last 24 hours, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference that many health workers are also "not reporting to duty as they fled the areas where they work due to bombardment".
Plans to deliver a large shipment of trauma and medical supplies to Lebanon will not be able to go ahead on Friday due to flight restrictions over the country, he added.

Didn’t take long for ambulances to get targeted

@Easterissland as usual. A sense of deja vu?

I think the answer is that until it became a specifically Jewish country, no one cared about what the land was actually called. They just lived there and didn't care who was in charge. I mean that in a good way - they just got on with life and it didn't make a difference to them. I mean, how many different rulers had there been over the centuries?

I think if it hadn't been specifically a Jewish state, the surrounding countries wouldn't have attacked in the first place and therefore we wouldn't be where we are now. We wouldn't have had the history we have.

Sorry, that was for @ScrollingLeaves
Oh and by 'they' I mean normal people who lived in the area! Not Hamas or other terrorist groups.

I know I have no right to be the speak police
but
this thread has turned into all other ones on the Gaza topic.
This thread has nothing to do with Palestines land ownership or antisemitism.

Can we all stop the derailments and let this be about the ongoing situation in Lebanon.

Just a thought as there are hundreds of threads going back many many months talking the same talk over and over again.

But they planned attacks on people in Israel. Who they came across in the process is irrelevant to the overall intention.

Re: not an attack on Jews as such.

Without remembering the exact details, I think Hamas came upon the Nova Music festival unexpectedly and had not planned that attack in advance. (Its original date had been moved or something like that.)

I am sure the Hamas/other Palestinian opportunistic terrorists thought of the people there as “them” “ those Israelis” in general. But watching the BBC commissioned documentary on the weekend and seeing how Western the festival seemed, it may have been that the massacre might not just have been an unleashing of the terrorists’ hate on Israelis per se ( there were other nationalities there too if they ever noticed) but an attack on all the things the terrorists are not allowed and which they have to suppress: youthful fun, drugs, drinking, dancing, getting into a trance, free love and so on. So in that sense it would not have mattered if they were Jewish or any other group.

It seems the whole festival was ‘other’ to them as they ran amok carrying out the massacre.

This is why I think Noa Argami dancing in her yellow bikini at a festival when she had been freed was her resistance to the evil of that massacre. It stood for everything the terrorists had tried to kill at the Nova Music Festival.