Free Palestine

I don't claim that today this is an actual threat. I do claim that I have no idea what's coming for my children - or their children. These things happen in a cycle and happened far more regularly prior to Israel than in the 2 generations since.

There are many countries I am not allowed to visit, just because I was born in Israel. So already the world is a smaller place for me and my children than it is for others. There are many places it is unsafe for me to live as a Jewish person, and even more where it is unsafe for me to 'look' Jewish (I stopped wearing my Jewish star in public a year ago after several unpleasant interactions). So it's not impossible to foresee a time when my descendants will need to escape again, just like my ancestors.

Given the long history of Jews being expelled from whatever countries they have tried to settle in, and of the recent final solution that sought to exterminate them, do you think that Jews need their own country? One they will not be persecuted in, expelled from or rounded up from for industrial slaughter?

Currently I would have to say no. You can't really claim that in the UK for example, or other European countries, jews are in danger of being expelled or rounded up for industrial slaughter, can you?

But I would also accept that the situation would have looked very different in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust when these decisions were being made, and they didn't have the benefit of seeing into the future.

Gosh, I wonder why Jews are a minority in 100 different countries? I wonder if there are any hints to be found in their thousands of years of existence and history of being persecuted, oppressed, boycotted, scapegoated, expelled, enslaved, forcibly converted, displaced, erased and murdered in colossal numbers? It's a wonder we're still here at all really. As long as we remain appropriately spread out all over the world where we've been magnanimously permitted to stay in manageably small numbers we'll be fine! Hooray!

I'm not going to be drawn further into a debate about the legitimacy of the state of Israel or the need for a Jewish state to protect the Jewish people after centuries of genocidal persecution. Those that are questioning it really need to reflect on both their motivation and the implications of what they are saying. Those reading this can, I hope, see where the argument leads.

I'm hazarding a guess that one of the problems people might have right now with recognising a Palestinian state is that it is currently part-run by a proscribed terrorist organisation which is actively holding hostages.

Given the long history of Jews being expelled from whatever countries they have tried to settle in, and of the recent final solution that sought to exterminate them, do you think that Jews need their own country? One they will not be persecuted in, expelled from or rounded up from for industrial slaughter?

I have noticed quite a few Jews comment in the wake of October 7th and the associated rise in international antisemitism and Jew persecution that they didn't really think anything of Israel before, but now they understood why it was necessary.

Nobody here to my knowledge, on the loosely pro-Israel side, has ever questioned the concept of a two state solution which by definition means believing in the legitimacy of a Palestinian state.

You can dismiss the concept of a homeland for yourself. You cant dismiss it for the Jewish people. They have a right to self determination and there is nowhere other than Israel that that could be. Israel always recognised the right of others to be in Israel and expected there to be an Arab state alongside them also. It was the Arabs that rejected the proposal and rejected the right of the Jews to be there.

I think you most certainly can dismiss it being used as justification for driving other people off their own, current homeland and taking over half of it for someone else. There's a difference between homeland as subjective aspiration and homeland as objective basis for deciding political solutions involving others. It's the latter that people have a problem with.

I also don't believe it follows that "the jewish people" - who before all this started were a disparate group united to various degrees by ethnicity and faith, spread out over much of the world and comprising a majority nowhere - had "a right to self determination", if by that you mean a right to their own country. As much as some people say that like it's obvious (and antisemitic to deny it), it's simply not a right that we ascribe to any other racial or religious group with similar geographic spread.

The "right to self determination" that became taken for granted with the end of empires and the ascendancy of the nation state, was one based on where people lived. It was a right for the people within a particular nation defined by geography to elect their own rulers, make their own laws, not be interfered with by foreign powers etc. If those people happened to be mostly of the same religion and that religion then informed how they made their laws and chose to be governed, so be it. But noone ever said that just because there are people of a particular religion that is a minority in 100 different countries, they have a "right" to be treated as if they were a majority in one, and certainly not a right that entitles them to kick other people off one in order to form such a majority.

In reality, there are countless religions and ethnic groups all over the world who don't have their own country, simply because they don't form a majority anywhere to rule one. The idea that religious and ethnic unity without geographical majority entitles a group to a state, far from being a generally agreed principle that it would be antisemitic to deny to the jews as some claim, was a specific invention of Zionism that is not awarded to anyone else. And if you think about the international implications involved, it can't be.

To keep questioning Israel's legimacy bolsters those who say the logical conclusion of that is the end of Israel.

I would say that the same applies to Palestine. Posters here have openly questioned the legitimacy of Palestinian recognition. It bolsters those, like Netanyahu who have sworn it won't and are preventing it from existing. It bolsters settlers who attack Palestinians daily. It bolsters Israelis who continue to vote in far right governments committed to there never being a Palestinian state. To most people Israelis are no more special than Palestinians. Both are equal. If a Palestinian state can be questioned and actively denied why can an Israeli state not be questioned? What makes Israel any different?

So you basically don't accept that Jews have a legitimate right to be in Israel even though you aren't actually advocating for the end of the current state of Israel, but your argument IS one used by those who do advocate for the destruction of Israel. To keep questioning Israel's legimacy bolsters those who say the logical conclusion of that is the end of Israel. Its a distortion if history and that process of distortion and delegitimacy is exactly what is highlighted in the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Yes, there were people there, of many ethnicities and religions including Jews. It wouldn't have been much use to Jewish refugees to plonk them in a desert unsuitable for supporting life, so anywhere that would have been chosen would have had people. But it wasn't in any way equivalent to putting Palestinians in Wales because there were Jews in the region as there had been for milennia and Israel is central to Jewish culture. Wales has no place in historic Palestinian culture.

That's pretty much exactly my view.

You’re not ‘fighting for a cause’ you are merely very obviously dodging a question you don’t want to answer on MN.

You were perfectly happy to discuss in extremely disparaging terms, the creation of Israel up to that point.

You might want to reflect on whether it is your current issues with Israel (which are very real and horrifying, no question) which have led you to describe a group of Jews who had just survived the Holocaust in a way that you have just realised that you wouldn’t want to describe a group of Muslims who settled into a country created in a similar way at the same time.

Our weapons being used in a genocide for a start.

I'm not Muslim btw. I'm a white British Christian. I'm pro human rights and anti genocide.

Like everyone I can choose which causes I fight for at any given time. Right now it's this particular genocide.

Yes what's the big difference @Alittlefeedbackwouldbenice that you seem to have no issue with the creation of Pakistan but feel strongly about the creation of Israel?

I think it’s quite telling that someone who was very happy to liken Jews to illegitimate squatters suddenly gets shy when asked if they would use the same words to describe those in a newly created Muslim country.

Deflection.

I think our colonial meddling has got a lot to answer for. But right now it's the Palestinians who are suffering a genocide, so no, I'm not going to engage in whataboutery.

You disliking or disagreeing with something now doesn’t make it illegitimate at the time.

Or do you also liken Pakistan to squatters and go on about how the creation of Pakistan as a Muslim country was illegitimate?

Do you think Israel as it is, that being an occupying power taking over the West Bank and parts of Syria should exist because that is the reality of what Israel is? Peace cannot progress until people also accept that Israel isn't and hasn't behaved well for very many years. The Israeli and supporters approach of saying they hate settlers, writing them off as just a few extremists but not doing anything out of their way to disrupt the movement means that peace cannot progress.

There weren’t just randomly ‘given’ Israel so it wouldn’t be anything like giving them Wales.

Partition is still something that is done in modern times. How else could you sort out a situation where two groups of people want their own country? Czechoslovakia was divided in the 1990s, for example.

I think many people say the creation of Israel was the wrong move only because of how things have panned out. They don’t tend to disagree with the partition of India and Pakistan, or Ireland and N Ireland.

People say that the Palestinians are right to continue fighting because Israel ‘took their land’, but that sort of thing happened in numerous other places and the best outcomes have always been for people who accepted the partition even when it involved significant movement of people. So I don’t see it as a great historical injustice at all. The only reason it looks like that is because the Palestinians and surrounding countries completely refused to accept the idea of a Jewish state alongside them.

I suggest you read what I put again.

I didn't actually say that they were squatters, but using the principle of squatting to show that something that is illegitimate at the start can become legitimate through occupation over time.

I agree though I'm calling them squatters is unfair as well. Squatters take over unoccupied land. It wasn't unoccupied.

They also literally purchased some of it...

Israel wasn’t created by “squatting Jews”, but by a process that led to the creation and legal recognition of the state by other people. They then defended their land in war and won. Both these methods were valid ways of acquiring land back then whether you agree with that now or not.

It is exceptionally unfair to characterise them as “squatters”.

👏👏👏

I don't think it was the right thing to create Israel in the first place. Not because Jewish people don't deserve their own country, but because they were already people there. I can totally understand the wish to have the safety of a country after everything Jewish people have been through. But I think we could have and should have come up with a better solution, one which didn't screw over innocent people. ,

However I accept that 80 years ago, the idea of people carving up and partitioning lands where others live, seem to be okay. It's not something we would do today.

The Palestinians have suffered greatly but there's be an outrage if they were given' Wales, for example!

Enough time has passed though that I don't think history can or should be undone. For the vast majority of Israelis that have grown up in Israel, It's all they've known and it's their home. I guess I think of it like squatters rights, in that over time a claim to legitimacy can grow.

So I support Israel's right to exist, even though I dispute that it should have been created in the first place, and think it was wrong by modern standards.

But we still have to deal with the great injustice done to the Palestinian people. They shouldn't come out of this any worse than the Israelis given all that was taken from them. To have not only lost your land, but then be treated in the way they have for the last 80 years is abominable, and for much of that it's been because of Israel's policies, policies of apartheid, and now genocide.