I think a lot of people here conveniently ignore that a significant number (50%) of Israelis aren’t of European descent they’re Mizrahi Jews, meaning Middle Eastern Jews.
These are people whose families lived for centuries in countries like Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. They didn’t come to Israel from Europe after the Holocaust, they were expelled or fled violent persecution from Arab countries in the mid-20th century, around the time of the founding of Israel.
These Jewish communities had been in Middle East for generations. Yet after 1948, more than 850,000 Jews were forced out of Arab and Muslim-majority countries. They had their property confiscated, faced mob violence, arrests, and killings. Most of these countries will not take them back, and many have effectively erased their Jewish histories.
Israel became the only place they could go for many Mizrahi Jews after being made stateless by these surrounding Arab countries.
There’s a narrative that Israel is just a colonial project of European Jews, but that ignores the lived experience of half the country’s Jewish population who are indigenous to the region and whose roots in the Middle East go just as deep as any other group there.
It’s absolutely right to care about Palestinian suffering, but we also need to understand the full, complicated history of this region, including the trauma and displacement of Middle Eastern Jews that never gets acknowledged.
So many comments here just completely dismiss and ignore this. 850,000 Jews from Arab countries were cast out. Israel took them in because they had nowhere else to go. These people were born in this region, as were their grandparents (and many generations before them).
Should they be put on boats and sent to the UK to Europe, places they share no heritage or culture with?
The Israeli government is vile.
Hamas are vile.
But let's not pretend that all Israeli Jews were these big baddies who just rocked up and decided to steal some land for the fun of it. Whether fleeing the Holocaust or being cast out of their homes by Arab countries, these people needed somewhere to go that they could try and be safe.
No one wants a one state solution. Not the Israelis and not the Palestinian people. This is clear from many polls and surveys. There is too much trauma on both sides and the ignorance of so many people sitting at home who think they know the answers is astounding.