If you are anti-Zionist, what do you think Israel should do?

[Poudretteite]

Should Israel open its borders? Be given back to the Palestinian people? Where should the Jewish people go? What about the high risk of genocide?

Interested to hear as many people over the last few days have said they are anti-Zionist and that it's different to antisemitism.

What’s that got to do with the price of fish?

It is the current Israelis who are laying claim to the land on the basis that ‘they’ were there first.

Like actually read a history book, it might assist your understanding.

@RedCrossSupporter

But who are the Palestinians? They certainly aren’t the descendants of the Philestines, whose’s culture and identity was wiped out nearly a thousand years before the arrival of Islam.

The truth is that they too are mostly settlers from all over the Arab world and their main objection to Israel seems to be that is is run by Jewish people.

I sympathise with the plight of every one in Gaza. It must be the most hellish, horrible situation. It shouldn’t be happening. But this did not come about in some sort of vacuum in which Israel is the only aggressor. It is very recent that Israel had the means to defend itself from incredibly hostile neighbours.

This is not just a case of what is happening now but what the aims are of both groups. If Israel leave Gaza alone and open up the borders and draw back then what would Hamas do? In all likelihood they’d keep killing until Israel didn’t exist anymore.

Because they were a minority group who dealt with the Greek empire, the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church and Islam who all wanted to dominate over minorities and all of whom used them as a scapegoat to their wider population.

Point in case- Yasser Arafat was Egyptian born in Cairo!

Sorry, you said
”Yes, 700k Palestinains were exiled and fled their home and land. As did over a million Jews from their homes and lands across the Arab world. It was not the Jews who refused to live in equality or to share.”

It only made sense to say that if you thought that the exiled Jews were exiled by Palestinians. They werent. Palestinians were ruled and oppressed by the same empires.

So you are saying then it is ok with whatever atrocity is committed against Jewish people by the Ottomans, Israel is then able to commit those same atrocities on the Palestinians?

I have read history books thanks. I was asking for your opinion.

It seems if Israel was also left free to do what it wanted with no reproach from the international community it would carry on land grabbing and building illegal settlements. I mean it does that anyway but it would be doing it at a much faster rate

@Coffeaddict This takes you on the 2500 year journey up to the expulsion of the Jews from what is now Spain in 1492

I have never said they weren't - although "Palestinian" didn't exist as a thing until 2000 years after Jewish did - I still consider Palestinian Arabs to be indigenous. It's obvious the Middle East is home to both Jews and Muslims.

Hardly a push to ask for one teeny, tiny bit to be for Jews

Well Netanhyu’s Dad was a Polish immigrant to Israel.

@LemonyTicket ask for a teeny tiny bit with the teeny tiny forced expulsion of those already living there

Jews are indigenous to Judea (Israel)
They were there a thousand years before Islam existed.

Islam has existed for long enough (since about 700 AD) Jerusalem is an important city to Muslims. As you must know it was under Muslim rule for a long time. You can’t really argue Jewish people have a claim to the area but Muslims don’t.

The reasons are multifaceted and vary throughout the 3000 years of persecution, from the strategic importance of their territory, to religious rhetoric, to stereotypes enabling scapegoating. Why does anyone pick a minority group and decide to persecute them?

Why do you think?

Suddenly all the historians are coming out to play

Haha - I am actually a historian. Though I work on a slightly different, adjacent region; but this is a complex part of modern history which isn’t easily summarised, nor reduced to Wikipedia statistics (by the way, we would never allow our students to rely on Wikipedia, which is often misleading. It only really works as an introductory resource and if you cross-reference lots of it to get a more holistic sense of the complexity of it all). I’m not Jewish or religious myself, and nor am I particularly supportive of Israel; but so much anti-Israel sentiment is very historically underinformed.

A huge number of Jewish people were expelled or displaced from late nineteenth century Russia and Eastern Europe in waves of antisemitic persecution’s and pogroms. Lots of them moved to the Palestine region of the Ottoman Levant precisely to return to a possible Jewish homeland. They often called themselves Zionist Palestinians; “Hovevei Zion”, but Palestinian. They moved to the region in successive waves between the 1880s and 1930s. Many settled in what are now Syria, Egypt or Jordan, and were displaced into Israel after 1948. Are their descendants occupiers? Do they get their lands back in Arab countries? Similarly, many contemporary Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank etc. are originally Syrian or Jordanian. Why don’t the surrounding Arab countries take steps to ensure a peaceful solution works?

The entire history of and migration in the region is really complex. None of this means that a two-state, peaceful solution shouldn’t be the way forward: but it helps no-one to be rehearsing inaccurate social media soundbites, either anti-Israel or anti-Palestinian.

Why should Palestinians be the ones who have to go elsewhere? And where would they go? None of those countries are willing to take them. Ultimately both sides are going
to have to share that land sooner or later. There is nowhere else either can go to now.

@RedCrossSupporter

Palestinians didn’t exist then. No one called themselves a Palestinian. It was not an identity.

Who were the Palestinians?
”What we now know thanks to ancient DNA studies is that around the period where both the Jewish and Arab peoples are first seen historically in the Levant region there was a major migration of population likely from what is now Syria into the Southern Levant, between 2500 BCE and 1500 BCE and by around 1500 BCE about half of the ancestry of the population seems to be made up of the immigrant population. The population of the Southern Levant as of 1500 BCE can be found making up the majority of the descendants of both the Jewish and Palestinian people today.”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israelis-and-palestinians-are-both-indigenous-and-why-that-matters/

The Philistines were of Greek origin, settlers from the Aegean, during the early Iron Age. They arrived after the Palestinians and Israelites.

It wasn’t an identity then, but the people called Palestinians today had ancestors there.

Yes, of course Hamas aren't wanting to live multiculturally. Anyone who says this is being willfully obtuse.

People need to stop trying to speak for others. The population statistics are:

Afghanistan: 99.7 % Muslim
Egypt: 94% Muslim
Iran: 99.4% Muslim
Iraq: 98% Muslim
Jordan: 97% Muslim
Libya: 97% Muslim
Palestine: 97.5% Muslim
Saudi: 96.2% Muslim
Turkey: 99% Muslim
Yemen: 97.2% Muslim

Someone suggesting Palestine wants to be Peckham is pretty silly. Multiculturalism isn't considered a virtue in everyone's value system

Not one word of this is true, but I'm going to highlight the most egregious comment for everyone:

"The dreadful fact is that the Palestinian cause only exists to wipe out a Jewish state."

Your refusal to live in reality contributed to what happened last week and the ongoing violence.

ive not understood the aversion to Wikipedia, yes it can be edited but if someone puts errors in the text and its a popular article its usually corrected quickly, that said other sources are also good as a comparison too, although i would not use it as a reference in an university essay etc

Oh dear - this might not prove the point you want to make?

You are confusing religion with culture…..

@Reallifelurker

I am not arguing that at all. All people’s should be able to get on and share the area. But it does not seem like either side is willing to do that.

It is absolutely ludicrous that people are still dying over land disputes in the modern world. Or that people consider it fine to believe that a while ethnic group should not exist and work to that end- and get wide spread support in their aims.

I am arguing with the idea that the Jewish people of Israel are colonisers who ‘stole’ the land from ‘native’ Palestinians. Because that is absolutely not the truth. It is so far from true that is is deliberate propaganda slogan to make Israel always look like the aggressor.