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.

I see the student politics has arrived.

Why are people going on about the IRA now?

Are these genuine posters? Name calling and insulting comments.

Development doesn't mean expansion! . Development of countries means improvement of the standard of living and quality of life of human inhabitants.

Read the room. The parallels are kinda obvious

Well..I think Israel/Palestine and Northern Island may be slightly different scenarios tbh
Though both involve terrorism.

Azerbaijan and Turkey aren’t neutral. Or have you not seen the news over the last three years?

On another note-

OP you’re best off reading things from Chatham House or RUSI than trying to make sense of anything people on the internet say on this. Half the information in this thread is bias and the other half is bonkers - you’re more likely to find a unicorn than you are to find common sense.

99.9% of randoms on the internet know nothing about how foreign policy or real politics work - only what they ‘see’ on TV. Most of this thread is probably full of ‘Russia-Ukraine experts’ and ‘COVID’ experts and probably even ‘China-Taiwan experts.’

If you want to know the answer to your questions, do some research.

I see the student politics has arrived.

All fired up after a fun day chanting "from the river to the sea", followed by a few celebratory pints.

I haven’t seen anyone salivating over murder. And you were the one who mentioned ‘brown people’ in that frankly racist way.

It is possible to think a ground invasion of Gaza is a terrible and want it not to happened (not least because it will lead to an all out war in the Middle East) and condemn Hamas as terrorist group that was founded on bigoted, totalitarian principles.

I’m also saying that if you consider yourself left wing and open minded and kind. And you find yourself defending a terrorist group that is homophobic, racist, misogynistic and anti-Semitic and proudly so. Then perhaps you aren’t as open minded as you think you are. Hamas are evil. What they did was evil. What Israel is doing in response is wrong and I hope they stop.

But all this student politics ‘free Palestine’ shit is embarrassingly over simplistic and pretty laughably ignorant of basic geopolitical systems and the wider history of the levant.

I supposed you’d also be horrified to learn that children in Jewish schools in London have had to be told not to wear their blazers in public because there is such fear of anti-Semitic attacks, which are up 435% since last week.

Please, stop your gaslighting and tell me that Palestinians have not been forced from their homes, houses razed to the ground, farms confiscated/destroyed. Not to mention children being tortured and murdered... This is world news and is recorded by United Nations. There is simply no denying it, no matter how unpleasant it is to you.

Regarding the word terrorists it was posted

“This language shouldn’t be EXCLUSIVELY used for brown people. “

The reply was to show it isn’t.

So to clarify for you…

The term terrorist is not exclusively used for “brown people” as suggested in the post, it is and has been used for “white people” too for example the IRA were terrorists and majority white Irish people.

There's a very interesting Louis Theroux documentary about ultra nationalist Jewish settlers. https://www.bbcselect.com/watch/louis-theroux-the-ultra-zionists/ I've seen it on Youtube.

The original post I responded to was basically saying exactly that. That because of the existence of other arab and muslim countries, Palestinians should not be complaining as they could live elsewhere whereas the state of Israel is the only Jewish state in the middle east.

I’m interested to know do you mean what you say when you say the people of Palestine need to be less bigoted, more tolerant and stop hating and plotting to kill. Do you genuinely feel that all or a majority of Palestinians are doing this, or do you mean Hamas?

Apologies - correction, typo

The term terrorist is not exclusively used for “brown people” as suggested in the post, it is and has been used for “white people” too for example the IRA were CALLED terrorists and majority white Irish people.

She says in her post that Israel should pull out of illegal settlements. They are obviously atrocious and people have every right to be bloody raging.

But historically?

My grandparents house and land and home for generations was taken in 1941. Then my parents' in 1956.

I don't feel a massive sense of loss, anger or anything. I get on with my life. Shit happened in the 1940s. I am lucky to be alive, certainly most of us were not so lucky.

The difference is, we arrived as refugees (twice) in a completely different place, not of our choosing and we got on with it. Didn't have a cent. But worked hard, made a life and now my life is great. Very fortunate.

The problem really isn't what happened 75 years ago as much as the fact Palestinian people have been kept in permanent limbo because the reality of the situation hasn't been accepted and no effort has been put into development of their lives.

They wouldn't need to worry about where their grandparents lived 80 years ago if they were helped to have a decent life now

They need peace, food, jobs, community, money, maybe travelling and realising the human sense of fulfillment they deserve. They need what everyone needs. A nice life!

They can't do that while they are being led by terrorists stealing everything they've got and keeping them as eternal refugees - even with their Arab brothers. They can't do that while Hamas is radicalising their children to murder rather than educating them so they can become fulfilled people.

I find people tend to use Zionism to describe a few different things.

Some just use it to mean approving, in the general sense, of Israel as a state. It basically takes it for granted that it is a legitimate state as it exists now and doesn't really make any kind of ideological stance as such. That's probably what most people mean when they use it.

Others use it ideologically, as in, there is some kind of necessity or right for an ethnically Jewish state to exist. Not just as a pragmatic solution to a problem like persecution of Jews, if it did not already exist as a political unit, they would say it ought to. Often this can have a religious element, and for some religious Jewish people (and weirdly evangelical Christians in the US) this is a really important idea. There are quite a few people who think of it that way, too, and then some who sort of combine the two in a mushy way.

I don't believe in the second of those things myself, I do think that people who live in a place have a right to citizenship, and some kind of voice in government, but I don't thing rights belong to states - no state has a right to exist in a particular form. But I don't think that there is any religious call from God for either Jews or Muslims have to their vision of a state in that particular place.

In the end I don't know what Israel should do. I am pragmatic, and while I think the whole idea of establishing a homeland in the Middle East for Jews living across the whole world came from very human and humane motives, I don't think it was ever politically going to work, and I can't see any way to make it work now. I think in time the whole region will be a failed state and revert to some sort of chaos, or one side will obliterate the other.

Not a happy thought but it is what I think will happen.

It's quite sad - there's such a lack of nuance present in debate today. In all fairness, it's probably practically impossible to properly debate a subject that is so multi faceted in a thread such as this but there is a real lack of empathy in some of the posts that one reads on here. Compromise is such a dirty word these days but without it, we're pretty much guaranteed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

@Tiredandgrumpy31

I do really mean Hamas. It is late and I’m getting a bit imprecise. Sorry. I would hope that most people in Gaza and The West Bank are more open minded than Hamas. But situations like this are only going to drive those divisions deeper. It is so so horrible.

@Ameni

Thanks for the explanation. That makes more sense. I agree the word should apply what ever the race of the perpetrators.