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.

@FeliciteFaff Jordan was part of Palestine.
When Palestine was created in 1920 it contained all of what is now Israel and Jordan. In 1921 the UK unilaterally decided that it would not allow Jews to settle East of the Jordan River.
In 1922 when the League of Nations Mandate was ratified the UK notified the Secretary General that all provisions for furthering the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” would not be applied East of the Jordan River. So the Jewish people got really stiffed there, didn't they?
Later the UK proclaimed Trans-Jordan as a separate state and created a Hashemite government there. Today that part of Palestine is the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
So the Arabs IMO don't have an axe to grind there.

I stand behind this 100%
We are watching genocide.
This is worse than Bosnia was, but at least then Thatcher called it for what it was.

So why have Israeli forces shot and killed 8,700 Palestinian children between 2015 and 2022? Security and defense? Are children not civilians then?

“The Israeli military and border police forces are killing Palestinian children with virtually no recourse for accountability.”
”In all cases, Israeli forces shot the children’s upper bodies, without, according to witnesses, issuing warnings or using common, less-lethal measures such as tear gas, concussion grenades, or rubber-coated bullets.”
”From 2017 to 2021, fewer than one percent of complaints of violations by Israeli military forces against Palestinians, including killings and other abuses, resulted in indictments, the Israeli rights group Yesh Din reported.”
“Between 2015 and 2022, the UN attributed over 8,700 child casualties to Israeli forces...”
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/28/west-bank-spike-israeli-killings-palestinian-children

Yes. UN has designated it as an ongoing war crime by Israel

”The Human Rights Council this afternoon held an interactive dialogue with Michael Lynk, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967, who said that in his report, he examined whether the Israeli settlements were in violation of the absolute prohibition against “settler implantation” in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. He concluded that the Israeli settlements did amount to a war crime.”
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/07/israeli-settlements-amount-war-crime-special-rapporteur-tells-human-rights

see full UN investigation and report at
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-israel/index

Canaan was colonised by the Syriac ethnicity during the Bronze Age, who are common ancestors of the Jewish peoples and all other Palestinians (of all religions). And then the Israelites took advantage of the Bronze Age collapse to rise to power/rule in the region to create two Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judaea in the land of Canaan. Have you not read Exodus about the Canaanites? The Promised Land? That was the new religion of Judaism taking hold. Have you not read any archaeological or DNA studies on the migrations of the Syriac peoples into the Levant?

Over time the ethnicity also adopted Christianity and then Islam- many converting from pagan religions or Judaism to Christianity and then again many converting to Islam.

The conflict today is more about religion than ethnicity- although part of the “othering” is for both sides to declare those of a different religion are a different ethnicity too and so have no claim to their common ancestral homeland.

“The study in Cell also shows that migrants from the distant Caucasus Mountains combined with the indigenous population to forge the unique Canaanite culture that dominated the area between Egypt and Mesopotamia during the Bronze Age, lasting from approximately 3500 B.C. until 1200 B.C.”

“The researchers also compared the ancient DNA with that of modern populations and found that most Arab and Jewish groups in the region owe more than half of their DNA to Canaanites and other peoples who inhabited the ancient Near East—an area encompassing much of the modern Levant, Caucasus, and Iran.”
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/dna-from-biblical-canaanites-lives-modern-arabs-jews

“The results match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai. They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times. And in a recent study of 1371 men from around the world, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews.”
https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-israel/index

I think the neighbouring Arab countries rejected the 1948 division of Palestine because it was undemocratically being imposed by European and American imperialists. It was more a matter of principle than anti-Semitism.

I really don’t know why this history matters? Yes nonmuslims were oppressed under the Ottoman Empire (Turkish empire), including Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrians and so on, but Ottomans are not the same people as the Palestinians. Even modern day Turkey (the same ethnicity as the Ottomans) are a secular society that doesn’t oppress citizens on the basis of religion.

So the implied fear that if Christian and Muslim Palestinians were allowed out of apartheid and allowed to keep their homes and lands, that the Jewish citizens would end up oppressed seems unfounded to me.

That’s from the 1988 Hamas charter and was not present in the 2017 Hamas charter. Hamas is also a terrorist organisation, you cannot conflate them annd their views with the views of all Palestinians. It would be like claiming that all Israelis share the views of Lehava- which is an extremist group in Israel that consistently engages in violent hate crimes towards Palestinians.

”I then saw tens of thousands of Israelis marching through an area that's usually a bustling gathering place for Palestinians. There were all kinds of people, mainly fairly mainstream orthodox Jewish groups, chanting religious songs. But then the most common chants that I heard were, death to Arabs, may your village burn and insults of the Prophet Muhammad.
I saw a lot of T-shirts with rifles inside stars of David. I watched a mob lurch at a Palestinian video journalist, try to grab his equipment. Reporters from the BBC were also assaulted, too. And these are the kinds of scenes we see every single year when this march takes place.”

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/02/1102728946/a-look-at-jewish-extremism-in-israel

Gaza is not a self governed state. It is closest to a 19th century reservation as the US had for Native American.

Israel controls the water and electricity as a means of control- it’s not free. As they also control food, medicine and employment prospects.

They bombed the Gaza power plant in 2014 to try and destroy it.

They control all building permits and all movement of construction supplies in and out of Gaza. Gazans were not permitted to become self sufficient for these necessities by Israel. Israel wouldn’t even let them rebuild schools that had been destroyed by Israeli bombs.

Hamas sole agenda isn’t to commit genocide. This is not true.

Prior to the establishment of Israel, the entire region was multi-cultural.
The West Bank and Jerusalem still is, although it is quickly being ethnically cleansed of all non Jewish residents.

It’s a bit like blaming Black Africans for the apartheid camps of Black Africans in S. Africa for being mono-cultural. It’s been forced on them.

Valid point indeed. So sorry, where do you suggest the Palestinians go then?

I can’t believe you are so oblivious to not know why so much aid is needed in Gaza, it is because Israel constantly bombs it. Every year.

In your little allegory, you would be lobbing hand grenades over to your next door neighbour once a week as well as everything you’ve done. You’d also ensure they lost their jobs, and you’d control their benefits money and withhold water, power, food, medicine from them based on how grovelling nice they behaved towards you.

That is like saying the deep south was multicultural before the civil war.

There are not, and have never been, equal rights. Those have always been dependent on race or religion.

It was apartheid.

Israel is granting work permits to 10,000 Gazans

So only 10,000 people in a population of 2.3 million are allowed to work off the reservation. Can you not see how oppressive this is? Apply that to Manchester…it’s a city of the same size.

Er, no under the Ottomans while there was some oppression it did not amount to apartheid. And the Deep South under slavery was much worse than apartheid because it was slavery.

There are degrees of oppression and it doesn’t help that you don’t seem to understand this concept enough to select appropriate analogies.

Have you not read Exodus about the Canaanites

I have a degree in theology, specialising in ancient Israel.

I have a masters in Middle Eastern history.

I'm Iraqi.

And a practicing Jews.

And as I said; colonised by Greece, Romans, Ottomans and not by Jews.

What are you talking about? That’s equivalent to the UK issuing 10,000 work visas. Either you want Palestine to be in respected as it’s own state or not - the double standard is bizarre and telling. Open borders are not the norm, especially when your neighbour elected a government with a stated determination to genocide your people.

Please don’t compare the indigenous people of America to the non-indigenous people of the levant, who do have a state and every opportunity to live peacefully.

Massacres still occurred under the Ottomans and Jewish people were not allowed freedom of worship. The Mamluks were brutal. The Arab-British coalition banned Jews from buying land and specifically banned Jewish immigration during WWII. The Muslim Caliphates made Jewish people wear yellow stars around their neck. Still feel multicultural to you?

It was apartheid. Law was enshrined under the empire to give anyone who wasn't Muslim reduced status and typically that meant.

They had to live in seperate areas

Wear distinctive clothes

Couldn't work in government or military

Weren't allowed to testify against a Muslim in court

Structure rules on how they could pray / bold houses / behave

They had to show redirect to Muslims in the street

And so on. There was also regular and indiscriminate killings along with many, many pogrums.

Then I can only conclude you are not calling the migration and settling of the Syriac peoples amongst the Canaanites during the Bronze Age “colonisation” for political reasons.

every opportunity to live peacefully

That is a ludicrous statement quite frankly* *

You might as well say Israel was given every opportunity to live peacefully for all the sense it makes.

And what does this have to do with Palestinians? Nothing at all.

Again, what does this have to do with Palestinians? They were not the Umayyad’s or the Ottomans or any of the caliphates in between.

Are you going to trot out the Crusader kingdoms next? Or Constantine and the Eastern Roman Empire?

Gaza isn’t an independent nation state with self-rule. So no, it is not equivalent to issuing work visas.

“Trot out” the history of oppression of the Jewish people? You’re so dismissive of our history. Are you aware you come across like that?

The history is absolutely relevant to understanding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, because the story of Jewish suddenly arriving in 1948 to be mean to Arabs who later term themselves Palestinians is both nonsense and designed to create anti-Israel sentiment with anti-colonialists.