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.

fair points i stand corrected, although if it predated the creation of two states, then why did anyone think the two states would be successful ?

@Poudretteite coffeeaddict77 · Today 17:37

Given the US seem to support Isreal and there are a lot of Jewish people there they could consider offering Isreal some land though.

Same could be said about Saudi, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, The Emirates, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt........you know, all those Muslim countries with lots of land and LOTS of money for the Palestininans

That's an excuse. And it's one that has led directly to the violence we're seeing.

If the Palestinians had something to lose (their own country, not constantly getting bombed, being allowed to get to jobs, being able to receive supplies) then I bet they would be much less likely to tolerate Hamas and Hamas would have a much harder time recruiting people.

You are pretending that this problem can't be solved.

The Jewish people wanted and needed their own state after 6 million of them were wiped out during the Holocaust!
Reducing it to a "biblical connection" is just so wrong.

Depends really, if you're not Jewish then absolutely kick them out.

If you are Jewish then no, you need to let them stay. In fact, if you don't pay for their utilities and send them regular Tesco deliveries you're a sick fuck.

Antsy** No. You called it "inevitable". You said Hamas "had no other choice". You said these things, that you think are true, are down to Israel's actions over the years. That is absolutely, 100%, cast iron justification, and making excuses for terrorism.

It's not my attitude that is the problem here.

I guess from the rest of your post that you think (or will claim) that you're 'explaining' rather than 'justifying', but your 'explanation' is wrong. Hamas are not responding to poverty or oppression or living in an open air prison or anything else you could say (rightly) about conditions in Gaza and for Palestinians more generally. While these are huge and real problems for Palestinians, Hamas are Islamic extremists who are committed to killing Jews and eradicating Israel as a Jewish state. The bit of your post I agree with is that Palestinians deserve their own functioning, prosperous, free state of their own. Most people manage to support that prospect without justifying a resort to terrorist actions.

I really don't know. I started a thread to ask exactly that question - why the Zionists of the 1930's and 40's thought it could work out. I very much doubt they thought it would have gone the way it has. The thread was deleted as antisemitic. Maybe it was just naivety or blind optimism, or an idea that God would help out - for the religious ones among them.

The Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s rejected every British proposal to give the Jews a state of their own. A 1938 Commissioner offered the jews just a 500 square mile area. The Arabs still refused it. They had plenty to lose at that time. Until the reasons for that are understood there's no point trying to understand current issues like Hamas.

As others have said, there are small minority sects within Judaism that believe that only God can establish a new Israel.

i do wonder if Balfour Declaration In 1917, played a part in the support for the idea

@WaveyGodshawk you misunderstood me, I am thinking practically. Yes a Jewish state was needed after WW2 but unfortunately it hasn’t worked out very well. I was simply questioning why families felt safer in a Jewish state rather than building communities in other countries. In an ideal world I do believe there should be a Jewish homeland but at what cost?

but how can anyone concieve of gods perspectives if all we have is the written words and books written by humans ?

Looking at my family's history, since 1500 they were thrown out of 5 different European countries losing everything each time.

Fled Germany in the 1940's - losing homes, businesses... everything bar the clothes they stood up in. Those houses are still standing today... I've visited them. Germany said they were needed to rehome Germans after the war and not a penny was paid in compensation. There are pieces of paper revoking all German citizenship purely because they were Jewish.

Today the family is spread across multiple countries thanks to sanctuary given during the war. Some are in Israel. There are still a number of relatives who have direct experience of concentration camps.

Funnily enough, despite endlessly losing their property, homes and livelihoods none of them have ever turned into revolutionaries - headed for the caring professions in general.

There is no simple answer as to 'who owned the land' - it's changed hands multiple times over the centuries.

Land in Israel was often bought from absentee Arab landlords. The Palestinian tenant farmers were probably unhappy that the new owner wanted to live on the land they had just bought - but we often hear this today in the UK. If you rent a property and your landlord sells it to someone who wants it as their own home, yep it's a pain, but ultimately it's not your property.

The Balfour Declaration was a result of Zionists campaigning though. But yeah, maybe they thought if the British empire was going to support them they thought that would be enough to make up for the animosity of their neighbours.

In 1938 the cost to the Arabs would have been 500 square miles. That was one of the British offers. The Arabs wouldn't even give them that. A bit of decency towards their former dhimmis at that time would have solved the problem.

What was the ownership situation before Balfour & Britain dictated what should happen? Israel should occupy the lands that were unoccupied when they moved back and give back and land that belonged to Palestine.

You acknowledge Jews need a place where they feel safe - where would you suggest that could be?

Stamford hill? Manchester? America?

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for peace on both sides but some of the videos earlier this year of American people entering the homes of Palestinians demanding them to leave and claiming it was now their property crossed the line for me.

You know what religious people believe surely. There's no point in arguing with them about this.

You realise why Jews need a Jewish state don’t you?

The British didn't dictate what happened in the end. The Jews declared independence and all the surrounding Arabs states attacked them.

Israel can't move anywhere, it's a state. If you mean when the Jews moved back, they didn't move back. There were Jews living there all the time, long predating the Islamic conquest. They lived as dhimmis, second class citizens under Islamic laws. There were even gold stars at time. It was their land as much as it was the muslim's land, insofar as both had lived there for centuries.

That land hasn't been unoccupied for millennia.

Ok so i am going to assume that the Jews are bad, horrible, evil people. Then when the people in Gaza were getting so much aid did they not develop their own capabilities to supply their own water and eletricity.
That is the first thing I would do.

true, it is odd, all of human kinds creations , achievements etc, all made and created by humans, even books written by humans etc, and we dismiss the ideas of Santa, tooth fairy, but then treat the words in some books as gospel ?

I don't think people have been migrating from those countries to live in Isreal, Gaza or the West bank over the past few decades have they and I don't think those countries have supported Palestinians to evict people that were already there from their land.

Bit if you go back to the time when Jews were first exiled and enslaved you would need to refer to the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea - basically the same area they have now )the Gaza Strip maps almost directly onto the Kingdom of the Philistines .

One of the reasons is that Zionism didn’t just appear out of nowhere in the 1930s and 1940s - it was a long-standing political movement dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, including under the Ottoman Turks. The British Mandate envisaged two states well before the creation of the UN (and the idea was on the international political stage long before even the League of Nations or WWI - there had been Jewish campaigns for an Israeli homeland in the mid-1800s. One reason is that there was a long history of maltreatment or expulsion of Jewish people in lots of other countries around the world). Obviously the case for a Jewish homeland became more pressing after the Holocaust; but it had been a cause for a long time.

None of this appeared out of nowhere in 1948, or was somehow dreamt up by the British.