Israel supporting counter marches in London - about time

[mids2019]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13304895/Met-Police-arrest-Palestine-Israel-march-London-protest-Gaza.html

I think in a democracy this is absolutely necessary. Obviously policing will be important but it is good to see that in terms of street protest this is not a come sided issue.

I wonder how many are going to be arrested losing their rag seeing Israeli flags an masse after getting themselves riled up calling for a ceasefire.....

“I only see Palestinians seeking to exclude Jews from 'people who belong here', not the other way round. Israel has 20% Arab citizens.”

The land that is now Israel used to have 94.7% Arab citizens.

But yeah, as you say, all you see is that it’s the Jewish citizens who now comprise 79% of the population that are under threat of ethnic cleansing exclusion from Israel. Despite the fact that the % of Jewish citizens has climbed consistently from 5% to 79% while the 94.7% of Arab citizens of all other religions has declined to 20%.

Very strange sort of ethnic cleansing exclusion where you end up going from a minority to the majority (with all the power).

OK, the Gaza and WB bit was a bit tongue in cheek.

Egypt governed Gaza after 1948. Israel occupied Gaza during the 1956 Suez crisis, then returned it to Egypt. Israel occupied Gaza again after the 1967 war (along with the Sinai) and Egypt didn't take it back when Israel returned the Sinai in the peace treaty.

In 1948, Jordan occupied the WB then annexed it in 1950. Israel occupied the WB again after the 1967 war. Jordan renounce it's claim in 1988.

@statsfun thank you 😏 for admitting it was' tongue in cheek'. Would you have admitted it if not caught out? Probably not and then so many ignorant people would have filed that away and used it as a fact in future argument.

Tongue in cheek- so giving is a euphemism for lost that war.

For those earlier in in the thread who had doubts about the Jewish people who joined our marches

And one more thing to the poster who told me that 'Palestinian' was first coined in the 60's: I was chatting to a very elderly Jewish lady on the march yesterday and when I told her my grandfather came from Haifa, she told me that her mother came from a village nearby and, wait for it, her mother called herself Palestinian.

@BibiSuzanne
Excelente video

This is really interesting - I know that early forms of writing happen around the bronze age in several places but do people already have a sense of nationhood to call themselves palestinian & that is articulated in writing? Surely not? Its not my area & I cant easily find anything authoritative online. Can you point me to written recirds showing people calling themselves palestinian, or being referred to as palestinian this early?

@SharonEllis I wasn't denying that there are issues with the marches, that wasn't my point. It's just frustrating that some people assert almost as if factual, that people haven't exhausted other avenues except for marching.
It's extremely easy to write to your MP, there are even templates you can use or edit accordingly that takes no more than a minute. Many people i have spoken to have mentioned they have written to their MP's. In my community and others that i know of, that was the first point of action that was discussed. The response I recieved was disappointing but predictable from my MP.

They didn’t disappear. They intermarried and were absorbed into the indigenous population. It wasn’t the first or last migration of people to/from Europe to the Near East. Their descendants are still there, amongst the Palestinians and Israelis.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-dna-sheds-new-light-biblical-philistines-180972561/

I can give you a few excerpts from this book I recommended earlier
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36645450-palestine
it is a 386 page book (excepting the bibliography) published by the University of Edinburgh.

p60
“In seven known Assyrian clay tablet and cuneiform inscriptions….the Assyrians called the region connected with modern Palestine ‘Palashtu’, ‘Palastu’ or ‘Pilistu’, and called the people who lived in this region Palestinians: ‘pa-la-as-ta-a-a’ beginning with…Adad-Nirari III (from 811 BC to 783 BC)…to Esarhaddon (…681-669 BC).”

“The text of the Sana’a Stele,…:
I subdued from the bank of the Euphrates, the land of Hatti, the land of Amurru in its entirety, the land of Tyre, the land of Sidon, the land of Humri, the land of Edom, the land of Palastu, as far as the great sea of the setting Sun. I imposed tax and tribute on them.”

“The Palestinians are also mentioned in the Nimrud Letters..dated c. 735 BC:
“….I spoke to them in these terms:’Bring down lumber, do your work on it, do not deliver it to the Egyptians or Palestinians or I shall not let you go up in the mountains.”

P69- when coinage was invented…
“…Palestinian currency struck in Gaza from 538 BC until the occupation of Palestine by Alexander the Great in 332 BC….”

P71
“Palestine was the name used most commonly, consistently and continuously for over 1200 years throughout classical and Late Antiquity, from ….500 BC…until the occupation of Palestine by the Muslim armies in 637-638 AD.”

First up is Herodotus (c. 484-425 BC) used Palaistine to refer to Palestine. He distinguishes them from Syrians and Phoenicians. “Herodotus, who travelled widely in Palestine and Syria and beyond the coastal region, does not mention Judaea or refer to Jews. He does not mention such terms as Cana’an or Canaanites or Israelites in Palestine; nor does he describe monotheism in the country. First as archaeological evidence shows, monotheism was a much later development in Palestine and the Near East (Masalha 2007)…”(p76)

It goes on through history, dozens of examples including examples of famous Jewish scholars in Jerusalem like Josephus ( c. 25 BC to 50 AD ) referring to themselves as Palestinians and the country as Palestine.

There was an interesting blog on Times of Israel regarding how successive waves of new religions, Christianity and Islam, caused many Jewish Palestinians to convert. Sometimes by choice, but sometimes at the point of a sword. This, the author is saying, would explain the DNA studies showing close ethnic affinity between Israelis and Palestinians.

”Tzvi Misinai, a software pioneer, who has devoted his life to assembling the facts on this issue, says that 90 per cent of Palestinian Arabs are descendants of Jews and 50 per cent know it.”

”The Crusaders when they came here found that the Arabs here spoke Aramaic, not Arabic.”

“When the original Arabians invaded, the population was comprised of a majority of Greek-speaking Christians and a large minority of Aramaic-speaking Jews.
The Arabians did not colonize the Promised Land because they saw that this population was not hostile.
Skip ahead 400 years and a Shi’ite caliph in Egypt decided to forcibly convert everyone here to Islam. The Christians cleared out. Their numbers from that day to this have remained miniscule. The Jews remained and converted.
The decree was cancelled 30 years later but only a quarter of the Jews returned to practising Judaism openly. There was a practical reason for this and you can’t blame the others. Islamic society consisted of two classes of people, superiors and inferiors or “dhimmis.” The dhimmis were hit with confiscatory taxes and had no rights. Rather than impoverish themselves, those who remained technically Muslims, left well enough alone. But there was no Inquisition among the Muslims. No one was snooping on them. They continued speaking Aramaic and paying no more than lip service to Islam.
A traveller Rabbi Yitzhak Khilu in 1300 said he met many nomad Bedouin who were Jews. They had never left the country ever.
The DNA findings back this up. The Palestinian Arabs, who are descendants of Jews, are very close to Ashkenazi Jews in their gene makeup.”
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/most-palestinians-are-descendants-of-jews/

Thanks for sharing. Looking at the images of the march behind her it does look like relocating to Hyde Park was a good idea and has freed up central London for people going about their business.

There is also seems plenty of space for joggers and walkers which I know @mids2019 was concerned about.

The march started at Parliament square and ended at Hyde Park. Again, what I saw was extremely peaceful

Ah, well the point of ALL THAT is that pro Israel counter marches are needed because there is a nasty undercurrent comparing Israel’s apartheid society and internal oppression of Palestinians as that of a “coloniser”.

Israel is built on the right of return for Jewish refugees that had been forced from Palestine as long as millennia ago. A return to their homeland. Currently 47% of all Jews live there.

It can’t be directly compared to the Dutch and British in S. Africa because the Dutch and British were never forced to leave S Africa ever in the history of humanity.

One problem is the double standard, recognition of someone’s ancestral homeland and right to return should not be limited by their religion.

Pictures were for those who still believe that 'visible Jews' are too frightened and intimidated by us.
The elderly lady I referred to in an earlier post said that she feels very safe with us on the march, but has been pushed over by pro Zionists and broke her nose.

@KestrelMoon
Thank you for those posts, really interesting.
Sorry, haven't scrolled back to name the other poster, thank you as well for your posts with a different take on the history of the peoples of this area.
I've learnt a lot.

Thanks, this is great. Sorry if I missed the post recommending the book.

Interesting that she says she not a zionist.
I wonder what she means by this?

Exactly that!!! What do you think she means by it then?

Some of my very elderly Jewish relatives (most now long dead) spoke of being called Palestinians as a derogatory term for Jews in the ME and NA countries where they lived pre-1948 and being told to go back to Palestine. The irony.

I'm sorry about your relatives. But it shows that the term Palestinian was used even then. My mother was Iraqi (my father was Palestinian) and she spoke longingly of her time in Iraq and there was no issue with religion. Her close family friends were Jewish and Muslim ( we are Christians.

I had read ( need to find the source) that the early Zionists started stirring hatred in the Middle East in order for the Jews to leave and populate Palestine.

On another thread someone said they'd been led to believe that Zionist meant someone who wants to get rid of non-Jews from Israel which doesn't seem to be true so I think asking people what they mean by Zionist or 'not a Zionist' is a fair question.

Anti Zionism is an opposition to the creation of the state of Israel on Palestine. Simple. Not the murder of Jews. We believe in the right of return.

But Israel has been created, so what now?