To wish those in Israel safety in these coming times

[mids2019]

Israel is a country at war and I know many will have links or family in that country so I think it appropriate to wish them safety in the coming days.

And Iran didn’t help fund the attacks on 7th October? Iran wants to obliterate Israel and was fast becoming a nuclear threat to Israel and its allies. By taking out these military targets, Israel has made the world a safer place for the UK other allies. It has every right to defend itself.

@hareclive as a point of information, I believe that some recent studies in the public domain would tend to argue away from your first paragraph, such as the one referred to in the link below, from 2022.

https://hms.harvard.edu/news/ancient-dna-provides-new-insights-ashkenazi-jewish-history

No sympathy for Israel? Yet you’ll defend a corrupt ineffective government that is Hamas?
A government that openly wants to exterminate Israel?

I dont think most people would interpret the replies you have had in that way. But your persistence in insisting Israelis are white explains a lot about how you approach this subject. I think the Middle East and Israel in particular is a bit too complex for your mindset.

@hareclive
You are woefully ignorant of Jewish history.

Around half of Israelis descend from people who immigrated from countries in the ME, many of them fleeing persecution (look up the Farhud) or pitched out with the clothes they stood up in and very little else.
C1945:
Iran: 100k Jews - now, 8k
Iraq: 135k Jews - now, a handful
And so on.

And from another post:
you only have empathy for white European/American Israelis. it's disgusting
About half of Israelis are of Middle Eastern origin and so are shades of brown.
(And FYI, my own family is racially mixed. One of my absolute favourite cousins was VERY brown.)

Oh I thought we would get round to that. Are all Jewish people white?

I think we can safely say @hareclive has never come across a sephardi Jew, or an Indian or an Ethipian for that matter.

Absolutely bang on the nose 👏 👏

It would seem not...
Nor one from Ethiopia...

Sorry I edited my post!

No problem!

Am outright lie. The Palestinian Arabs actually petitioned the Brits to limit immigration.

Israel was ancestral Jewish homeland that had been colonised. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed in WWI, there was absolutely no reason the Jews shouldn't be allowed to re-establish a homeland in at least part of the land.

The majority of Mandatory Palestine (Trans Jordan, about half of Israel) was set aside as a Arab state. After the UN vote to partition the land into two sovereign states, the Palestinian Arabs started a civil war against the Palestinian Jews. The Jews fought back, and in the ensuing battles some Arabs lost their homes.

Six months later, in May 1948, when Israel declared independence, the Arab League declared war, in the hope of eliminating Israel. Once again, the Jews fought back, and in that war even more Arabs lost their homes.

When the armistice was reached in 1949, Arabs living within the borders of Israel were granted Israeli citizenship, while those who had been displaced as a result of the war they'd started, were not allowed back in. Understandably.

This is the history of 'Jews stealing Palestinian land' in a nutshell.

As an aside, this is in the Israeli deceleration of independence, written and read out at the time:
WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

Are all your muslim friends Arabs? Perhaps you live in London as the majority of muslim communities in the UK aren't ethnic Arabs. There are many Islamic countries in the world. eg In Africa (bit of a battleground), eastern Europe and Asia.
There are of course other faiths represented in the Middle East, though in a minor way...and getting progressively minor if fundamental islamists have their way.

So muslim does not equal Arab and Arab does not equal muslim. Generally my given response is 'seriously' what's the problem with Arabs, then you can decide if you want that discussion with those people.......

A. It wasn't sovereign. Making it a Jewish state doesn't in itself take away anyone's private land. In the same way that you can live in Britain, under the British government, yet own your house.

B. It was very sparsely populated. At present there are 10 times as many people living in Israel as in 1947, and it's still nowhere near overpopulated. So for the most part it actually was a land without people.

I’m sorry, but this is so ignorant I’m not sure where to start.

If you are labouring under the delusion that there were no Jews on this land or elsewhere in the Middle East, and that modern Israel is solely populated by white Jews who were displaced from Europe in the mid 20th Century, then you seriously need to educate yourself.

Start your reading by looking into the Mizrahi Jewish community and where they lived and how they were persecuted. Then read up about the Sephardi community. Hell, even when it comes to Ashkenazi Jews who had settled in Northern Europe (until they were persecuted), they were only there because they had been displaced from their ancestral lands in what is now Israel.

Information in your second paragraph has been commonly believed on this forum, since the board was set up. The posters aren't interested in educating themselves. It's much easier to - repeatedly - shout, Israel bad, Palestine good.

tbf there are Palestinians in what is now Israel who are descendants of those that stayed when others fled through a combination of justified fear, incited fear (Pan Arabists wanting to stir up division) and the over confident promises of surrounding Arab nations that they could come back when all the Jews had been removed.

I think the partition of Pakistan was more brutal but the Sikhs I know aren't hankering to go back, though I heard some talk of Sikh separatism and Khalistan a few years back.

I'm afraid this is true.

You just don't see brown Muslim Palestinians as people at all. you only have empathy for white European/American Israelis. it's disgusting

You are projecting. It is you who has shown no empathy whatsoever towards Israelis. You have emoted and raged on behalf of the Palestinians, often on the basis of misinformation, but shown no compassion for the innocent Israelis on the other side. You are so extremely biased you don’t even see your own bias, and instead point the finger elsewhere.

I’m getting increasingly worried about the number of earnest idiots who weigh in on this subject full of fire and outrage, on the basis of no actual factual historical knowledge whatsoever. I guess they’ve just been fired up by whatever fashionable twattery the Omnicause idiots are dishing up on Twitter, that they swallow hook line and sinker, without ever troubling themselves to actually find out the facts.

“tbh, the replies to me on here perfectly illustrated why I have no sympathy for Israeli citizens in the face of what Israel has done to Palestine. You just don't see brown Muslim Palestinians as people at all. you only have empathy for white European/American Israelis. it's disgusting”

@hareclive you seem to be equating people who disagree with you here, with white European/American Israelis.
Have I misread? I don’t think everyone disagreeing with you is Israeli. I certainly am not.

The first Israeli people I met were very distinctive/unusual looking people, with a very unfamiliar accent. Certainly not white, European or American.
I’m embarrassed to say 19yr old me was massively ignorant about all things Jewish and Israel. Reading Anne Frank was about the sum of my knowledge. I was well supposed to be educated too.

But Israel does right? So why have thousands of innocent civilians been killed so far?

I don’t know much, though have learned a massive amount in the last year, sadly.

I can recognise disingenuous bollocks and naive idealism though.

This place has been amazing as an education. The tone and elucidation of ideas is exceptionally educational. Dismiss the hectoring, concentrate on the empathic, and you get a great balance.

Perhaps because terrorists deliberately hide in among civilians. Human shields. There was a distressed Palestinian raging about it as he and his family were trekking to safety, having been targeted again because of Hamas. He was clear who he blamed.

Why would all my muslim friends be Arab? What a strange question. But to answer this question, not at all.

There are many Islamic countries in the world. eg In Africa (bit of a battleground), eastern Europe and Asia.
Is this supposed to be a joke? Do you seriously think people don't know this? Are you very young? It's just that you sound like you are trying to provide some sort of clever insight or information. But to clear it up so that you don't keep coming back to cross examine me, they were complaining about Arabs in Israel. It sounded unpleasant. They were very used to speaking like that.

Does that clear it up? If not please drop it now and move on.