But surely comparison of Gaza under occupation by Egypt and by Israel ignores one massive difference, which is that Egypt weren't responsible for the Nakba that carved up Palestine in the first place and forced much of the population out of their original homes? How on Earth would you then expect Palestinians (or their supporters in other countries) to have the same attitude toward the two?
I don’t recall ever saying I think Palestinians should have the same feelings toward us as Israel. I don't think that. I do think when we occupied Gaza we should have given the people there citizenship of Egypt, or, created a state for them and made them citizens of that. Israel did a far better job of looking after Gaza and it’s people than we did but we wanted the Jews to be prevented from having control over Muslim land, and that is what it was all about.
Arab Palestinians are likely to feel less sense of cultural estrangement from another muslim, Arab country administering them than from a western-backed jewish one
I completely agree. Ideally they should have been administering themselves. Likewise all people who do not want to be administered in a Muslim culture, and prefer liberal democracy, should rightly have that choice to. This choice is denied to almost everyone in my region.
I wasn't around when they were occupied by Egypt and Jordan so I can't speak for what was said about it, by them or anyone else. If they had less resistance to it than being occupied by Israel that's their business.
I completely agree.
It doesn't mean they have to acquiesce to being occupied by Israel.
I completely agree. When they no longer threaten Israel, nobody has to occupy them.
However all this is putting the cart before the horse, because they shouldn't be occupied by Israel in the first place, and it's not their damn duty to check their own motives deeply and earnestly for traces of antisemitism in order to make their colonisers feel better about colonising them.
Arabs colonised Israel. Jews did not, they were there before anyone else. If you have persuaded yourself Jews colonised Israel you are seriously delusional.
And your use of words like "occupation" is misleading.
In simple terms Israel exists. It is a country with around 7 million citizens. It has existed as long or longer than Pakistan, Bangladesh, Singapore...it already exists.
If Palestinians persist with the choice of attacking Israeli citizens, bombing Israel indiscriminately, suicide bombing civilians, murdering and kidnapping any opportunity they get, and working towards trying to annihilate Israel then they are an existential threat to a sovereign country.
Whatever the history, Israel, like any sovereign country can and will defend it’s citizens and sovereignty. If they choose war, they will lose and people will die.
Israel will not allow them freedom to import / export or move people in such a way that is a threat to it’s security. If you feel that is "occupation" then the other alternative is to give them a state and control of their own imports and movements and what will happen with 100% certainty is first that they will use that freedom to attack Israel - albeit with far more serious weapons - and secondly, Israel will wipe them off the face of the planet.
If you feel that would be better, that is your opinion. I think that is the dumbest idea imaginable.
So no, they “shouldn’t be occupied in the first place”, but if they do those things, they will remain occupied. How long that is, is probably their choice. Certainly 7 October set them back at least a decade.
There were jewish and Christian minorities living peacefully alongside the muslim majority in Palestine for centuries before any of this kicked off, and it only became a major political problem once Zionism appeared.
Not true. While Jewish and Christian minorities often lived without constant violence under Muslim rule, they were legally second-class citizens under the dhimmi system - subject to special taxes, restrictions on worship, housing, dress, and public status. Describing this as "peaceful coexistence" is misleading. It’s akin to saying Black Americans lived peacefully under Jim Crow - so long as they accepted permanent inequality and humiliation, they were tolerated. The relative absence of mass killings depended not on equality or harmony, but on strict social and legal subordination.
Colonised by people from other countries, and ethnically cleansed the native population from it in order to artificially prop up its identity as majority jewish.
Due to repeated colonisation and abuse, including by Arabs, Jews were a diaspora population. Many were in Europe, many were in the middle east. That doesn't change that they were from Israel. Just as it doesn't change that I am from Egypt and am middle eastern, even if I lived for a thousand years in Europe. Jews had a right to a national home in the middle east, the place from which they came. They had a right for this to be in Israel, where they originated as a people and where all their most important cultural and religious sites were.
They were very happy to share it with Arabs, and indeed they do. Arabs were only happy to share it with Jews if they were subordinate, and that is simply not just. Had Arabs provided equality in the countries around the middle east where Jews were in diaspora, they would not have wanted to leave. And yes, they did have a long standing issue with antisemitism. If you think that's not the case, you are seriously mislead. that, however, escalated significantly in the mid 20th century when prominent Nazis quite literally flew out to the middle east with translations of Mein Kamp in Arabic, giving them lessons on how to ethnically cleanse Jews.
After World War II, Egypt became a haven for former Nazis - welcoming them not as fugitives, but as allies. Under both King Farouk and President Nasser, ex-SS officers, Gestapo agents, and Nazi scientists were recruited to help Egypt fight what they saw as their common enemies: Jews, Britain, and communism.
Nazi rocket experts were put to work developing missiles aimed at Israel. Nazi propagandists converted to Islam - one became a government adviser, churning out antisemitic propaganda for Radio Cairo, which broadcast Nazi-style conspiracy theories and Holocaust denial across the Arab world. This is the world I grew up in.
I am sure you will try to twist that around to justify it as you have other things in your post, but try and sit with it for a minute and really consider: AFTER the Holocaust, after all the horrors of it came to light, we welcomed in Nazis and broadcast their shit over our airways. But we get off lightly here. No one in the west seems to want to hold us to account for it.
But I assure you, whatever your Palestinian friends might have told you, the intention of the Arab league in 1948 when we invaded Israel the day after it announced it's independence was to enact the Holocaust phase II - and if you genuinely believe that that was justified because they dared want independence, exactly as you would do, from our colonial rule, then I can't help you.
Yes, there are terror groups among the populations surrounding Israel that want to see it annihilated.
Not "terror groups among the populations" -the government. The government was elected on the singular policy of annihilating Israel.
Guess what: that's what you get when you use the dominance of western geopolitical power to stick a bunch of people in someone else's land and tell the original owners to fuck off somewhere else.
They were not the owners.They were a majority population on land which was historically Jewish, and which was shared by many groups, which their particular group had colonised for almost 600 years. The Arabs colonised it and many Arabs moved their and many people converted to Islam, and that does not make them the “owners” of anything. The minorities are still just as valuable and just as worthy of the same rights. Once Israel was established as a state, it had the same rights as every other state to let anyone it bloody well wanted emigrate there and if that included Jews who were refugees, then good for them. that is nobodies business - Palestinians had they accepted their own state would have been free to do the exact same thing.
If there's going to be any hope of peace or reconciliation, at some point the parties to the conflict who made that terrible, profoundly racist decision (Israel and the west) are going to have to own up to their responsibility for the consequences of it.
to be perfectly honest, I find your post to be profoundly racist. It denies Jewish right of self determination, it denies Jewish history and it seeks to undermine the same rights of all minorities.
If you want to know what would have happened had Israel never been created, just look at what’s happened to the Kurds, the Yazidis, the Copts. Would you still pat yourself on the back if you'd condemned the Jews to the same fate - powerless, scattered, and at the mercy of regimes that have erased nearly every trace of religious diversity from the region?
A Middle East belonging entirely to Islam was never its historical reality, but that’s what it's fast becoming.
Since Israel’s founding, the rest of the region has seen the ruthless purge of its minorities: Assyrian and Armenian Christians driven out or slaughtered; Kurds bombed, gassed, and displaced by the hundreds of thousands; Yazidis massacred and enslaved. I mean, did you watch the Yazidi girls being burned alive because they would not convert? Do you know thousands of them were taken as sex slaves from ages as young as 10??
Baha’is in Iran imprisoned and executed simply for existing; Coptic Christians terrorised with church burnings and forced migration. Even within Islam, Sunni and Shia have purged one another from entire cities. The once-diverse mosaic of the Middle East has been systematically flattened into sectarian rule, religious supremacy, and fear. And in all that chaos, people still ask why the Jews needed a state of their own.
Thank God they do.