Free Palestine

[mommyandmore]

Please forgive my ignorance! Please can someone tell me the history of this? I have obviously seen and read what has unfolded over the past year but I’d really like someone to break down what’s happening. The things I’m seeing are horrific! Thanks and please no sarky comments, I’m really wanting to educate myself further about this.

oh give over op you been living under a bush?

plus you will get wildly differing opinions

Oh come off it. The history goes back 2000+ years and there’s many different interpretations of what happened and who did what to whom. You can get some answers by googling or reading the Middle East board.

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this is what I didn’t want 🙈 yes I have googled and it’s bloody confusing to me! I wondered if anyone could simplify…maybe Mumsnet not tge best place to ask

In the late 19th century a movement called Zionism arose encouraging jews from elsewhere in the world to emigrate to Palestine (then under the control of the Ottoman Empire and populated mostly by Arab muslims, with a small jewish minority) and create a jewish homeland.

In 1917 Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, which expressed support for the idea of a jewish homeland in Palestine, without dealing with how that would impact upon the indigenous population.

In the course of WWI the Ottoman Empire ceased to exist.

At the end of WWI Palestine, along with several other territories in the region, was made a "mandate" of Britain. This basically meant Britain was charged with overseeing its transition to nationhood - setting up the relevant political and judicial institutions etc.

During the interwar period Zionist migration increased. The British administrators favoured it in various ways, eg by changing laws and traditions of land ownership, exacerbating the growth of Zionism as a separatist movement. There was considerable violence between Zionist settlers and the indigenous population.

Britain considered how to deal with this violence and came up with the idea of partitioning Palestine into two countries, one jewish and one Arab muslim. The Zionists broadly supported this idea, while the Arabs (both Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries) rejected it.

At the end of WW2, the situation was exacerbated by thousands of refugees from the Nazi concentration camps arriving in Palestine. Britain couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution so said "bugger this, we've had enough", announced the mandate would be ending and left it for the UN to sort out.

The UN decided on a partition plan with a larger Israel, to account for prospective immigration over subsequent decades, and a smaller Palestine, even though at the time jews made up about a third of the population. Again this was accepted by Zionists but not by Arabs.

In 1948, in accordance with this plan, the state of Israel was declared. The Arab League immediately declared war upon it. Israel won that war and in the ensuing peace treaty the rest of Palestine was divided up - the West Bank between Israel and Transjordan, the Gaza strip to Egypt.

There was continual hostility, every so often erupting into war, between Israel and everyone else over the following decades. In 1967 after the six day war between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria, which Israel won, Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza strip, which it has controlled ever since.

Palestinians in those territories continued to rebel and refuse to accept the occupation. The UN also didn't accept it and repeatedly declared it illegal. Israel maintained that it was necessary as a security "buffer zone" against countries that sought its annihilation. As a general pattern, small and ineffective skirmishes by Palestinians would be met by overwhelming military force by Israel, killing vastly more.

In the 1980s and 1990s there were attempts to resolve the conflict and create a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but these were unsuccessful.

In 1988 Hamas was founded to fight for Palestinian statehood, with an explicit project to destroy Israel and create a single state over the whole of Palestine which would have an Arab muslim majority.

Israel continued to establish settlements in the occupied territories, treating the native Palestinians as second class citizens with few rights.

In 2005 Israel withdrew its settlements from Gaza (while maintaining and expanding them in the West Bank) and turned it over to self government, but maintained military and border control over it, restricting what could come in, who could go out etc.

In 2007 The Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas to government. Conflict erupted intermittently between Hamas and Israel, breaking into all out war in 2014.

In 2023, Hamas staged a raid into Israeli territory, killing about 1000 - 1500 people (depending on who you believe) and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel then went into all out war, obliterating Gaza, killing over 50,000 Palestinians (which it justifies by saying it is attempting to eradicate Hamas). The Palestinian civilians have been repeatedly ordered to evacuate from one area to another, had their livelihoods destroyed and are now suffering widespread starvation. Israel has been accused of delberate genocide in order to eventually take full control of the whole area.

@dropoutin has given a good explanation.

Thank you @dropoutin I didn’t know all of that

Only a good explanation if you want to come in three quarters of the way through the story. Why did Jews want a homeland in the Middle East and why did they pick that place? Where did they come up with the name Israel and why is there a Jewish Temple underneath the mosque in Jerusalem?

The post weirdly skips that bit.

I can only say that the long response here is wildly biased and unhelpful. But OP - it’s a story of thousands of years so quite difficult to summarise. If you really want to learn you’ll need to do more homework.

Sorry yes there was something I omitted -

When the Zionists started taking over the region they cited the justification that their ancestors had lived there thousands of years ago and it had been promised to them by God in their holy book.

In your opinion. To me it looks fairly accurate.

You mean because it was their homeland?

At one point thousands of years ago, yes.

I'm curious as to what some people think is biased about my chronology above, as I was genuinely trying to be balanced and objective. I could have been far more biased if I'd wanted to. For example I included the Israeli justification for the occupation in the fact that they had neighbours who openly wanted to destroy them. I stated that Hamas had declared their intention to annihilate Israel. I said Israel has now been accused of genocide (which you can't really leave out in terms of its relevance to current debate), without offering an opinion whether I agree with that accusation.

I did date the whole thing from the last major source of demographic conflict, the Zionist migrations, as prior to that the region was relatively settled for hundreds of years under the Ottomans. I personally believe the idea that people can justify taking over a land by who lived there thousands of years ago, let alone by what a religious scripture says (I'm an atheist) is absurd and unworkable from the point of view of international law - imagine if the whole world did that! There'd be no USA, no Australia...

But if anyone wants to add something more substantial about that to what I've written they're welcome. In the meantime, they're also welcome to point out what I've written from the point in history I started at is not factual and balanced. Obviously there are things left out - the OP did ask for a summary, not a detailed treatise. If there's something so necessary to the narrative that I've omitted, which would change everything once included, please tell us what it is.

I'm curious as to what some people think is biased about my chronology above

You acted like Zionists randomly picked a place in the Middle East to call their homeland. You act like they didn't have any right to buy property or land there or that it didn't then become their home. You admit that there were already Jews living there but it wasn't their homeland?

I suppose it might be useful to include ‘why’ the Jews kept leaving their birthplaces to show up somewhere else. For thousands of years Jewish people had very limited options. In many, many places they weren’t allowed to be citizens, or had their citizenship stripped one day, or were kicked out of entire villages or neighbourhoods or countries. No one wanted them and they had nowhere to go. In WW2 they were murdered in the millions and those who escaped were turned away from America and the UK and almost anywhere they tried. Boatloads of desperate people with ‘one’ place to try. So you can’t tell the story of Israel without telling the story of the Jewish people in the diaspora.

Anyone who comes from a family who has been Jewish for multiple generations has a story of escape and survival against the odds - my great grandparents survived the Russian pogroms in the 1880. The families split up - some went to America (my story), some to Europe to get murdered in the next generation, and one sibling walked to what is now Israel.

(I am secular and married to a non Jewish man and I actually thought we might be moving past the inherent necessity of having one country to escape to in times of need but recent events have shown me that antisemitism certainly hasn’t died and we aren’t safe. That doesn’t mean I think the government in charge of Israel is right - but I -/ an Israeli / British / American citizen I often disagree with plenty in all of these countries.)

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No one wanted them and they had nowhere to go.

Yes, google "the expulsion of Jews from..." and look at what autocomplete gives you. England, for example, expelled Jews between 1290 and 1656.

So it's entirely understandable and reasonable that Jews might want their own homeland that no one else could expel them from.

You acted like Zionists randomly picked a place in the Middle East to call their homeland.

Fair enough. Yes - Zionism was rooted in the belief that the land of Palestine was the "homeland" of millions of people who came from elsewhere in the world for as many generations back as anyone could remember. And in the belief that this connection with the land was more important than the connection of the people who actually lived there, so it justified forcing them out of their homes to clear a country for a jewish majority.

You act like they didn't have any right to buy property or land there

No I don't.

You admit that there were already Jews living there but it wasn't their homeland?

Maybe the problem is I don't fully understand what you mean by "homeland". I said straight up that there was a jewish minority among the Arab muslim majority. I thought it would be obvious that that meant it was the "land" which was "home" to all of those people, Arab and jewish alike. Just like the UK is to me.

I think it's the part where mystical conceptions of "homeland" based on ancient history and religious myth trump simple practical ones based on where people live, that I'm not getting.

Well it’s not like majority rule for most of the world right? When the European Australians showed up they were outnumbered. The European Americans too. So it’s not that relevant to look back.

There was nowhere in the world with a majority Jewish population until Israel was founded (and it remains unique today) so by your rules there should never be a Jewish country?

What you also don't seem to be getting is that creating countries by drawing lines on a map was hardly unusual back in those days.

"Britain considered how to deal with this violence and came up with the idea of partitioning Palestine into two countries, one jewish and one Arab muslim."

They created Pakistan as a Muslim country in 1947, partitioning India to do so. Millions were displaced and killed as a result.

Going back to your original post, you said "At the end of WW2, the situation was exacerbated by thousands of refugees from the Nazi concentration camps arriving in Palestine. Britain couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution so said "bugger this, we've had enough", announced the mandate would be ending and left it for the UN to sort out."

You say that you are trying to be neutral but honestly, your tone describing this is horrendous.

As a PP describes Jews had been expelled from almost everywhere at one time or another. You're suggesting that they should try to make their home somewhere that they had been expelled from previously, and could be expelled from again. Or worse.

Hitler hated the Jews. He came up with the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which was the industrial extermination of all Jews. They were rounded up from what you would like to consider their 'homelands', put on trains to extermination camps and murdered in their millions. That was the Final Solution to the fact that Jews were not wanted, and not seen as human.

And you wanted the camp survivors to go back to the countries they had been rounded up in for extermination? That those were their 'homelands'? That their fleeing to a place of potential safety was 'exacerbating a situation in the Middle East' where they weren't wanted. Where were they wanted?

What is your answer to 'What is the Final Solution to the question of what to do with Jews who have been hounded across the globe and a serious attempt made to eliminate them?

In that scenario, giving them a country where they can go and rule themselves after the horrors of the Holocaust doesn't seem that outrageous. And other countries were being created at the time - like I said Pakistan, in 1947, as a specifically Muslim county. Jordan was only created as an independent state at the same time.

I'm not suggesting that it was fair that these things happened, but it wasn't just a case of pesky refugees from concentration camps rocking up in Palestine for no reason apart from to cause a problem for the locals. They had just survived the Holocaust and were desperate for safety. And it wasn't just a case of Jews being handed a country when all borders were settled everywhere and no countries were being created or lines drawn on maps to 'solve' other problems.

Your 'neutral' post also gives literally no explanation as to why Jews might want a Jewish country, why they might think Israel is the right place for this, and why many Jews chose to go there after surviving the concentration camps. (It also misses out on Jews emptying out to Israel from the surrounding Arab countries where they were not in fact allowed to live equally and happily).

@noblegiraffe

There's much that's reasonable in your post. Your comparison with Pakistan is certainly thought provoking.

However, with respect, I think you're reading some things into my chronology that aren't there and that I didn't mean. This may be because my "tone" was inappropriately brusque or informal, out of a combination of trying to summarise so much into a short precis and not treating monumental factors like the Holocaust with the gravitas they deserve, in which case I apologise.

As a PP describes Jews had been expelled from almost everywhere at one time or another. You're suggesting that they should try to make their home somewhere that they had been expelled from previously, and could be expelled from again. Or worse.

Hitler hated the Jews. He came up with the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, which was the industrial extermination of all Jews. They were rounded up from what you would like to consider their 'homelands', put on trains to extermination camps and murdered in their millions. That was the Final Solution to the fact that Jews were not wanted, and not seen as human.

And you wanted the camp survivors to go back to the countries they had been rounded up in for extermination? That those were their 'homelands'? That their fleeing to a place of potential safety was 'exacerbating a situation in the Middle East' where they weren't wanted. Where were they wanted?

I never suggested anything about where they should have made their home. I never said anything about "wanting them to go back" anywhere. I never even said that they shouldn't have gone to live in Palestine. I simply said that that is what happened, and that the British couldn't come up with a political solution to it that they were willing to take responsibility for. I was attempting to simply describe the facts of what happened, rather than one or other interpretation of what should have happened, as that's what the OP seemed to want.

As for my views on those issues:

Zionism long predates the Holocaust, and the idea of partition predates it too, so I don't think we can really use the Holocaust as justification for it. If you think it was justified then you must have a reason why it was justified before WW2, when it was first mooted. It probably wouldn't have come up as the answer to what to do with the Holocaust survivors if the impulse and political direction towards it was not already established.

I certainly get that it's easy to look back now and imagine a different path for Palestine that doesn't involve the creation of Israel, but that it was a very different proposition when dealing with the recent, unprecedented horror of the Holocaust. I wouldn't have wanted to be the one to tell the concentration camp survivors "Oh my God that was terrible, but the solution isn't to take some of someone else's country and make it yours". I understand why the international community didn't feel able to do that.

At the same time, there's something profoundly racist about the fact that western countries' solution to the problem was not to sort it out within their own domain, but to impose it upon some powerless brown people instead.

The fact that jews were systematically and horribly exterminated by the Nazis doesn't mean that jews were unable to live safely in any non-jewish-majority country in the west, as many now do.

And Hitler, as Ken Livingstone famously and factually pointed out to his cost, was an enthusiastic Zionist.

@dropoutin It’s not the Holocaust that begins this story. You could say it begun with the Russian Jews making their way to Israel in the 1800s. There was a huge Zionist movement then as they weren’t even considered citizens in Russia and were being treated horribly. Or you could say it begun in the 1400s when Jews were expelled from Spain. Or or or. The Holocaust is one thing, not the whole picture.

Well indeed. I started my original summary from the late 19th century and only just touched on the Holocaust. The post above was in answer to @noblegiraffe

There's a board set up for this OP. Why don't you have a look there.