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.

Why is it strange? My grandfather fled religious persecution to come to the USA. He is a coloniser and I am a grandchild of colonisers because I’m not Native American.

Fleeing persecution is one of the top reasons why people migrate and colonise other lands.

The problem isn’t unique though. This is not the first time that British lines drawn on maps have caused wars, massacres, ethnic cleansing. There was an arrogance of the British Empire and the after effects are still echoing today,

There are two sides to every border.

Egypt controls their side and insist they have kept it open for humanitarian aid.

Israel controls the Palestinian side and they have kept it firmly shut.

There is no such thing as one side of an international border completely controlling both sides of a border.

Its a completely different situation. European colonisers in the United States had no connection to the land that they settled. They perceived it as 'virgin' land, a fresh start. The Jewish people originate in Israel, there has been a long presence of Jews in Israel, despite repeated colonisation of their land and exile and their cultural connection to the land has been continuous. And despite the history, in the United states immigrants are recognised as Americans, despite hierarchies of race that still to a greater or lesser extent. Israelis are still having to prove their legitimacy.

Yes most countries stick to their borders.

They know if they invade, seize and occupy a neighbour they will be in for resistance ranging from peaceful protest to terrorism. They might also suffer international pressure to withdraw and leave the occupied country to resume its independent statehood. Some might even be invaded themselves by a UN mandated coalition to force the withdrawal of troops and enact a regime change.

Netanyahu has had far more patience than Saddam did.

I read Qatar was requested to take in Hamas leaders by Israel and U.S. - so that they did not go to Syria?

"When the Hamas office was opened in Qatar several years ago, it was done with the very explicit support of the U.S. and Israel. This was not done against their wishes," Juneau said.

Can you link an article which shows Qatar were pre -warned they would be bombed if continued to house Hamas leadership?

No wonder Qatar seriously upset.

www.cbc.ca/news/politics/israel-attack-doha-consequences-mediator-1.7628885

Israel still controlled all of Gaza’s borders. It bombed it airstrip. It did not allow Gaza to use its sea border for trade.

Imagine a situation where by other countries would not allow ships to sail to Israel from it’s ports, or refused to support flights to and from Israel. Might that seriously interfere with a thriving Israeli economy?

I know that not all Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition- but have you seen polls about how the majority of Israelis view Palestinians? They literally are feasting in comparison to the humanitarian crisis happening on their doorstep step - and either they have been sheltered from the truth by the press or they have closed their ears and shut their eyes.

I think it is kind of a subjective thing, the concept of homeland.

I do think that after dozens of generations away, that a land of origin in the distant past is not really yours to claim outright.

Besides, Israel plus the land it occupies includes the homeland of the Palestinians. If Israelis are not colonizers, then neither are Palestinians and so some kind of fair peace process is needed that recognises both peoples belong there.

You cam dismiss the concept of a homeland for yourself. You cant dismiss it for the Jewish people. They have a right to self determination and there is nowhere other than Israel that that could be. Israel always recognised the right of others to be in Israel and expected there to be an Arab state alongside them also. It was the Arabs that rejected the proposal and rejected the right of the Jews to be there.

Would you then support the EU port workers then voting not to support trade of weapons and other goods to a country suspected of committing war crimes and killing thousands of innocent civilians? A country that laid siege to civilians preventing them accessing essential goods?

Would you support a boycott of this country due to decisions of its government?

I’m not sure what you’re showing here. During ww2 when Jewish people were desperately trying to leave Europe, they were often turned away. There were quotas and restrictions and eventually everything stopped altogether. The British then turned the Jews away from what was then Palestine so they snuck in if they could. This screenshot shows this?

The concept of a homeland is a subjective thing. That is not dismissing the concept of a homeland, that is acknowledging it and the fact that there are probably as many opinions on what does homeland mean to you are there are people.

I doubt very much that the entire Jewish community have cookie cutter views on Israel as their homeland on a personal level instead of or as well as on a historic level.

It was the Arabs that rejected the proposal and rejected the right of the Jews to be there.
History is history, no one alive today rejected the 1947 partition plan. I suspect many rejected it because the British had decided it was best for all concerned as a knee jerk reaction to that sort of imperialist arrogance. Trump and the US are the inheritors of that arrogance on the world stage today. After all, it is we who have blocked the entire UN from acting to stop genocide by vetoing every call for a ceasefire.

I personally feel that the parties involved (Israeli and Palestinian) are all new people with their own ideas. Saying It was the Arabs that rejected the proposal and rejected the right of the Jews to be there. is meaningless because what was agreed to or rejected by men who are bones in their graves is not a determiner of what the men in power will agree to today.

Why do you reserve all the blame for the British, who were only administering the region because there was a vacuum after the Ottoman collapse? Do the Ottomans get any blame? Or the UN?

There is a weird narrative of Western arrogance combined with self-hatred that also runs though this whole debate. Blame the West for everything (including Israel, which is lumped in with the West even though culturally and ethnically it is very Middle-Eastern). Absolve anyone non-Western of any blame, to the point of denying them any power or agency at all. The Ottomans were literally a colonial power in the region for centuries but Turkey does not come in for any blame.

I was showing that there was in fact more than ‘one’ place to try to flee to as a Jewish WWII refugee.

The Wiki numbers of Jewish WWII refugees taken in are in thousands, so you said:
those who escaped were turned away from America and the UK

But in fact America (US) took in 190,000 Jewish refugees, the UK took in 65,000 Jewish refugees.

Out of 811,000 Jewish refugees, 120,000 went to Palestine (accepted by the UK on behalf of the local Palestinians).

Factually speaking the ‘one’ place you said Jewish refugees had to go took in less than 15% of the total number of Jewish refugees. 85% went to the many other places.

I don’t reserve all the blame for the British. I do blame them for their Balfour declaration of intent to carve up the Ottoman Empire and set aside land that was not theirs and they had no right to for a Jewish homeland.

It was not much different than Capt Cook claiming Tahiti for Mad King George.

Also the Ottoman Empire didn’t just “collapse” like a Jenga tower, it was defeated by the British in WWI. The British attacked it first, it entered the war and then the British armed and funded nationalist Arab leaders who wanted freedom from the Ottoman Empire. Then came the Sinai campaign that ended with the British capturing Jerusalem. Finally, the British defaulted on their promises to the Arab nationalists and decided they would carve up the land by drawing lines on maps however they pleased freezing out the local Palestinians from any right of self-determination.
https://www.concordor.com/Britains-Role-in-Defeating-the-Ottoman-Empire-During-World-War-I

The Ottomans were literally a colonial power in the region for centuries but Turkey does not come in for any blame.

I suppose we could blame them for losing WWI.
Hitler would probably have died as a failed artist.
No WWII, as WWII was in part caused by the ruinous and punitive WWI reparations placed on Germany by the victors.
No Holocaust

Yes, all the Ottomans’ fault.

I don’t think we are understanding each other. You’re showing me the percentage of Jews who were taken in by other places. I’m talking about the many others who weren’t. I found the Wikipedia page and you need to keep reading.

After WW2, there were hundreds of thousands of displaced, stateless Jewish people in refugee camps in Europe. When some of them tried to go ‘home’ in Poland, they were the victims of pogroms. The United States, UK, etc etc didn’t want them. Thousands chose to run the Palestine blockade set up by the UK to stop Jewish people from legally entering Palestine. That’s what led to the creation of a Jewish state - a literal lack of any other solution outside another Holocaust.

Your stat is something else altogether.

We are all living in countries with 1000s of years old histories.

I don’t think anyone here doesn’t feel sympathy for the Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.

Of course they needed a refuge.

But it’s an unfortunate fact that there were people already on the land who had been living there for centuries. You can’t just go in and displace those people and not expect pushback. Of course the Palestinians weren’t going to accept the land in which they’d lived in for generations being taken away. War was inevitable.

We wouldn’t expect any other people to roll over and take it so why do we expect of the Palestinians? The holocaust wasn’t their doing, so why should they have to pay the price for it?

Britain should have managed it better. They promised it to both sides and pulled out when it got too much. And the UN had no right to carve up the land without even consulting the local communities. And the US should sort out their own problems of gun violence and healthcare before they spend billions abroad.

@dropoutin your explanation was excellent and very impartial, I thought.

Again with this weird deflection of agency. The Ottomans entered WW1 on the side of Germany and then attacked Russia. Obviously they were then open to attack from Russia's allies.

The point is, the Ottomans had controlled the area now known as Palestine for centuries. They did not make any moves to allow self-government or statehood to the people living there. The British attempted this and it went badly. Should they have just stepped in and administered it as a colonial power like the Ottomans?

This narrative of refugees coming in and 'taking land' from people already there is massively simplistic though. In some cases that did literally happen, but often the land was bought or had not been occupied. In any event, there were many Jewish people already there who had a wish for statehood, as well as many middle-eastern Jews in places like Egypt and Iran who were being persecuted and wanted a safe place to go within the middle-east. The whole region was being carved up following the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

Again, we should remember that half the people living in Israel are not European. There was a great deal of movement of peoples around the middle east at that time and it is completely reasonably that the UN and the British thought that partition was the solution, as it had been in other parts of the world. The result of partition is always that some people have to move. The narrative always focuses on displacement of Palestinians and forgets the many thousands of middle-eastern Jews who were displaced.

The Nakba was massive. Whole Palestinian villages were depopulated. It’s an accurate thing to say.
And yes European Jews bought up land. Sometimes the land was empty, sometimes it resulted in the eviction of the Arab tenants. It’s not inaccurate to say that.
Every sympathy for those Mizrahi Jews who were evicted from the Middle Eastern lands, especially as they often suffered discrimination at the hands of the Ashkenazi elite upon arrival. Every sympathy, but again it’s not the fault of the Palestinians.

The Nakba was massive. Whole Palestinian villages were depopulated. It’s an accurate thing to say.

And yet it was tiny compared to the mass movement of people and deaths caused by the Partition of India which happened in 1947, an estimated 12-20 million people displaced per Wikipedia, compared with around 750,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948. At the time it was probably considered a comparably minor act.

Post WWII was a time of massive upheaval and redrawing of maps all over. Germany was split in two around the same time.

Obviously these things had devastating consequences for the people involved, but in the general world situation, why not draw a few more lines on a map and create a Jewish state?

Exactly. There were around 60 million people displaced in Europe at the end of the second world war. National borders were being redrawn all over the place and vast movements of people uprooted from places that had been their homes for generations.. It was a time of extraordinary upheaval.

And yet it was tiny compared to the mass movement of people and deaths caused by the Partition of India which happened in 1947, an estimated 12-20 million people displaced per Wikipedia, compared with around 750,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948. At the time it was probably considered a comparably minor act.

It was about half of the population. Percentage wise more of the population were displaced in Mandatory Palestine than by the Partition of India.