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.

The Ashkenazi ‘elite’? Huge numbers of them were Eastern European peasants…

Regardless, the point is not whether the displacement of Jews was the Palestinians fault. I don’t know why you’d look at it in terms of fault and blame. Partition was happening at that time to address practical problems: displacement; empire collapse; desire for self-determination etc.

It’s also true what you say about Palestinians being bought out and whole communities being displaced, but again, that was happening all over the place. There were thriving Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, Iran etc that completely disappeared at that time. In my view the partition itself was the right decision. In that context I can’t see what else they should have done.

I think as ever with this subject people view what happened to Palestinians in isolation against a standard of perfection. Rather than in its actual historical and geo-political context.

Jewish temple underneath a mosque because Jewish people lived there thousands of years BEFORE Islam existed and Islam was brought into that area by people of the Muslim faith.

All this talk about who had to learn thousands of years ago makes me a bit worried that Rome is going to want its land back...
Should we get our empire back?

Land has changed that so many times throughout history. I really don't think it's relevant anymore.

You can only blame the British you know, never the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire fell and never gets blamed for any of their colonisation.

Tell that to Palestinian people who gave been lobbing missiles into Israel fir a very long time. Tell them. Israel is a state and its not going anywhere. Perhaps Palestinian Jordan could share it's land with other Palestinian people. Its Palestinian Jordan big enough, do they need Israel as well. Are Jewish people not allowed any land anywhere.

Indeed. No such thing as occupied territories then.

So many historical redrawings of borders.

Meanwhile at the UN.....

So let me get this right, Israel gets the land because of a claim thousands of years ago, but the Palestinians don't because we shouldn't be thinking about history. I'm not quite sure how to comprehend that level of hypocrisy.

And no such thing as an ancient claim to the land by Israel. Therefore, they were colonisers.

Which country was Israel a colony of?

@Alittlefeedbackwouldbenice Land has changed that so many times throughout history. I really don't think it's relevant anymore.

Did you not mean that?

I believe that modern history is relevant but not ancient history. I don't believe the Romans have any claim on England. Or the Vikings.

More modern history is very different.

I don't see how it can be right for Israel to claim the land based on an ancient historical state, whilst ignoring more modern history with it being predominantly Palestinian.

What's done is done, and I'm not suggesting the state of Israel be undone in any way now, because that would be an injustice for the people living there. But there also needs to be justice for the Palestinians who have been treated abysmally in this.

As I said, I don’t personally care what happened 2000 years ago. Who could possibly even know. I do care about Israel’s continued existence and I do think the Jewish people can surely unapologetically have one teeny tiny country without being under constant threat.

of course it is terrible to be displaced but there are endless stories about displacement (highland clearances, Russian pogroms, trail of tears, on and on forever) and that’s awful but we can’t solve human nature by destroying Israel. The result would be catastrophic for the Jewish people, the region and the rest of the world too. Surely no one actually thinks Hamas should have more responsibility?

It’s not something that is easily “simplified”.

As I said, I agree - what was done should not be undone. I don't think a nation should be founded where other people were living, but clearly that happened a lot in the past. I can't imagine we'd think it was acceptable now.

I certainly don't want hamas to have any more power, I'd like them to go, along with Netanyahu and his crowd from Israel, and let more moderate people from both sides to negotiate a way for people to live together.

Its not clear what you're saying. You say you don't think Israel should be 'undone'.Do you accept Israel as it is should exist? Yet you seem to also be questioning its legitimacy. How can peace progesss without an acceptance of the legitimacy of yhe modern state of Israel?

There are still wars about boundaries elsewhere, this isn’t particularly unique. The thing that is incredibly difficult is that this war gets so much more attention than other ones, and it’s hard not to think it’s more about Jewish people than an argument about borders.

Ukraine used to be part of Russia, then wasn’t and now Russia wants them to cease to exist. This was the popular topic for marches and fundraising and sunflowers and whatnot until everyone moved on to Israel.

But the marches and the chanting and whatnot isn’t entirely or always about the country of Israel, its spilling out into every single aspect of many Jewish people’s lives. My daughter was attacked at school, my father’s synagogue had horrible graffiti just last week, my brother’s Jewish school has armed security now as they’ve had so many bomb threats… this has always happened but, in my lifetime, never as intensely and constant. My grandparents would recognise this fear however as they lived through it.

And what was notable about the surge in antisemitism here and elsewhere was that it was immediate after 7 October nothing to do with Israel's response which came later anyway It was like a dam burst, Jew hatred was ok, and was even to be celebrated. And then, denied.

I am so sorry about your family's experience and horrified that it is replicated around the diaspora.

I don't think it was the right thing to create Israel in the first place. Not because Jewish people don't deserve their own country, but because they were already people there. I can totally understand the wish to have the safety of a country after everything Jewish people have been through. But I think we could have and should have come up with a better solution, one which didn't screw over innocent people. ,

However I accept that 80 years ago, the idea of people carving up and partitioning lands where others live, seem to be okay. It's not something we would do today.

The Palestinians have suffered greatly but there's be an outrage if they were given' Wales, for example!

Enough time has passed though that I don't think history can or should be undone. For the vast majority of Israelis that have grown up in Israel, It's all they've known and it's their home. I guess I think of it like squatters rights, in that over time a claim to legitimacy can grow.

So I support Israel's right to exist, even though I dispute that it should have been created in the first place, and think it was wrong by modern standards.

But we still have to deal with the great injustice done to the Palestinian people. They shouldn't come out of this any worse than the Israelis given all that was taken from them. To have not only lost your land, but then be treated in the way they have for the last 80 years is abominable, and for much of that it's been because of Israel's policies, policies of apartheid, and now genocide.

👏👏👏

Israel wasn’t created by “squatting Jews”, but by a process that led to the creation and legal recognition of the state by other people. They then defended their land in war and won. Both these methods were valid ways of acquiring land back then whether you agree with that now or not.

It is exceptionally unfair to characterise them as “squatters”.

They also literally purchased some of it...

I suggest you read what I put again.

I didn't actually say that they were squatters, but using the principle of squatting to show that something that is illegitimate at the start can become legitimate through occupation over time.

I agree though I'm calling them squatters is unfair as well. Squatters take over unoccupied land. It wasn't unoccupied.

There weren’t just randomly ‘given’ Israel so it wouldn’t be anything like giving them Wales.

Partition is still something that is done in modern times. How else could you sort out a situation where two groups of people want their own country? Czechoslovakia was divided in the 1990s, for example.

I think many people say the creation of Israel was the wrong move only because of how things have panned out. They don’t tend to disagree with the partition of India and Pakistan, or Ireland and N Ireland.

People say that the Palestinians are right to continue fighting because Israel ‘took their land’, but that sort of thing happened in numerous other places and the best outcomes have always been for people who accepted the partition even when it involved significant movement of people. So I don’t see it as a great historical injustice at all. The only reason it looks like that is because the Palestinians and surrounding countries completely refused to accept the idea of a Jewish state alongside them.