> ... the Jewish state... its people experienced...
This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of the Israeli population is far too young to have directly experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.
To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?
It's under-remarked on, but for a majority of Israeli Jewish people, the nakba era might have more immediate salience than the Holocaust. That's because they're not, as the popular imagination has it, all colonists from Europe; they're the Jewish people of the Middle East and North Africa, all of whom were forcefully expelled from their own homes after 1948.
There's no question that the Holocaust has enormous salience to Israeli Jewish people. But if you trace your roots to rural Arab Jewish families from Yemen or Iraq, your more immediate concern would be your own family's immediate viability in a world without Israel. A new rise of European fascism wouldn't be your problem; the fact that you'd have literally no place to go would be. You're sure as shit not moving back to Yemen.
I feel like I haven't written anything that would give the impression that I'm unaware of the crimes Israel inflicted on Arabs during the capital-n Nakba.
The problem is: it doesn't matter. The point is that Arab Jewish people are in Israel now, by the millions. The issue isn't that they've won some kind of trauma competition; it's the simple practical fact of their presence and the history that brought them there.
Your second point, about MENA "nations" expelling Jewish people "in a vacuum", is deeply concerning. No matter what Israel did in Palestine, Arab Jewish people had no culpability. Arguments like this are why the distinction between criticism of Israel and outright antisemitism are so slippery. I too think that distinction is weaponized, but it's hard to press the point when you're making facially antisemitic arguments.
Clearly it does matter to significant portions of the people who either directly experienced it or are the children of those who did. I would argue it was a major driving factor for violent opposition to the Israeli state, now since replaced by Israel's current actions (current as in last 30 years) as the impetus.
> No matter what Israel did in Palestine, Arab Jewish people had no culpability.
I'm glad this discussion has forced me to do some research. I actually wonder how many of the early immigrant waves were even "expelled" in the first place, rather than moving of their own volition. Here's the example from Yemen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Magic_Carpet_(Yemen)...
And in Iraq's case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ezra_and_Nehemiah
"Like most Arab League states, Iraq initially forbade the emigration of its Jews after the 1948 war on the grounds that allowing them to go to Israel would strengthen that state; however, by 1949 the Iraqi Zionist underground was smuggling Jews out of the country to Iran at about a rate of 1,000 a month, from where they were flown to Israel.[23] At the time, the British believed that the Zionist underground was agitating in Iraq in order to assist US fund-raising and to "offset the bad impression caused by the Jewish attitudes to Arab refugees".
> That the MENA nations who expelled their minority Jewish populations did so in a vacuum
How does something occurring in Palestine justify this? Tying the actions of Jewish militias to your local Jewish population is antisemitic… if they expelled them to protest the creation of Israel, then that isn’t anti-Zionist. That they mostly all ended up going to Israel is ironically supporting the Zionist cause
No, there were no reports of a pogrom against Jews in Egypt in 1956. However, during the Suez Crisis in the same year, some Jewish individuals faced increased tensions and discrimination. Many Jews eventually left Egypt, but it wasn't a pogrom in the traditional sense.
In the context of a discussion about potential crimes against humanity, an argument that ethnic cleansing is sometimes ok feels particularly unconvincing.
> How does something occurring in Palestine justify this?
The real question is, would that have happened if it were not for:
-demonstrated brutality against the Palestinian population
-explicit creation of the Israeli state tied to a particular ethno-religious identity
If there had been no violence, and if Israel had just been a newly-independent country with the creation led by but not defined by the culture of the Jewish immigrants, would there have been a purge across the region? Personally I think not.
I'm trying to highlight that there is significantly more nuance to the creation of Israel beyond "we just showed up one day and everyone was mean to us for no reason" which, IMO, has surprisingly crept into numerous comments even on HN where you would expect such an educated demographic to know better...
This is again a frankly antisemitic argument. Arab Jewish people in Tunisia bore no responsibility whatsoever for what happened 1800 miles away from them. Racism isn't nuance, it's just racism.
This is both false and irrelevant. Anti-Jewish pograms in MENA following the Arab-Israeli war are well documented. Israel had a variety of motivations for ensuring they could comfortably resettle in Israeli territory, but that doesn't change the crisis Arab Jewish people faced in their home countries: they were forcibly expelled.
Further, it doesn't matter. Most stats I've seen suggest that the Mizrahim are at least a plurality of Israelis, and none of those people can return to their "colonialist home countries". By way of example, long before the current Gaza war, the literal first "official" action Ansar Allah took when it established control of territory in Yemen was to expel the very few remaining Jewish families.
People can say it matters until they're blue in the face, but the legitimacy of Israeli popular sovereignty within its 1967 borders is so difficult to argue with that we might as well accept it as complete. We're talking about millions of people, well armed, with a series of powerful historical arguments, and, of course, a nuclear arsenal. Their self-conception is immensely material in ways I don't feel like online Palestinian activists understand.
One reasonable way to think about Israel: their moral claim to Tel Aviv is much stronger than our claim to Dallas. And yet, for all the "turtle island" talk, no serious person entertains the idea of rolling back American sovereignty.
None of this legitimizes the ongoing military strategy in Gaza, or, for that matter, the West Bank crisis or the management of the 2-state process, something that the Israeli right has successfully and for decades worked to derail.
I only bring this up because I feel like there's a tendency in message board discussions to center Israel's legitimacy on the Holocaust, as if that's the sum total of what binds Israeli Jewish people to the land. No, it's much more complicated and deep than that.
I don't believe that might makes right and just because Israel is armed and backed by the West does not give them impunity to steal land. 1948 was not hundreds of years ago, there are people who are still alive who were ethnically cleansed from their land and forced into Gaza. Palestinians have a much stronger right of return than anyone who wasn't living in Palestine prior to 1948.
I think you might believe might makes right more than you realize, because, as I've laid out, it's easier to make a moral case for Israeli sovereignty over Tel Aviv than for American control of Texas --- you advocate against Israel because it seems like a plausible cause, and that plausibility is denominated in international military might. You don't advocate for the return of Texas to the people of Mexico because you viscerally understand it's never going to happen.
That being the case (maybe it isn't!), there are two big problems with your strategy:
1. It isn't possible. They're not going anywhere.
2. It's incoherent. There are very few countries in the world with a morally-hygienic claim to their land. Certainly, with the possible exception of Egypt, none of Israel's neighbors can! They're all of them creations of France and the UK.
You're making a lot of assumptions about my position. I most certainly do think we owe both indigenous people and Black people massive amounts of land reparations in the US.
Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded. It has less support than ever before politically.
Several additional problems with your argument past what D.C. just said:
1. Israel has in fact immense support, far more than the South African government ever had.
2. Apartheid South Africa was a system of minoritarian rule, which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel (further, Arab Israelis have nominally full citizenship rights, and in fact fight for the IDF; they are a minority, unlike the victims of Apartheid, but they're also not living under an apartheid system).
3. For a majority of Israeli Jewish people, there is no other place in the world for them to go. There is no prospect of a negotiated settlement that forecloses on a Jewish state. Their BATNA is war. That wasn't the case with the Boers.
In these kinds of discussions I feel like people conflate the situation in Gaza and the West Bank with that of Israel proper. Continued Israeli occupation of Gaza probably is untenable! That occupation will eventually be disbanded, the way South African Apartheid was. But here we're talking about the entire state of Israel. Like I said, start with Texas, because that'll happen first.
> Apartheid... which does not exist within the 1967 borders of Israel
It isn't formal, but Arabs are marginalized and discriminated against. In West Bank, E Jerusalem, and Hebron, all that supremacy is dialed upto 11.
> Israel has in fact immense support
Fear and intimidation isn't support. Besides, I don't see this support lasting long outside of the US and Germany if the Oslo-process continues, which it will because for the Israeli right Judea and Samaria are too good to give up.
> talking about the entire state of Israel
I think folks mean the one-state reality but not total exodus of the Jews, though, it might come to pass if they let their guard down, now that there's genuine animosity to fuel a feud for another century.
I'm assuming you just missed the previous comments where I agreed that the Palestinians have a powerful moral argument about Gaza and the West Bank. If you read the thread, I think you'll see we might not have much to disagree about.
> Israel can be disbanded just like South Africa was disbanded.
South Africa wasn't disbanded, not even close. Apartheid ended more-or-less peacefully; non-whites were given the vote; and more-or-less democratic elections have been held ever since.
It's not self-evident that "the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust [should] stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime". In Liberia, where the freed American slaves were sent to, they essentially enslaved the native population.
You've been posting flamewar comments to this thread, which is against HN's rules and particularly against the intended spirit that I tried to express at the top of the thread. Please stop doing this. The thread is hellish enough as it is, and posts like these put it on the fast track to far worse.
Then kindly please eliminate racist and antisemitic comments so people don't have to respond to them. Especially the ones that spread false information and hatred like the comment I was responding to.
I'm trying to make the moderation calls as even-handed as possible and have scolded many accounts (and banned some) who are taking the opposite position from yours—including the commenter who was just arguing with you here.
That doesn't change the fact that you (I don't mean you personally, but everyone commenting) need to follow the rules and post in the intended spirit regardless of what others are doing.
Everyone always feels like the other started it and did worse; if you take that as a basis, all we end up with is a downward spiral, and that's what we're trying to avoid here.
You've been posting flamewar comments to this thread, which is against HN's rules and particularly against the intended spirit that I tried to express at the top of the thread. Please stop doing this. The thread is hellish enough as it is, and posts like these put it on the fast track to far worse.
This is your error. States and peoples are not unitary entities with a single coherent outlook and will. The vast majority of the Israeli population is far too young to have directly experienced the Holocaust, which ended 80 years ago. There are plenty of people in Israel who do not want to commit atrocities against Palestinians. There are also people who feel that they have a (literally) god-given right to occupy the territories where Palestinians currently live. If you think of Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet as being basically the same people who survived Nazi concentration camps in World War 2, then nothing Israel is doing in 2024 will make much sense.
To my mind, Israel's actions toward Palestinians (both in Gaza and the West Bank) are powerful evidence that nationalism inherently leads to atrocity no matter who's involved. If the cultural memory of being targeted by the Holocaust won't stop an ethno-state from setting up an apartheid regime, what will?