Jews were kicked out of all the Arab nations they lived in, were persecuted in Europe, and you think that they shouldn’t get a sovereign country for themselves? Should the Kurds get one? Tibetans? Catalonias? Scottish?
No one is entitled to displace people from their homes or deny people equal rights on the basis of their race, religion, or ethnicity for any reason. There is no exception for people seeking refuge from oppression.
Jews have and had the right to seek refuge from oppression. No one has the right to perpetuate oppression.
And no, I don't believe ethnonationalism is a panacea for anyone. The world would not be a better place if we could only subdivide into a multitude of homogenous little nations. I am grateful for the cultural diversity of my country. Countries like Japan that strive to protect their racial homogeneity will pay a steep cost.
There are two lines of logic that disrupt this reasoning. One is israel as an independent state hasn’t existed for thousands of years. The other is Jews do have refuge and safe harbors in the form of western countries. Plenty of Jews living quite comfortably with no threat of war protected by the largest military on the planet in west LA.
So really these people have no reason to be elevated among similarly displaced people who did have a sovereign nation within much more recent timelines, and they aren’t without safe harbor or communities in safer nations that guarantee their rights.
So if the state of Israel does not exist for the safety of Jewish people as logic has plainly laid out, why does it exist? Easy. Military foothold. This is a modern day crusader state. A beachhead. An airbase. A missile platform. A hidden nuclear arsenal. A prolific defense industry with very little red tape binding it. These are the true foundations of Israel today. Everything else is a fig leaf poorly hiding this when you apply rational logic to the emotional justifications that people use. And everything Israel does makes perfect rational sense in light of its true purpose.
There are also cities in Europe where Muslim women are harassed for wearing a hijab, where mosques are either illegal to construct or vandalized outright, and hotels in which refugees from Arab countries are torched in race riots.
>A couple of months ago a religious jew tried to walk through London, and a police officer stopped him because there’s a pro Palestinian protest, and his presence there would be inflammatory.
Gideon Falter is rather specifically a pro-Israel campaigner who, per a 13-minute filmed exchange with the officer involved, had behaved provocatively towards protesters, and was accompanied by members of Isaac Herzog's security detail. The clip that was widely circulated omits this context. But even if it was as clear-cut as Falter makes it out to be, it would be weird to cite this incident of one cop being a racist dope as evidence of endemic antisemitism in Europe - Orthodox Jews frequently participate in such protests, after all.
As unfortunate as it is, genocides and persecution based on ethnicity or religious orientation are not unique to the Jewish experience. In either case the solution is to target these actions and these policies. The existence of the state of Israel does nothing to further action against these efforts, if what you allege about entire cities in Europe is indeed true. Israel seems to not protect the European Jew at all, nor the African Jew, the Asian Jew, or the Jew anywhere really aside from the Jew within the state of Israel who is actively working to further the goals of the armed forces of Israel, because the state of Israel itself turns its back on Jews in Israel who are critical of this direction.
I just can't get over the cognitive dissonance that this sort of primitive tribalistic propaganda world view creates. Where on the one hand it is claimed that these groups are like water is to oil: entirely immiscible and irreconcilable and should be kept apart as the sole solution. Then you go to a random city in the United States and Germans, Jews, Iranians, Chinese, Russians, and Americans are all neighbors, seeing themselves as equal, working together and raising their kids together, thinking nothing of it because they all share more or less the same exact lived experience.
I presume you misunderstand the purpose of the Jewish state. It’s not to protect Jews living in europe from persecution, it’s to provide a safe haven from persecution. Without site they have no where to go when things get bad. And things to bad many times for Jews in the past 2500 years since their exile.
Thinking that the world isn’t tribal is naive, most of it is. Not living as a jew probably doesn’t give you the same perspective, we get daily articles about antisemitism around the world. Be it synagogue firebombs in Australia or Canada, Jewish schools getting shot at in USA, a Jew was refused service in a restaurant in Italy, another Jew had his ear torn off by a Syrian refugee in Athens, and there’s plenty more accounts. If you’re not exposed to that you have no idea how it feels. But I guess that Jews are “white” and can’t be discriminated against, or if they do, they deserve it.
You get headlines like that about literally every religious group facing some disgusting persecution elsewhere. Should every religious group have its own ethnostate in its legendary borders? Perhaps yes perhaps not. I am in the not camp where I feel religious distinctions are unnecessary labels we put on our species that hold us back. I don’t see why we shouldn’t all be able to live as neighbors and why we need to be kept apart. I know this is not a common sentiment of course, and most of the world considers itself still religious and in favor of segregation at least along subconscious cultural lines.
>and you think that they shouldn’t get a sovereign country for themselves?
That's a really easy question: no.
Plenty of people don't have sovereign countries for themselves. Some of them persecuted, some of them integrated by force into other countries. Countries are not owed. They simply are. Tibet is being wholly integrated and controlled by China. Catalonia is somewhat asking for it, native americans are being relegated as second class citizens, and aboriginals in Australia are being left to die. Romanis do not have a country based around their culture.
Jews should absolutely be protected, in whichever country they are. That does not make the world owe them a country. Countries are not owed, they just are. As it stands, Israel is, but as a result of what they have done, not because it was owed to them.
The Scottish have a nation called Scotland. It's not entirely sovereign - yet - but it's clearly heading in that direction, and it has already diverged significantly from England on many fundamental policies.
But even when it does become sovereign, I'm finding it hard to imagine that Scotland would annex Northumberland - which used to be Scotland in the distant past - and rape, murder, and starve the English people living there.
There is no excuse for the kind of barbarisms that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Not ethnonationalism, not history, not the holocaust, not October 7.
And from an obvious common sense point of view, living in an embattled fortress territory is an eccentric definition of "safe."
It's an outbreak of collective psychopathy and deserves to be labelled as such. The people in charge are basically insane. Extremist ethnonationalism always is, whatever the nationality or background.
The Kurds, Tibetans, Catalonia, or Scottish don't need to ethnically cleanse the land to get their own nation. That's the difference. This is not hard to understand. Most people do not object to the concept of a Jewish state, they object to the ethnic cleansing.
So where can a Jewish state be established without removing the local population?
And regarding some history on the establishment of Israel, after the UN partition resolution the Arabs started a civil war, where Arabs fled from Jewish territories, and Jews fled from Arab territories (Bethlehem and Hebron for example). So you could say that 2 ethno states were established.
lawlessone says: "...since most of them were killed.
Not sure how the colonization of America justifies other colonization's.
Unless you think everyone is owed a 1 free genocide pass?"
Most of them died from disease. Far more of them died from disease than died from say, hand to hand combat or warfare on the plains.
The American Indians were toast as soon as the first coughing European stepped ashore. The native Americans had no immunity to the stew of diseases that had been brewing in Europe and Asia for centuries, so the Indians simply died. Once an Indian had a disease (s)he could spread it to other indians (s)he met. The flame front of infection raged ahead of the white man across the continent. The "mountain men" encountered regions where entire societies were struck down: bodies everywhere, tools, lodging, structures left intact but virtually no one was around (and many the infected likely fled to more remote lands, worsening the spread).
One estimate is that 61 million people lived in the Americas prior to European contact. Between 1492 and 1600 about 50 million native Americans died of disease.
"Killed?" Yes but rarely intentionally. "Genocide?" No.
You're skipping over the whole "manifest destiny" bit, where the remaining natives were systematically hunted down and destroyed. Trail of Tears ring any bells?
And note this was perpetrated by The United States, not the "American colonists". This was happening in the 1800s, a good 300 years after the initial disease front came through.
If the United States had respected the native populations the American West would look very different today. Compare with current Central and South America for example (which were certainly still victims of both disease and genocide, but it was less thorough due to differences in colonizers and geography).
What are you talking about? the original commenter rejected the idea of a Jewish state because ethno states are bad. I made a counter claim.
I’d be happy to live next to a Palestinian country, if it will recognize Israel as a Jewish state, and be a peaceful neighbor. Unfortunately, they reject the idea of 2 states, or they want 2 states where 1 is Palestinian, and the other is paletwith a Jewish minority.
Are you talking about native Americans? Germans that used to live in Poland? Jews that used to live in Syria? Israelis that lived in Sinai before it was returned to Egypt? Mexicans that lived Texas? Australian aboriginals? Inuits in Canada? How about the one million afghans Iran just expelled?
If you’re not happy, that’s on you. Time moves on, you need to accept the existence of the Israeli state.
> If you’re not happy, that’s on you. Time moves on, you need to accept the existence of the Israeli state.
Fair enough, but what happens when the US (inevitably) decide that they're not going to support Israel anymore. Bibi has basically turned support of Israel into a culture war argument, and without consistent US support, I'm not sure Israel will survive in it's current form.
Mind you, climate change could make the whole Middle East uninhabitable before then, so it's possible that the Israeli state will last until then.
And lets be clear, I don't think most people have an issue with the existence of an Israeli state, but what's been happening in Judea and Samaria for the past twenty or so years and Gaza currently is deeply, deeply wrong and reminds me of my favourite phrase, "the only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns from history". One would think that the Jewish people would have learned better lessons from their persecution, but apparently they learnt different lessons than I expected.
Well, Israel successfully won several wars without the US support in its early years. And right now the Israeli weapons manufacturers are booming, look at deals with the romania and Germany.
Its great that most people don’t have problem with our existence, but our neighbors do. That’s why we have wars.
And comparing it to the holocaust is quite different, in the entire Jewish history we never seeked to destroy anyone, we were always targeted because of antisemitism. The Palestinians? They are taught in schools that we are the devil.
Mmmm, maybe you should read the Bible? Lots of violence committed by the Israelis there.
> comparing it to the holocaust is quite different
Sorry, it's mostly the same (and incredibly similar to Irish history between Catholics and Protestants). Both sides dehumanise each other, and that leads to violence and suffering. How often does Israeli media cover the bombing of Gaza? Like, a lot of the footage didn't appear on most Western media until 12months + into the conflict.
One could also make the argument that what's happening in the West bank/Gaza is basically ghettoization, which was something that happened to the Jews a lot in Western Europe. It's profoundly depressing that all the Jewish people have learned is to inflict this kind of suffering on other people.
And the current plans to basically force all of the Gazans out is again, incredibly similar to historical pogroms and treatment meted out to the Jewish people.
