Credit Andy Singer 2024
Pretty sure modern Israel was founded by western powers as a place to send Jews after WWII.
Arab counties shipped Jews to Palestine after they decided to kick them out of their own countries.
Where are the Jews supposed to go?
Little thought expiriment for you: maybe segregating an entire class of people into one secluded corner of the world is fucking stupid? Maybe taking something that requires the murder of thousands or millions isn’t worth the price?
Zionism is a settler colonialism project that was able to really start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
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Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness" or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for thenewcomers.
The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat.
An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab problem ”-the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land" and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population.
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10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
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Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Ethnic Cleansing
Good Books on the History
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Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History - Nur Masalha
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The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948 - Nur Masalha
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A History of Modern Palestine - Ilan Pappe
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The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine - Rashid Khalidi
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The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine - Ilan Pappe
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The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Origins and Consequences - Avi Shlaim
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The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories - Ilan Pappe
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The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development - Sara Roy
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10 Myths of Israel - Ilan Pappe (summery)
Wdym sources? You want me to post links 100 year old documents pertaining to British Occupation of Palestine and subsequent League of Nations and later U.N. resolutions to move more Jewish people into Palestine? You need written accounts of the May 13th 1948 withdrawal of British Troops and May 14th establishment of Israel as the first “Jewish State” in 2,000 years?
How about a source on POTUS Truman publicly acknowledging Israel 11 minutes after it was founded. “Some advisors felt that creating a Jewish state was the only proper response to the holocaust and would benefit American interests” according to TrumanLibrary.gov
Why should I have to waste time educating your ass that can’t perform basic web searches?
Right but this is a separate issue. My original comment was about Israelis whose families have been living in that region of the world for millennia. They have a right to be there. They are not equivalent to colonists from Europe arriving in the Americas.
The Israeli government uses antisemitism as a weapon to attack their critics. They conflate criticism of the Israeli government with attacks on Jews. It’s bullshit, duplicitous rhetoric.
But here we are conflating Israelis who can trace their ancestry to that region for millennia with (a minority of) European Jews who moved there during/after WW2, and calling all of them colonists. Now we are being duplicitous!