Comment on So is Israel just going to finish Palestine off?
Keeponstalin@lemmy.world 4 months agoThose weren’t ignored, they were addressed with the last link. Palestinians are not responsible for the Jewish exodus. Your argument is trying justify the Israeli Apartheid and Genocide by conflating Palestinians with all Arabs/Muslims and conflating all Jewish people with Israel.
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.
Forced expulsion of Palestinians has been central to Zionism since the 1880’s
There are a lot of factors of the Jewish exodus from the Muslim world, but your conflating of the two as justification or minimization of the Nakba doesn’t work; unless you somehow think all Arabs or Muslims are the same. But it’s pretty clear your racist towards Palestinians or Arabs or Muslims when your argument boils down to ‘they are violent primitives and deserve to die,’ just going straight to dehumanization and ignoring all material conditions of Apartheid
Iraqi-born Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, speaking of the wave of Iraqi Jewish migration to Israel, concludes that, even though Iraqi Jews were “victims of the Israeli-Arab conflict”, Iraqi Jews aren’t refugees, saying “nobody expelled us from Iraq, nobody told us that we were unwanted.” He restated that case in a review of Martin Gilbert’s book, In Ishmael’s House.
Yehuda Shenhav has criticized the analogy between Jewish emigration from Arab countries and the Palestinian exodus. He also says “The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.” He has stated that “the campaign’s proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a ‘right of return’ on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of ‘lost’ assets.”
Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath has rejected the comparison, arguing that while there is a superficial similarity, the ideological and historical significance of the two population movements are entirely different. Porath points out that the immigration of Jews from Arab countries to Israel, expelled or not, was the “fulfilment of a national dream”. He also argues that the achievement of this Zionist goal was only made possible through the endeavors of the Jewish Agency’s agents, teachers, and instructors working in various Arab countries since the 1930s. Porath contrasts this with the Palestinian Arabs’ flight of 1948 as completely different. He describes the outcome of the Palestinian’s flight as an “unwanted national calamity” that was accompanied by “unending personal tragedies”. The result was "the collapse of the Palestinian community, the fragmentation of a people, and the loss of a country that had in the past been mostly Arabic-speaking and Islamic.
SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You didn’t address anything. You posted 3 unsourced paragraphs from 3 random historians that contain cherrypicked statements that confirm your biases. This isn’t the smoking gun evidence you think it is. Their opinions have no bearing on the actual events that happened, assuming that these are their opinions or that their opinions are credible, both of which are big ifs. I actually linked over a dozen examples of actual events and their aftermath in over half a dozen countries, including the Palestinian territories. I actually provided context, you provided confirmation bias.
The Palestinians had their own ethnic cleansing of Jews, but that’s besides the point. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not contained to just Israel and Palestine. It is much bigger than that, and it has affected way more people. Disingenuous people like you try to box in the conflict to specific parameters to push propaganda fueled narratives, like you brought up about apartheid and genocide. The fact that this is how you’re choosing to frame things just shows that you don’t actually have an interest in the truth, but rather your interest lies in satisfying the narratives you’ve subscribed to. You can’t oversimplify the conflict. You can’t erase the coalition wars the Arabs waged against Israel or the million Jews that were exiled from the islamic world or the havoc that the Palestinian refugees caused in the Arab countries that invited them or so on. If this conflict was localized to just Israel and Palestine then it would be such a big global conflict. It would’ve been thought of in the same light as the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict or the Morocco-Sahrawi conflict… but it’s not… for a reason.
I’m not sure what you were trying to achieve here, but I already know the definition of ethnic cleansing.
Literally 21% of Israeli citizens are Arab, and another 6% is neither Jewish or Arab.
That’s not what I’m doing. You’re trying very hard to push this idea, but it’s not going to work. If you actually scroll up and read my original statement, I simply claimed that the violence and ethnic cleansing went both ways… which is undoubtably true.
No, but the conflict is broader than what you’re trying to make it out to be. Take Jordan for example. This country has taken part in multiple coalition wars against Israel on behalf of Palestine, spent decades supporting Palestine militarily/economically/politically, had governed the West Bank, ethnically cleansed Jews from it’s land, ethnically cleansed Jews from East Jerusalem, lost both to Israel, had taken in a lot of Palestinians, kicked out those Palestinians when they tried to overthrow the government (black September), expelled the PLO to Lebanon, took in Palestinians again afterwards, became the second Arab country to recognize Israel, and the list goes on and on. This is a history that runs deep with the conflict. It’s not just Jordan, but also Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and so on. You can’t pretend that this history doesn’t exist. No, not all Arabs or muslims are the same and not all Jews are the same, but this conflict is interwoven with these identities, at least to a degree.
I’m literally Arab, I’m Iraqi. But I’m sure you know more about Arab world than I do.
When did I do that exactly? I have at no point argued anything even remotely close to that. I merely challenged the brain dead and blatantly false narrative that you and your propaganda driven friends here are harping on, which is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one sided and always has been when that’s very clearly not true. I then proceeded to give examples that disprove this notion. It’s clear you don’t actually have a case to present. You try to sound smart, but once you scratch the surface the facade disappears and you reveal yourself to be a pretentious . If you’re going to lie and put words in my mouth then I have no interest in talking with you.
Keeponstalin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I added the link, those quotes show why most historians consider the comparison of the Nakba and Jewish exodus from the Muslim world to be a false equivalence. While there were certainly pogroms, the vast majority of Jewish immigrants were able to sell their possessions and willingly move. This is in contrast to the Nakba, where all 800,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed by a deliberate ethnic cleansing campaign. Whether you recognize it or not, when you bring up the exodus as a reaction to the Nakba with the conclusion that both sides are bad, the point of that argument is a justification for the Nakba.
If you’re Iraqi, how do you not see that all the different Arab countries have their own interests? While there was some semblance of pan-Islamism and pan-arabism during the British Mandate, it ultimately was a failed project. Jordan, Egypt, and other countries were not operating on the ‘behalf of Palestine,’ and their actions are not the fault of Palestinians.
You bring up the 1913 Pogroms and the 1930s Riots in Palestine in reaction to the Nakba too, as if they were fueled by Antisemitism instead of anti-settler-colonialism. Even the commissions done by the British disagree with that.
The Concept of forcible transfer the native Palestinians population was central to Zionism since the 1880s when Palestine was chosen as the location. During the British Mandate, around a 100,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced by land purchases (unlike previous land purchases, where peasants would normally continue working and living on the land). Ben-Gurion used Partition as a tactic to dissuade the British from considering a Bi-National Secular State, and instead create a causi-belli for the beginning of a Jewish ethnostate within Palestine. The Nakba, or Plan Dalet, was deliberately planned for over a year. That ethnic cleansing campaign is directly responsible for the Palestinian Occupied Territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. The 1967 war was a deliberate tactic for Israel to take control of those areas and begin the never ending occupation, once those policies were practiced on the Palestinian population that remained in the Green Line after the Nakba.
So what are you trying to agrue? Because none of that is false.
The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948
Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
1967 war: Haaretz, Forward
Israel Martial Law and Defence (Emergency) Regulations practiced in the occupied territories after 1967
SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world 4 months ago
No, you can’t make up claims like this. Your quotes do NOT show that most historians have this opinion. It only shows that those very specific individuals hold this opinion, that is all. In fact the very Wikipedia article that you linked provides examples of historians who disagree with this narrative. If you want to prove that most historians hold this opinion then you’re going to need evidence that actually supports that claim like a survey or a poll.
Interesting you say that because the very article you linked disproves your claims:
Clearly the situation is much more complex given how the situation differed from country to country, from culture to culture, and from community to community. The sheer scale of this exodus prevents it from being entirely uniform. However, despite that, it still does disprove the notion that the Jewish exodus went all fine and dandy like you’re making it out to be. Even the most conservative estimates range in the billions. That is an insane amount. Even if we become ultra skeptical about this particular estimate and cut the figures by a factor of 10 due to exaggeration from bias, that would still put the amount somewhere between $10 and $30 billion. The amount lost per person on average is somewhere between $10,000 and $30,000. Even if we cut this estimate by a factor of 100, that would still be a high amount. So while some Jews might’ve been lucky enough to sell their property and voluntarily move, that wasn’t the case for many.
Yes, this was bad. I never argued against the Nakba. I’m not having a juvenile competition about which is worse. I’m just proving the point that the violence and ethnic cleansing isn’t one sided. It went both ways.
No, that’s not a coherent line of thought. The point is to showcase that the one sided narrative that you’re pushing for is false. You can’t oversimplify this conflict to good vs bad. You’re trying to spin these historical events in way that disregards so much context that it renders your renditions of them to be historically inaccurate and misleading. You’re doing it now by trying to pretend that the Jewish exodus from the muslim world wasn’t bad at all. That’s simply not true.
When the UN proposed the partition plan in 1947, the Jews rejoiced while the Arabs protested and rioted. This turned in to the 1947-1948 civil war which lead both sides to lose about 1000 lives each. This escalated when the Arab Liberation Army infiltrated Palestinian population areas and started organizing attacks on Jews. This eventually culminated in the Arab Liberation Army blockading the 100,000 or so Jews in Jerusalem. The Jewish army tried to send supplies in but the Arab militants killed all who tried to get through. This event caused the US to withdraw it’s support from the partition plan, which embolden the Arab Liberation Army into thinking that it could end the partition plan all together. In the meantime, there were talks between the Arab countries on militarily intervening on behalf of Palestine. The Jews who were fighting were struggling, but their leadership ordered them to hold ground as much as possible until they could come up with a new strategy that defended the Jews in anticipation of the impending Arab invasion.
That strategy eventually came, and it was called plan Dalet. The plan was to basically secure the Jewish settlements, unify them into a single cohesive unit, remove the Palestinians in between, and declare the independence of a new Jewish state. This was the beginning of what the Palestinians called the Nakba. This plan lasted about a month or two, and on May 14th, 1948, a day before the British Mandate ended, the Jews declared independence. The US and USSR both recognized the new state, but the Arab countries refused and decided to form a coalition army and invade. The Arab world was already hostile to Jews due to the antisemitic hatred that descends from islam, the situation in the British Mandate, and their close relations to Nazi Germany (which were spurred by their mutual hatred of Jews). The Jews in the muslim world faced constant discrimination, violence, and harassment, but after the Arab countries invaded? The rhetoric and propaganda were dialed up to max. This was the beginning of the Jewish exodus from the muslim world.
Back to the invading Arab countries, while their numbers were great, they were pretty incompetent. Armies had poor communication among themselves, there was poor coordination among the different countries, and the leadership made poor decisions. This led the Arab forces to lose ground to the Israeli army. As Israel was making gains, it was basically continuing plan Delat on the new territory that it acquired. Which caused more displacement of Arabs. Meanwhile, the Arab countries increased their propaganda and nationalist rhetoric even more at home to compensate for their losses, which caused even more discrimination, harassment, and violence against Jews which forced more of them to flee. These events kept going until 1949, when Israel pretty much won and signed armistices with the invading countries. The end result? Over 6,000 dead Jews, over 10,000 dead Arabs, over 700,000 displaced Arabs, and around 1 million Jews were displaced. It should be noted that the violence, displacement, and aggression didn’t stop from either the Jews or the Arabs, and things kept going, at a slightly slower pace, until things boiled over again in 1967.
That’s so much history happening in such a short span of time that affected so many people. There was no moral side and there was no unjust cause. It’s a lot complicated than that. But that’s my point. You can’t brush off all this context. You can’t oversimplify this conflict to comic book superhero storylines. You can’t disregard historical information because you subscribed to an inaccurate narrative. Pointing out the complexity of the situation is not a justification of anything, it’s merely pointing out the complicated reality.
Back then, the idea of different Arab nations hasn’t really set in yet. There were different Arab states, but the Arab world viewed itself as one big nation and thought that eventual unification was inevitable. That’s why they went to such great lengths to try and help establish Palestine. Each state acted in it’s own interests, yes, but they were all pursuing the same goals. Not to mention that the Palestinian leadership called on them for help, so they didn’t go in uninvited. Of course, you can’t blame this on civilians, but these states did act on behalf of the Palestinian state that they wanted to take place. All of these ideas are less true today because so much time and history has passed that the different states were able to form their own national identities. Even though Arabs still view themselves as one people (this is slowly but surely decreasing in popularity), idea of unification is now seen as farfetched and even as undesirable.