alt Hacker NewsExcept it is...? Jews were living peacefully in Palestine long before the establishment of a judeo-supremacist apartheid state, to the point you had entire refugee boats of Ashkenazis seeking safe harbor from the holocaust, who ironically became the cornerstone founding population of the Jewish state after the Nakba in 1948 killed and forcefully expelled hundreds of thousands of people (it's the ultimate cautionary tale on unchecked immigration lol).
You start to have a problem when you try to forcibly alter the demographics of a region to become majority Jewish, in a region where the majority were not Jews. This is quite literally Zionism 101. If you don't think this is the root cause, what pray tell do you believe it is?
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There was a lot of inter-community conflict in the years (decades) preceding the formation of Israel, so it wasn't exactly peaceful. That there were some groups (on both sides, though the Jewish ones were far more effective, well-trained, and well-funded) that exploited those conflicts for escalation does not deny that the conflict already existed.
I would also argue that imposing the jizya/dhimmi status, creating "second class citizen status" for non-Muslims was, in and of itself, a form of Muslim-supremacist society in Palestine before Israel existed. Either convert to being a Muslim, or be stuck as a second-class citizen.
Zionist settlement started in the 1870’s on legally purchased land. Most of that land was uninhabited. Tel Aviv was founded on literal sand dunes in 1908 and is Israel’s most populated area. Jaffa was the closest Arab city which is still predominately Arab. Northern Israel become majority Jewish without military force under the Ottomans and then British empires.
However even then there were regular pogroms and killing of Jews by the Arabs as there had been for centuries before.
The British Mandate also turned away ships full of Ashkenazi Jews Holocaust survivors as well.
Don’t forget the nearly 850,000 MENA Jews expelled from across every Arab country after Israel was created.
It’s not nearly as cut and dry as many believe.
I think the ongoing conflict is the result of:
- Jewish flight/migration to Palestine, neglecting the reality to one extent or another that Palestinian Arabs were there and had aspirations to form a state
- Arab /Muslim nations forcibly ejecting their Jews to Israel in the 50s-70s (ashekenazi Jews are a minority in Israel, most are from Arab counties and Iran), thus fueling the Jewish population there. I can't think of a greater strategic failure from the Muslim perspective here, because Israelis from these countries ended up by proportion being the most extreme right-wing of Israelis (see crazy statements by the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel as examples, his family is from Iraq I believe). These folks are not going to relocate to Berlin or Vienna any time soon.
- Muslim leaders using the conflict for their internal political purposes-- think Arab nationalist Egypt or Syria or Iraq, or Islamist Iran. I find it had to believe that the leaders of any of these countries care at all about the plight of the Palestinians, in fact, the more Palestinians suffer, the more these political entities gain. Up to a point though-- it wasn't enough for Asad, and Iran will fall too, because people want more than an enemy to focus on
- Muslim chauvinism. This one is underappreciated in my opinion! But in my opinion, a huge driver of the conflict. Muslims just don't want to let go of Jews, Christians and other minorities not being dhimmis in what used to be Muslim land. Muslims demand to be the top dogs in the levant. That's the reality they want to restore, as much as Jewish religious extremists have similar biases.
- ongoing cycle of violence since the 1920s
- organizations like Hamas that exist to resist peace initiatives and, for example, sabotaged the oslo accords by blowing up buses in Israel. Similar extremists exist on both sides, but Hamas was founded explicitly to resist peace and pursue maximalist goals. NGOs like UNRWA also have a stake in the conflict continuing, sadly.
No other conflict like Israel Palestine exists in the world for a reason. Even Ukraine is willing to cede land unjustly to Russia to end that war. Palestinians have been alternating between euphoria and great tragedy for 80 years now and refuse anything but the most maximalist vision, and suffer as a result because it drives away good faith actors that would otherwise support them (for example, liberal Israelis, many successive US administrations). Palestinians are really bad a picking their battles and strategic thinking. October 7th did not go as they envisioned, and only an irrational person would pretend the illusory gains there were worth it, which was pretty clear to me in real time on October 7th, while many Gazans were inexplicably celebrating in the streets.
Peaceful??
No. The attacks were normal, not news. Think Jim Crow.
And the "Nakba" is mostly illusion. Lots of Arabs left at Arab behest, getting out of the way of the intended destruction of Israel. Oops, didn't work. Israel didn't ethnically cleanse Israel, most of it's neighbors did ethnically cleanse their areas.
And where you go wrong is thinking it was forceful. They bought land and moved to it.
And the root cause is that the Jews threw off centuries of oppression and the Muslims can't stand that. They considered the land conquered. As normal, when a victim throws off the abuser the level of violence goes way up.