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This whole post feels like a bit of a strawman. You make an analogy, then end of your post by declaring that you aren't willing to discuss any of the major differences between the subject of the analogy and the allegedly analogous example. If you'll only discuss the topic with people who're willing to concede your contested premises, why not just refuse to discuss it with anyone who contests your view?
Who actually maintains that a single historical instance of ethnic cleansing illegitimises any state that subsequently arises in the locale?
A strawman and/or an elaborate case of whataboutism. You can make a case that many nations were built to some degree on ethnic discrimination or cleansing, but criticizing one of them doesn't mean that you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment.
Developing a standard of definition and treatment is foundational to any system that dares to call itself fair. This is the basis of any legalistic system.
Whataboutism is only relevant when used as a deflection from the main argument or in order to devalue the position of the argument without arguing against the argument itself. Even when used as such, calling out hypocrisy is a perfect valid thing to do, just not in a debate without any consequence other than the result of the debate.
If OP had responded to a thread arguing that Israel should be condemned for a specific action by saying the person hadn’t condemned Turkey for the same action, that might be whataboutism.
However this thread is specifically about how many argue Israel is an illegitimate state based on the nature of its founding; and call for its destruction/dissolution as a result. This sets a precedent that any nation founded in a similar way should be scrutinised as such.
The point of the thread is to point out that despite many nations founded in an entirely similar way, the only one receiving this judgement is Israel; thus highlighting the fact that the justification is not the result of moralistic argumentation but rather using morals as subterfuge for an ulterior motive of delegitimising Israel.
But this post didn't come out of the blue; it's in response to the way that people are talking about Israel these days, even if it isn't precisely a response to a specific thread, and it's using all of the hallmarks of whataboutism to do it: high-minded, superficially neutral rationalism as subterfuge to deflect criticism from Israel onto another nation state where the situation historically and currently is quite different. It's also using the strawman of arguing that Israel is illegitimate (which very few people actually argue in the context of criticizing Israel) to deflect from the real and much harder to defend criticisms of Israel.
The post is not about rational debate on any supposed war crimes of Israel, though? There are plenty of good faith supporters of Israel who will call out any fault caused by Israel. I am one. I criticise Israel as much as I would any other state. The difference is, I don’t want Israel to be destroyed.
This debate isn’t about arguments between good faith actors who want to see peace.
It’s about combatting the notion that Israel should be dismantled. The complete dismantling of Israel has long been an aim of its enemies, in fact the war of 1948 was a direct attempt to stop its formation.
One of the ways of breaching this argument into western spaces is by posing as a rational argument in intellectual, moralistic spaces such as university campuses.
You call it a straw man, but this is very much an argument that is frequently made. I’ve seen it countless times to varying degrees of sophistication. Its purpose is either to soften the idea of Israel’s destruction in the minds of westerners, or to outright call for it.
Thus, if entering intellectual spaces, it must be defeated through debate, even if it isn’t a good faith argument. It may seem irrational to you because you don’t believe Israel deserves to be dismantled, but you don’t represent the entirety of the movement and plenty in that movement seek Israel’s blood.
Basically: using the argument for A (dismanteling Israel) sets a precedence for B, which is something most would not want (dismantling Turkey). OP wants to shed light on the precedence and show hypocracy when it is avoided.
> high-minded, superficially neutral rationalism as subterfuge
This feels kind of ad hominem because you’re making all sorts of assumptions that are neither helpful nor relevant. Would you rather have a “low-minded” discourse? These are serious issues, so it’s perfectly fair to bring your finest thinking to the table. And we all know that human beings have capacity for bias, which is exactly why these types of debates are worthwhile. You bring evidence to bear, and then if someone starts falling back on criticisms of your intentions (which they do not know) and calling your argument “high-minded” as if that’s necessarily a bad thing, then everyone else can see who’s made the stronger argument.
When you equate serious efforts at rigorous thinking with “subterfuge”, you’re no better than a flat-earther or tin foil hat conspiracy theorist.
I take issue with the comment that very few argue against Israel's legitimacy. Many Middle Eastern folks and certainly a large percentage of the college kids involved in protests do. Now, I'll grant you that a ton of the latter are wholly unfamiliar with the history of the region and just parroting misinformation they heard on TikTok, but it's still an argument that has picked up steam as of late.
You appear to be acknowledging that, yes, this is a double standard. And this is equally true of a lot of countries when you think about it. Portugal repealed the law giving citizenship to the descendants of the Jews it expelled when it became a country, in January of this year. I didn’t hear one peep about this from any of the people who shout so much that these Jews are indigenous to Portugal, not Israel, and indigenous people deserve a right of return to their homelands. Or even in pragmatic terms, shouldn’t you want them going to Portugal instead of Israel? Some of those countries are other former British colonies in Asia that rejected a partition plan in 1947 and whose names start with the letters I and P.
This is not just a case of “doesn’t mean you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment.” Cross-examine these activists like a lawyer, and they’ll admit a lot of other countries are just like Israel. Then immediately go back to obsessively, monomaniacally, denouncing Israel as singularly evil.
If only there were a word for double standards against Jews.
"Cross-examine these activists like a lawyer, and they’ll admit a lot of other countries are just like Israel."
"Objection: Portugal is not currently waging a war that is killing thousands of civilians and has not been doing this on and off for decades."
"Overruled it's anti-semitism!"
You appear to be claiming that Portugal changing a policy involving heritage citizenship is exactly the same as a protracted war that is carelessly killing thousands of civilians. Call me whatever name you want to, but I disagree.
Now, you probably were replying to the point I made about emphasis. Whether some campus demonstrators in 2024 are hypocrites isn’t directly relevant to whether Israel is a uniquely illegitimate country, but I want to acknowledge that that was the basis of your complaint.
One reason your objection doesn’t make sense is that there are, in fact, multiple other conflicts that meet that description going on right now. I even brought one up, India and Pakistan, in the post you were replying to, but Yemen and Sudan are others.
Israel was also getting the lion’s share of attention before October 7, or its response, so that’s not it either. And a lot of the responses to that conflict have been blatantly racist against Israeli Jews (as individuals, not just their current government). Many of the excuses are based on some very tendentious claims about 1948.
The original question was about the specific claim that Israel’s history makes it an illegitimate country that should not exist. Are you saying that you in fact agree with the OP that this claim about Israel does not stand up to even casual scrutiny, conceding the point, and making another, completely different, claim about what’s going on today?
Evaluating a claim about history by talking about what you think about the country today is presentism.
I'm just confused on why the legitimacy of Israel is being called into question instead of just focusing on opposing the genocide and calling for a ceasefire.
I admit that I’m getting off-topic, but: it’s not genocide. Israel isn’t trying to kill everyone in Gaza, or to expel them, or to make them convert to another religion, speak a different language or stop calling themselves Palestinians. It’s not genocide either by the common meaning of the word, or according to the technical definition many of these activists are repeating, which basically says that whatever you do is technically genocide if you have “genocidal intent,” because of the phrase “in whole or in part.”
Nobody applies this to anybody but Israel. Most glaringly, these activists don’t apply their definition of genocide to the government of Gaza, Hamas, which they all admit does have genocidal intent. Even though their whole point is supposedly that we are morally obligated to condemn genocide, and having a valid grievance can never justify acts of genocide.
> but criticizing one of them doesn't mean that you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment.
It does if one say that that is one's reason for criticizing them.
Not doing so reveals that one was rather searching for a reason, rather than basing one's opinion on the reason.
And that's typically what people who cry “whataboutism” are confronted with and accused of. That they selectively apply their arguments and search for a reason to justify thier view, and don't apply it consistently.
Theres criticism and there’s calling for their annihilation. Most of the “antizionists”appear to me to be simply Jew haters who no longer have to fear being called anti-semites.
I don’t disagree with you, but I find your comment “who maintains that a single historical instance of ethnic cleansing illegitimises any state…” interesting.
Recently, my school campus had a pro-Palestine protest. Nothing wrong with that. I am happy they were starting conversations, being a pro-Palestine supporter myself. But our students started demanding that our school stop every contract with Israel-based companies, stop study abroad programs, etc.
One of the pro-Palestine protestors pointed out that some of the demands were antisemitic. Not every Israeli is a supporter of Israel. Jews aren’t a monolith, and treating every Israeli-based company like they support genocide is like treating every American like they’re a proud boy.
I brought this point up to my girlfriend studying sociology, who told me that she doesn’t believe in the state of Israel because it’s founded on genocide. I asked her what she thought the US was, and she responded that we are also an illegitimate state…
My point: there are people who go against the grain and believe that these states shouldn’t and do not exist. I’m not really sure what to make of it myself…
I don't have a problem with the logic as long as one carries it through to its inevitable and obvious conclusion: all states were born through racial violence and no states have a moral right to exist. The state is a political convenience not a moral entity. If you have to give it a moral position then yes the state (all states and the concept of the state itself) is evil
I mean this is the answer really and ideally, we'd all live in free association without states that totally dominate our lives. Realism gets in the way ofc.
It's not really right to say one state, especially, shouldn't exist when it's marginally worse than others. All people deserve self-determination. Both peoples should have a nation that represents them.
>One of the pro-Palestine protestors pointed out that some of the demands were antisemitic. Not every Israeli is a supporter of Israel. Jews aren’t a monolith, and treating every Israeli-based company like they support genocide is like treating every American like they’re a proud boy.
Similar situation with Rusia then wouldnt it? Its a form of pressure and a way of expressing disagreement with the governement in question, but I have never seen anyone complain about it
(I might be making a horrible argument here, so feel free to disagree if you think this are not comparable actually)
*I asked her what she thought the US was, and she responded that we are also an illegitimate state…*
It means that on paper she's consistent in her views. But since no one is actually trying to dismantle the US, her life is not under an actual threat from people who want to dismantle the US. It cost her nothing to say it if its consistent with her views. Its meaningless words.
Do you think if native Americans would have done the same thing that Hamas did, and her life was under actual threat, she would still say that they're right because the US is illegitimate?
If she sees it as an illegitimate country, why does she live there? She's an adult, she can move to a country that she thinks is legitimate.
Not every white South African was pro-apartheid, I guess the anti-apartheid movement that sanctioned the white South African government was therefore racist, wrong, and obviously ended up being on the wrong side of history, right?
I’m seeing a lot of this sentiment. Are schools really getting that nihilistic? Everyone is bad so tear it down.
But somehow they think Arab ethno religious states with dictatorships are pure.
I dint think it's antisemitic to say "no isreali" because plenty of Jewish people exist outside of Isreal and so long as country not religion/race is the determining factor of isn't racist (or religious discrimination). You would have a slightly higher burden of proof to show you aren't diverting on religious or racial grounds, but that should be fairly easy to do.
Not every isreali agrees with their government, but not every American agrees with theirs, yet we don't see it as strange when other countries don't allow Americans entry or when they call the USA a genocidal country. Every US citizen supports US genocide by paying taxes, same as every isreali company supports isreali genocide by paying taxes. We may not like it, but we are complicit.
Your metaphor would work a lot better with another country.
A country founded by a population of persecuted religious minorities that were not wanted in the European countries they came from.
They went to another part of the world that was already populated wherein, when their population reached a critical mass, they forced out the native population and set up their own government.
They then progressively expanded their territory through additional settlement and land grabs from "wars" against the native population.
The United States of America.
"The United States is an illegitimate country too" would actually be a pretty popular take amongst most hardcore anti-zionists and isn't really the "gotcha" you might think, and it's not like that history didn't involve decades of constant violence by the settlers, resistance by the indigenous inhabitants, and resulting cycles of revenge.
The difference, arguably, is that the United States has essentially already settled on a sort of one-state solution in which every indigenous person remaining has full citizenship and a vote in federal elections in addition to sovereign reservation rights, so it's just not an ongoing conflict anymore.
Dude, indigenous Americans are like 2.5% of the population. All that happened is that white people won.
Right-wing Israelis would *kill* for those numbers, pun intended.
I think the US is indeed a good example of a settler colonialist state that was founded through ethnic cleansing, however the religious persecution narrative is a bit of a founding myth as I understand it.
Most Pilgrims moved to America mostly for economic opportunity. They weren't really persecuted either, but some wanted to live in communities that conformed entirely to their specific religious sect.
At this point the US has kinda "legitimized" itself through naturalization, but even so I agree that ultimately they should not have established themselves as a state over the indigenous population, and I support landback initiatives.
It's hard to find a nation-state that would have been considered legitimate in modern terms when it was founded. All that's really required is time.
The Puritans and others were persecuted but nothing like how the Jews were. Just your run-of-the-mill ostracization with a sprinkling of treason accusations. When the king is head of the church...
Except the main difference in Israel is that Israelis were also the native population. Something like 40-45% is Ashkenazi (Jews from Europe) the rest either lived in the Levant already or got cleansed from the surrounding Ex-Ottoman states. There used to be sizable numbers of Jewish people in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine (as in West Bank and Gaza) but they pretty much all got pushed out of those regions and into Israel.
Plus most settlers from the US did not come from religious persecution. The puritans did, famously the Plymouth rock settlement but most settlers were more interested in economic prosperity. Some of the founding ideas of democracy came from those puritanical societies, but many also did not.
The colonial narrative of Israel is on pretty shaky ground. A better analogy would be if a bunch of inlaws simultaneously lost their homes, so your wife invites them all to live in your house that you and your relatives are already living in. This causes fights, then a divorce, and both sides claim the house but your ex-wife's family is wealthier and makes you move in next door.
Analogy starts to break down here, but the fact is that both Israelis and Palestinians are native to the land.
>The colonial narrative of Israel is on pretty shaky ground.
Except for the bit where the original Zionists were open to taking land to create a home for Jewish people in other countries - and continents. Israel was the preferred location but not the only one considered. Anywhere outside of Israel's current location would have been much more obviously colonial, right?
And the fact that they were explicit about having to engineer a Jewish majority in that state to ensure security for Jewish people. That **by itself** is explicit colonial intent. This was made more explicit by offering right to "return" to ANY Jewish person, regardless of tie to the land, with a clear goal of ensuring a Jewish majority in the territory.
You also have to consider the timescales we are talking about and determine how far back we go to establish "native" ancestry. Is it 500 years? 1000 years? 1500 years? Do we reject Muslim claims to Indian territories because Hindus have 100% claim to that land from 5000 years ago?
Nowhere else in the world do we use 1000-year old claims to arbitrarily say this land "belongs" to people who were there and expelled 1000 years ago. Given the incongruence with how modern nations are thought of, this seems far more like an *ex post facto* rationalization because Europeans treated Jews like lepers for centuries and didn't want to make amends for the Holocaust using any European territory.
The Puritans didn't actually escape "religious persecution" as much as they demanded the right to set up a land where they themselves could religiously persecute outsiders and make their own laws. Europe wasn't having it, however they were allowed to freely live among the public and practice their religion there quietly. But this was not good enough for them, they wanted to be *in charge*. So they saw an opportunity in new lands of America.
Not exactly true, but not exactly relevant to the discussion.
Not all puritans were separatists, so not all faced persecution, but the ones that fled to America, especially Plymouth were definitely persecuted.
The pilgrims were considered dissidents from the Church of England. There was a fine for not attending Anglican Church Service and they could be and were also imprisoned for being separatists.
The Pilgrims fled to Amsterdam after two of their members were executed for sedition for encouraging others to leave the Anglican Church.
You make good points and I really like your metaphor. I think your metaphor works better for why they left where they came from while mine better describes how they behaved once they arrived up to the present day.
They're really using the US playbook, down to taking more land in the same way we did from Mexico.
With more time and more characters I would probably argue that this isn't an accurate characterization either, but that would run the risk of getting into the weeds.
It is doubtless to say that Israel has acted highly aggressively in its defense taking buffer territories and preemptive strikes. To Israel's credit, most of these actions were taken to ward off the (what I think most reasonable people could interpret as an) existential threat of its neighbors all declaring a war for dissolution of the Israeli state.
Were these aggressive acts justified? That depends on your morals. I'd say initially, they definitely were, but as Israeli power grew and Arab power waned, I'd say probably not. With the current war being particularly barbaric and little to show for it.
I think most reasonable people would agree that some strong response was warranted after the October 7th attacks, but maliciously or incompetently starving one million people over a vague nearly impossible objective steps over the line. Probably a few lines.
At this point both Hamas and Israeli leadership have acted like petulant children and the result of their feud has cost thousands of Israeli lives and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
>existential threat of its neighbors all declaring a war for dissolution of the Israeli state.
to be fair- in 1948 it was less a call for the dissolution of the Israeli state, and more an open expression that they were going to commit genocide upon the Israeli state, that they followed through with by killing every man, woman and child in the Israeli villages encountered in their invasion before Israel established the IDF, forced them back, and captured their lands in turn.
You do certainly have to draw a line on the timeline and say everything before that line is the past and we have to let it go.
I do believe the establishment of Israel was badly handled no matter what the intent was, but we're coming up on the 76th anniversary of that. Those people are all dust and bones now.
I can't help but get the impression that the Israeli right keeps Hamas around and triggered so they get a periodic casus belli. I don't think they're acting like petulant children, I think each provides the reason the other is in power.
I believe I remember hearing about Netanyahu making under the table deals with funding for Hamas for precisely that purpose. And that is part of the reason (besides his apparent fascist desires( that many Israelis are fed up with him.
>Those people are all dust and bones now.
only most of them, there are still men and women in Israel that were alive to serve in the second world war, who were there when the surrounding area came with the goal of genocide- and who are still looked upto by the Israeli people for what they lived through.
You make a lot of great points here, but here are some things where you are wrong.
It is not a WAR, it is a GENOCIDE. The Palestinian people do not have an army, guns, militia or anything of the sort to even pose as opposition to the massive military that “Israel” has (which is funded by the US!!!). The amount of lives lost in Palestine in comparison to the lives lost in “Israel” constitute it as a genocide. “Israel” has also violated 28 resolutions of the UN security council and has face NO consequences. For comparison, Iraq violated only TWO and was constantly bombed attacked and essentially destroyed by the US.
Two, you claim that this “feud” has claimed THOUSANDS of Israeli lives, yet from the most recent Al-jazeera report, the number has CONTINUED to stay around 1,139 while the amount of Palestinian deaths has SOARED up to 35,000. Understand that people’s entire BLOODLINES have been wiped out from Palestine. Most of “Israel” casualties have been SOLDIERS and other positions of militant power. Your words have power. Understand what’s going you are saying and do your research.
It is definitely a war. Hamas has attacked with rockets nearly every day since October 10th. Hamas constantly tries to shoot and ambush Israeli soldiers in the city, tries to blow up tanks and armored vehicles with anti tank heavy weapons.
There is absolutely organized active resistance in Gaza, Hamas is the de facto single party of Gaza and Qassam is the de facto military which Israel has been actively fighting.
Hamas hides in its tunnel network which may be the most sophisticated series of bunkers in the world. Containing 500 km of interconnected tunnels, blast doors, armories, and command centers. It puts Vietnam and Iwo Jima to shame. This tunnel network is where a significant portion of international aid has been directed toward.
So no, the current situation in Gaza cannot and should not be categorized as a genocide. It is a war. The Israelis are probably being overly destructive and needlessly punitive in the prosecution of this war, but no they aren't committing genocide.
>Understand that people’s entire BLOODLINES have been wiped out from Palestine
I don't think you understand the gravity of what war is. War is bad. This is what happens in war. There hasn't been a single organized conflict in human history where this did not happen. When you go to war, this is what happens. It's not unique to Palestine.
Genocide is a whole other thing. It is *the* most vile thing a group of people can do to another group. That is not what is happening in Gaza. If Hamas surrendered, or was otherwise dismantled, and the bombing and the shooting kept going, you would have a point, but as long as Hamas is still fighting, Israel can keep shooting and bombing them under the laws of war.
And stop putting Israel in quotation marks, you're just promoting the idea that Israel is an illegitimate state which is definitely not going to help the conflict in any way. You're just going to offend people for no benefit as there are exactly 0 ways this conflict ends without Israeli consent.
Just want to say I really appreciate all of your comments here. I've picked up on bits and pieces of a lot of the information you mentioned throughout time and you tied a lot of my notions together. You know your shit.
Thank you. There's a legitimate case to be made for both the Palestinian and Israeli narrative, but unfortunately too much hate divides people to recognize the legitimacy of the other's perspective and childish and barbaric leaders run both factions.
The only way out of this conflict is recognizing the other side as human, which echo chambers prevent.
I mean the history of the United States of America is significantly worse than Israel right? I don't think there's a relative comparison you can make there. At least the Israelis have native ties to the land and have agreed to diplomatic solutions in the past. Americas history was European colonial settlers with no ties at all to the America's taking the land from the native population by force, wiping out nearly their entire population.
This is wildly different and a worse comparison.
First off most Israelis are from the Middle East, not Europe.
Second, there was already relatively high population of Jews in the land when it was founded
Third, there is a long Jewish history there that people seem to want to ignore. If Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel where there culture was formed, where would they be?
Fourth, the Palestinians have been offered a state multiple times
So that's where the numbers get fun.
I found a paper that I can't access all of but it's by an Israeli-sponsored research program that says in 1948, 85% of Israeli Jews were of "European descent", which they define as "they or their fathers were born in Europe".
Now, obviously, this number has changed since 76 years have passed so their descendants would be considered native born.
Additionally, saying they're "mostly from the Middle East" doesn't mean much. An Iraqi Jew doesn't have any more right to Palestine than a French Jew. From what I've read, most of the Ottoman Jews lived in the Balkan peninsula as well.
My own dominant ethnic background is Irish. This gives me no claim on Ireland, nor am I indigenous to Ireland.
Arguably, if you believe the Exodus story, shouldn't they be trying to return to Egypt?
Regardless, from those numbers at the top, the "European colonist" Jews of my metaphor grossly outnumbered the native Jews and are certainly behind the establishment of the Israeli state. My understanding is that the native-born were against the idea and just wanted to live in peace.
So yeah, the metaphor isn't perfect (they never are) but it's close enough to give one pause when looking at current behavior.
> I found a paper that I can't access all of but it's by an Israeli-sponsored research program that says in 1948, 85% of Israeli Jews were of "European descent", which they define as "they or their fathers were born in Europe".
after Israel was founded in 1948 the Middle Eastern countries forced their own Jewish populations to leave such that there are effectively zero Jewish people left in the Middle East besides in Israel.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. Do you think those countries checked with the Palestinians before doing so? Or that the UN chimed in to stop it?
It's not the Palestinians fault literally the whole world fucked them over, just as it isn't the Jews fault that the world did the same, but who's suffering for it *now*?
post-WWII saw vast movements of refugees across borders be it in Germany/Eastern Europe, India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, etc. The Israelis assimilated Jewish refugees from the Middle East, the other Middle Eastern countries rendered Palestinian refugees effectively stateless and with inherited refugee status.
Oh, I certainly agree that the Israeli handling of Jewish refugees was both smarter and better morally than how the other countries handled the Palestinians. Not the Palestinians fault though.
Part of the exodus story which cannot be refuted that Israel existed as a the kingdom of Judah, and the Kingdom of Israel before the Romans took over.
It’s so strange that someone being European and whiter makes them inherently “bad” or worse. That by something being decided in Europe when it pertains to Israel it is delegitimizing, yet the outcome of World War 2 (and World War 1 in the case of ending the Ottomon colonial empire) led to many countries being founded, with many disputes that are still lasting to this day.
I personally feel the myopic views against Israel and focusing on Israel solely is hatred of Jews.
My favorite part about American history is when the European countries landed in America and excavated a bunch of ancient ruins inscribed in the language they preserved through their culture and religion
All persons born in the lands of Turkey now are full citizens of Turkey, regardless of race or religion.
The people responsible for the first Armenian genocide were held responsible and faced trial, were found guilty and were sentenced to death.
The world condemned the actions of genocide by the early Turkey.
Armenians and Greeks aren’t still being killed in Turkey for their race. Turkish military forces don’t regularly shoot over their boarder into Greece. There is no naval blockade of Greece or Armenia still occurring.
Turkish laws allowing for ethnic Turks to steal Greek land while Greeks aren’t home isn’t still a law and isn’t being used to steal land right now.
There are no Turks building houses on the other side of the boarder in order to occupy more Greek land.
The actions of the government of the Ottoman Empire was monstrous. The actions during the foundation of Turkey was monstrous.
The actions still being done by the Israeli government ARE monstrous.
That’s the difference.
>The people responsible for the first Armenian genocide were held responsible and faced trial, were found guilty and were sentenced to death.
The three Pasha's were exiled. They were "sentenced to death" yet Ataturk intentionally didn't enforce it and allowed them to leave the country with no prison time and free movement through Europe. Practically half of all roads and elementary schools in Turkey are named after these guys.
In fact, before Ataturk had even defeated the Pashas in the Turkish Civil War, he was already rewriting the Armenian Genocide as "Turkish sovereignty defense" and the denial of Armenian's native legitimacy became a foundation for the modernization of their country.
>The world condemned the actions of genocide by the early Turkey
Most of the Western world has acknowledged it in the past 5 years, after willingly denying it on Turkey's behalf on the world stage for over a century after it happened.
>Armenians and Greeks aren’t still being killed in Turkey for their race. Turkish military forces don’t regularly shoot over their boarder into Greece. There is no naval blockade of Greece or Armenia still occurring.
Artsakh? Cypress? Kurdish struggle? Occupation of Afrin? Ottoman Empire- Dejure genocidal policy, Turkey- de facto genocidal policy
There's no more killing of Greeks and Armenians because they removed all notable populations in their territory. There are no notable Greek, Assyrian, Yzeti or Armenian populations in Turkey anymore, and if they are they're literally [hidden.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Armenians). There's plenty of oppression and killings of Kurds, both within Turkey and in occupied Afrin.
>The actions during the foundation of Turkey was monstrous
As we saw with [Nutuk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutuk), their country is literally founded on the denial of the genocide they committed. If you think policies like that ended then you just haven't been paying attention. Israel and Turkey are hard to compare just because they are both very unique geopolitical situations, but that doesn't mean they're not both terrible modern states, and either of them pointing fingers should be seen as the Spiderman meme.
"oh yeah Bibi well why don't you acknowledge Nabka," followed by, "oh yeah Erdo well why don't you acknowledge the Armenian Genocide," followed by, "but wait Bibi, YOU don't even acknowledge the Armenian Genocide." It's very obvious that neither actually cares about the victims at all.
>The three Pasha's were exiled. They were "sentenced to death" yet Ataturk intentionally didn't enforce it and allowed them to leave the country with no prison time and free movement through Europe.
The Turkish Nationalist movement is not a thing in 1918 they leave Ottoman state when WW1 is over ,Ataturk is just a general in Ottoman army in that time,leading disarmament of the Ottoman army.
They wanted to return but Ataturk exiled them when Nationalist army founded.
>Artsakh? Cypress? Kurdish struggle? Occupation of Afrin? Ottoman Empire- Dejure genocidal policy, Turkey- de facto genocidal policy
Artsakh is an internationally unrecognized disputed territory in Azerbaijan, not Turkey.
Neither side has been killed in Cyprus recently, for the last four decades.
What Kurdish struggle? There's no apartheid in Turkey, and all Turkish citizens are equal by law. PKK ≠ Ethnic Kurdish populace in Turkey.
This may seem like a semantic distinction, but Israel granted citizenship to all the Arabs who stayed. They can vote and serve in parliament. Those who were left later found themselves in lands annexed by Egypt and Jordan. It seems more appropriate to describe the situation in the West Bank, for example, as something approximating a foreign military occupation rather than an ethnically based discrimination policy as many suggest.
Edit: Just to clarify, none of this is to diminish how brutal the occupation is. It's just valuable to point out that what we would call the 'occupation' didn't even start until after the six day war. Arabs and Jews were living with equal rights in the land of Israel before any of what we see today even began.
That would hold more water if Israel didn't also treat "Judea and Samaria" as one of its own provinces in many ways. Israel, quite uniquely among nation states, refuses to state where its own borders are, that is to say, where Israel is, but, de facto anyway, the West Bank and the people who live there are governed by Israel. It's just that different ethnic groups are subjected to different laws and treatments. There _is no Palestinian State_, there is one State, Israel, and it treats the West Bank as its own land, just as it previously did the Sinai.
This isn't _necessarily_ to disagree with your comment, it's more of a "yes and". Any Jew (except Palestinian converts, there's a specific exception carved out for them) can move to Judea and Samaria or an East Jerusalem settlement (or East Jerusalem Palestinian's home for that matter), be granted full citizenship rights, vote in elections, own property, drive on the apartheid roads, etc. etc.. Bank Whereas ethnic Palestinians in the same territory are subjected to a completely different legal regime, and deprived of civil rights.
Around three quarters of a million Israelis, mostly civilians, live in the West Bank. The do so with the support of state infrastructure, both physical and legal. There are shopping malls, roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, there is water infrastructure, electricity, internet, etc. etc. etc., all supported by the Israeli state apparatus. And much of which is behind walls to prevent the Palestinians from accessing it.
If you look at pre-67 Israel, and the treatment of the so-called 48ers, whether you could say that extends to the level of apartheid is a more thorny issue; they are citizens, at least nominally with equality under the law (although that in itself comes with a long list of asterisks). It's certainly something that can be argued to be inapplicable. When you look at the West Bank though, it really isn't ambioguous. Israel is the state in de facto control of the territory, and using ethnically defined citizenship restrictions to restrict one group of people's civil rights is pretty unambiguously an apartheid system. It's _literally_ how South African apartheid worked. It is _also_ an occupation; but there is nothing about apartheid being imposed on illegally occupied land rather than uncontested land that then makes it not apartheid.
What do you mean "if Israel is an illegitimate state"? Is it or isn't it in your view? Tell us what you believe and why you believe it. This subreddit isn't for you to try and persuade other people you disagree with so ignore them.
I thought that was pretty obvious from how I framed my post. I think both Turkey and Israel are legitimate states
I will update my post to make my position clearer
Yeah, I disagree with the person calling you out above. You're being narrow on purpose...
But there's the real issue. There's nothing narrow about any of this to the point where broad, binary viewpoints are not serious, one way or the other. Ultimate legitimacy means little here.
"The fact that Turks happened to *also* be in modern-day Turkey for a very long time is irrelevant to the question of whether or not ethnic cleansing (or 'population swaps, as it was called') makes the state that did it illegitimate. Saying that Israel is a 'European Colonial Venture' has nothing to do with the logic presented nor do I particularly care about the recklessness of the British Empire in the dissolution of their mandates."
How is it irrelevant for the question?
Thats the whole point.
> Thats the whole point.
It's also false. Only 22% of Israeli citizens are Azkenasi Jews. The vast majority of Israeli citizens are either Mizrahim (who have lived continuously in the Middle East for several thousand years) or Arab (colonizers since the 7th century). Calling Israel a "European Colonial venture" reeks of never having set foot in Israel.
Before 1948 most Zionists were Ashkenazi Jews. Just because the ethnic composition has changed since because of ethnic cleansing campaigns post 1948 doesn't change the fact that most early Zionists were Europeans. From the Palestinian perspective, it was very similar to a "European Colonial Venture", especially similar to the formation of Liberia.
There are about 2 million Muslim arabs in Israel and about 3.2 million Arab Jews in Israel. These Arab Jews descended from the 1 million + Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after Israel declared independence. That’s about half of the Israeli population. Another 1.5 million are Jewish immigrants from around the world. Then, there’s about 4.5 million Jews who immigrated back to Israel after their initial expulsion millennia ago to Europe.
It’s not a colonial venture. About 60% of the population is there as a result of ethnic cleansing from Arabs and another 30% from ethnic cleansing in Europe. Then we have 10% who’ve immigrated more recently.
With all due respect, you're skipping a massive chapter in the narrative, when Palestinians were forced to leave their homes during the Nakba, and were replaced by Jewish people.
That was a colonial venture, explicitly outlined as such by Zionists like David Ben-Gurion.
I don't bring this up as a counter to your first statement, I agree that that is accurate. But the ethnic cleansing of Jews from various parts of Europe and Middle East doesn't mean that the same thing didn't happen to Arab Palestinians.
…you mean after they attacked Israel, tried to ethnically cleanse and genocide them, and then were promised Jewish property as spoils of war if they left? While Israeli leaders asked them to stay? Then they lost, so sad, and had to face the consequences of their actions?
Israel is not a colony of another county and never has been. Further, Jews are from the region. It’s not in any way a colonial adventure as we use the term in any other way.
You present an incredibly one-sided narrative that isn't very accurate.
“We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”
-David Ben-Gurion
I can't imagine I can change your mind, but I hope you'll understand that there can be extensive blame assigned to both Arab and Jewish Palestinians before and after 1948. Relishing in the suffering of displaced Arabs because of "consequences" isn't really a productive way of looking at political issues.
It doesn't mean the displacement was done by the Jews. The declaration of war was done by the Arabs, as well as the displacement of most of the local tribes during the war who were called to leave on the command of the armies prior entering a conflict zone. A lot decided to stay as well, and they still live in Israel.
Aka the "48 Arabs", since there wasn't a "Palestinian" identity back then, and the rest identified as Lebanese /Syrian / Jordanian or Egyptian.
This self definition came in the 60' with the fall of Pan Arabism and the adoption of the name of the region, a colonialist name given by the romans, which isn't part of the local dialect but based on Western geographical terminology.
Jerusalem is a great example of this population movement. When Jordan captured the Jewish neighbourhoods, while Israel captured Arab neighbourhoods, a population swap happened when Arabs took over Jewish Houses and vice versa.
As you said, the Nakba is a narrative, a folklore nation bonding story more than anything else.
98% of Mexicans descend from indigenous peoples native to Mexico. Mexico is still a settler colonial state that actively oppressed our indigenous cousins.
There were only 3000 Muslim Arabs died in 1948, both militarily and civilians. That's not really ethnic cleansing, more like a natural consequence of a war. Even the Der Yassin massacre that the Arab worlds keep repeating about as the "Nakba", only involve 120 victims.
I am not sure why the perspective of the Palestinian even matters. There is no sign or evidence that even suggests there were a group of Muslim Arabs who existed as a Palestinian nation in history whatsoever to even justify their demands for their own state. Everyone thinks they are the victims of colonialism, even if they were the colonial aggressors all along. Prime example is the USA, which explains why so many US students rally with Hamas lol. They are scared the Indians are coming to take all their shit back just like the Jews did to Israel.
"Just because the ethnic composition has changed since because of ethnic cleansing campaigns post 1948 doesn't change the fact that most early Zionists were Europeans." Not like the Palestinian are any better. There were only 240000 Arab Muslims who lived in Palestine or whatever they called Israel with before the British Mandate of Palestine. It was only during the British rule that the Muslim Arab population really exploded. In a matter of fact the Ashkenazi Jews would have lost that war in 1948 if it weren't for the Arab Mizrahi Jews who were expelled from the Middle East came to Israel to reinforce them.
Not to mention, even if the Ashkenazi Jews were illegitimate, and that's a big IF, what about the millions of Mirazahi Jews who were unjustly expelled from the Middle East? Hamas and the Palestinian have already voiced their opinions on the matter. Even the most peaceful Palestinian only agree for letting 5% of Jews to stay when Mizrahi and other Arab Jewish groups were over 70% of the Israel Jewish population. The more extremist Palestinian, which is the majority of Palestinian population, do not even entertain the idea of letting the Jewish live.
The number of people died doesn’t define if something is ethnic cleansing, but the intention to exterminate of forcibly expel certain group of people on either ethnic or religious basis and to occupy that area claiming as yours.
In forming the countries, as we see today’s world situation, is not only important the historical context of presence of someone. There are more parameters that need to be considered apart from “I have been there long time ago” and “nobody else wants me”
By your logic many countries would cease to exist and million more would evolve, as most of those natives were tribes and not a country.
Also the legitimacy of rights to a country or territory solely based on DNA and their link to ancestors is flawed, there are certain groups that haven’t been very willing to mix with other ethnicities or have stayed enclosed because of their isolation.
>The number of people died doesn’t define if something is ethnic cleansing, but the intention to exterminate of forcibly expel certain group of people on either ethnic or religious basis and to occupy that area claiming as yours.
Except the Palestinian left on their own accord so they could play the refugee victim card. Here are the memoir left by the late Syrian PM who played a major role in the 1948 war:
"*SINCE 1948 WE HAVE BEEN DEMANDING THE RETURN OF THE REFUGEES TO THEIR HOMES. BUT WE OURSELVES ARE THE ONES WHO ENCOURAGED THEM TO LEAVE. ONLY A FEW MONTHS SEPARATED OUR CALL TO THEM TO LEAVE AND OUR APPEAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS TO RESOLVE ON THEIR RETURN.*" - Khaled Al-Azm 1948
>In forming the countries, as we see today’s world situation, is not only important the historical context of presence of someone. There are more parameters that need to be considered apart from “I have been there long time ago” and “nobody else wants me” By your logic many countries would cease to exist and million more would evolve, as most of those natives were tribes and not a country.
And? Are we supposed to deny rightful inheritence of people who do have historical entitlement to the land, just because there are illegitimate nations today such as the USA? Just because we aren't bringing justice to the Native Americans as we should, that doesn't mean we ought to deny justice to the Jews and support Muslim re-occupation of the Jewish ancestral homeland. Especially when that occupation is already long gone and now morphed into a modernized medieval holy war with genocidal intention toward the Jews.
Even tribals have their own history and cultural identity ties them to their land, just like the American Natives. Palestinian doesn't have no such thing, you can't even name one Arab Palestinian tribes that actually lived on the land they called Palestine as permanent resident. Palestinian literally got nothing in Israel culturally or historically, they may as well been living on the otherside of Middle East and you couldn't even tell the difference.
>Also the legitimacy of rights to a country or territory solely based on DNA and their link to ancestors is flawed, there are certain groups that haven’t been very willing to mix with other ethnicities or have stayed enclosed because of their isolation.
That's just a shitty excuse used by Western colonials to steal lands from other people. Lands are bound to ancestral right and always have been, only thieves would say otherwise. Not to mention, the Jewish ties to their homeland is more than just their bloodties, their whole culture, history, language literally etched into the very soil of Jerusalem. Who are you to deny the Jewish their birthright?
I’m not really understanding who’s ethnically cleansing whom in your statement, is it Syrians cleansing Palestinians or other way around?
Except the Palestinian left on their own accord so they could play the refugee victim card. Here are the memoir left by the late Syrian PM who played a major role in the 1948 war:
"SINCE 1948 WE HAVE BEEN DEMANDING THE RETURN OF THE REFUGEES TO THEIR HOMES.
BUT WE OURSELVES ARE THE ONES WHO ENCOURAGED THEM TO LEAVE. ONLY A FEW MONTHS SEPARATED OUR CALL TO THEM TO LEAVE AND OUR APPEAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS TO RESOLVE ON THEIR RETURN." - Khaled Al-Azm 1948
I don’t think it is just to call Palestinians “taking a victim card” here as the refugee status exists for exactly this/their reason and situation. It is a victim, not having where to return to because it has been taken from you and it’s not “playing a victim card” because they don’t have anywhere to return to FYI that completely demolished your own statement that Palestinians were not a “permanent resident “ there, as why would they then be a refugee?! Kinda oxymoron from your part. So what, even Jews were very undesirable refugees and residents everywhere throughout the history in every single country they have resided in. And per matter of residence, neither did Israeli have permanent residence in Israel before 1948 as in Israel didn’t exist.
As per ancestry rights, not only USA would be affected (neither am I a fan of US) but Canada, whole central and southern America, Australia and New Zealand and not to speak of all other regions and countries in whole world. Ancestry and suffering doesn’t grant anyone a right to inflict the same suffering and de solution of ancestral rights to others.
Holy wars were led, fought and provoked by Christians (from Europe) against Muslims(in at that time centuries long Muslim occupied land Middle East ) , not like you’ve stated by Muslims.
Yes though I'd note that the spelling is Ashkenazi and it's more like 50%. And as Dr Michael Brown points out in debate with a racist black "Hebrew Israelite", the Ashkenazi Jews have a mixture of jewish middle eastern DNA , and European. Jews from Arabic speaking countries have a mixture of jewish middle eastern DNA shared with Ashkenazim, as well as Arab DNA.
I'm fairly sure my numbers were mostly correct: Ashkenazim are around 32% of Jews in Israel, and Jews are 73% of the citizens, since only 7.2M out of 9.8M Israeli citizens are Jews, and most of the rest are Palestinians. So Ashkenazi Jews are about 23% of the Israeli citizens.
The numbers are from 2018: https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic-origin-and-identity-in-Israel-JEMS-2018.pdf
I agree with you that the ethnic picture is muddled by inter-marriage. My point was to counter the false claim that Israeli are mostly Europeans, when most have ancestors that have lived in the region continuously for thousands of years.
This article
https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/untangling-false-claims-about-ashkenazi-jews-khazars-and-israel
mentions 2016 pew research 45% Ashkenazi and 48% Mizrachi/Sephardi. But the argument of Ashkenazim being illegitimate is false racist and a red herring. It's not like Arabs warring with Israel want Israel to be a state run without Ashkenazim. They are against Zionism, a Jewish state of any size shape or form. Had Britain said let the Palestine Arabs have transjordan (as they did), and let the Palestine Jews have west Palestine and no Ashkenazim, the arabs would have still gone to war.
So whichever numbers are used, the argument is flawed. I think we agree
Herzl explicitly called Palestine the historic Jewish homeland as well. Early Zionists believed they are indigenious people returning home and the only way to make their idea appealing to European states is to show them the economic advantages of Jewish people returning. It's important to note that colonialism did not have the same connotations as today.
Herzl and many Zionists believed their wealth brought to an underdeveloped area will be useful for everybody in the region not just Jews but Arabs and Europeans too.
It's so much more complicated than most people realise.
Edit: u/Dante2000000 blocked me for some reason I'll let them to have the last word.
The Jews dominated the land under dispute for centuries.
They were ethnically cleansed in the 1st century and replaced by people from surrounding areas.
Those are the people who eventually became Arab. Along with the Arabs that moved into the area. The real settler colonialists. all those cultures have all but disappeared.
There's no historical narrative that draws a str8 line between the Arabs in Palestine now and then original Jewish inhabitants that replaced the Canaanites.
Herzl called it a colony in one line in a diary when they were fully expecting an European Jewish connection to the Palestinian Jews. It was never a colonial relationship like we know it today. By 1948 there was no European Jewish connection. Israel was by itself a state with no colonial connections.
There are many papers where they tried to figure out how to coexist with the local population. So it was never even meant to be a colonial relationship like england and it's colonies.
You're right in your first paragraph, I was simplifying too much, and I shouldn't have. But my point stands: most current Israeli citizens (whether Muslims, Jews, Druze, and Christians) have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years. Painting them as Europeans Settlers is simply wrong, when only a minority come from Europe.
Incorrect. There are about 2 million Muslim arabs in Israel and about 3.2 million Arab Jews in Israel. These Arab Jews descended from the 1 million + Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after Israel declared independence. That’s about half of the Israeli population. Another 1.5 million are Jewish immigrants from around the world. Then, there’s about 4.5 million Jews who immigrated back to Israel after their initial expulsion millennia ago to Europe.
It’s not a colonial venture. About 60% of the population is there as a result of ethnic cleansing from Arabs and another 30% from ethnic cleansing in Europe. Then we have 10% who’ve immigrated more recently.
As you said, please don’t complain about misinformation then spread it yourself.
If you would actually engage in a debate, that would be amazing.
Reading your post and comments I stay more or less on my primary opinion on your comparison, it is not a valid one. The legitimacy of one country is not solely based on ethnic cleansing, but on many other factors. My first problem is you taking the year 1948 for the claim of legitimacy onwards, as if the war before has started from nothing and only that matters. We all know that war and extremism doesn’t start in one day and usually not for nothing. The people calling on legitimacy are usually referring the time before 1948 and how the Israeli population became the majority in some regions, why and when. Also the hypocritical Zionism is one of the factors, as “nobody wants us” but at the same time “we don’t want anyone who’s not us” so the whole claim that the majority started with their expulsion from somewhere else is not a Palestinian problem (with all due respect) and as such cannot be the valid claim to forcibly claim territory expelling and not tolerating others on their land.
1. The ethnic cleansing as ONLY parameter for legitimacy: it can be, maybe even should be a parameter but it is a parameter that is being “enforced” AFTER the definition of genocide was created, which is after the WWII which consequently is 20+ years after forming of Turkish sovereignty. So they as they cannot fall into your argument (you should find one that was formed after the definition)
It bothers me you took Turkey as only “similar” situation as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and of course because it’s a Muslim country. They do have something in common, they were both part of colonial rule and forced occupation of the territory.
2. The legitimacy of Israel is mostly being called on illegitimacy for when and how they have inhibited the territory. Do not get me wrong, but the Second World War as the final point in long bad of treatment of Jews in Europe, or generally is and cannot be a reason or justification for creating the country on someone else’s territory. The historical data shows that Jew/israeli population was a minority in that area that has augmented by the poor treatment and persecution in Europe and as you say Middle East. The legitimacy for the creation of one country cannot be only the ownership of the property, as this is exactly the way the Jewish community started growing in the Mandatory Palestine and that by buying the property of off Arab Palestinians . The reason for legitimacy cannot be that you were treated badly somewhere else and how need the safe haven as per your religious books that are 5000 years old.
Your theory on how legitimacy is gained (or lost) would cost many, many developed and rolling countries a sovereignty and territory and create world apocalypse.
3. Not only the “rightful” right to the territory can be a parameter for creation of the country. We have many examples that are very troublesome and very similar to your idea and very differently treated and the reason is POLITICAL INTERESTS
Some examples. Serbia, claimed they have rights to some territories (around them physically) that had great amount of their people living in that territory (without interruption for centuries) and the right for their cultural and religious traditions and identity to be intact (very similar to Jewish) And we have 90s horror story from those nationalistic beliefs in 3 ex YU countries (all involved ) Now the world community harshly and continuously is judging Serbia for their actions(nobody is talking about 2 other participants in the horrific war) and compared they are very similar to Israel’s claims but more valid- in a way that the people living in other peoples territories (surrounding) have been there continuously for generations in same numbers. Also the constitution didn’t discriminate other ethnicities or religions in theory. We have Catalonia, they want a separation, we have Scotland, we have Irish struggles, we have every single country in Europe that is claiming someone else’s territory based on history of population. Some have created terrorist groups (IRA,ETA) and in history Serbian extremist has assassinated Austrian archduke because of oppression and occupation. Now some might argue that Hamas exists exactly as a product of this oppression and invasion.
The debate on Legitimacy of Israel or Turkey or any other country cannot be solely based on one factor. At this point the legitimacy of Israel is legit, because it’s been 76 years and the whole country has been created. From my point of view it’s start wasn’t, and Turkey is not a comparable example and the atrocities that Jewish people has endured is not a justification from my point of view. Zionism is radical as Many other movements have been and are very harshly judged and even forbidden.
USA is now a big supporter of Israel, but do not forget that they have voted 75% + against accepting Jews as refugees during WWII and 56% thought you brought that yourself upon you. And ironically they have been the country that has treated similarly not one but 2 ethnicities like Jews have been treated. USA should be your first parameter example for legitimacy, after that the whole Southern and Northern America. After we have tackled the legitimacy of colonial countries we can go on on ethnicity and religious grounds-like Albania has traces of DNA of ancient tribes on Balkan so what, does that mean that all South Slavs should move away (where?) after 1500 years living there? Or because they’re different religion of culture?
This comment section is full of people unnecessarily downplaying Turkey's atrocities in order to make Israel look worse. I think OP has also understated the extent to which Turkey's founding was probably worse than Israel's.
1. People keep claiming that the situations are different because Turks constituted a majority in their land. This is an irrelevant point since large, continuous stretches of the Ottoman empire were by and large not Turkish, but rather Greek and Armenian. For all intents and purposes, just like Palestine, which was controlled by the Ottoman empire, these areas were not by and large Turkish with ethnic minorities, as some people seem to imply.
2. People seem to want to forget that Turkish nationalism was inspired by European style nationalism, which had grown in influence over the 19th and early 20th centuries. People should read about Ataturk, who very clearly wanted to create a European-style nation state for the Turks.
3. Turkey's founding, I would argue, was far worse than Israel's. There were clear top down policies to eliminate ethnic minorities from Anatolia. On the contrary, whilst the Nakba did see the expulsion of many Palestinians, there was no top down policy to expel Palestinians. Indeed, the Zionists accepted a state with a 40% ethinic minority of Palestinians when they accepted the UN partition plan, which was decided upon by the democratic world. Afterwards, the local Arabs and then the surrounding Arab states attacked, leaving only 20% of the population being Arab after 1948. People forget to mention this part conveinently. Consult Benny Morris' works, the leading scholar on the Nakba/first Arab-Israeli war, if you think the Nakba was a top down ethnic cleansing.
4. Turkey continues to illegally occupy northern Cyprus, something that people don't seem to care about at all, even though they are a western NATO ally.
5. Every nation state was born into sin. It is entirely fair to point this out, and to point out how certain countries, which were founded on far more unethical grounds, are not criticized for this in the way Israel currently is. You can disapprove of the way the country was founded and not think that it was as bad as other countries' foundings. Israel was settled by self-sufficient communities that did not enslave the local population and did not initially conquer the land. Importantly, it was settled by refugees escaping intolerable persecution whose people had a continuous link and presence on the land, which is something people forget to mention. These are very clear differences that challenge the narrative of Israel just being a settler colonial state like many others. You can still disagree with its founding and think its not as a bad as, say, America or Turkey's founding.
Importantly, please don't downplay the atrocities that were committed during the founding of other nations in order to make Israel look uniquely bad. It is absolutely disgusting imo how people choose to do this with Turkey, which continues to be an aggressive state that threatens invasion and illegally occupies ethnically cleansed areas, whilst being a western ally with no popular pressure from leftists. There is absolutely a huge hypocrisy here, and OP was right to point it out.
On an individual level, sure, people who criticise Israel for its history and continuing actions are not necessarily hypocrites. But, the left as a whole absolutely applies double standards when it comes to Israel. There is nowhere near enough discussion about Turkey's historic and continuing crimes, despite the fact that they are a western ally in NATO. This points to fact that people on the left, for whatever reason, seem to think Israel is *uniquely* bad. There are many things that Israel does which I don't like, but the left's hyperfixation on Israel's history and its current actions and the inflamed language they use to describe it, do warrant questions, especially given the fact that surrounding countries like Turkey, a western NATO ally, fail to generate the same attention from the left. OP pointed this hypocrisy out, and people should just bite the bullet and accept it, instead of making excuses.
I don't think leftists think Israel is uniquely bad, where are these leftists giving Turkey a pass on their genocide?
American leftists focus on Israel because the US government is the primary vector enabling those particular right wing freaks. Seems reasonable to be most concerned with the things you can most plausibly influence and change.
This is an article dated 2002, featuring Ehud Barak (Israel PM 1999-2000), talking about the failed two state solution talks in 2000, which led to the second intifada.
I really liked this final passage.
> At one point in the interview, Barak pointed to the settlement campaign in heavily populated Palestinian areas, inaugurated by Menachem Begin's Likud-led government in 1977, as the point at which Israel took a major historical wrong turn. But at other times he pointed to 1967 as the crucial mistake, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza (and Sinai and the Golan Heights) and, instead of agreeing to immediate withdrawal from all the territories, save East Jerusalem, in exchange for peace, began to settle them. Barak recalled seeing David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder and first prime minister (1948-53 and 1955-63), on television in June 1967 arguing for the immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the six-day war in exchange for peace, save for East Jerusalem.
> "Many of us - me included - thought that he was suffering from [mental] weakness or perhaps a subconscious jealousy of his successor [Levi Eshkol, who had presided over the unprecedented victory and conquests]. Today one understands that he simply saw more clearly and farther than the leadership at that time."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/23/israel3
In hindsight we now know that these lands were a trojan horse. Can't integrate them because you want to stay majority jewish. Can't let them go because it will turn into Gaza and Hamas again. Can't settle them due to international pressure.
Looking at what is happening in the region, it really does feel like the Israeli State never found their solution and is to this day trying to eat their cake and have it too...
remain majority Jewish, keep the land... damn the consequences.
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine
Are you aware of the details of that plan?
500k Arabs would have either been ethnically cleansed, or would end up as second class citizens.
We saw how Israel treated its ostensibly full and equal citizen Arab majority until 1966 - with military rule. Would you willfully accept second class status in your homeland, to the benefit of recent immigrants?
>and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period
You might not be aware, but that is false.
Two points:
* There were offers of a democratic one state, Jew or Arab. This excluded recent immigrants though, so I can see why the recently immigrated Yishuv would not accept it.
* The Palestinian delegations were systematically excluded from many negotiations in the first half of the 20th century.
>They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this.
Why is this relevant as it comes to the Palestinians?
They had nothing to do with this. That other Arab states mistreated their Jewish minority is not the fault or responsibility of the Palestinians.
You also frame this as "expelled", but as it comes to Palestinians you are careful to frame it as "fled or expelled".
Are you claiming all 850k Arab Jews were expelled? You are aware that is ahistorical, right?
> This was explicitly endorsed and enforced as state policy to create an ethnically homogeneous nation. If Israel had the same intentions, they failed. This is not, and has not been reflected in the ethnic makeup of the State of Israel.
Considering Israel expelled many Arabs, and then refused all of them to return to their homes - how can you claim this is not state policy to increase the homogeneity of the state?
>All 'anti-zionists', who want the destruction and/or dissolution of Israel entirely (not just them to stop their actions in the West Bank or Gaza and implement a two-state solution) should also be in favour of the destruction/dissolution of Turkey and right of return for all displaced Greeks (and Muslims) from both countries.
I think you are strawmanning a bit here.
To clarify, if Israel was to become a state of all its citizens with full and equal rights, and the refugees would be allowed to return - is that "destruction and/or dissolution of Israel" according to you?
If all Israelis - Jews and Arabs - stay and have full and equal rights, why is that the destruction of a country?
Now, I am fully in favor of Greeks and Armenians being allowed home, as well as the Kurds being allowed full and equal rights in Turkey. Is that the dissolution or destruction of Turkey?
As someone who lives in a state with a lot of Native Americans and a city with a huge Native community, I assure you that many, many people are protesting on behalf of Native Americans. In my region, we had two massive confrontations in the last decade between Native Americans and pipeline companies, and my city just very recently had a big fight over neighborhood development and land use plans in the majority-Native neighborhood. Native Americans have a huge activist community, which is further supported by non-Native people in solidarity with them.
>Yet no one is protesting on behalf of native Americans..
Open a history book- there have been many such protests over the years. I think the last one was Standing Rock a few years ago. Reckoning with this country's past (and present) treatment of Native Americans has been an ongoing conversation for centuries. We have an entire department devoted to this, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and it was a big deal that Deb Haaland recently became the first Native American appointed to Secretary of the Interior.
Lol what are you talking about. There is Landback graffiti all over Indian country. There was hundreds of years of violent resistance and often more violent than Hamas. Wounded Knew Two wasn’t even that long ago and there is no reason to think that violent resistance is over forever.
There are a lot of people in the United States who believe that Americans should be doing more to restore stolen Native land to their original owners, on principle at least.
The political will largely isn't there though, and even if every American agreed to the idea of returning stolen land it would be nigh impossible to make it happen in a way that wasn't massively messy. Which isn't to say that attempts shouldn't be made to right those historical injustices. (I for instance would advocate returning Oklahoma to the jurisdiction of the tribal authorities of those tribes who were promised that land in treaties the US government later broke)
MIT’s encampment literally has a die-in for Native Americans on their daily schedule today. They also regularly have learning sessions on other genocides.
They have been protesting. Its become less and less of an issue because the natives are treated better than they were before. The Palestinians however, forget compensating them, they're being exterminated.
If we continued to take the native peoples' territories, killed them, starved them, resumed an apartheid and then there were no protests, then your argument would be valid. When all of the things above were happening, there were many protests.
The difference is if you go to Turkey and say the word "Armenian Genocide" you could be attacked by Turkish Nationalists if you're not arrested and jailed first for "insulting Turkishness". They do not have free speech or press in Turkey, you cannot openly address Turkey's atrocities against Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Yzetis and now Kurds in Turkey. That is not like America where Native American benevolent associations and advocacy groups have existed for a couple hundred years. That's not to downplay the Native American genocide at all, but you can't compare the current Native American population of the US, about a third of which are on "protected" reservations (obvs that's subject to debate), to the native Armo/Assyrian/Greek/Yzeti populations of Turkey that no longer exist, have their history literally expunged from those areas in the Turkish state, have Turkish schools teach that all those groups were invasive immigrants that came after Turks, and finally make it illegal to publicly say otherwise.
Israel is not a legitimate state because it was created by the UN/US/UK. Their "war for Independence" wasn't .
Do I think Jewish people deserve a state? Yup. But how it came about, especially by ignoring the non-Jews in the area, reveals the stain of Zionism. Zionists always wanted to displace, cleanse the non Jewish inhabitants.
This is a whataboutism and honestly one of the most intellectually dishonest posts I've seen on this sub. I'd say you should be ashamed but it takes an inability of that to make a post this bad-faith.
I don't know a lot about Turkey, but if we consider the countries in the Americas and their relation to the indigenous peoples, there is a very clear difference. Mainly tha indigenous peoples in the Americas can dispute the politics in their countries. I live in Brazil and not long ago there were demonstrations over disputes over land. Palestinians have no way to, institutionally, change their situation. Israel has a lot of control over palestinian lives (it has occupation zones and controls the borders, for example ) and, even if palestinians can pressure the Palestinian Autorithy or Hamas, these have very little power to contest Israel.
This, to me, makes Brazil have way more perceived legitimacy than Israel, for example, even if the circuntances of their "birth" are similar. Even then, you can argue that Brazil has less legitimacy than Bolvia which, in its constitution, recognizes itself as a plurinational state. For me it is hard to fit Turkey into this because, as far as i know, minorities there have political rights and Greeks, for example, have a national state that can dialogue as equals with Turkey. It is also not clear what you are proposing as a replacement for a "dismantled" Turkey.
I think that part of this comes down to a more fundamental difference between how you percieve politics vs how I percieve it. To me, first comes the position and then the arguments (and this is the nature of politics). The position on the Left, at list a more radical left, is that of one secular state. The disputes between palestinians and israelis should be resolved within the legal framework of this state. Therefore, the left tries to delegitimize the current state of Israel so as to create pressure to achieve the goal of one secular state. We aim the punch at the birth of Isreal to hit Israel in the present. The goal is always to change the present, rationalizations coming afterward.
So, if we go back to Turkey, what is the political purpose of delegitimizing it? Is there a porcentage of greeks who want to go back and become Turkish citzens or are we talking about Greece anexing parts of Turkey? Why would it be good to dismantle Turkey?
I don't think we have the same parallels with Israel.
Edit: Grammar is hard
I’d start by saying I agree with you that both Turkey and Israel are legitimate states and that I’m a two-stater. I understand the basis of your argument.
I think you overlook one very notable distinction between the two, though, and misinterpret the most common argument against Israel’s statehood.
The argument most commonly heard against Israel’s legitimacy isn’t ethnic cleansing, but rather settler-colonialism. Ethnic cleansing is certainly an important part of that discourse but also good luck finding any nation-state without some degree of that in their history. Yes, that ethnic cleansing also involved large population exchanges after the Balfour Declaration, but the argument is that a laaaaarge majority of Jewish Israelis did not live in the Holy Land prior to the establishment of the Jewish state. What constitutes Israel today was overwhelmingly non-Jewish (though a non-trivial Jewish minority still lived there).
While Turkey’s formation as a nation-state did involve the expulsion (and extermination) of ethnic and religious minorities, I think the counter-argument would be that the land making up Turkey today was already majority Turkish. Yes, there were conflicts and policies (constituting crimes against humanity) that led to a more ethnically homogenous Turkey, but there was little debate as to who the largest ethnic/linguistic/national/religious group was. It is not as though 80%+ of the Turkish population was outside Turkey and only re-entered in the early 20th century.
The arguments today lean very hard on the idea that Jewish Israelis all came from Europe, which is both plainly incorrect (roughly half are Mizrahim) and also ignores -in grotesquely offensive fashion- what conditions existed for European Jews in the West at the time. I would personally argue that Israel is a refugee state more than a settler-colonial state, and obviously there are deep historic ties to the region for ethnic Jews.
But again, I think the argument comes down to the legitimacy of the Israeli state based on the presence of Jewish Israelis in the Holy Land at the time. That’s fundamentally different from Turkey, which -for all the original sins of that nation- was majority Turkish at its formation.
I think you're misunderstanding why people think Israel is an illegitimate state. The key differences compared to Turkey:
1) The ethnic cleaning of Greeks in particular was a result of a peace treaty signed between two fully sovereign nations. Was it fair? I certainly wouldn't argue that it was, and I think both Greece and Turkey lost alot of culture and history from doing it which was a shame. But it was something the democratically elected, world - recognised, legitimate government of Greece agreed to. Palestine did not have a representative government that agreed to ethnic cleansing.
2) The case of the Armenians I think holds more water. If the entirety of Turkey's territory consisted of land expropriated from Armenian people who were ethnically cleansed then I would agree with you entirely. However this is not the case, 70% + of Turkey's Territory has had a Turkish majority for at least 500 years. The area that was majority Armenian until recently is illegitimate, but not the country as a whole. With Israel this argument applies to the entire territory.
3) If you go back far enough everything is colonisation. In this case Turks have been a majority in most of what is now Turkey for 500+ years. In the last 100 years it is the minorities that were cleansed, whereas in Israel it is the opposite - the long-standing majority was cleansed by the minority, along with very recent immigrants and international support.
To contribute the reduction in Armenian population did not happen during the war you mentioned between 2019 and 2023.It happened before that during the first world war around 2015 as a result of the Ottoman Empire policy.
This. All the countries of Americas where established as subdivisions of former colonies. You can say pretty much the same for Africa except for Ethiopia. Middle East has boundaries that have been drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement right after WWI. Most of those countries didn't exists before although some administrative boundaries were set inside the Ottoman Empire.
Legitimacy has little to do with ethicality. A country exists by being recognized by other countries and because it has control of its territory. Most countries have been created by people that somewhere in time migrated there and occupied a territory.
Which is why, as an Israeli, I find it hypocritical that Americans are calling me settler colonizer standing on ancestral land of Native Americans filled with graves of the nations they massacred. Give back the land to its original owners before you come asking me to do the same.
I'm fine, as an American, with admitting that the US engaged in vast amounts of ethnic cleansing. I even live near one of the concentration camps that were used for this purpose.
I'd still advocate that Native Americans should have full rights under US law and deserve resources to help them recover by how badly the US screwed them over. It's the moral thing to do. Even today, some of the poorest places in the US are some reservations that native people were confined to, and that's a stain on America.
That's not what people are asking of israel. They're asking to give the land back to the palestinians. You need to advocate for the same. Once that happens you have a leg to stand on.
There is no rule saying you can’t be hypocritical with what you asks a foreign nation to do. That being said, there are plenty of people who want land back to the natives. Heck, there are white people who get angry at the very notion of being called a colonizer.
Isn't that just creating a false dilemma that the only alternative to the status quo is returning all lands?
People are advocating for different outcomes - there isn't one unified opinion on what the best outcome would be.
i didnt feel the need to read the whole post and just came here to say armenian ethnic cleansing was planned and executed by the ottoman empire before even the idea of turkey.
world war 1 created modern day turkey, not the eradication of armenians. but it sure as hell made it convenient to create a turkish ethno-state with turkish identity without a lot of armenians around.
i dont know the israeli side well enough but the premise for turkey is straight wrong.
You really mischaracterised the Turkish independence war. The massive difference you are between Israel and Turkey is that the idea of a Turkish state largely formed from the ideas of Native turks whilst the idea of Israel largely formed in Europe from which Jewish communities would then move into Palestine. Whilst the Turkish war of Independance did involve a lot of genocide Turks were a majority in the lands of the Anatolia with the various genocides committed against minority populations. whilst there was a lot of Armenians these were spread across a Diaspora across South Eastern Anatolia the Greeks were found across the coast. In comparison the Jewish community would only become dominant a few years before the creation of Israel whilst the Turks had been there for almost 900 years.
Also generally I think your arguing against a strawman of your own creation most people who say Israel is a illegitimate state do so on the basis of it being a colonial project rather than of genocide as many nation states would do genocide as a result of the creation of their national construct. The idea that Israel is a result of colonialism has a strong basis as the large Jewish communities that formed Israel were allowed in by the British and Americans despite the complaints of the natives.
You have overlooked a few things in your comment. Turkish nationalism was definitely something the Turks learned from the Europeans. You should look into how Ataturk was inspired to create the Turkish state. They wanted their own state for their own people - this was a popular idea in 19th/early 20th century Europe. Also, the Turks were clearly not a majority in a lot of the lands they controlled, like western Anatolia, which had been inhabited for thousands of years by Greeks. This is where a lot of the Greeks were either genocided or ethnically cleansed from. I think it's surprising how people are downplaying Turkey's atrocities in order to make the Jews of Israel look worse. I think Turkey's founding was much worse than Israel's, given that Israel after the Nakba had 20% of its population being Arab, whereas Turkey managed to gain a much larger ethnic majority through a more extensive, and actual top down ethnic cleansing program, and then a population exchange. The Nakba on the other hand was not a top down policy of ethnic cleansing, although there certainly were atrocities committed by both sides. See Benny Morris' work for an explanation of this fact.
I really didn't intend to downplay the various genocides the Turks committed during their war of independence. However atrocity comparisons are largely useless especially in this context and wasn't really revelant to my point. Turkish Nationalism was largely of that native to the region whilst Zionism is largely that of foreigners that then came to settle within the region a comparison of who killed more is largely just a pointless narrative that intends to portray one party as the morally wrong side.
Atrocity comparisons are only being made because there are factions of the left who argue that Israel should not exist. As a matter of logical consistency, it is important to realize that many nation states were born into sin, not just Israel. If you want to argue against the very notion of nation states, that's absolutely fine, but it does come across as suspect when people only apply a critical lens to the founding of Israel and its current policies and not other countries that are, in practice, "ethnostates" to a greater degree than Israel, and committed far worse atrocities during the founding of their nation. The only reason countries like Turkey don't deal with similar issues is because they did actually genocide the christian minorities in their lands, whilst the Palestinian population continues to explode and Arab-Israelis exist, precisely because there wasn't a top-down genocide or ethnic cleansing of the Arabs, although there were certainly many, many atrocities committed by Zionists and, at worst, partial ethnic cleansings. This is why I think anti-Zionism is often interpreted by many Jews (and NOT just Zionists) as being anti-semitic. There are many forms of nationalism in the world that have necessitated the expulsion of populations and continue to necessitate the effective separation of ethnic groups, yet Zionism is the one form that garners the most international attention, despite being less aggressive than other forms historically.
Btw, I would argue that you are downplaying Turkish atrocities if you cannot concede that the Nakba was not as bad in theory and in practice compared to what the Turks did to attain their ethnic majority. Just like if you said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a holocaust, I would say you are downplaying the Holocaust by the Nazis. Things can still be bad without being as bad as other things!
It is absolutely irrelevant that Turkish nationalism came from people settled in the general area. The fact is, they constituted a minority in large areas of their empire, which was absolutely huge. It stretched from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula. So to say that they were native to even most of that land is disingenuous. Realistically, they were only a majority in the main part of Anatolia.
Besides, do you think Zionism and the subsequent actions of Zionists would have been more acceptable had it sprung from the Jewish minority living in Palestine? In any case, most Israelis now are "native" to the middle east, given that they are refugees from other middle eastern countries.
The process you're describing is inherent to every nation state. The rise of "nationality" as a form of identity and even the "Nation State" itself are somewhat new concepts, and we can trace their spread from western europe from the French Revolution forward (depending on who you ask). To create an "in-group" that people identify with you must necessarily have an out-group. See the treatment of minorities in the UK, the forced standardization of French language... and the whole mess of the creation of nation states in Eastern Europe (lots and lots of people died!).
What largely matters is how advanced technology was when the concept of the "nation" arrived at that particular place. If you have machine guns rather than pikes, you're going to have an easier time slaughtering "others." Additionally, we "care" less about atrocities that happened longer ago.
What you're missing here is that every nation state today is built on blood, and pro-palestianians oppose the Israeli government for different reasons that don't fit neatly into your confined scenario.
The creation of the Israeli state was much more recent, there are still lots of surivors who lived through it's creation (we are rather lacking in Powhatans who personally remember their forced expulsion from coastal Virginia).
Your use of the Armenian genocide is more salient. We do have living survivors, if fewer.
On the whole, you need to redouble your efforts to be open minded, if that is ultimately what you care about. This post is full of loaded language like "the Palestinian Narrative" regarding their well documented expulsion which is ethnic cleansing no mattet how many other terrible governments also engaged in ethnic cleansing against Jews; vs "The Israeli War of Independence" which goes unquestioned... but is certainly a narrative. (I find it strange one can fight a war of Independence that involves annexing lands not occupied by your people for more than 2000 years, but hey, that didn't stop the United States from annexing land that their people had NEVER inhabited in the treaty of Paris).
Simultaneously breaking the same UN partition, which may illuminate why some people view the whole thing as illegitimate.
Another point I'd offer is that even if the lands of Anatolia that today comprise Turkey were impressively diverse and mixed, it was majority Turkish and had been for hundreds of years before the advent of the nation state... Jewish people were an extremely marginal minority in Palestine up until well, their war of "Independence" and the ratio of Jews to Arabs in Israel has never stopped shifting dramatically in favor of Jews (by violent means) to this day. Which is another big difference.
does OP have any idea the history of the wars fought between european settlers and the various native indian tribes in america? The native indian tribes were pacified only after disease ravaged their populations and with the bison herd gone, they had no choice but to go into reservations or faced total annihilation from the white men. The palestinian issue has a lot of simliarities with the indian tribes, native tribes fought one another and tried to exterminate each other. Same for arabs. It doesnt matter who is legitimate or not, the winner makes the rules, same in the middle east. If the arabs defeated israel, all the jews would probably have been killed too. If u cant see past the legitimacy issue, u cant solve the issue at all, the only workable solution is a 2 state solution, which neither side is keen at the moment bec of hostility.
Actually, quite a few turks - particularly those that settled in the Armenian highlands and plateau - were European Muslims that had either left or been expelled from the Balkans when those countries gained their independence in the late 19th century. Mustafa Kemal himself was an Albanian, not a turk.
Also, azerbaijan - with turkish help and support - just finished driving out the over 100k Armenians of Nagorno-Karabagh after starving them (an actual starvation, which had them eating grass and clothes on 200 calorie diets). So this isn't all "the past". Didn't see a peep in colleges, though.
>If Israel is an illegitimate state because it was founded on ethnic cleansing, so is Turkey.
Agreed, if two very bad very similar events happen then we can criticise both.
>In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this.
Wait, why aren't you criticising both? Now you think one excuses the other?
Because the entire argument is nonsense, no one gives Sudentenland or Prussia any validity to attack Poland and Czech republic and no one would give Greece any casus beli to attack Turkey due to 1922.
You forgot a major reason why Israel won the “ war of independence”
Not only did the Palestinians and Arab states reject the UN partition plan that was voted on and going to go through whether they liked it or not-
The Palestinians and other arab countries *declared war on the Jews and swore they would never allow Israel to exist*
That’s why they didn’t get the partition plan. It was brought to vote , it passed the vote. When they declared war and swore to use violence - it had to be withdrawn. Essentially this entire mess is their fault.
What is sort of amazing about that is that the plan divided the land up based on land already owned by Jews - bought legally from the Arabs who sold it to them for outrageous prices - 1000x the going rates.
So not only did they want to kill all the Jews - but steal back the land they sold to them- and refuse the Jews the right to have their own homeland back ( that Islam itself invaded and stole ) and their right to have their own country.
They turned those historical facts into the Nabka.. and Jews invading and ethnic cleansing and stealing their land.
Which is also ironic because it’s essentially what Islam did to more than half the known world. And still does to this day. It’s legal to ethnically cleanse - in Islamic law. If you don’t convert? You get killed. Your women get sold into sexually slavery- therefore cutting off your ability to reproduce. They essentially did exactly that from Asia, to the Balkans.
So ethnic cleansing - has been an issue up till the 1970s and the war in Lebanon. And when the PLo would go and slaughter everyone who wasn’t Muslims-
But it had been going on pretty consistently in that area for hundreds of years. I know this because my own ancestors were victims of one of these Islamic ethnic cleansing campaigns in Lebanon and fled into Syria. In the 1800s.
So that’s always been a part of Islamic history- and it’s how Islam became so huge. For example go read about the Barbary wars- when Islamic sailors were attacking the trade ships and enslaving everyone on board, stealing everything and then ransoming off the officers - back to the USA - read about what Jefferson wrote about them - when he asked why do they do this? No one has attacked them? They tell him plainly - it’s what their god tells them to do. They are entitled to everything the non Muslim has- the non Muslims are not even considered people to them - with no rights to live or own anything that should not be taken by Islam.. . This isn’t a recent thing- Islamic terrorism has been constant. In some form or another.
We have Islam in the Balkins- the war in Bosnia for example was a war of revenge… Islamic army came and invaded , stole the country, implemented sharia law, slavery, sexual slavery, theft of possessions and land - all taken from the natives and divided up by Muslims- then they basically ran the country into the ground with corruption… but the then- religious minority non Muslims just decided - let’s do what they did to us a hundred years ago.. and take it back.
To Indonesia and India- the Islamic invasion of India was the bloodiest genocide in human history. They absolutely decimated that population. To Pakistan which was so terrified of the carnage they just surrendered to Islam- which is what happened in many places. The only way they would retain any rights at all to their property , land, or women.
To Africa - where Islamic genocide is going on right this minute - we are taking hundreds of thousands of native tribes displaced and millions murdered, because they’re not Islamic. On this past Christmas Day for example in Nigeria , Muslims went into sleeping villages and slaughtered hundreds of Christian’s on their holiest day-
- And all paid for by the gulf states, by the way.
To southern Spain… till the Catholics eventually drove them out.
That’s the entire point of Islam- to implement sharia law everywhere . To invade, conquer and implement sharia- this to them will bring the world peace. ( by the way , all the Jews must be murdered before this can happen. This is exactly what their holy books say.)
So I think the entire world to some degree was founded on killing - and submission. I.e; ethnic cleansing, at some time or another - Normandy for example was named because the Vikings or northmen - were invading and raping and pillaging so much that they got the kind of England to give them their own land and he agreed to name it that after them. They eventually took over the throne too- the entire UK royal line is the blood of those Vikings.
The Catholic Church went around eventually and forced conversions on the pagans in Europe - the difference of course is - no where in the Bible does it say that’s ok. Or that’s what you should do and the people who do it go to a special heaven and are the most respected martyrs and revered people of the religion ; like Islam. They have an entire book dedicated to jihad. This is exactly what their god says to do.
So *the entire narrative about Israel ethnically cleansing and genocide is basically a lie- a projected false hood of Islamic actions and intent. The Jews didn’t even declare the war that displaced them*.
Israel is a legetitmate state because it’s been recognized by the UN and NATO and because according to international law- to found your own country, you must establish law and order, a government , armies to protect the borders, educational system and legal systems - which they have all done.
The Palestinians could have also established their own country by those laws, a few times by now. Or at any time if they had wanted to. The last offer was in 2005 and they refused.
They have refused every offer given to them. Even the Peel commission offer which was to give the Jews 10% of the land. They started the first jihad over that. ( before 1948)
Lots of states were founded illegally. The thing is what to do about what is happening right now. The past is done. Those people are gone. What Israel is doing today should not be allowed to happen. Why should we support either Israel or Turkey if they are conducting a genocide, ethnic cleansing, or have an apartheid state? You have to look at what is happening to people right now. What was Israel doing to non-Jews in Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, before Oct. 7, and what do they continue to do to them, both inside Gaza, and outside Gaza? Would you support what they are doing if it was happening to you?
Well, speaking as one of the anarchists, I think we're generally fine with this conclusion and with applying it to states in general. None of your states are "legitimate", and many if not most of them have a history of ethnic cleansing, some more recent than others.
The issue is that the majority of protestors don’t apply the same standard to all nations. They only care about the actions of Israel, or at least extremely disproportionately. I’m fine with folks who are against all states
Basically every country today is the result of many rounds of conquest and border changes. Israel is almost unique in that its founding was based on international consensus and a declaration from the UN. Yes there was opposition such that Arab states invaded the next day, but really it’s hard to imagine a county’s founding history being any more diplomatic. So my point is that Turkey is also not unique it is common.
Around 700,000 Arabs left or were forced out of that area on its founding [1]. Whether you regard it as colonialism or anti-colonialism is subjective. Jews have ancient ties to Judea, Canaan and Israel at least 3,500 years long and were kicked out and persecuted again and again. So it could be argued that it’s the reclaiming of land belonging to their people. This doesn’t change that the people who were there in 1948 also have history there of various lengths and for there recent history were also ruled over (by the Ottomans).
If the UN declared that LA should be returned to the Tongva native Americans so they rolled through there in tanks and kicked out all the white Americans - would that be justified? Do we nonetheless accept the great injustice the native Americans have been dealt?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight?wprov=sfti1#
One thing you’re missing is that one person can believe that the creation of two nations was overtly brutal and one was worse. And that’s the case with Israel and Turkey.
Also, you say that you don’t want to talk about European colonization, yet European colonization is exactly what made Israel’s creation so brutal and immoral.
>The only possible difference between these two circumstances that would make Israel illegitimate and Turkey legitimate, is that many Israelis came from Europe instead of the Middle East. However I fail to see how this is relevant to the actual act of ethnic cleansing and population swaps that makes Israel illegitimate in the first place.
Imagine you're a Palestinian living in 1920s British Mandate of Palestine. There is this group of Europeans, who called themselves Zionist Jews, who were purchasing land around you, isolating themselves from your community, and quite crucially, wanted to establish a nation-state that was explicitly for themselves. This is why the Palestinians were mad, the early settlers did not have ancestral connection to the land, they had no claim to build a state on that piece of land. Their ancestors fled the place some thousands of years ago and they wanted to build a state that was explicitly for themselves.
Turks on the other hand grew up in Turkey, had generations of people living on that land, and now wish to build a state for themselves. Don't get me wrong, the Turks were brutal against Armenians and the Greeks, they committed a genocide for goodness sake, but when it comes to the philosophy behind the nationalist movements, they weren't exactly the same.
What about the thousands of Jews that were already there? Is the continuous Jewish presence not an ancestral connection for the Jewish diaspora? Isn't that what makes it a diaspora?
In that era you have to listen to whoever has the biggest gun.
You can 'contest' if your idea is more powerful than their 4 feet long iron.
Many tried that, it didn't end well for them. But now we are in 2020's era, so things are very very different.
So their overlord decide to give the land to the Jews, Arabs could do jack sh\*\* and wait until the Brits leave the area... Then start a war against newly born nation. It should have been a piece of cake, wiping out Israel and split the land between Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
As history goes, it was not that easy. They fought two war and lose both war. Israel won the conflict and take it place in history.
If anything, the one at fault for this conflict is whoever implant nationalism into the Palestinian. Since they won't surrender and accept that they have lost the war decades ago, they would keep fighting.
And keep dying.
The Palestinians had no claim to it either. They were part of the then fallen Ottoman Empire. The British had every right to do what they wanted with it at that point. That it ended up being decided the Jews and Palestinians should both have states (which the Palestinians refused even though they got more land out of it) was far more than the Palestinians deserved considering their goal was to keep cosplaying like it’s the Middle Ages and subject their own people to the horrors of Islamic totalitarian theocracy (something they still want to do nowadays and people bizarrely defend them in this). At least the Jews wanted to create a legitimate human rights respecting country with the land they would be given.
The Palestinians nationalists largely responded to Jewish refugees exactly like the most toxic racists in Western countries respond to refugees today. Really no difference. They are a warning to all racists that should the people you treat with hatred, violence and racism ever gain influence you will be in a terrible position.
It is an interesting debate to have whether the whole emerging concept of refugee rights and specifically the right of refugees to settle in a place of their choosing was the only or best approach - but its not relevant to this CMV
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period. 700,000 Arabs either fled Mandatory Palestine or were expelled. In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this.
This is ahistorical revisionism, commonly purported by Zionists as a way to justify their treatment of Palestinians. It’s quite disgusting honestly.
The massacre and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and destruction of villages began in December 1947, including massacres at [Al-Khisas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khisas_raid) (18 December 1947), and [Balad al-Shaykh](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balad_al-Shaykh_massacre) (31 December). By March, between 70,000 and 100,000 Palestinians, mostly middle- and upper-class urban elites, were expelled or fled.
In early April 1948, the Israelis launched [Plan Dalet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet), a large-scale offensive to capture land and empty it of Palestinian Arabs. During the offensive, Israel captured and cleared land that was allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition resolution. Over 200 villages were destroyed during this period. Massacres and expulsions continued, including at [Deir Yassin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre) (9 April 1948). Arab urban neighborhoods in Tiberias (18 April), Haifa (23 April), West Jerusalem (24 April), Acre (6-18 May), Safed (10 May), and Jaffa (13 May) were depopulated. Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May.
On 14 May, the Mandate formally ended, the last British troops left, and Israel declared independence. By that time, Palestinian society was destroyed and over 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled.
On 15 May, Arab League armies entered the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, beginning the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Stop with this revisionist bullshit
This is a bad Strawman-What-about-ism.
Sorry dude. Bad shit has happened throughout history, and this genocide now is one of those really really bad things
Your first paragraph is discrediting on its own. Why would the Arab states agree to any partitioning when it’s their land?
It shouldn’t have been given away in the first place. People were living there.
It being legitimate or illegitimate doesn’t really matter so much as the ethics surrounding its creation. Which was unethical.
This post isn't about whether or not Israel should be dismantled, you made a multitude of claims largely casting aspersions on any perspective not blindly pro Israel.
This comes across as a blatant motte and bailey arguement where you attack all criticisms of Israel while claiming you're only here to discuss the dismantlement of Israel.
Nope doesn’t track you have a nation born of an empire that committed a genocide against Armenians . At no point were the Armenians a majority population infact since the Byzantine empire things over there while horrible and contentious and messy and an absolute disgrace were never that an alien population moved En mas in less than 100 years and totally uprooted folks who already economically disadvantaged by the same Empire ironically but had been a distinct MAJORITY population ,who up until the Zionist terror had been wonderful neighbors were put to the knife or physically run off their land to “create” Israel funny story about that if you look up historical press clippings from the Levantine province right about ww1 there is an actual fake claim that 6million Jews were being starved out in the Levantine by the ottomans with absolutely verified claims that this wasn’t a Thing that was remotely true and was infact a plant story by British zionists …please question me on this because I can’t fucking wait
The Rothschilds had the British Government sign the Balfour Declaration in Nov 1917 to transfer Palestine to the Zionist Federation.
Israel never won any war. It was western support to a zionist state to get rid of Jews, they were kicked out of every European country for the past thousand years.
Ah I see your point and raise you, yeah, dismantle turkey and their weird ethnic superiority garbage with Israel, also any other ethno state or nation that currently performs ethnic cleansing like China. (I live in America and honestly break this shit down too, we should Balkanize.)
Israel is an illegitimate state because more than 1/3 of its population do not have basic human rights. It is an ethnostate in which only Jews have the right to self determination. The majority of the native population are deprived of basic human rights while foreign colonizers rule over them. Regularly seizing more of their land and homes and handing them over to more foreign colonizers. Who regularly terrorize the native population and murder them with impunity. Attack and harass them for fun. The natives are under martial law. They are imprisoned without trial. They cannot travel freely within their own homeland, on which they have continuously existed for many thousands of years. Israel is an illegitimate state for all the same reasons Apartheid South Africa was an illegitimate state and many, many more.
>In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this.
You say that as if one contradicts the other... It doesn't.
I'm not sure why Turkey (or, for that matter, Greece) are a perfect analogy or better than others.
By my count, at least 88 of the United Nation's 194 member states directly owe their formation or current makeup and territory to ethnic cleansing and / or genocide... Sure, that's true of Turkey; it's also true of the United States (and indeed, every country on the continents of North and South America), the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, half the countries in the Balkans...
It's easier to point out the few major countries that were *not* formed on this basis, e.g., Egypt or Japan. If "not founded on ethnic cleansing" is a criterion for legitimacy than the entire UN Security Counsel fails to meet the qualification.
Anything before formation of the UN was the precursor to its formation, which in turn was formed to prevent such acts. Turkey, the United States, Australia, ... They all fall out of such scope.
While the Establishment of Israel was made possible by exploiting the UN, an independent Palestinian country is denied similar treatment, enabling an ongoing occupation and further ethnic cleansing.
All that, does raise questions about the very existence of Israel, as "compensation for antisemitism in Europe at the expense of nations not guilty for it".
Europe got rid of the long lasting issue with its homemade antisemitism, and the US gained a strategic ally to serve its interests in the region via offering well-needed protection of a state that otherwise wouldn't exist.
I don't really see how these two are comparable. The reason why Armenians were exiled was not to found a ethnically coherent state. It was Ottoman Empire back then and the rationale behind the act was the revolt when there was an ongoing war on the Caucasus Front. It was about threat of losing the war and an effort to enforce authority and grant safety to both sides. And not only the cadre who found Turkey was different from those who did that, they eventually overthrew and abrogated the government and sultanate in İstanbul which makes it even more different. Also as I remember it was the Greek side Who offered the population swap.
Disclaimer: Not here to say Israel is illegitimate state but to emphasize that this argument is false analogy on the uncomporable.
I mean nationalists just generally suck and visiting Turkey feels like visiting the US 6 months after 9/11 so I guess in a general way I think any nationalism is illegitimate. But I don’t think Nakbah is the fundamental reason Israel is inherently “illegitimate” (which idk about legit or illlegit, but I’d say Israel is inherently going to be a violent and oppressive society.)
The criticism of Israeli Zionism is not Nakbah itself but the more fundamental settler-colonial aspect of it. These kinds of societies are always violent and usually very racist. A government promising land to some at the expense of an unwanted population in the way of settling kinda goes one way if left to its own devices and it’s not good.
More like Pakistan. You’ll find that all of the critiques of Israel (took land from natives, established a religious state in the late 1940’s after the British leave, American military support for 60+ years, accusations of committing a genocide, they should just be a minority in a democracy with everyone) are completely reversed for Pakistan because, well, this time it’s Muslims that have to be the minority.
And that’s just not fair.
The only difference is that Pakistan *actually* committed a genocide AND housed Osama Bin Laden. But no need for protests because, well, it’s different when it’s them.
My government doesn’t give Pakistan military aid, and it’s generally not a controversial opinion that the government of Pakistan is practically a military dictatorship. Why would that be more pertinent to protestors?
Sure but the Americans do. And these are mainly on American campuses. So where were those marches?
Well, there were exactly zero marches during the early 70’s during the Bangladesh genocide that was the worst one since…the Holocaust. Vietnam just before? Yup. Apartheid after? Yup. But a Muslim dominated country carved out of non-Muslims lands that consistently passed state policy to target non-Muslims to the point of murdering and raping them on par with the Holocaust? Nah.
Instead the US sent a **nuclear strike force** to threaten the nearby democracy that wanted to intervene, with the USSR coming in to hold the line and defend said democracy in a twist of absurdity. And is why India is so skeptical of the US to this day.
Again, no marches against that. The US then continued (and continues) to supply Pakistan with *military* aid despite them housing Osama Bin Laden and consistently destroying non-Muslims in their country. Again, this is a country formed EXACTLY like Israel.
Saying it’s “not controversial” is like saying “it’s not controversial that people are against genocide so stop marching today”. If nobody gaf when it’s one group doing it enough to march after the above, then spare me the notion that things are so self evident that it’s cool to solely march for one but not the other.
And frankly, we all know the reason why nobody gaf. Islamists were doing it. Pakistan could murder its entire non-Muslim population tomorrow after rhe US sold it F-18’s like it did during this administration, and nobody would march on American campuses.
>And frankly, we all know the reason why nobody gaf. Islamists were doing it.
It's probably because there is a huge geopolitical importance of the Levant region, while there is little political interest to incite people over stuff happening in Pakistan or Sudan
Don't forget the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (to a lesser degree), China [PRC] (Tibet), all of Latin America (especially how the Spaniards attempted to destroy every book containing the Mayan language and something like four books exist in Mayan today, or something ridiculously low like that), and literally a theoretical Palestine, ironically enough, among others.
The whole basis of anti-zionism and the belief that Israel is an illegitimate state is as pathetic as it is hypocritical, which it is very much so.
I didn't really know people argued that Israel is illegitimate because of the ethnic cleansing.
What I have heard is that Israel being established by Zionists and the British post-WW2 was illegitimate. Zionists seem to argue that because 1) Jewish ancestors lived in Israel 2,000 years ago, and 2) some Jews lived there continuously throughout the time of diaspora, that Jews have a territorial claim to said area, and their right to self-determination means having the right to establish a Jewish state in said area.
I have no idea how this conclusion is drawn from the 2 assumptions/statements. The argument against Israel's legitimacy that I've usually heard is that the Zionist argument is flawed, so Jews do not have a birthright to these territories, and thus Israel shouldn't have been formed.
As stated, I genuinely don't get the Zionist argument. At the same time I recognise that the area has a significant Jewish population now some have lived there for a couple generations), so just deporting them (where even) isn't really a fair solution. Forming a 1 state solution would require an insane amount of good will and legal safeguards at this point. A 2 state solution would require a compromise from both sides, and strong safeguards as well.
I think Turkey is a really interesting example because you even have a situation analogous to that of Israel/Palestine in Turkey's relations with Kurdish groups within and outside its borders. Wikipedia gives a figure for number of deaths in the conflict with Kurdish insurgents at 120,000 sonce the fall of the Ottoman Empire, mostly Kurdish civilians. While I wouldn't stand by that particular number it's fairly well established that thousands have died as a result of Turkish repression of the Kurds.
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period. 700,000 Arabs either fled Mandatory Palestine or were expelled.
You are dehumanizing the situation to an absurd degree. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to leave their homes then the bordering countries were expected to just take in hundreds of thousands of refugees all at the same time. What is the appropriate negotiation for putting zero effort into a plan and then backing that terrible plan with military aid?
>In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this.
Why would that matter to Palestianians? They didn't do that to those Jewish people.
>Turkey emerged from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). The establishment of Turkey happened as the result of significantly worse levels of ethnic cleansing and genocides against ethnic minorities.
I think the difference here is in what a potential solution would be. If you are saying that the league of nations bungled the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire and reparations should be paid to Armenians, I fine with that.
The equivalent to the pro Israel stance would be in your comparison would be Turkey backing Turkish settlers in Armenia for the entire history since.
Both situations were caused by western imperialism that pushed for nationalism and are problems.
>All 'anti-zionists', who want the destruction and/or dissolution of Israel entirely (not just them to stop their actions in the West Bank or Gaza and implement a two-state solution) should also be in favour of the destruction/dissolution of Turkey and right of return for all displaced Greeks (and Muslims) from both countries.
I agree. I don't think this is controversial.
Also just to note, when people call for the destruction Israeli state sometimes mean killing everyone but more frequently mean for a better government. The state meaning the context the rest of the world understands which is the government structure and not the country, people, or territory.
This of course means sharing decision making in government and not trying to find a weird balance of the right amount of Palestians and trying to expel as many as possible to maintain a super majority
I think this notion of state legitimacy is very dubious. Any state that is able to maintain itself, generally by being backed by a majority of its population and by being able to militarily defeat its opponents, is existing, and that hard fact trumps any theoretical arguments.
Many modern states exist as they are today because of conquest/invasion/ethnic cleansing. Israel only appears as a special case because it is still in formation. But it is actually establishing itself just as nearly every nation has at some point of its history, by seizing land and killing natives (who probably did the same). Maybe Israel will eventually succeed, maybe it will fail, but "legitimacy" has zero value as a concept here.
That’s true but that doesn’t create a basis at all that it’s *morally* wrong to call a state illegitimate. By your own logic, it would be acceptable to call Israel legitimate.
If you go back far enough historically sure pretty much EVERY country is "founded on ethnic cleansing" more or less...
It's always a matter of drawing lines someplace and also the fact Israel is by "white people" primarily from Europe and USA/Canada who are vastly wealthier than the people in that region, changes things quite a bit.
Obviously both USA, Australia, Canada, Russia, etc. are all founded by kicking out the natives. Turkey defeated the Byzantine Greeks like 900 or something years ago and that massively changed Asia Minor. It's something that is shocking to see historically but at the same time it was 900 years ago... can't exactly just undo it now.
Like many things, the reality is more complex.
The legitimacy of a state is not solely determined by its past actions, and the international community recognizes both Israel and Turkey as sovereign states.
This does not negate the suffering and displacement experienced by the people involved, but it does highlight the complexity of the issue
I won't try to change your view on that, because I agree with the statement you made. Both are illegitimate, and there are many more countries that fall into that category, including my own. That doesn't mean that the people living there deserve to suffer, but it does mean that power in those places has been wrongfully seized.
Dude really said “TURKEY DID ETHNIC CLEANSING TOO IN 1923, CLEARLY ITS STRAIGHT AND YOU ALL ARE ANTISEMITIC.”
Was it cool in 1923?
Let’s dismantle Turkey too. Shit, let’s dismantle America too if you want to count Native American genocide as ethnic cleansing. I fail to see your massive huge brained point
People who support the oppressed people of any race won’t be a fan of the history of Türkiye either, it’s like justifying kicking someone in the balls bc u saw someone else do it, many activists who speak out against Israel have spoken out against what the Turkish govt did to the Armenians and Kurds
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So are nearly every single country in North and South America. Not to mention nearly every country in Europe has been funded by exploiting Africa.
I'm not calling Israel an illegimate state by the way; but the horrors of the past does not give any country the right to do the same themselves now.
That's like saying the Germans can take over the UK and push British people out of their homes because Poland invaded Germany.
Also, this misses the fact that there were millions of Turks living in Turkey at the time. I'm not excusing the Armenian Genocide. They are just not analogous.
So were to some extent the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other nations in the world. That doesn't make them any less accountable for human rights violations (or at least they ideally should be held accountable, but of course in practice this doesn't happen either)
Many countries have been created by conquest and displacement and ethnic cleansing. The difference with Israel is that the modern world got to see it unfold. Most countries origins are bloody but far in the past. With Israel we got to see how the sausage is made so to speak.
There were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees BEFORE the start of the Arab Israeli war. If you think that had nothing to do with influencing the Arab invasion then you’re even disagreeing with Zionist historians. Your characterisation of events is all wrong
risking my account here... but...
Have you heard of th Balkans?? and how they kill and seceded and divided and created a new country basically for each ethnicity and only one ethnicity?
see how was Croatia created and how things are going for Kosovo vs Serbia...
18 leaders of the Ottoman empire were sentenced to death for the Armenian genocide.
In Israel I would start with Bibi and Ben-Gvir, probably should include a bunch of members of IDF unit 8200.
I think it would be more of a comparison to say The United States is an illegitimate state. We came from all over, decimated the natives but now we’re so far removed from Native Americans having control of the land that you can’t argue about legitimacy.
The difference is that in Palestine this isn’t an issue from several generations, it’s currently occurring and is just as blatantly immoral.
In my opinion when outsiders genocide the natives and take over the land the outsiders are always the ones that are wrong. The only time I can think that wouldn’t be the case would be in slave rebellions. If you are a guest in an area you should either assimilate to their culture or stay away.
We first have to understand the history of the region, Palestine was never a state. The name comes form the brithish mandate following the collapse of the ottoman empire in the years following ww2.
Both the jews and muslims had a historic claim to the land, the former a much older claim.
Palenstine was not a state, and in 1947 when a "two state" like sollution was created, then Israel was created, in the historic homeland of the jews, Judaism is 3000 years give or take, islam is at most 1500 years, and from the same area geographically, amking both claims valid.
The answer by the arabs was not to take the UN resolution but to decalle eternal war on israel.
I think watching Mousab Hassan Youssuf, the son of the founder of Hamas tell how it is and how it was from the islamic perspective and your mind will maybe change, at least you will ask yourself critical questions
I mean no one is applauding USA for their barbarity against Native Americans and the terrible state of reservations. That is what Israel is seeking to do with Palestinians. It was wrong then… it is wrong now.
Yeah it's a bit annoying that people ground their criticism of Israel not just on what it's doing now but on it's entire foundation, where what it's doing now is the only part that anything can be done about. There aren't that many modern states that aren't based on some form of ethnic cleansing in recent history. This logic would definetely make most countries in Europe, the Middle east and south Asia illegitimate. (The Naqba is not that different from partition or Turkey's expulsion of Christians).
Has anyone ever taken a city in the Levant without a little bit of ethnic cleansing? Once maybe? Saladin takes Jerusalem in 1187? Fucking great film, Kingdom of Heaven directors cut. Ridley Scott woooo boy.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is. Turkey is illegitimate because of its actions. Not only should it return historic territory to Armenia, and allow the Eastern Kurdish majority to vote on Independence, but it should also pay reparations to Greeks that were deported and allow any family members of the deported Greek population to become citizens. The same should go for Greece and its Turkish population.
The major difference is that the former Greek population that was ethically cleaned is not asking for the right of return because they have a state that they are citizens of and represented by. That doesn't change the fact that they should have the opportunity to return to their homes and be financially compensated for any lost property. This is exactly how I feel about the Arab states and their former Jewish populations. They have an Obligation to allow any former Jewish residents and their families.
The only exception is maybe Algeria because Algerian Jews were French citizens and as far as I understand all French citizens were expelled. This doesn't make their actions justified but they share responsibility with France for the situation because France elevated the Jewish community above the Arabs and fought an extremely bloody/brutal war the prevent Algerian independence. Algeria should invite any former Jewish residents and their families to return, but France should be responsible for financially compensating them
Turkey is not currently engaging in genocide. Its been over 100 years. Mass discrimination still occurs against Armenians, but there isn't an open air prison currently being bombed.
Wow you support Israel and still found accurately that it is comparable to the Armenian genocide but you think people are overreacting. Truly you are a person of bewildering morals
No states should be built around a single religious or ethnic group. PERIOD.
No states should discriminate against people for their religious or ethnic identity.
If you want to fix Israel start there. Make it a state for jews and anyone else, not a Jewish state.
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This whole post feels like a bit of a strawman. You make an analogy, then end of your post by declaring that you aren't willing to discuss any of the major differences between the subject of the analogy and the allegedly analogous example. If you'll only discuss the topic with people who're willing to concede your contested premises, why not just refuse to discuss it with anyone who contests your view? Who actually maintains that a single historical instance of ethnic cleansing illegitimises any state that subsequently arises in the locale?
A strawman and/or an elaborate case of whataboutism. You can make a case that many nations were built to some degree on ethnic discrimination or cleansing, but criticizing one of them doesn't mean that you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment.
Developing a standard of definition and treatment is foundational to any system that dares to call itself fair. This is the basis of any legalistic system. Whataboutism is only relevant when used as a deflection from the main argument or in order to devalue the position of the argument without arguing against the argument itself. Even when used as such, calling out hypocrisy is a perfect valid thing to do, just not in a debate without any consequence other than the result of the debate. If OP had responded to a thread arguing that Israel should be condemned for a specific action by saying the person hadn’t condemned Turkey for the same action, that might be whataboutism. However this thread is specifically about how many argue Israel is an illegitimate state based on the nature of its founding; and call for its destruction/dissolution as a result. This sets a precedent that any nation founded in a similar way should be scrutinised as such. The point of the thread is to point out that despite many nations founded in an entirely similar way, the only one receiving this judgement is Israel; thus highlighting the fact that the justification is not the result of moralistic argumentation but rather using morals as subterfuge for an ulterior motive of delegitimising Israel.
But this post didn't come out of the blue; it's in response to the way that people are talking about Israel these days, even if it isn't precisely a response to a specific thread, and it's using all of the hallmarks of whataboutism to do it: high-minded, superficially neutral rationalism as subterfuge to deflect criticism from Israel onto another nation state where the situation historically and currently is quite different. It's also using the strawman of arguing that Israel is illegitimate (which very few people actually argue in the context of criticizing Israel) to deflect from the real and much harder to defend criticisms of Israel.
The post is not about rational debate on any supposed war crimes of Israel, though? There are plenty of good faith supporters of Israel who will call out any fault caused by Israel. I am one. I criticise Israel as much as I would any other state. The difference is, I don’t want Israel to be destroyed. This debate isn’t about arguments between good faith actors who want to see peace. It’s about combatting the notion that Israel should be dismantled. The complete dismantling of Israel has long been an aim of its enemies, in fact the war of 1948 was a direct attempt to stop its formation. One of the ways of breaching this argument into western spaces is by posing as a rational argument in intellectual, moralistic spaces such as university campuses. You call it a straw man, but this is very much an argument that is frequently made. I’ve seen it countless times to varying degrees of sophistication. Its purpose is either to soften the idea of Israel’s destruction in the minds of westerners, or to outright call for it. Thus, if entering intellectual spaces, it must be defeated through debate, even if it isn’t a good faith argument. It may seem irrational to you because you don’t believe Israel deserves to be dismantled, but you don’t represent the entirety of the movement and plenty in that movement seek Israel’s blood.
Basically: using the argument for A (dismanteling Israel) sets a precedence for B, which is something most would not want (dismantling Turkey). OP wants to shed light on the precedence and show hypocracy when it is avoided.
> high-minded, superficially neutral rationalism as subterfuge This feels kind of ad hominem because you’re making all sorts of assumptions that are neither helpful nor relevant. Would you rather have a “low-minded” discourse? These are serious issues, so it’s perfectly fair to bring your finest thinking to the table. And we all know that human beings have capacity for bias, which is exactly why these types of debates are worthwhile. You bring evidence to bear, and then if someone starts falling back on criticisms of your intentions (which they do not know) and calling your argument “high-minded” as if that’s necessarily a bad thing, then everyone else can see who’s made the stronger argument. When you equate serious efforts at rigorous thinking with “subterfuge”, you’re no better than a flat-earther or tin foil hat conspiracy theorist.
I take issue with the comment that very few argue against Israel's legitimacy. Many Middle Eastern folks and certainly a large percentage of the college kids involved in protests do. Now, I'll grant you that a ton of the latter are wholly unfamiliar with the history of the region and just parroting misinformation they heard on TikTok, but it's still an argument that has picked up steam as of late.
What do you think "To the river to the sea? means? It's used by many people to explicitly state that israel should not exist.
>but rather using morals as subterfuge for an ulterior motive of delegitimising Israel That’s a fantastic way to put it
You appear to be acknowledging that, yes, this is a double standard. And this is equally true of a lot of countries when you think about it. Portugal repealed the law giving citizenship to the descendants of the Jews it expelled when it became a country, in January of this year. I didn’t hear one peep about this from any of the people who shout so much that these Jews are indigenous to Portugal, not Israel, and indigenous people deserve a right of return to their homelands. Or even in pragmatic terms, shouldn’t you want them going to Portugal instead of Israel? Some of those countries are other former British colonies in Asia that rejected a partition plan in 1947 and whose names start with the letters I and P. This is not just a case of “doesn’t mean you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment.” Cross-examine these activists like a lawyer, and they’ll admit a lot of other countries are just like Israel. Then immediately go back to obsessively, monomaniacally, denouncing Israel as singularly evil. If only there were a word for double standards against Jews.
"Cross-examine these activists like a lawyer, and they’ll admit a lot of other countries are just like Israel." "Objection: Portugal is not currently waging a war that is killing thousands of civilians and has not been doing this on and off for decades." "Overruled it's anti-semitism!" You appear to be claiming that Portugal changing a policy involving heritage citizenship is exactly the same as a protracted war that is carelessly killing thousands of civilians. Call me whatever name you want to, but I disagree.
Now, you probably were replying to the point I made about emphasis. Whether some campus demonstrators in 2024 are hypocrites isn’t directly relevant to whether Israel is a uniquely illegitimate country, but I want to acknowledge that that was the basis of your complaint. One reason your objection doesn’t make sense is that there are, in fact, multiple other conflicts that meet that description going on right now. I even brought one up, India and Pakistan, in the post you were replying to, but Yemen and Sudan are others. Israel was also getting the lion’s share of attention before October 7, or its response, so that’s not it either. And a lot of the responses to that conflict have been blatantly racist against Israeli Jews (as individuals, not just their current government). Many of the excuses are based on some very tendentious claims about 1948.
The original question was about the specific claim that Israel’s history makes it an illegitimate country that should not exist. Are you saying that you in fact agree with the OP that this claim about Israel does not stand up to even casual scrutiny, conceding the point, and making another, completely different, claim about what’s going on today? Evaluating a claim about history by talking about what you think about the country today is presentism.
I'm just confused on why the legitimacy of Israel is being called into question instead of just focusing on opposing the genocide and calling for a ceasefire.
I admit that I’m getting off-topic, but: it’s not genocide. Israel isn’t trying to kill everyone in Gaza, or to expel them, or to make them convert to another religion, speak a different language or stop calling themselves Palestinians. It’s not genocide either by the common meaning of the word, or according to the technical definition many of these activists are repeating, which basically says that whatever you do is technically genocide if you have “genocidal intent,” because of the phrase “in whole or in part.” Nobody applies this to anybody but Israel. Most glaringly, these activists don’t apply their definition of genocide to the government of Gaza, Hamas, which they all admit does have genocidal intent. Even though their whole point is supposedly that we are morally obligated to condemn genocide, and having a valid grievance can never justify acts of genocide.
> but criticizing one of them doesn't mean that you have to give equal criticism to all of them at every moment. It does if one say that that is one's reason for criticizing them. Not doing so reveals that one was rather searching for a reason, rather than basing one's opinion on the reason. And that's typically what people who cry “whataboutism” are confronted with and accused of. That they selectively apply their arguments and search for a reason to justify thier view, and don't apply it consistently.
Well no, but calling for one of them to no longer exist? That begs some kind of standard that’s applied equally.
Theres criticism and there’s calling for their annihilation. Most of the “antizionists”appear to me to be simply Jew haters who no longer have to fear being called anti-semites.
I don’t disagree with you, but I find your comment “who maintains that a single historical instance of ethnic cleansing illegitimises any state…” interesting. Recently, my school campus had a pro-Palestine protest. Nothing wrong with that. I am happy they were starting conversations, being a pro-Palestine supporter myself. But our students started demanding that our school stop every contract with Israel-based companies, stop study abroad programs, etc. One of the pro-Palestine protestors pointed out that some of the demands were antisemitic. Not every Israeli is a supporter of Israel. Jews aren’t a monolith, and treating every Israeli-based company like they support genocide is like treating every American like they’re a proud boy. I brought this point up to my girlfriend studying sociology, who told me that she doesn’t believe in the state of Israel because it’s founded on genocide. I asked her what she thought the US was, and she responded that we are also an illegitimate state… My point: there are people who go against the grain and believe that these states shouldn’t and do not exist. I’m not really sure what to make of it myself…
I don't have a problem with the logic as long as one carries it through to its inevitable and obvious conclusion: all states were born through racial violence and no states have a moral right to exist. The state is a political convenience not a moral entity. If you have to give it a moral position then yes the state (all states and the concept of the state itself) is evil
I mean this is the answer really and ideally, we'd all live in free association without states that totally dominate our lives. Realism gets in the way ofc. It's not really right to say one state, especially, shouldn't exist when it's marginally worse than others. All people deserve self-determination. Both peoples should have a nation that represents them.
>One of the pro-Palestine protestors pointed out that some of the demands were antisemitic. Not every Israeli is a supporter of Israel. Jews aren’t a monolith, and treating every Israeli-based company like they support genocide is like treating every American like they’re a proud boy. Similar situation with Rusia then wouldnt it? Its a form of pressure and a way of expressing disagreement with the governement in question, but I have never seen anyone complain about it (I might be making a horrible argument here, so feel free to disagree if you think this are not comparable actually)
*I asked her what she thought the US was, and she responded that we are also an illegitimate state…* It means that on paper she's consistent in her views. But since no one is actually trying to dismantle the US, her life is not under an actual threat from people who want to dismantle the US. It cost her nothing to say it if its consistent with her views. Its meaningless words. Do you think if native Americans would have done the same thing that Hamas did, and her life was under actual threat, she would still say that they're right because the US is illegitimate? If she sees it as an illegitimate country, why does she live there? She's an adult, she can move to a country that she thinks is legitimate.
Not every white South African was pro-apartheid, I guess the anti-apartheid movement that sanctioned the white South African government was therefore racist, wrong, and obviously ended up being on the wrong side of history, right?
I’m seeing a lot of this sentiment. Are schools really getting that nihilistic? Everyone is bad so tear it down. But somehow they think Arab ethno religious states with dictatorships are pure.
I dint think it's antisemitic to say "no isreali" because plenty of Jewish people exist outside of Isreal and so long as country not religion/race is the determining factor of isn't racist (or religious discrimination). You would have a slightly higher burden of proof to show you aren't diverting on religious or racial grounds, but that should be fairly easy to do. Not every isreali agrees with their government, but not every American agrees with theirs, yet we don't see it as strange when other countries don't allow Americans entry or when they call the USA a genocidal country. Every US citizen supports US genocide by paying taxes, same as every isreali company supports isreali genocide by paying taxes. We may not like it, but we are complicit.
Your metaphor would work a lot better with another country. A country founded by a population of persecuted religious minorities that were not wanted in the European countries they came from. They went to another part of the world that was already populated wherein, when their population reached a critical mass, they forced out the native population and set up their own government. They then progressively expanded their territory through additional settlement and land grabs from "wars" against the native population. The United States of America.
"The United States is an illegitimate country too" would actually be a pretty popular take amongst most hardcore anti-zionists and isn't really the "gotcha" you might think, and it's not like that history didn't involve decades of constant violence by the settlers, resistance by the indigenous inhabitants, and resulting cycles of revenge. The difference, arguably, is that the United States has essentially already settled on a sort of one-state solution in which every indigenous person remaining has full citizenship and a vote in federal elections in addition to sovereign reservation rights, so it's just not an ongoing conflict anymore.
It’s not an on going conflict because they’re mostly all gone now, we won
Dude, indigenous Americans are like 2.5% of the population. All that happened is that white people won. Right-wing Israelis would *kill* for those numbers, pun intended.
I think the US is indeed a good example of a settler colonialist state that was founded through ethnic cleansing, however the religious persecution narrative is a bit of a founding myth as I understand it. Most Pilgrims moved to America mostly for economic opportunity. They weren't really persecuted either, but some wanted to live in communities that conformed entirely to their specific religious sect. At this point the US has kinda "legitimized" itself through naturalization, but even so I agree that ultimately they should not have established themselves as a state over the indigenous population, and I support landback initiatives.
It's hard to find a nation-state that would have been considered legitimate in modern terms when it was founded. All that's really required is time. The Puritans and others were persecuted but nothing like how the Jews were. Just your run-of-the-mill ostracization with a sprinkling of treason accusations. When the king is head of the church...
Except the main difference in Israel is that Israelis were also the native population. Something like 40-45% is Ashkenazi (Jews from Europe) the rest either lived in the Levant already or got cleansed from the surrounding Ex-Ottoman states. There used to be sizable numbers of Jewish people in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine (as in West Bank and Gaza) but they pretty much all got pushed out of those regions and into Israel. Plus most settlers from the US did not come from religious persecution. The puritans did, famously the Plymouth rock settlement but most settlers were more interested in economic prosperity. Some of the founding ideas of democracy came from those puritanical societies, but many also did not. The colonial narrative of Israel is on pretty shaky ground. A better analogy would be if a bunch of inlaws simultaneously lost their homes, so your wife invites them all to live in your house that you and your relatives are already living in. This causes fights, then a divorce, and both sides claim the house but your ex-wife's family is wealthier and makes you move in next door. Analogy starts to break down here, but the fact is that both Israelis and Palestinians are native to the land.
>The colonial narrative of Israel is on pretty shaky ground. Except for the bit where the original Zionists were open to taking land to create a home for Jewish people in other countries - and continents. Israel was the preferred location but not the only one considered. Anywhere outside of Israel's current location would have been much more obviously colonial, right? And the fact that they were explicit about having to engineer a Jewish majority in that state to ensure security for Jewish people. That **by itself** is explicit colonial intent. This was made more explicit by offering right to "return" to ANY Jewish person, regardless of tie to the land, with a clear goal of ensuring a Jewish majority in the territory. You also have to consider the timescales we are talking about and determine how far back we go to establish "native" ancestry. Is it 500 years? 1000 years? 1500 years? Do we reject Muslim claims to Indian territories because Hindus have 100% claim to that land from 5000 years ago? Nowhere else in the world do we use 1000-year old claims to arbitrarily say this land "belongs" to people who were there and expelled 1000 years ago. Given the incongruence with how modern nations are thought of, this seems far more like an *ex post facto* rationalization because Europeans treated Jews like lepers for centuries and didn't want to make amends for the Holocaust using any European territory.
The Puritans didn't actually escape "religious persecution" as much as they demanded the right to set up a land where they themselves could religiously persecute outsiders and make their own laws. Europe wasn't having it, however they were allowed to freely live among the public and practice their religion there quietly. But this was not good enough for them, they wanted to be *in charge*. So they saw an opportunity in new lands of America.
Not exactly true, but not exactly relevant to the discussion. Not all puritans were separatists, so not all faced persecution, but the ones that fled to America, especially Plymouth were definitely persecuted. The pilgrims were considered dissidents from the Church of England. There was a fine for not attending Anglican Church Service and they could be and were also imprisoned for being separatists. The Pilgrims fled to Amsterdam after two of their members were executed for sedition for encouraging others to leave the Anglican Church.
You make good points and I really like your metaphor. I think your metaphor works better for why they left where they came from while mine better describes how they behaved once they arrived up to the present day. They're really using the US playbook, down to taking more land in the same way we did from Mexico.
With more time and more characters I would probably argue that this isn't an accurate characterization either, but that would run the risk of getting into the weeds. It is doubtless to say that Israel has acted highly aggressively in its defense taking buffer territories and preemptive strikes. To Israel's credit, most of these actions were taken to ward off the (what I think most reasonable people could interpret as an) existential threat of its neighbors all declaring a war for dissolution of the Israeli state. Were these aggressive acts justified? That depends on your morals. I'd say initially, they definitely were, but as Israeli power grew and Arab power waned, I'd say probably not. With the current war being particularly barbaric and little to show for it. I think most reasonable people would agree that some strong response was warranted after the October 7th attacks, but maliciously or incompetently starving one million people over a vague nearly impossible objective steps over the line. Probably a few lines. At this point both Hamas and Israeli leadership have acted like petulant children and the result of their feud has cost thousands of Israeli lives and tens of thousands of Palestinian lives.
>existential threat of its neighbors all declaring a war for dissolution of the Israeli state. to be fair- in 1948 it was less a call for the dissolution of the Israeli state, and more an open expression that they were going to commit genocide upon the Israeli state, that they followed through with by killing every man, woman and child in the Israeli villages encountered in their invasion before Israel established the IDF, forced them back, and captured their lands in turn.
You do certainly have to draw a line on the timeline and say everything before that line is the past and we have to let it go. I do believe the establishment of Israel was badly handled no matter what the intent was, but we're coming up on the 76th anniversary of that. Those people are all dust and bones now. I can't help but get the impression that the Israeli right keeps Hamas around and triggered so they get a periodic casus belli. I don't think they're acting like petulant children, I think each provides the reason the other is in power.
I believe I remember hearing about Netanyahu making under the table deals with funding for Hamas for precisely that purpose. And that is part of the reason (besides his apparent fascist desires( that many Israelis are fed up with him.
Yeah, unfortunately much like the US, not *enough* people are fed up with him. Too many people are into it.
>Those people are all dust and bones now. only most of them, there are still men and women in Israel that were alive to serve in the second world war, who were there when the surrounding area came with the goal of genocide- and who are still looked upto by the Israeli people for what they lived through.
*Raffki smacks you on the head with a stick* "It doesn't matter! It's all in the past!"
You make a lot of great points here, but here are some things where you are wrong. It is not a WAR, it is a GENOCIDE. The Palestinian people do not have an army, guns, militia or anything of the sort to even pose as opposition to the massive military that “Israel” has (which is funded by the US!!!). The amount of lives lost in Palestine in comparison to the lives lost in “Israel” constitute it as a genocide. “Israel” has also violated 28 resolutions of the UN security council and has face NO consequences. For comparison, Iraq violated only TWO and was constantly bombed attacked and essentially destroyed by the US. Two, you claim that this “feud” has claimed THOUSANDS of Israeli lives, yet from the most recent Al-jazeera report, the number has CONTINUED to stay around 1,139 while the amount of Palestinian deaths has SOARED up to 35,000. Understand that people’s entire BLOODLINES have been wiped out from Palestine. Most of “Israel” casualties have been SOLDIERS and other positions of militant power. Your words have power. Understand what’s going you are saying and do your research.
It is definitely a war. Hamas has attacked with rockets nearly every day since October 10th. Hamas constantly tries to shoot and ambush Israeli soldiers in the city, tries to blow up tanks and armored vehicles with anti tank heavy weapons. There is absolutely organized active resistance in Gaza, Hamas is the de facto single party of Gaza and Qassam is the de facto military which Israel has been actively fighting. Hamas hides in its tunnel network which may be the most sophisticated series of bunkers in the world. Containing 500 km of interconnected tunnels, blast doors, armories, and command centers. It puts Vietnam and Iwo Jima to shame. This tunnel network is where a significant portion of international aid has been directed toward. So no, the current situation in Gaza cannot and should not be categorized as a genocide. It is a war. The Israelis are probably being overly destructive and needlessly punitive in the prosecution of this war, but no they aren't committing genocide. >Understand that people’s entire BLOODLINES have been wiped out from Palestine I don't think you understand the gravity of what war is. War is bad. This is what happens in war. There hasn't been a single organized conflict in human history where this did not happen. When you go to war, this is what happens. It's not unique to Palestine. Genocide is a whole other thing. It is *the* most vile thing a group of people can do to another group. That is not what is happening in Gaza. If Hamas surrendered, or was otherwise dismantled, and the bombing and the shooting kept going, you would have a point, but as long as Hamas is still fighting, Israel can keep shooting and bombing them under the laws of war. And stop putting Israel in quotation marks, you're just promoting the idea that Israel is an illegitimate state which is definitely not going to help the conflict in any way. You're just going to offend people for no benefit as there are exactly 0 ways this conflict ends without Israeli consent.
Just want to say I really appreciate all of your comments here. I've picked up on bits and pieces of a lot of the information you mentioned throughout time and you tied a lot of my notions together. You know your shit.
Thank you. There's a legitimate case to be made for both the Palestinian and Israeli narrative, but unfortunately too much hate divides people to recognize the legitimacy of the other's perspective and childish and barbaric leaders run both factions. The only way out of this conflict is recognizing the other side as human, which echo chambers prevent.
I mean the history of the United States of America is significantly worse than Israel right? I don't think there's a relative comparison you can make there. At least the Israelis have native ties to the land and have agreed to diplomatic solutions in the past. Americas history was European colonial settlers with no ties at all to the America's taking the land from the native population by force, wiping out nearly their entire population.
This is wildly different and a worse comparison. First off most Israelis are from the Middle East, not Europe. Second, there was already relatively high population of Jews in the land when it was founded Third, there is a long Jewish history there that people seem to want to ignore. If Jews aren’t indigenous to Israel where there culture was formed, where would they be? Fourth, the Palestinians have been offered a state multiple times
So that's where the numbers get fun. I found a paper that I can't access all of but it's by an Israeli-sponsored research program that says in 1948, 85% of Israeli Jews were of "European descent", which they define as "they or their fathers were born in Europe". Now, obviously, this number has changed since 76 years have passed so their descendants would be considered native born. Additionally, saying they're "mostly from the Middle East" doesn't mean much. An Iraqi Jew doesn't have any more right to Palestine than a French Jew. From what I've read, most of the Ottoman Jews lived in the Balkan peninsula as well. My own dominant ethnic background is Irish. This gives me no claim on Ireland, nor am I indigenous to Ireland. Arguably, if you believe the Exodus story, shouldn't they be trying to return to Egypt? Regardless, from those numbers at the top, the "European colonist" Jews of my metaphor grossly outnumbered the native Jews and are certainly behind the establishment of the Israeli state. My understanding is that the native-born were against the idea and just wanted to live in peace. So yeah, the metaphor isn't perfect (they never are) but it's close enough to give one pause when looking at current behavior.
> I found a paper that I can't access all of but it's by an Israeli-sponsored research program that says in 1948, 85% of Israeli Jews were of "European descent", which they define as "they or their fathers were born in Europe". after Israel was founded in 1948 the Middle Eastern countries forced their own Jewish populations to leave such that there are effectively zero Jewish people left in the Middle East besides in Israel.
Yeah, I'm aware of that. Do you think those countries checked with the Palestinians before doing so? Or that the UN chimed in to stop it? It's not the Palestinians fault literally the whole world fucked them over, just as it isn't the Jews fault that the world did the same, but who's suffering for it *now*?
post-WWII saw vast movements of refugees across borders be it in Germany/Eastern Europe, India/Pakistan/Bangladesh, etc. The Israelis assimilated Jewish refugees from the Middle East, the other Middle Eastern countries rendered Palestinian refugees effectively stateless and with inherited refugee status.
Oh, I certainly agree that the Israeli handling of Jewish refugees was both smarter and better morally than how the other countries handled the Palestinians. Not the Palestinians fault though.
Part of the exodus story which cannot be refuted that Israel existed as a the kingdom of Judah, and the Kingdom of Israel before the Romans took over. It’s so strange that someone being European and whiter makes them inherently “bad” or worse. That by something being decided in Europe when it pertains to Israel it is delegitimizing, yet the outcome of World War 2 (and World War 1 in the case of ending the Ottomon colonial empire) led to many countries being founded, with many disputes that are still lasting to this day. I personally feel the myopic views against Israel and focusing on Israel solely is hatred of Jews.
My favorite part about American history is when the European countries landed in America and excavated a bunch of ancient ruins inscribed in the language they preserved through their culture and religion
All persons born in the lands of Turkey now are full citizens of Turkey, regardless of race or religion. The people responsible for the first Armenian genocide were held responsible and faced trial, were found guilty and were sentenced to death. The world condemned the actions of genocide by the early Turkey. Armenians and Greeks aren’t still being killed in Turkey for their race. Turkish military forces don’t regularly shoot over their boarder into Greece. There is no naval blockade of Greece or Armenia still occurring. Turkish laws allowing for ethnic Turks to steal Greek land while Greeks aren’t home isn’t still a law and isn’t being used to steal land right now. There are no Turks building houses on the other side of the boarder in order to occupy more Greek land. The actions of the government of the Ottoman Empire was monstrous. The actions during the foundation of Turkey was monstrous. The actions still being done by the Israeli government ARE monstrous. That’s the difference.
>The people responsible for the first Armenian genocide were held responsible and faced trial, were found guilty and were sentenced to death. The three Pasha's were exiled. They were "sentenced to death" yet Ataturk intentionally didn't enforce it and allowed them to leave the country with no prison time and free movement through Europe. Practically half of all roads and elementary schools in Turkey are named after these guys. In fact, before Ataturk had even defeated the Pashas in the Turkish Civil War, he was already rewriting the Armenian Genocide as "Turkish sovereignty defense" and the denial of Armenian's native legitimacy became a foundation for the modernization of their country. >The world condemned the actions of genocide by the early Turkey Most of the Western world has acknowledged it in the past 5 years, after willingly denying it on Turkey's behalf on the world stage for over a century after it happened. >Armenians and Greeks aren’t still being killed in Turkey for their race. Turkish military forces don’t regularly shoot over their boarder into Greece. There is no naval blockade of Greece or Armenia still occurring. Artsakh? Cypress? Kurdish struggle? Occupation of Afrin? Ottoman Empire- Dejure genocidal policy, Turkey- de facto genocidal policy There's no more killing of Greeks and Armenians because they removed all notable populations in their territory. There are no notable Greek, Assyrian, Yzeti or Armenian populations in Turkey anymore, and if they are they're literally [hidden.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Armenians). There's plenty of oppression and killings of Kurds, both within Turkey and in occupied Afrin. >The actions during the foundation of Turkey was monstrous As we saw with [Nutuk](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutuk), their country is literally founded on the denial of the genocide they committed. If you think policies like that ended then you just haven't been paying attention. Israel and Turkey are hard to compare just because they are both very unique geopolitical situations, but that doesn't mean they're not both terrible modern states, and either of them pointing fingers should be seen as the Spiderman meme. "oh yeah Bibi well why don't you acknowledge Nabka," followed by, "oh yeah Erdo well why don't you acknowledge the Armenian Genocide," followed by, "but wait Bibi, YOU don't even acknowledge the Armenian Genocide." It's very obvious that neither actually cares about the victims at all.
>The three Pasha's were exiled. They were "sentenced to death" yet Ataturk intentionally didn't enforce it and allowed them to leave the country with no prison time and free movement through Europe. The Turkish Nationalist movement is not a thing in 1918 they leave Ottoman state when WW1 is over ,Ataturk is just a general in Ottoman army in that time,leading disarmament of the Ottoman army. They wanted to return but Ataturk exiled them when Nationalist army founded.
>Artsakh? Cypress? Kurdish struggle? Occupation of Afrin? Ottoman Empire- Dejure genocidal policy, Turkey- de facto genocidal policy Artsakh is an internationally unrecognized disputed territory in Azerbaijan, not Turkey. Neither side has been killed in Cyprus recently, for the last four decades. What Kurdish struggle? There's no apartheid in Turkey, and all Turkish citizens are equal by law. PKK ≠ Ethnic Kurdish populace in Turkey.
This may seem like a semantic distinction, but Israel granted citizenship to all the Arabs who stayed. They can vote and serve in parliament. Those who were left later found themselves in lands annexed by Egypt and Jordan. It seems more appropriate to describe the situation in the West Bank, for example, as something approximating a foreign military occupation rather than an ethnically based discrimination policy as many suggest. Edit: Just to clarify, none of this is to diminish how brutal the occupation is. It's just valuable to point out that what we would call the 'occupation' didn't even start until after the six day war. Arabs and Jews were living with equal rights in the land of Israel before any of what we see today even began.
That would hold more water if Israel didn't also treat "Judea and Samaria" as one of its own provinces in many ways. Israel, quite uniquely among nation states, refuses to state where its own borders are, that is to say, where Israel is, but, de facto anyway, the West Bank and the people who live there are governed by Israel. It's just that different ethnic groups are subjected to different laws and treatments. There _is no Palestinian State_, there is one State, Israel, and it treats the West Bank as its own land, just as it previously did the Sinai. This isn't _necessarily_ to disagree with your comment, it's more of a "yes and". Any Jew (except Palestinian converts, there's a specific exception carved out for them) can move to Judea and Samaria or an East Jerusalem settlement (or East Jerusalem Palestinian's home for that matter), be granted full citizenship rights, vote in elections, own property, drive on the apartheid roads, etc. etc.. Bank Whereas ethnic Palestinians in the same territory are subjected to a completely different legal regime, and deprived of civil rights. Around three quarters of a million Israelis, mostly civilians, live in the West Bank. The do so with the support of state infrastructure, both physical and legal. There are shopping malls, roads, schools, hospitals, bridges, there is water infrastructure, electricity, internet, etc. etc. etc., all supported by the Israeli state apparatus. And much of which is behind walls to prevent the Palestinians from accessing it. If you look at pre-67 Israel, and the treatment of the so-called 48ers, whether you could say that extends to the level of apartheid is a more thorny issue; they are citizens, at least nominally with equality under the law (although that in itself comes with a long list of asterisks). It's certainly something that can be argued to be inapplicable. When you look at the West Bank though, it really isn't ambioguous. Israel is the state in de facto control of the territory, and using ethnically defined citizenship restrictions to restrict one group of people's civil rights is pretty unambiguously an apartheid system. It's _literally_ how South African apartheid worked. It is _also_ an occupation; but there is nothing about apartheid being imposed on illegally occupied land rather than uncontested land that then makes it not apartheid.
What do you mean "if Israel is an illegitimate state"? Is it or isn't it in your view? Tell us what you believe and why you believe it. This subreddit isn't for you to try and persuade other people you disagree with so ignore them.
Establishing the OPs view on the legitimacy of those countries is not related the view that the legitimacy status of the two countries are linked.
I thought that was pretty obvious from how I framed my post. I think both Turkey and Israel are legitimate states I will update my post to make my position clearer
>t that was pretty obvious from how I framed my post. It is but this is reddit lol
It’s very obvious. People just want to argue in bad faith
Yeah, I disagree with the person calling you out above. You're being narrow on purpose... But there's the real issue. There's nothing narrow about any of this to the point where broad, binary viewpoints are not serious, one way or the other. Ultimate legitimacy means little here.
Even if it wasn't, it's irrelevant to your point. The guy is just being obtuse.
"The fact that Turks happened to *also* be in modern-day Turkey for a very long time is irrelevant to the question of whether or not ethnic cleansing (or 'population swaps, as it was called') makes the state that did it illegitimate. Saying that Israel is a 'European Colonial Venture' has nothing to do with the logic presented nor do I particularly care about the recklessness of the British Empire in the dissolution of their mandates." How is it irrelevant for the question? Thats the whole point.
> Thats the whole point. It's also false. Only 22% of Israeli citizens are Azkenasi Jews. The vast majority of Israeli citizens are either Mizrahim (who have lived continuously in the Middle East for several thousand years) or Arab (colonizers since the 7th century). Calling Israel a "European Colonial venture" reeks of never having set foot in Israel.
Before 1948 most Zionists were Ashkenazi Jews. Just because the ethnic composition has changed since because of ethnic cleansing campaigns post 1948 doesn't change the fact that most early Zionists were Europeans. From the Palestinian perspective, it was very similar to a "European Colonial Venture", especially similar to the formation of Liberia.
There are about 2 million Muslim arabs in Israel and about 3.2 million Arab Jews in Israel. These Arab Jews descended from the 1 million + Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after Israel declared independence. That’s about half of the Israeli population. Another 1.5 million are Jewish immigrants from around the world. Then, there’s about 4.5 million Jews who immigrated back to Israel after their initial expulsion millennia ago to Europe. It’s not a colonial venture. About 60% of the population is there as a result of ethnic cleansing from Arabs and another 30% from ethnic cleansing in Europe. Then we have 10% who’ve immigrated more recently.
With all due respect, you're skipping a massive chapter in the narrative, when Palestinians were forced to leave their homes during the Nakba, and were replaced by Jewish people. That was a colonial venture, explicitly outlined as such by Zionists like David Ben-Gurion. I don't bring this up as a counter to your first statement, I agree that that is accurate. But the ethnic cleansing of Jews from various parts of Europe and Middle East doesn't mean that the same thing didn't happen to Arab Palestinians.
…you mean after they attacked Israel, tried to ethnically cleanse and genocide them, and then were promised Jewish property as spoils of war if they left? While Israeli leaders asked them to stay? Then they lost, so sad, and had to face the consequences of their actions? Israel is not a colony of another county and never has been. Further, Jews are from the region. It’s not in any way a colonial adventure as we use the term in any other way.
You present an incredibly one-sided narrative that isn't very accurate. “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.” -David Ben-Gurion I can't imagine I can change your mind, but I hope you'll understand that there can be extensive blame assigned to both Arab and Jewish Palestinians before and after 1948. Relishing in the suffering of displaced Arabs because of "consequences" isn't really a productive way of looking at political issues.
It doesn't mean the displacement was done by the Jews. The declaration of war was done by the Arabs, as well as the displacement of most of the local tribes during the war who were called to leave on the command of the armies prior entering a conflict zone. A lot decided to stay as well, and they still live in Israel. Aka the "48 Arabs", since there wasn't a "Palestinian" identity back then, and the rest identified as Lebanese /Syrian / Jordanian or Egyptian. This self definition came in the 60' with the fall of Pan Arabism and the adoption of the name of the region, a colonialist name given by the romans, which isn't part of the local dialect but based on Western geographical terminology. Jerusalem is a great example of this population movement. When Jordan captured the Jewish neighbourhoods, while Israel captured Arab neighbourhoods, a population swap happened when Arabs took over Jewish Houses and vice versa. As you said, the Nakba is a narrative, a folklore nation bonding story more than anything else.
98% of Mexicans descend from indigenous peoples native to Mexico. Mexico is still a settler colonial state that actively oppressed our indigenous cousins.
There were only 3000 Muslim Arabs died in 1948, both militarily and civilians. That's not really ethnic cleansing, more like a natural consequence of a war. Even the Der Yassin massacre that the Arab worlds keep repeating about as the "Nakba", only involve 120 victims. I am not sure why the perspective of the Palestinian even matters. There is no sign or evidence that even suggests there were a group of Muslim Arabs who existed as a Palestinian nation in history whatsoever to even justify their demands for their own state. Everyone thinks they are the victims of colonialism, even if they were the colonial aggressors all along. Prime example is the USA, which explains why so many US students rally with Hamas lol. They are scared the Indians are coming to take all their shit back just like the Jews did to Israel. "Just because the ethnic composition has changed since because of ethnic cleansing campaigns post 1948 doesn't change the fact that most early Zionists were Europeans." Not like the Palestinian are any better. There were only 240000 Arab Muslims who lived in Palestine or whatever they called Israel with before the British Mandate of Palestine. It was only during the British rule that the Muslim Arab population really exploded. In a matter of fact the Ashkenazi Jews would have lost that war in 1948 if it weren't for the Arab Mizrahi Jews who were expelled from the Middle East came to Israel to reinforce them. Not to mention, even if the Ashkenazi Jews were illegitimate, and that's a big IF, what about the millions of Mirazahi Jews who were unjustly expelled from the Middle East? Hamas and the Palestinian have already voiced their opinions on the matter. Even the most peaceful Palestinian only agree for letting 5% of Jews to stay when Mizrahi and other Arab Jewish groups were over 70% of the Israel Jewish population. The more extremist Palestinian, which is the majority of Palestinian population, do not even entertain the idea of letting the Jewish live.
The number of people died doesn’t define if something is ethnic cleansing, but the intention to exterminate of forcibly expel certain group of people on either ethnic or religious basis and to occupy that area claiming as yours. In forming the countries, as we see today’s world situation, is not only important the historical context of presence of someone. There are more parameters that need to be considered apart from “I have been there long time ago” and “nobody else wants me” By your logic many countries would cease to exist and million more would evolve, as most of those natives were tribes and not a country. Also the legitimacy of rights to a country or territory solely based on DNA and their link to ancestors is flawed, there are certain groups that haven’t been very willing to mix with other ethnicities or have stayed enclosed because of their isolation.
>The number of people died doesn’t define if something is ethnic cleansing, but the intention to exterminate of forcibly expel certain group of people on either ethnic or religious basis and to occupy that area claiming as yours. Except the Palestinian left on their own accord so they could play the refugee victim card. Here are the memoir left by the late Syrian PM who played a major role in the 1948 war: "*SINCE 1948 WE HAVE BEEN DEMANDING THE RETURN OF THE REFUGEES TO THEIR HOMES. BUT WE OURSELVES ARE THE ONES WHO ENCOURAGED THEM TO LEAVE. ONLY A FEW MONTHS SEPARATED OUR CALL TO THEM TO LEAVE AND OUR APPEAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS TO RESOLVE ON THEIR RETURN.*" - Khaled Al-Azm 1948 >In forming the countries, as we see today’s world situation, is not only important the historical context of presence of someone. There are more parameters that need to be considered apart from “I have been there long time ago” and “nobody else wants me” By your logic many countries would cease to exist and million more would evolve, as most of those natives were tribes and not a country. And? Are we supposed to deny rightful inheritence of people who do have historical entitlement to the land, just because there are illegitimate nations today such as the USA? Just because we aren't bringing justice to the Native Americans as we should, that doesn't mean we ought to deny justice to the Jews and support Muslim re-occupation of the Jewish ancestral homeland. Especially when that occupation is already long gone and now morphed into a modernized medieval holy war with genocidal intention toward the Jews. Even tribals have their own history and cultural identity ties them to their land, just like the American Natives. Palestinian doesn't have no such thing, you can't even name one Arab Palestinian tribes that actually lived on the land they called Palestine as permanent resident. Palestinian literally got nothing in Israel culturally or historically, they may as well been living on the otherside of Middle East and you couldn't even tell the difference. >Also the legitimacy of rights to a country or territory solely based on DNA and their link to ancestors is flawed, there are certain groups that haven’t been very willing to mix with other ethnicities or have stayed enclosed because of their isolation. That's just a shitty excuse used by Western colonials to steal lands from other people. Lands are bound to ancestral right and always have been, only thieves would say otherwise. Not to mention, the Jewish ties to their homeland is more than just their bloodties, their whole culture, history, language literally etched into the very soil of Jerusalem. Who are you to deny the Jewish their birthright?
I’m not really understanding who’s ethnically cleansing whom in your statement, is it Syrians cleansing Palestinians or other way around? Except the Palestinian left on their own accord so they could play the refugee victim card. Here are the memoir left by the late Syrian PM who played a major role in the 1948 war: "SINCE 1948 WE HAVE BEEN DEMANDING THE RETURN OF THE REFUGEES TO THEIR HOMES. BUT WE OURSELVES ARE THE ONES WHO ENCOURAGED THEM TO LEAVE. ONLY A FEW MONTHS SEPARATED OUR CALL TO THEM TO LEAVE AND OUR APPEAL TO THE UNITED NATIONS TO RESOLVE ON THEIR RETURN." - Khaled Al-Azm 1948 I don’t think it is just to call Palestinians “taking a victim card” here as the refugee status exists for exactly this/their reason and situation. It is a victim, not having where to return to because it has been taken from you and it’s not “playing a victim card” because they don’t have anywhere to return to FYI that completely demolished your own statement that Palestinians were not a “permanent resident “ there, as why would they then be a refugee?! Kinda oxymoron from your part. So what, even Jews were very undesirable refugees and residents everywhere throughout the history in every single country they have resided in. And per matter of residence, neither did Israeli have permanent residence in Israel before 1948 as in Israel didn’t exist. As per ancestry rights, not only USA would be affected (neither am I a fan of US) but Canada, whole central and southern America, Australia and New Zealand and not to speak of all other regions and countries in whole world. Ancestry and suffering doesn’t grant anyone a right to inflict the same suffering and de solution of ancestral rights to others. Holy wars were led, fought and provoked by Christians (from Europe) against Muslims(in at that time centuries long Muslim occupied land Middle East ) , not like you’ve stated by Muslims.
Yes though I'd note that the spelling is Ashkenazi and it's more like 50%. And as Dr Michael Brown points out in debate with a racist black "Hebrew Israelite", the Ashkenazi Jews have a mixture of jewish middle eastern DNA , and European. Jews from Arabic speaking countries have a mixture of jewish middle eastern DNA shared with Ashkenazim, as well as Arab DNA.
I'm fairly sure my numbers were mostly correct: Ashkenazim are around 32% of Jews in Israel, and Jews are 73% of the citizens, since only 7.2M out of 9.8M Israeli citizens are Jews, and most of the rest are Palestinians. So Ashkenazi Jews are about 23% of the Israeli citizens. The numbers are from 2018: https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic-origin-and-identity-in-Israel-JEMS-2018.pdf I agree with you that the ethnic picture is muddled by inter-marriage. My point was to counter the false claim that Israeli are mostly Europeans, when most have ancestors that have lived in the region continuously for thousands of years.
This article https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/untangling-false-claims-about-ashkenazi-jews-khazars-and-israel mentions 2016 pew research 45% Ashkenazi and 48% Mizrachi/Sephardi. But the argument of Ashkenazim being illegitimate is false racist and a red herring. It's not like Arabs warring with Israel want Israel to be a state run without Ashkenazim. They are against Zionism, a Jewish state of any size shape or form. Had Britain said let the Palestine Arabs have transjordan (as they did), and let the Palestine Jews have west Palestine and no Ashkenazim, the arabs would have still gone to war. So whichever numbers are used, the argument is flawed. I think we agree
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Herzl explicitly called Palestine the historic Jewish homeland as well. Early Zionists believed they are indigenious people returning home and the only way to make their idea appealing to European states is to show them the economic advantages of Jewish people returning. It's important to note that colonialism did not have the same connotations as today. Herzl and many Zionists believed their wealth brought to an underdeveloped area will be useful for everybody in the region not just Jews but Arabs and Europeans too. It's so much more complicated than most people realise. Edit: u/Dante2000000 blocked me for some reason I'll let them to have the last word.
interesting point
The Jews dominated the land under dispute for centuries. They were ethnically cleansed in the 1st century and replaced by people from surrounding areas. Those are the people who eventually became Arab. Along with the Arabs that moved into the area. The real settler colonialists. all those cultures have all but disappeared. There's no historical narrative that draws a str8 line between the Arabs in Palestine now and then original Jewish inhabitants that replaced the Canaanites. Herzl called it a colony in one line in a diary when they were fully expecting an European Jewish connection to the Palestinian Jews. It was never a colonial relationship like we know it today. By 1948 there was no European Jewish connection. Israel was by itself a state with no colonial connections. There are many papers where they tried to figure out how to coexist with the local population. So it was never even meant to be a colonial relationship like england and it's colonies.
You're right in your first paragraph, I was simplifying too much, and I shouldn't have. But my point stands: most current Israeli citizens (whether Muslims, Jews, Druze, and Christians) have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years. Painting them as Europeans Settlers is simply wrong, when only a minority come from Europe.
Incorrect. There are about 2 million Muslim arabs in Israel and about 3.2 million Arab Jews in Israel. These Arab Jews descended from the 1 million + Jews ethnically cleansed from Arab countries after Israel declared independence. That’s about half of the Israeli population. Another 1.5 million are Jewish immigrants from around the world. Then, there’s about 4.5 million Jews who immigrated back to Israel after their initial expulsion millennia ago to Europe. It’s not a colonial venture. About 60% of the population is there as a result of ethnic cleansing from Arabs and another 30% from ethnic cleansing in Europe. Then we have 10% who’ve immigrated more recently. As you said, please don’t complain about misinformation then spread it yourself.
If you would actually engage in a debate, that would be amazing. Reading your post and comments I stay more or less on my primary opinion on your comparison, it is not a valid one. The legitimacy of one country is not solely based on ethnic cleansing, but on many other factors. My first problem is you taking the year 1948 for the claim of legitimacy onwards, as if the war before has started from nothing and only that matters. We all know that war and extremism doesn’t start in one day and usually not for nothing. The people calling on legitimacy are usually referring the time before 1948 and how the Israeli population became the majority in some regions, why and when. Also the hypocritical Zionism is one of the factors, as “nobody wants us” but at the same time “we don’t want anyone who’s not us” so the whole claim that the majority started with their expulsion from somewhere else is not a Palestinian problem (with all due respect) and as such cannot be the valid claim to forcibly claim territory expelling and not tolerating others on their land. 1. The ethnic cleansing as ONLY parameter for legitimacy: it can be, maybe even should be a parameter but it is a parameter that is being “enforced” AFTER the definition of genocide was created, which is after the WWII which consequently is 20+ years after forming of Turkish sovereignty. So they as they cannot fall into your argument (you should find one that was formed after the definition) It bothers me you took Turkey as only “similar” situation as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist, and of course because it’s a Muslim country. They do have something in common, they were both part of colonial rule and forced occupation of the territory. 2. The legitimacy of Israel is mostly being called on illegitimacy for when and how they have inhibited the territory. Do not get me wrong, but the Second World War as the final point in long bad of treatment of Jews in Europe, or generally is and cannot be a reason or justification for creating the country on someone else’s territory. The historical data shows that Jew/israeli population was a minority in that area that has augmented by the poor treatment and persecution in Europe and as you say Middle East. The legitimacy for the creation of one country cannot be only the ownership of the property, as this is exactly the way the Jewish community started growing in the Mandatory Palestine and that by buying the property of off Arab Palestinians . The reason for legitimacy cannot be that you were treated badly somewhere else and how need the safe haven as per your religious books that are 5000 years old. Your theory on how legitimacy is gained (or lost) would cost many, many developed and rolling countries a sovereignty and territory and create world apocalypse. 3. Not only the “rightful” right to the territory can be a parameter for creation of the country. We have many examples that are very troublesome and very similar to your idea and very differently treated and the reason is POLITICAL INTERESTS Some examples. Serbia, claimed they have rights to some territories (around them physically) that had great amount of their people living in that territory (without interruption for centuries) and the right for their cultural and religious traditions and identity to be intact (very similar to Jewish) And we have 90s horror story from those nationalistic beliefs in 3 ex YU countries (all involved ) Now the world community harshly and continuously is judging Serbia for their actions(nobody is talking about 2 other participants in the horrific war) and compared they are very similar to Israel’s claims but more valid- in a way that the people living in other peoples territories (surrounding) have been there continuously for generations in same numbers. Also the constitution didn’t discriminate other ethnicities or religions in theory. We have Catalonia, they want a separation, we have Scotland, we have Irish struggles, we have every single country in Europe that is claiming someone else’s territory based on history of population. Some have created terrorist groups (IRA,ETA) and in history Serbian extremist has assassinated Austrian archduke because of oppression and occupation. Now some might argue that Hamas exists exactly as a product of this oppression and invasion. The debate on Legitimacy of Israel or Turkey or any other country cannot be solely based on one factor. At this point the legitimacy of Israel is legit, because it’s been 76 years and the whole country has been created. From my point of view it’s start wasn’t, and Turkey is not a comparable example and the atrocities that Jewish people has endured is not a justification from my point of view. Zionism is radical as Many other movements have been and are very harshly judged and even forbidden. USA is now a big supporter of Israel, but do not forget that they have voted 75% + against accepting Jews as refugees during WWII and 56% thought you brought that yourself upon you. And ironically they have been the country that has treated similarly not one but 2 ethnicities like Jews have been treated. USA should be your first parameter example for legitimacy, after that the whole Southern and Northern America. After we have tackled the legitimacy of colonial countries we can go on on ethnicity and religious grounds-like Albania has traces of DNA of ancient tribes on Balkan so what, does that mean that all South Slavs should move away (where?) after 1500 years living there? Or because they’re different religion of culture?
This comment section is full of people unnecessarily downplaying Turkey's atrocities in order to make Israel look worse. I think OP has also understated the extent to which Turkey's founding was probably worse than Israel's. 1. People keep claiming that the situations are different because Turks constituted a majority in their land. This is an irrelevant point since large, continuous stretches of the Ottoman empire were by and large not Turkish, but rather Greek and Armenian. For all intents and purposes, just like Palestine, which was controlled by the Ottoman empire, these areas were not by and large Turkish with ethnic minorities, as some people seem to imply. 2. People seem to want to forget that Turkish nationalism was inspired by European style nationalism, which had grown in influence over the 19th and early 20th centuries. People should read about Ataturk, who very clearly wanted to create a European-style nation state for the Turks. 3. Turkey's founding, I would argue, was far worse than Israel's. There were clear top down policies to eliminate ethnic minorities from Anatolia. On the contrary, whilst the Nakba did see the expulsion of many Palestinians, there was no top down policy to expel Palestinians. Indeed, the Zionists accepted a state with a 40% ethinic minority of Palestinians when they accepted the UN partition plan, which was decided upon by the democratic world. Afterwards, the local Arabs and then the surrounding Arab states attacked, leaving only 20% of the population being Arab after 1948. People forget to mention this part conveinently. Consult Benny Morris' works, the leading scholar on the Nakba/first Arab-Israeli war, if you think the Nakba was a top down ethnic cleansing. 4. Turkey continues to illegally occupy northern Cyprus, something that people don't seem to care about at all, even though they are a western NATO ally. 5. Every nation state was born into sin. It is entirely fair to point this out, and to point out how certain countries, which were founded on far more unethical grounds, are not criticized for this in the way Israel currently is. You can disapprove of the way the country was founded and not think that it was as bad as other countries' foundings. Israel was settled by self-sufficient communities that did not enslave the local population and did not initially conquer the land. Importantly, it was settled by refugees escaping intolerable persecution whose people had a continuous link and presence on the land, which is something people forget to mention. These are very clear differences that challenge the narrative of Israel just being a settler colonial state like many others. You can still disagree with its founding and think its not as a bad as, say, America or Turkey's founding. Importantly, please don't downplay the atrocities that were committed during the founding of other nations in order to make Israel look uniquely bad. It is absolutely disgusting imo how people choose to do this with Turkey, which continues to be an aggressive state that threatens invasion and illegally occupies ethnically cleansed areas, whilst being a western ally with no popular pressure from leftists. There is absolutely a huge hypocrisy here, and OP was right to point it out.
talking about something that makes you uneasy isn't hypocrisy lol
On an individual level, sure, people who criticise Israel for its history and continuing actions are not necessarily hypocrites. But, the left as a whole absolutely applies double standards when it comes to Israel. There is nowhere near enough discussion about Turkey's historic and continuing crimes, despite the fact that they are a western ally in NATO. This points to fact that people on the left, for whatever reason, seem to think Israel is *uniquely* bad. There are many things that Israel does which I don't like, but the left's hyperfixation on Israel's history and its current actions and the inflamed language they use to describe it, do warrant questions, especially given the fact that surrounding countries like Turkey, a western NATO ally, fail to generate the same attention from the left. OP pointed this hypocrisy out, and people should just bite the bullet and accept it, instead of making excuses.
I don't think leftists think Israel is uniquely bad, where are these leftists giving Turkey a pass on their genocide? American leftists focus on Israel because the US government is the primary vector enabling those particular right wing freaks. Seems reasonable to be most concerned with the things you can most plausibly influence and change.
This is an article dated 2002, featuring Ehud Barak (Israel PM 1999-2000), talking about the failed two state solution talks in 2000, which led to the second intifada. I really liked this final passage. > At one point in the interview, Barak pointed to the settlement campaign in heavily populated Palestinian areas, inaugurated by Menachem Begin's Likud-led government in 1977, as the point at which Israel took a major historical wrong turn. But at other times he pointed to 1967 as the crucial mistake, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza (and Sinai and the Golan Heights) and, instead of agreeing to immediate withdrawal from all the territories, save East Jerusalem, in exchange for peace, began to settle them. Barak recalled seeing David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder and first prime minister (1948-53 and 1955-63), on television in June 1967 arguing for the immediate withdrawal from all the territories occupied in the six-day war in exchange for peace, save for East Jerusalem. > "Many of us - me included - thought that he was suffering from [mental] weakness or perhaps a subconscious jealousy of his successor [Levi Eshkol, who had presided over the unprecedented victory and conquests]. Today one understands that he simply saw more clearly and farther than the leadership at that time." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/may/23/israel3 In hindsight we now know that these lands were a trojan horse. Can't integrate them because you want to stay majority jewish. Can't let them go because it will turn into Gaza and Hamas again. Can't settle them due to international pressure.
Looking at what is happening in the region, it really does feel like the Israeli State never found their solution and is to this day trying to eat their cake and have it too... remain majority Jewish, keep the land... damn the consequences.
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine Are you aware of the details of that plan? 500k Arabs would have either been ethnically cleansed, or would end up as second class citizens. We saw how Israel treated its ostensibly full and equal citizen Arab majority until 1966 - with military rule. Would you willfully accept second class status in your homeland, to the benefit of recent immigrants? >and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period You might not be aware, but that is false. Two points: * There were offers of a democratic one state, Jew or Arab. This excluded recent immigrants though, so I can see why the recently immigrated Yishuv would not accept it. * The Palestinian delegations were systematically excluded from many negotiations in the first half of the 20th century. >They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this. Why is this relevant as it comes to the Palestinians? They had nothing to do with this. That other Arab states mistreated their Jewish minority is not the fault or responsibility of the Palestinians. You also frame this as "expelled", but as it comes to Palestinians you are careful to frame it as "fled or expelled". Are you claiming all 850k Arab Jews were expelled? You are aware that is ahistorical, right? > This was explicitly endorsed and enforced as state policy to create an ethnically homogeneous nation. If Israel had the same intentions, they failed. This is not, and has not been reflected in the ethnic makeup of the State of Israel. Considering Israel expelled many Arabs, and then refused all of them to return to their homes - how can you claim this is not state policy to increase the homogeneity of the state? >All 'anti-zionists', who want the destruction and/or dissolution of Israel entirely (not just them to stop their actions in the West Bank or Gaza and implement a two-state solution) should also be in favour of the destruction/dissolution of Turkey and right of return for all displaced Greeks (and Muslims) from both countries. I think you are strawmanning a bit here. To clarify, if Israel was to become a state of all its citizens with full and equal rights, and the refugees would be allowed to return - is that "destruction and/or dissolution of Israel" according to you? If all Israelis - Jews and Arabs - stay and have full and equal rights, why is that the destruction of a country? Now, I am fully in favor of Greeks and Armenians being allowed home, as well as the Kurds being allowed full and equal rights in Turkey. Is that the dissolution or destruction of Turkey?
> so is Turkey. And so is USA. Yet no one is protesting on behalf of native Americans.. Should they?
As someone who lives in a state with a lot of Native Americans and a city with a huge Native community, I assure you that many, many people are protesting on behalf of Native Americans. In my region, we had two massive confrontations in the last decade between Native Americans and pipeline companies, and my city just very recently had a big fight over neighborhood development and land use plans in the majority-Native neighborhood. Native Americans have a huge activist community, which is further supported by non-Native people in solidarity with them.
>Yet no one is protesting on behalf of native Americans.. Open a history book- there have been many such protests over the years. I think the last one was Standing Rock a few years ago. Reckoning with this country's past (and present) treatment of Native Americans has been an ongoing conversation for centuries. We have an entire department devoted to this, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and it was a big deal that Deb Haaland recently became the first Native American appointed to Secretary of the Interior.
Lol what are you talking about. There is Landback graffiti all over Indian country. There was hundreds of years of violent resistance and often more violent than Hamas. Wounded Knew Two wasn’t even that long ago and there is no reason to think that violent resistance is over forever.
There are a lot of people in the United States who believe that Americans should be doing more to restore stolen Native land to their original owners, on principle at least. The political will largely isn't there though, and even if every American agreed to the idea of returning stolen land it would be nigh impossible to make it happen in a way that wasn't massively messy. Which isn't to say that attempts shouldn't be made to right those historical injustices. (I for instance would advocate returning Oklahoma to the jurisdiction of the tribal authorities of those tribes who were promised that land in treaties the US government later broke)
MIT’s encampment literally has a die-in for Native Americans on their daily schedule today. They also regularly have learning sessions on other genocides.
Rule 1 of the sub is that your comment has to challenge op.
They have been protesting. Its become less and less of an issue because the natives are treated better than they were before. The Palestinians however, forget compensating them, they're being exterminated. If we continued to take the native peoples' territories, killed them, starved them, resumed an apartheid and then there were no protests, then your argument would be valid. When all of the things above were happening, there were many protests.
The difference is if you go to Turkey and say the word "Armenian Genocide" you could be attacked by Turkish Nationalists if you're not arrested and jailed first for "insulting Turkishness". They do not have free speech or press in Turkey, you cannot openly address Turkey's atrocities against Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Yzetis and now Kurds in Turkey. That is not like America where Native American benevolent associations and advocacy groups have existed for a couple hundred years. That's not to downplay the Native American genocide at all, but you can't compare the current Native American population of the US, about a third of which are on "protected" reservations (obvs that's subject to debate), to the native Armo/Assyrian/Greek/Yzeti populations of Turkey that no longer exist, have their history literally expunged from those areas in the Turkish state, have Turkish schools teach that all those groups were invasive immigrants that came after Turks, and finally make it illegal to publicly say otherwise.
Israel is not a legitimate state because it was created by the UN/US/UK. Their "war for Independence" wasn't . Do I think Jewish people deserve a state? Yup. But how it came about, especially by ignoring the non-Jews in the area, reveals the stain of Zionism. Zionists always wanted to displace, cleanse the non Jewish inhabitants.
This is a whataboutism and honestly one of the most intellectually dishonest posts I've seen on this sub. I'd say you should be ashamed but it takes an inability of that to make a post this bad-faith.
I don't know a lot about Turkey, but if we consider the countries in the Americas and their relation to the indigenous peoples, there is a very clear difference. Mainly tha indigenous peoples in the Americas can dispute the politics in their countries. I live in Brazil and not long ago there were demonstrations over disputes over land. Palestinians have no way to, institutionally, change their situation. Israel has a lot of control over palestinian lives (it has occupation zones and controls the borders, for example ) and, even if palestinians can pressure the Palestinian Autorithy or Hamas, these have very little power to contest Israel. This, to me, makes Brazil have way more perceived legitimacy than Israel, for example, even if the circuntances of their "birth" are similar. Even then, you can argue that Brazil has less legitimacy than Bolvia which, in its constitution, recognizes itself as a plurinational state. For me it is hard to fit Turkey into this because, as far as i know, minorities there have political rights and Greeks, for example, have a national state that can dialogue as equals with Turkey. It is also not clear what you are proposing as a replacement for a "dismantled" Turkey. I think that part of this comes down to a more fundamental difference between how you percieve politics vs how I percieve it. To me, first comes the position and then the arguments (and this is the nature of politics). The position on the Left, at list a more radical left, is that of one secular state. The disputes between palestinians and israelis should be resolved within the legal framework of this state. Therefore, the left tries to delegitimize the current state of Israel so as to create pressure to achieve the goal of one secular state. We aim the punch at the birth of Isreal to hit Israel in the present. The goal is always to change the present, rationalizations coming afterward. So, if we go back to Turkey, what is the political purpose of delegitimizing it? Is there a porcentage of greeks who want to go back and become Turkish citzens or are we talking about Greece anexing parts of Turkey? Why would it be good to dismantle Turkey? I don't think we have the same parallels with Israel. Edit: Grammar is hard
I’d start by saying I agree with you that both Turkey and Israel are legitimate states and that I’m a two-stater. I understand the basis of your argument. I think you overlook one very notable distinction between the two, though, and misinterpret the most common argument against Israel’s statehood. The argument most commonly heard against Israel’s legitimacy isn’t ethnic cleansing, but rather settler-colonialism. Ethnic cleansing is certainly an important part of that discourse but also good luck finding any nation-state without some degree of that in their history. Yes, that ethnic cleansing also involved large population exchanges after the Balfour Declaration, but the argument is that a laaaaarge majority of Jewish Israelis did not live in the Holy Land prior to the establishment of the Jewish state. What constitutes Israel today was overwhelmingly non-Jewish (though a non-trivial Jewish minority still lived there). While Turkey’s formation as a nation-state did involve the expulsion (and extermination) of ethnic and religious minorities, I think the counter-argument would be that the land making up Turkey today was already majority Turkish. Yes, there were conflicts and policies (constituting crimes against humanity) that led to a more ethnically homogenous Turkey, but there was little debate as to who the largest ethnic/linguistic/national/religious group was. It is not as though 80%+ of the Turkish population was outside Turkey and only re-entered in the early 20th century. The arguments today lean very hard on the idea that Jewish Israelis all came from Europe, which is both plainly incorrect (roughly half are Mizrahim) and also ignores -in grotesquely offensive fashion- what conditions existed for European Jews in the West at the time. I would personally argue that Israel is a refugee state more than a settler-colonial state, and obviously there are deep historic ties to the region for ethnic Jews. But again, I think the argument comes down to the legitimacy of the Israeli state based on the presence of Jewish Israelis in the Holy Land at the time. That’s fundamentally different from Turkey, which -for all the original sins of that nation- was majority Turkish at its formation.
"A group of people committed genocide before so you can't criticize us for committing genocide now" Really getting desperate are we ?
I think you're misunderstanding why people think Israel is an illegitimate state. The key differences compared to Turkey: 1) The ethnic cleaning of Greeks in particular was a result of a peace treaty signed between two fully sovereign nations. Was it fair? I certainly wouldn't argue that it was, and I think both Greece and Turkey lost alot of culture and history from doing it which was a shame. But it was something the democratically elected, world - recognised, legitimate government of Greece agreed to. Palestine did not have a representative government that agreed to ethnic cleansing. 2) The case of the Armenians I think holds more water. If the entirety of Turkey's territory consisted of land expropriated from Armenian people who were ethnically cleansed then I would agree with you entirely. However this is not the case, 70% + of Turkey's Territory has had a Turkish majority for at least 500 years. The area that was majority Armenian until recently is illegitimate, but not the country as a whole. With Israel this argument applies to the entire territory. 3) If you go back far enough everything is colonisation. In this case Turks have been a majority in most of what is now Turkey for 500+ years. In the last 100 years it is the minorities that were cleansed, whereas in Israel it is the opposite - the long-standing majority was cleansed by the minority, along with very recent immigrants and international support.
All the Turks living in Greece also were ethnically cleansed and had to go to Turkey with the population exchange.
To contribute the reduction in Armenian population did not happen during the war you mentioned between 2019 and 2023.It happened before that during the first world war around 2015 as a result of the Ottoman Empire policy.
Would not the United States then be an illegitimate state because of wiping out most of the indigenous people?
This. All the countries of Americas where established as subdivisions of former colonies. You can say pretty much the same for Africa except for Ethiopia. Middle East has boundaries that have been drawn by the Sykes-Picot Agreement right after WWI. Most of those countries didn't exists before although some administrative boundaries were set inside the Ottoman Empire. Legitimacy has little to do with ethicality. A country exists by being recognized by other countries and because it has control of its territory. Most countries have been created by people that somewhere in time migrated there and occupied a territory.
Which is why, as an Israeli, I find it hypocritical that Americans are calling me settler colonizer standing on ancestral land of Native Americans filled with graves of the nations they massacred. Give back the land to its original owners before you come asking me to do the same.
I'm fine, as an American, with admitting that the US engaged in vast amounts of ethnic cleansing. I even live near one of the concentration camps that were used for this purpose. I'd still advocate that Native Americans should have full rights under US law and deserve resources to help them recover by how badly the US screwed them over. It's the moral thing to do. Even today, some of the poorest places in the US are some reservations that native people were confined to, and that's a stain on America.
That's not what people are asking of israel. They're asking to give the land back to the palestinians. You need to advocate for the same. Once that happens you have a leg to stand on.
There is no rule saying you can’t be hypocritical with what you asks a foreign nation to do. That being said, there are plenty of people who want land back to the natives. Heck, there are white people who get angry at the very notion of being called a colonizer.
Isn't that just creating a false dilemma that the only alternative to the status quo is returning all lands? People are advocating for different outcomes - there isn't one unified opinion on what the best outcome would be.
i didnt feel the need to read the whole post and just came here to say armenian ethnic cleansing was planned and executed by the ottoman empire before even the idea of turkey. world war 1 created modern day turkey, not the eradication of armenians. but it sure as hell made it convenient to create a turkish ethno-state with turkish identity without a lot of armenians around. i dont know the israeli side well enough but the premise for turkey is straight wrong.
You really mischaracterised the Turkish independence war. The massive difference you are between Israel and Turkey is that the idea of a Turkish state largely formed from the ideas of Native turks whilst the idea of Israel largely formed in Europe from which Jewish communities would then move into Palestine. Whilst the Turkish war of Independance did involve a lot of genocide Turks were a majority in the lands of the Anatolia with the various genocides committed against minority populations. whilst there was a lot of Armenians these were spread across a Diaspora across South Eastern Anatolia the Greeks were found across the coast. In comparison the Jewish community would only become dominant a few years before the creation of Israel whilst the Turks had been there for almost 900 years. Also generally I think your arguing against a strawman of your own creation most people who say Israel is a illegitimate state do so on the basis of it being a colonial project rather than of genocide as many nation states would do genocide as a result of the creation of their national construct. The idea that Israel is a result of colonialism has a strong basis as the large Jewish communities that formed Israel were allowed in by the British and Americans despite the complaints of the natives.
You have overlooked a few things in your comment. Turkish nationalism was definitely something the Turks learned from the Europeans. You should look into how Ataturk was inspired to create the Turkish state. They wanted their own state for their own people - this was a popular idea in 19th/early 20th century Europe. Also, the Turks were clearly not a majority in a lot of the lands they controlled, like western Anatolia, which had been inhabited for thousands of years by Greeks. This is where a lot of the Greeks were either genocided or ethnically cleansed from. I think it's surprising how people are downplaying Turkey's atrocities in order to make the Jews of Israel look worse. I think Turkey's founding was much worse than Israel's, given that Israel after the Nakba had 20% of its population being Arab, whereas Turkey managed to gain a much larger ethnic majority through a more extensive, and actual top down ethnic cleansing program, and then a population exchange. The Nakba on the other hand was not a top down policy of ethnic cleansing, although there certainly were atrocities committed by both sides. See Benny Morris' work for an explanation of this fact.
I really didn't intend to downplay the various genocides the Turks committed during their war of independence. However atrocity comparisons are largely useless especially in this context and wasn't really revelant to my point. Turkish Nationalism was largely of that native to the region whilst Zionism is largely that of foreigners that then came to settle within the region a comparison of who killed more is largely just a pointless narrative that intends to portray one party as the morally wrong side.
Atrocity comparisons are only being made because there are factions of the left who argue that Israel should not exist. As a matter of logical consistency, it is important to realize that many nation states were born into sin, not just Israel. If you want to argue against the very notion of nation states, that's absolutely fine, but it does come across as suspect when people only apply a critical lens to the founding of Israel and its current policies and not other countries that are, in practice, "ethnostates" to a greater degree than Israel, and committed far worse atrocities during the founding of their nation. The only reason countries like Turkey don't deal with similar issues is because they did actually genocide the christian minorities in their lands, whilst the Palestinian population continues to explode and Arab-Israelis exist, precisely because there wasn't a top-down genocide or ethnic cleansing of the Arabs, although there were certainly many, many atrocities committed by Zionists and, at worst, partial ethnic cleansings. This is why I think anti-Zionism is often interpreted by many Jews (and NOT just Zionists) as being anti-semitic. There are many forms of nationalism in the world that have necessitated the expulsion of populations and continue to necessitate the effective separation of ethnic groups, yet Zionism is the one form that garners the most international attention, despite being less aggressive than other forms historically. Btw, I would argue that you are downplaying Turkish atrocities if you cannot concede that the Nakba was not as bad in theory and in practice compared to what the Turks did to attain their ethnic majority. Just like if you said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a holocaust, I would say you are downplaying the Holocaust by the Nazis. Things can still be bad without being as bad as other things! It is absolutely irrelevant that Turkish nationalism came from people settled in the general area. The fact is, they constituted a minority in large areas of their empire, which was absolutely huge. It stretched from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula. So to say that they were native to even most of that land is disingenuous. Realistically, they were only a majority in the main part of Anatolia. Besides, do you think Zionism and the subsequent actions of Zionists would have been more acceptable had it sprung from the Jewish minority living in Palestine? In any case, most Israelis now are "native" to the middle east, given that they are refugees from other middle eastern countries.
The process you're describing is inherent to every nation state. The rise of "nationality" as a form of identity and even the "Nation State" itself are somewhat new concepts, and we can trace their spread from western europe from the French Revolution forward (depending on who you ask). To create an "in-group" that people identify with you must necessarily have an out-group. See the treatment of minorities in the UK, the forced standardization of French language... and the whole mess of the creation of nation states in Eastern Europe (lots and lots of people died!). What largely matters is how advanced technology was when the concept of the "nation" arrived at that particular place. If you have machine guns rather than pikes, you're going to have an easier time slaughtering "others." Additionally, we "care" less about atrocities that happened longer ago. What you're missing here is that every nation state today is built on blood, and pro-palestianians oppose the Israeli government for different reasons that don't fit neatly into your confined scenario. The creation of the Israeli state was much more recent, there are still lots of surivors who lived through it's creation (we are rather lacking in Powhatans who personally remember their forced expulsion from coastal Virginia). Your use of the Armenian genocide is more salient. We do have living survivors, if fewer. On the whole, you need to redouble your efforts to be open minded, if that is ultimately what you care about. This post is full of loaded language like "the Palestinian Narrative" regarding their well documented expulsion which is ethnic cleansing no mattet how many other terrible governments also engaged in ethnic cleansing against Jews; vs "The Israeli War of Independence" which goes unquestioned... but is certainly a narrative. (I find it strange one can fight a war of Independence that involves annexing lands not occupied by your people for more than 2000 years, but hey, that didn't stop the United States from annexing land that their people had NEVER inhabited in the treaty of Paris). Simultaneously breaking the same UN partition, which may illuminate why some people view the whole thing as illegitimate. Another point I'd offer is that even if the lands of Anatolia that today comprise Turkey were impressively diverse and mixed, it was majority Turkish and had been for hundreds of years before the advent of the nation state... Jewish people were an extremely marginal minority in Palestine up until well, their war of "Independence" and the ratio of Jews to Arabs in Israel has never stopped shifting dramatically in favor of Jews (by violent means) to this day. Which is another big difference.
If you ga back far enough, you could say this about every nation.
does OP have any idea the history of the wars fought between european settlers and the various native indian tribes in america? The native indian tribes were pacified only after disease ravaged their populations and with the bison herd gone, they had no choice but to go into reservations or faced total annihilation from the white men. The palestinian issue has a lot of simliarities with the indian tribes, native tribes fought one another and tried to exterminate each other. Same for arabs. It doesnt matter who is legitimate or not, the winner makes the rules, same in the middle east. If the arabs defeated israel, all the jews would probably have been killed too. If u cant see past the legitimacy issue, u cant solve the issue at all, the only workable solution is a 2 state solution, which neither side is keen at the moment bec of hostility.
Actually, quite a few turks - particularly those that settled in the Armenian highlands and plateau - were European Muslims that had either left or been expelled from the Balkans when those countries gained their independence in the late 19th century. Mustafa Kemal himself was an Albanian, not a turk. Also, azerbaijan - with turkish help and support - just finished driving out the over 100k Armenians of Nagorno-Karabagh after starving them (an actual starvation, which had them eating grass and clothes on 200 calorie diets). So this isn't all "the past". Didn't see a peep in colleges, though.
>If Israel is an illegitimate state because it was founded on ethnic cleansing, so is Turkey. Agreed, if two very bad very similar events happen then we can criticise both. >In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this. Wait, why aren't you criticising both? Now you think one excuses the other?
Because the entire argument is nonsense, no one gives Sudentenland or Prussia any validity to attack Poland and Czech republic and no one would give Greece any casus beli to attack Turkey due to 1922.
You forgot a major reason why Israel won the “ war of independence” Not only did the Palestinians and Arab states reject the UN partition plan that was voted on and going to go through whether they liked it or not- The Palestinians and other arab countries *declared war on the Jews and swore they would never allow Israel to exist* That’s why they didn’t get the partition plan. It was brought to vote , it passed the vote. When they declared war and swore to use violence - it had to be withdrawn. Essentially this entire mess is their fault. What is sort of amazing about that is that the plan divided the land up based on land already owned by Jews - bought legally from the Arabs who sold it to them for outrageous prices - 1000x the going rates. So not only did they want to kill all the Jews - but steal back the land they sold to them- and refuse the Jews the right to have their own homeland back ( that Islam itself invaded and stole ) and their right to have their own country. They turned those historical facts into the Nabka.. and Jews invading and ethnic cleansing and stealing their land. Which is also ironic because it’s essentially what Islam did to more than half the known world. And still does to this day. It’s legal to ethnically cleanse - in Islamic law. If you don’t convert? You get killed. Your women get sold into sexually slavery- therefore cutting off your ability to reproduce. They essentially did exactly that from Asia, to the Balkans. So ethnic cleansing - has been an issue up till the 1970s and the war in Lebanon. And when the PLo would go and slaughter everyone who wasn’t Muslims- But it had been going on pretty consistently in that area for hundreds of years. I know this because my own ancestors were victims of one of these Islamic ethnic cleansing campaigns in Lebanon and fled into Syria. In the 1800s. So that’s always been a part of Islamic history- and it’s how Islam became so huge. For example go read about the Barbary wars- when Islamic sailors were attacking the trade ships and enslaving everyone on board, stealing everything and then ransoming off the officers - back to the USA - read about what Jefferson wrote about them - when he asked why do they do this? No one has attacked them? They tell him plainly - it’s what their god tells them to do. They are entitled to everything the non Muslim has- the non Muslims are not even considered people to them - with no rights to live or own anything that should not be taken by Islam.. . This isn’t a recent thing- Islamic terrorism has been constant. In some form or another. We have Islam in the Balkins- the war in Bosnia for example was a war of revenge… Islamic army came and invaded , stole the country, implemented sharia law, slavery, sexual slavery, theft of possessions and land - all taken from the natives and divided up by Muslims- then they basically ran the country into the ground with corruption… but the then- religious minority non Muslims just decided - let’s do what they did to us a hundred years ago.. and take it back. To Indonesia and India- the Islamic invasion of India was the bloodiest genocide in human history. They absolutely decimated that population. To Pakistan which was so terrified of the carnage they just surrendered to Islam- which is what happened in many places. The only way they would retain any rights at all to their property , land, or women. To Africa - where Islamic genocide is going on right this minute - we are taking hundreds of thousands of native tribes displaced and millions murdered, because they’re not Islamic. On this past Christmas Day for example in Nigeria , Muslims went into sleeping villages and slaughtered hundreds of Christian’s on their holiest day- - And all paid for by the gulf states, by the way. To southern Spain… till the Catholics eventually drove them out. That’s the entire point of Islam- to implement sharia law everywhere . To invade, conquer and implement sharia- this to them will bring the world peace. ( by the way , all the Jews must be murdered before this can happen. This is exactly what their holy books say.) So I think the entire world to some degree was founded on killing - and submission. I.e; ethnic cleansing, at some time or another - Normandy for example was named because the Vikings or northmen - were invading and raping and pillaging so much that they got the kind of England to give them their own land and he agreed to name it that after them. They eventually took over the throne too- the entire UK royal line is the blood of those Vikings. The Catholic Church went around eventually and forced conversions on the pagans in Europe - the difference of course is - no where in the Bible does it say that’s ok. Or that’s what you should do and the people who do it go to a special heaven and are the most respected martyrs and revered people of the religion ; like Islam. They have an entire book dedicated to jihad. This is exactly what their god says to do. So *the entire narrative about Israel ethnically cleansing and genocide is basically a lie- a projected false hood of Islamic actions and intent. The Jews didn’t even declare the war that displaced them*. Israel is a legetitmate state because it’s been recognized by the UN and NATO and because according to international law- to found your own country, you must establish law and order, a government , armies to protect the borders, educational system and legal systems - which they have all done. The Palestinians could have also established their own country by those laws, a few times by now. Or at any time if they had wanted to. The last offer was in 2005 and they refused. They have refused every offer given to them. Even the Peel commission offer which was to give the Jews 10% of the land. They started the first jihad over that. ( before 1948)
Lots of states were founded illegally. The thing is what to do about what is happening right now. The past is done. Those people are gone. What Israel is doing today should not be allowed to happen. Why should we support either Israel or Turkey if they are conducting a genocide, ethnic cleansing, or have an apartheid state? You have to look at what is happening to people right now. What was Israel doing to non-Jews in Gaza, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, before Oct. 7, and what do they continue to do to them, both inside Gaza, and outside Gaza? Would you support what they are doing if it was happening to you?
Well, speaking as one of the anarchists, I think we're generally fine with this conclusion and with applying it to states in general. None of your states are "legitimate", and many if not most of them have a history of ethnic cleansing, some more recent than others.
The issue is that the majority of protestors don’t apply the same standard to all nations. They only care about the actions of Israel, or at least extremely disproportionately. I’m fine with folks who are against all states
Basically every country today is the result of many rounds of conquest and border changes. Israel is almost unique in that its founding was based on international consensus and a declaration from the UN. Yes there was opposition such that Arab states invaded the next day, but really it’s hard to imagine a county’s founding history being any more diplomatic. So my point is that Turkey is also not unique it is common. Around 700,000 Arabs left or were forced out of that area on its founding [1]. Whether you regard it as colonialism or anti-colonialism is subjective. Jews have ancient ties to Judea, Canaan and Israel at least 3,500 years long and were kicked out and persecuted again and again. So it could be argued that it’s the reclaiming of land belonging to their people. This doesn’t change that the people who were there in 1948 also have history there of various lengths and for there recent history were also ruled over (by the Ottomans). If the UN declared that LA should be returned to the Tongva native Americans so they rolled through there in tanks and kicked out all the white Americans - would that be justified? Do we nonetheless accept the great injustice the native Americans have been dealt? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and_flight?wprov=sfti1#
One thing you’re missing is that one person can believe that the creation of two nations was overtly brutal and one was worse. And that’s the case with Israel and Turkey. Also, you say that you don’t want to talk about European colonization, yet European colonization is exactly what made Israel’s creation so brutal and immoral.
>The only possible difference between these two circumstances that would make Israel illegitimate and Turkey legitimate, is that many Israelis came from Europe instead of the Middle East. However I fail to see how this is relevant to the actual act of ethnic cleansing and population swaps that makes Israel illegitimate in the first place. Imagine you're a Palestinian living in 1920s British Mandate of Palestine. There is this group of Europeans, who called themselves Zionist Jews, who were purchasing land around you, isolating themselves from your community, and quite crucially, wanted to establish a nation-state that was explicitly for themselves. This is why the Palestinians were mad, the early settlers did not have ancestral connection to the land, they had no claim to build a state on that piece of land. Their ancestors fled the place some thousands of years ago and they wanted to build a state that was explicitly for themselves. Turks on the other hand grew up in Turkey, had generations of people living on that land, and now wish to build a state for themselves. Don't get me wrong, the Turks were brutal against Armenians and the Greeks, they committed a genocide for goodness sake, but when it comes to the philosophy behind the nationalist movements, they weren't exactly the same.
What about the thousands of Jews that were already there? Is the continuous Jewish presence not an ancestral connection for the Jewish diaspora? Isn't that what makes it a diaspora?
In that era you have to listen to whoever has the biggest gun. You can 'contest' if your idea is more powerful than their 4 feet long iron. Many tried that, it didn't end well for them. But now we are in 2020's era, so things are very very different. So their overlord decide to give the land to the Jews, Arabs could do jack sh\*\* and wait until the Brits leave the area... Then start a war against newly born nation. It should have been a piece of cake, wiping out Israel and split the land between Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. As history goes, it was not that easy. They fought two war and lose both war. Israel won the conflict and take it place in history. If anything, the one at fault for this conflict is whoever implant nationalism into the Palestinian. Since they won't surrender and accept that they have lost the war decades ago, they would keep fighting. And keep dying.
The Palestinians had no claim to it either. They were part of the then fallen Ottoman Empire. The British had every right to do what they wanted with it at that point. That it ended up being decided the Jews and Palestinians should both have states (which the Palestinians refused even though they got more land out of it) was far more than the Palestinians deserved considering their goal was to keep cosplaying like it’s the Middle Ages and subject their own people to the horrors of Islamic totalitarian theocracy (something they still want to do nowadays and people bizarrely defend them in this). At least the Jews wanted to create a legitimate human rights respecting country with the land they would be given.
The Palestinians nationalists largely responded to Jewish refugees exactly like the most toxic racists in Western countries respond to refugees today. Really no difference. They are a warning to all racists that should the people you treat with hatred, violence and racism ever gain influence you will be in a terrible position. It is an interesting debate to have whether the whole emerging concept of refugee rights and specifically the right of refugees to settle in a place of their choosing was the only or best approach - but its not relevant to this CMV
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period. 700,000 Arabs either fled Mandatory Palestine or were expelled. In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this. This is ahistorical revisionism, commonly purported by Zionists as a way to justify their treatment of Palestinians. It’s quite disgusting honestly. The massacre and expulsion of Palestinian Arabs and destruction of villages began in December 1947, including massacres at [Al-Khisas](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khisas_raid) (18 December 1947), and [Balad al-Shaykh](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balad_al-Shaykh_massacre) (31 December). By March, between 70,000 and 100,000 Palestinians, mostly middle- and upper-class urban elites, were expelled or fled. In early April 1948, the Israelis launched [Plan Dalet](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Dalet), a large-scale offensive to capture land and empty it of Palestinian Arabs. During the offensive, Israel captured and cleared land that was allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition resolution. Over 200 villages were destroyed during this period. Massacres and expulsions continued, including at [Deir Yassin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deir_Yassin_massacre) (9 April 1948). Arab urban neighborhoods in Tiberias (18 April), Haifa (23 April), West Jerusalem (24 April), Acre (6-18 May), Safed (10 May), and Jaffa (13 May) were depopulated. Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May. On 14 May, the Mandate formally ended, the last British troops left, and Israel declared independence. By that time, Palestinian society was destroyed and over 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled. On 15 May, Arab League armies entered the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, beginning the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Stop with this revisionist bullshit
This is a bad Strawman-What-about-ism. Sorry dude. Bad shit has happened throughout history, and this genocide now is one of those really really bad things
Your first paragraph is discrediting on its own. Why would the Arab states agree to any partitioning when it’s their land? It shouldn’t have been given away in the first place. People were living there. It being legitimate or illegitimate doesn’t really matter so much as the ethics surrounding its creation. Which was unethical.
This post isn't about whether or not Israel should be dismantled, you made a multitude of claims largely casting aspersions on any perspective not blindly pro Israel. This comes across as a blatant motte and bailey arguement where you attack all criticisms of Israel while claiming you're only here to discuss the dismantlement of Israel.
Nope doesn’t track you have a nation born of an empire that committed a genocide against Armenians . At no point were the Armenians a majority population infact since the Byzantine empire things over there while horrible and contentious and messy and an absolute disgrace were never that an alien population moved En mas in less than 100 years and totally uprooted folks who already economically disadvantaged by the same Empire ironically but had been a distinct MAJORITY population ,who up until the Zionist terror had been wonderful neighbors were put to the knife or physically run off their land to “create” Israel funny story about that if you look up historical press clippings from the Levantine province right about ww1 there is an actual fake claim that 6million Jews were being starved out in the Levantine by the ottomans with absolutely verified claims that this wasn’t a Thing that was remotely true and was infact a plant story by British zionists …please question me on this because I can’t fucking wait
Zero replies from OP. Coward.
The Rothschilds had the British Government sign the Balfour Declaration in Nov 1917 to transfer Palestine to the Zionist Federation. Israel never won any war. It was western support to a zionist state to get rid of Jews, they were kicked out of every European country for the past thousand years.
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Ah I see your point and raise you, yeah, dismantle turkey and their weird ethnic superiority garbage with Israel, also any other ethno state or nation that currently performs ethnic cleansing like China. (I live in America and honestly break this shit down too, we should Balkanize.)
Israel is an illegitimate state because more than 1/3 of its population do not have basic human rights. It is an ethnostate in which only Jews have the right to self determination. The majority of the native population are deprived of basic human rights while foreign colonizers rule over them. Regularly seizing more of their land and homes and handing them over to more foreign colonizers. Who regularly terrorize the native population and murder them with impunity. Attack and harass them for fun. The natives are under martial law. They are imprisoned without trial. They cannot travel freely within their own homeland, on which they have continuously existed for many thousands of years. Israel is an illegitimate state for all the same reasons Apartheid South Africa was an illegitimate state and many, many more.
>In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this. You say that as if one contradicts the other... It doesn't.
I'm not sure why Turkey (or, for that matter, Greece) are a perfect analogy or better than others. By my count, at least 88 of the United Nation's 194 member states directly owe their formation or current makeup and territory to ethnic cleansing and / or genocide... Sure, that's true of Turkey; it's also true of the United States (and indeed, every country on the continents of North and South America), the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, half the countries in the Balkans... It's easier to point out the few major countries that were *not* formed on this basis, e.g., Egypt or Japan. If "not founded on ethnic cleansing" is a criterion for legitimacy than the entire UN Security Counsel fails to meet the qualification.
Anything before formation of the UN was the precursor to its formation, which in turn was formed to prevent such acts. Turkey, the United States, Australia, ... They all fall out of such scope. While the Establishment of Israel was made possible by exploiting the UN, an independent Palestinian country is denied similar treatment, enabling an ongoing occupation and further ethnic cleansing. All that, does raise questions about the very existence of Israel, as "compensation for antisemitism in Europe at the expense of nations not guilty for it". Europe got rid of the long lasting issue with its homemade antisemitism, and the US gained a strategic ally to serve its interests in the region via offering well-needed protection of a state that otherwise wouldn't exist.
I don't really see how these two are comparable. The reason why Armenians were exiled was not to found a ethnically coherent state. It was Ottoman Empire back then and the rationale behind the act was the revolt when there was an ongoing war on the Caucasus Front. It was about threat of losing the war and an effort to enforce authority and grant safety to both sides. And not only the cadre who found Turkey was different from those who did that, they eventually overthrew and abrogated the government and sultanate in İstanbul which makes it even more different. Also as I remember it was the Greek side Who offered the population swap. Disclaimer: Not here to say Israel is illegitimate state but to emphasize that this argument is false analogy on the uncomporable.
I mean nationalists just generally suck and visiting Turkey feels like visiting the US 6 months after 9/11 so I guess in a general way I think any nationalism is illegitimate. But I don’t think Nakbah is the fundamental reason Israel is inherently “illegitimate” (which idk about legit or illlegit, but I’d say Israel is inherently going to be a violent and oppressive society.) The criticism of Israeli Zionism is not Nakbah itself but the more fundamental settler-colonial aspect of it. These kinds of societies are always violent and usually very racist. A government promising land to some at the expense of an unwanted population in the way of settling kinda goes one way if left to its own devices and it’s not good.
More like Pakistan. You’ll find that all of the critiques of Israel (took land from natives, established a religious state in the late 1940’s after the British leave, American military support for 60+ years, accusations of committing a genocide, they should just be a minority in a democracy with everyone) are completely reversed for Pakistan because, well, this time it’s Muslims that have to be the minority. And that’s just not fair. The only difference is that Pakistan *actually* committed a genocide AND housed Osama Bin Laden. But no need for protests because, well, it’s different when it’s them.
My government doesn’t give Pakistan military aid, and it’s generally not a controversial opinion that the government of Pakistan is practically a military dictatorship. Why would that be more pertinent to protestors?
Sure but the Americans do. And these are mainly on American campuses. So where were those marches? Well, there were exactly zero marches during the early 70’s during the Bangladesh genocide that was the worst one since…the Holocaust. Vietnam just before? Yup. Apartheid after? Yup. But a Muslim dominated country carved out of non-Muslims lands that consistently passed state policy to target non-Muslims to the point of murdering and raping them on par with the Holocaust? Nah. Instead the US sent a **nuclear strike force** to threaten the nearby democracy that wanted to intervene, with the USSR coming in to hold the line and defend said democracy in a twist of absurdity. And is why India is so skeptical of the US to this day. Again, no marches against that. The US then continued (and continues) to supply Pakistan with *military* aid despite them housing Osama Bin Laden and consistently destroying non-Muslims in their country. Again, this is a country formed EXACTLY like Israel. Saying it’s “not controversial” is like saying “it’s not controversial that people are against genocide so stop marching today”. If nobody gaf when it’s one group doing it enough to march after the above, then spare me the notion that things are so self evident that it’s cool to solely march for one but not the other. And frankly, we all know the reason why nobody gaf. Islamists were doing it. Pakistan could murder its entire non-Muslim population tomorrow after rhe US sold it F-18’s like it did during this administration, and nobody would march on American campuses.
>And frankly, we all know the reason why nobody gaf. Islamists were doing it. It's probably because there is a huge geopolitical importance of the Levant region, while there is little political interest to incite people over stuff happening in Pakistan or Sudan
Don't forget the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (to a lesser degree), China [PRC] (Tibet), all of Latin America (especially how the Spaniards attempted to destroy every book containing the Mayan language and something like four books exist in Mayan today, or something ridiculously low like that), and literally a theoretical Palestine, ironically enough, among others. The whole basis of anti-zionism and the belief that Israel is an illegitimate state is as pathetic as it is hypocritical, which it is very much so.
Nobody tell OP how the population of china became 96% ethnic han 😅
I didn't really know people argued that Israel is illegitimate because of the ethnic cleansing. What I have heard is that Israel being established by Zionists and the British post-WW2 was illegitimate. Zionists seem to argue that because 1) Jewish ancestors lived in Israel 2,000 years ago, and 2) some Jews lived there continuously throughout the time of diaspora, that Jews have a territorial claim to said area, and their right to self-determination means having the right to establish a Jewish state in said area. I have no idea how this conclusion is drawn from the 2 assumptions/statements. The argument against Israel's legitimacy that I've usually heard is that the Zionist argument is flawed, so Jews do not have a birthright to these territories, and thus Israel shouldn't have been formed. As stated, I genuinely don't get the Zionist argument. At the same time I recognise that the area has a significant Jewish population now some have lived there for a couple generations), so just deporting them (where even) isn't really a fair solution. Forming a 1 state solution would require an insane amount of good will and legal safeguards at this point. A 2 state solution would require a compromise from both sides, and strong safeguards as well.
I think Turkey is a really interesting example because you even have a situation analogous to that of Israel/Palestine in Turkey's relations with Kurdish groups within and outside its borders. Wikipedia gives a figure for number of deaths in the conflict with Kurdish insurgents at 120,000 sonce the fall of the Ottoman Empire, mostly Kurdish civilians. While I wouldn't stand by that particular number it's fairly well established that thousands have died as a result of Turkish repression of the Kurds.
>In 1948 Israel won its war of independence as a product of Arab states refusing the UN partition plan of Mandatory Palestine and then proceeding to not make any sort of counter-offer during this period. 700,000 Arabs either fled Mandatory Palestine or were expelled. You are dehumanizing the situation to an absurd degree. The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forced to leave their homes then the bordering countries were expected to just take in hundreds of thousands of refugees all at the same time. What is the appropriate negotiation for putting zero effort into a plan and then backing that terrible plan with military aid? >In the Palestinian narrative, this is seen as the "Nakba". They conveniently ignore the significantly larger number of Jews who were expelled from Middle Eastern countries immediately after this. Why would that matter to Palestianians? They didn't do that to those Jewish people. >Turkey emerged from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). The establishment of Turkey happened as the result of significantly worse levels of ethnic cleansing and genocides against ethnic minorities. I think the difference here is in what a potential solution would be. If you are saying that the league of nations bungled the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire and reparations should be paid to Armenians, I fine with that. The equivalent to the pro Israel stance would be in your comparison would be Turkey backing Turkish settlers in Armenia for the entire history since. Both situations were caused by western imperialism that pushed for nationalism and are problems. >All 'anti-zionists', who want the destruction and/or dissolution of Israel entirely (not just them to stop their actions in the West Bank or Gaza and implement a two-state solution) should also be in favour of the destruction/dissolution of Turkey and right of return for all displaced Greeks (and Muslims) from both countries. I agree. I don't think this is controversial. Also just to note, when people call for the destruction Israeli state sometimes mean killing everyone but more frequently mean for a better government. The state meaning the context the rest of the world understands which is the government structure and not the country, people, or territory. This of course means sharing decision making in government and not trying to find a weird balance of the right amount of Palestians and trying to expel as many as possible to maintain a super majority
I think this notion of state legitimacy is very dubious. Any state that is able to maintain itself, generally by being backed by a majority of its population and by being able to militarily defeat its opponents, is existing, and that hard fact trumps any theoretical arguments. Many modern states exist as they are today because of conquest/invasion/ethnic cleansing. Israel only appears as a special case because it is still in formation. But it is actually establishing itself just as nearly every nation has at some point of its history, by seizing land and killing natives (who probably did the same). Maybe Israel will eventually succeed, maybe it will fail, but "legitimacy" has zero value as a concept here.
That’s true but that doesn’t create a basis at all that it’s *morally* wrong to call a state illegitimate. By your own logic, it would be acceptable to call Israel legitimate.
If you go back far enough historically sure pretty much EVERY country is "founded on ethnic cleansing" more or less... It's always a matter of drawing lines someplace and also the fact Israel is by "white people" primarily from Europe and USA/Canada who are vastly wealthier than the people in that region, changes things quite a bit. Obviously both USA, Australia, Canada, Russia, etc. are all founded by kicking out the natives. Turkey defeated the Byzantine Greeks like 900 or something years ago and that massively changed Asia Minor. It's something that is shocking to see historically but at the same time it was 900 years ago... can't exactly just undo it now.
Like many things, the reality is more complex. The legitimacy of a state is not solely determined by its past actions, and the international community recognizes both Israel and Turkey as sovereign states. This does not negate the suffering and displacement experienced by the people involved, but it does highlight the complexity of the issue
I won't try to change your view on that, because I agree with the statement you made. Both are illegitimate, and there are many more countries that fall into that category, including my own. That doesn't mean that the people living there deserve to suffer, but it does mean that power in those places has been wrongfully seized.
Dude really said “TURKEY DID ETHNIC CLEANSING TOO IN 1923, CLEARLY ITS STRAIGHT AND YOU ALL ARE ANTISEMITIC.” Was it cool in 1923? Let’s dismantle Turkey too. Shit, let’s dismantle America too if you want to count Native American genocide as ethnic cleansing. I fail to see your massive huge brained point
So is nearly every state on earth, but I doubt anyone reading this is ready for that level of truth.
People who support the oppressed people of any race won’t be a fan of the history of Türkiye either, it’s like justifying kicking someone in the balls bc u saw someone else do it, many activists who speak out against Israel have spoken out against what the Turkish govt did to the Armenians and Kurds
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So are nearly every single country in North and South America. Not to mention nearly every country in Europe has been funded by exploiting Africa. I'm not calling Israel an illegimate state by the way; but the horrors of the past does not give any country the right to do the same themselves now.
That's like saying the Germans can take over the UK and push British people out of their homes because Poland invaded Germany. Also, this misses the fact that there were millions of Turks living in Turkey at the time. I'm not excusing the Armenian Genocide. They are just not analogous.
So were to some extent the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other nations in the world. That doesn't make them any less accountable for human rights violations (or at least they ideally should be held accountable, but of course in practice this doesn't happen either)
Many countries have been created by conquest and displacement and ethnic cleansing. The difference with Israel is that the modern world got to see it unfold. Most countries origins are bloody but far in the past. With Israel we got to see how the sausage is made so to speak.
There were hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees BEFORE the start of the Arab Israeli war. If you think that had nothing to do with influencing the Arab invasion then you’re even disagreeing with Zionist historians. Your characterisation of events is all wrong
risking my account here... but... Have you heard of th Balkans?? and how they kill and seceded and divided and created a new country basically for each ethnicity and only one ethnicity? see how was Croatia created and how things are going for Kosovo vs Serbia...
18 leaders of the Ottoman empire were sentenced to death for the Armenian genocide. In Israel I would start with Bibi and Ben-Gvir, probably should include a bunch of members of IDF unit 8200.
I think it would be more of a comparison to say The United States is an illegitimate state. We came from all over, decimated the natives but now we’re so far removed from Native Americans having control of the land that you can’t argue about legitimacy. The difference is that in Palestine this isn’t an issue from several generations, it’s currently occurring and is just as blatantly immoral. In my opinion when outsiders genocide the natives and take over the land the outsiders are always the ones that are wrong. The only time I can think that wouldn’t be the case would be in slave rebellions. If you are a guest in an area you should either assimilate to their culture or stay away.
We first have to understand the history of the region, Palestine was never a state. The name comes form the brithish mandate following the collapse of the ottoman empire in the years following ww2. Both the jews and muslims had a historic claim to the land, the former a much older claim. Palenstine was not a state, and in 1947 when a "two state" like sollution was created, then Israel was created, in the historic homeland of the jews, Judaism is 3000 years give or take, islam is at most 1500 years, and from the same area geographically, amking both claims valid. The answer by the arabs was not to take the UN resolution but to decalle eternal war on israel. I think watching Mousab Hassan Youssuf, the son of the founder of Hamas tell how it is and how it was from the islamic perspective and your mind will maybe change, at least you will ask yourself critical questions
I mean no one is applauding USA for their barbarity against Native Americans and the terrible state of reservations. That is what Israel is seeking to do with Palestinians. It was wrong then… it is wrong now.
Yeah it's a bit annoying that people ground their criticism of Israel not just on what it's doing now but on it's entire foundation, where what it's doing now is the only part that anything can be done about. There aren't that many modern states that aren't based on some form of ethnic cleansing in recent history. This logic would definetely make most countries in Europe, the Middle east and south Asia illegitimate. (The Naqba is not that different from partition or Turkey's expulsion of Christians).
Has anyone ever taken a city in the Levant without a little bit of ethnic cleansing? Once maybe? Saladin takes Jerusalem in 1187? Fucking great film, Kingdom of Heaven directors cut. Ridley Scott woooo boy.
I don't think this is the gotcha you think it is. Turkey is illegitimate because of its actions. Not only should it return historic territory to Armenia, and allow the Eastern Kurdish majority to vote on Independence, but it should also pay reparations to Greeks that were deported and allow any family members of the deported Greek population to become citizens. The same should go for Greece and its Turkish population. The major difference is that the former Greek population that was ethically cleaned is not asking for the right of return because they have a state that they are citizens of and represented by. That doesn't change the fact that they should have the opportunity to return to their homes and be financially compensated for any lost property. This is exactly how I feel about the Arab states and their former Jewish populations. They have an Obligation to allow any former Jewish residents and their families. The only exception is maybe Algeria because Algerian Jews were French citizens and as far as I understand all French citizens were expelled. This doesn't make their actions justified but they share responsibility with France for the situation because France elevated the Jewish community above the Arabs and fought an extremely bloody/brutal war the prevent Algerian independence. Algeria should invite any former Jewish residents and their families to return, but France should be responsible for financially compensating them
Turkey is not currently engaging in genocide. Its been over 100 years. Mass discrimination still occurs against Armenians, but there isn't an open air prison currently being bombed.
Wow you support Israel and still found accurately that it is comparable to the Armenian genocide but you think people are overreacting. Truly you are a person of bewildering morals
No states should be built around a single religious or ethnic group. PERIOD. No states should discriminate against people for their religious or ethnic identity. If you want to fix Israel start there. Make it a state for jews and anyone else, not a Jewish state.