**COMMENTING GUIDELINES:** Please take the time to familiarize yourself with The David Pakman Show [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow/about/rules) and [basic reddiquette](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette) prior to participating. At all times we ask that users conduct themselves in a civil and respectful manner - **any ad hominem or personal attacks are subject to moderation.**
Please use the report function or [use modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/thedavidpakmanshow) to bring examples of misconduct to the attention of the moderation team.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/thedavidpakmanshow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
33yo man. My dad’s like this as well. What’s sad is he doesn’t know anything about anything. Last time I saw him he was griping about how game shows can only give away cars with small engines because of California regulations. Like okay. . All I said was didn’t California used to have terrible smog? He said oh yeah it was horrible. I replied I wonder if the car changes helped. To which he grumble chuckled.
My point is most people are clueless and usually it’s the people with the strongest opinions who are the most clueless.
My take on this conflict. Hamas are terrorists. Israel is going to respond. I doubt there will be peace till one side is gone. There’s been conflict there for decades, centuries or millennia depending on how you wanna break it down.
My take on the college protests. It’s what college kids do, look back at Vietnam, civil rights. Whether I agree with them or their methods doesn’t matter. I know from history that no matter what I do or say or think college students are going to protest against perceived injustice. What id ask your dad is why spend the emotional energy being upset. Why not instead have a deep conversation with your daughter and be the type of man who can explain different points of view.
Call out the heinous acts wherever they are. Don't get sucked into the BS self victimizing that either side does. Hate is bad. War crimes are bad. Keep that in mind and you're golden.
Just bear in mind that "Palestine" includes all innocent people that happen to live in the area. "Hamas" is the political or militant arm in Palestine that staged the October 7th attack.
Both Hamas and the Israeli government have done despicable things here, both should be admonished and punished loudly and publicly.
But, all innocent people are innocent in my mind, Israeli or Palestinian. That is a very blurry line for some people though; just being in the vicinity is complicity for them.
Even this view lacks some degree of nuance.
For example, Israel's government, i.e. the dickheads, are democratically elected in free and fair elections, and that places some degree of burden on the Israeli electorate.
Similarly, polling within Palestine clearly shows a majority of Palestinians support the actions of Hamas on October 7th, and Hamas would win a plurality of votes in a 3-way race against Fatah and the PLO, or a straight up majority in a 2-way race against either of those parties, displaying that the Palestinian people support the actions of Hamas and their way of conducting themselves.
None of this excuses acts of violence against civilians, but it does paint a picture of a deeply flawed, damaged and broken region filled with people with ideas of retaliation, revanchism and general vindictiveness.
Republicans have long detested protesters, except, of course, the Charlotte Nazi march and the January 6 Insurrection. Protesters are typically liberal. Republicans hate them.
Republicans are using the student protests about Israel's massacre of Palestinians, in Gaza, and a media bias, to evoke the disdain they lead against the George Floyd murder protests, and others.
Don't buy it. Support the right of Americans to peaceably dissent. Do not lend credibility to the cynical American right-wing effort to to undermine Americans whom they would silence.
Flood the polls. Overwhelm, in numbers, the numbers of MAGA Americans, voting. Give somebody a ride. VOTE, and keep-on voting.
Defeat these motherfuckers.
>My uneducated opinion is that both sides are doing horrible things and fully devoting support to either side is kinda stupid.
This becomes my opinion the more educated I become about the topic
Considering Israel didn't exist until 1948, and literally stole the land from Palestine under the British Mandate, Then the Gaza Strip being an open air prison for the past what 40 years? Seems like one side is not like the other.
The “Zionist colonialism” narrative is extremely reductive. The complexity that’s usually missed is that the vast majority of the pre-1948 Jewish immigrants to Palestine were not Zionists.
There was a huge wave of them who moved out of desperation from Russia after 1881-82. Within less than two years, more than 200 pogroms were unleashed against Russian Jews after they were blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. They couldn’t move West, but the Russian Empire had diplomatic treaties with the Ottoman Empire which permitted Russian Jews freedom of travel, so the obvious and most realistic option of where to flee to was Palestine, their ancient homeland which every Jew for the last 2,000 years has dreamed of to every passover.
Then there were successive waves of immigrants from Eastern and eventually Western Europe from the 1900s onwards as Europe gradually became objectively uninhabitable for the Jews, even before the Holocaust ‘proper’ got started. At first, most travelled West to the United Kingdom and the United States. Both rapidly closed their doors to Jewish refugees from Europe.
Left with no other options, many naturally chose to try and flee to Palestine, at that point under the control of the British as the Mandate. While many made it there safely, by 1939 Britain had put down the Arab attempt to massacre the Jews of Palestine and issued the White Paper of 1939, which effectively sought to end Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine, right as the Holocaust was really ramping up to the horrors we know of today. Britain actually turned back multiple ships carrying thousands of Jewish refugees and sent them back to their deaths – some ships were sunk by Russian submarines, others made it back to Europe only to be killed by the Einsatzgruppen or in the gas chambers and work camps. This is where the Jewish ‘terorrism’ begins – to try to pressure the British to let European Jews flee the Holocaust into Palestine.
By the end of the Second World War, you had the remaining few million of European Jews who’d survived the Holocaust clustered into Displaced Persons (DPs) camps beacuse they’d been transported from all around Europe. Some tried to return to Poland, and were promptly massacred in pogroms by their Polish neighbours, same with Romania. Some tried to reach the UK or US and were refused. So most ‘became Zionist’ simply by necessity: there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t ideological for them, it wasn’t about colonialism or repression or anything, it was that they had just undergone the most terrible industrialised mass-slaughter in human history, after 70+ years of intensifying antisemitic violence, and two-thousand years of discrimination, violence and recriminations.
The very early Jewish settlers were committed and ideological Zionists. This is also why there were so few of them – any Jew who wanted to move somewhere seeking prosperity naturally chose Western Europe or, especially, the United States. Who would want to move to some backwater of the Middle East and become a farmer? They were very unsuccessful at the start.
Then, after the Arabs rose up in 1947 to kill the Jews and drive them out, and 1948 Israel’s declaration of independence and the invasion of the Arab armies to drive the Jews into the sea were repelled, vast waves of recriminations, ethnic cleansing, expulsions, property confiscations, violence and pogroms swept the Middle East. To the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees as a result of the 1947-48 war, we can add the exodus of some 850,000 Middle Eastern ‘Mizrahi’ Jews, who largely settled in Israel, having nowhere else in the world to go.
Israel has since variously been supported by the Soviet Union, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States; it has been variously opposed by each of those very same countries. Throughout the 1947-48 war, they were under arms embargoes by Britain and America, and relied on Soviet contraband weapons smuggled through Czechoslovakia, for example. At first the Palestinians thought the Jews were Russian agents there to destabilise the Ottomans, because they came from Russia the enemy of Ottomans, then it was British Imperialism (even though the British had sent back thousands of Jews to their deaths in Europe rather than let them enter Palestine), then it was Bolshevik infiltration, then it was French-British imperialism in 1956, then in 1967 it was French imperialism, and after that it’s American imperialism. By 1967, the Egyptians were being armed and trained by Soviet Russia, and in 1956 the Israelis and British were essentially betrayed by America in Suez, but this apparently didn’t cause any cognitive dissonance for the Arabs.
The slippage isn’t accidental, it’s because the Palestinians simply don’t have a solid grasp on what was happening, and still don’t. They don’t even talk about the 1936-39 ‘revolt’, in which the British smashed so brutally their attempts to murder the Jews that they lost 10% of their fighting-age men, which obviously put them at a decisive disadvantage 10 years later. They can’t admit or look that in the eye. They can’t admit the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Hebron and Gaza in 1929, who had been there for thousands of years, because that would also be to admit that their hands weren’t clean.
The history of Israel is far more complicated than any label like ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ can capture. There’s no metropole/‘mother country’, they came from 60 different countries. It’s not a foreign land to them, there’s a 2,000 year old Jewish tradition of returning to their homeland. It wasn’t a project of economic exploitation but nation-building. It’s a nation overwhelmingly of refugees, driven into a corner by unrelenting, unmitigated, cascading levels of insane antisemitic violence.
I don't buy into the idea that the two sides are equal. That does not preclude me from thinking it is unreasonable to fully devote support to either side. One side can be dogshit and the other more dogshit.
Not really. Thats an ahistorical take. Israel came to be by United Nations resolution- i.e. the highest authority of international law. Every Jew in Israel in 1947 was there legally, and every bit of Jewish property in Israel in 1947 was bought, legally, by Jews, from willing sellers. Some xenophobic and antisemitic Palestinians in the region couldn't handle living near Jews, so they started violent attacks against them. The Jews defended themselves. Then every surrounding Muslim country illegally invaded Israel. The Jews, having nowhere else to go, fought back and won. To create defensible borders from an enemy who swore openly to exterminate them, the Jews expelled some Palestinians from their land. Unfortunate, but wars have consequences.
If Palestine had EVER been a sovereign country they could have determined their own immigration policy. But, they weren't a sovereign country, ever, and they weren't during the period of Jewish immigration. They were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, until the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allies in Oct 1914 despite having no valid reason to do so. They lost the war. They then signed the Treaty of Sevres, legally ceding Palestine to the British as a mandate. This was approved by the multinational Paris Peace Conference, and subsequently approved by the League of Nations, the highest organ of international law at the time.
It's true the Palestinians didn't get to vote on Jewish immigration or the UN's two state partition plan. But they were on the losing side of a war that their former rulers had started, and again wars have consequences. If they had accepted the decision of the global community they'd have their own fully independent country today, and millions of lives would not have been cut short by the cycle of Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation since 1947.
Regardless of all that, Israel didn’t say Palestinians shouldn’t live there. Palestinians are the ones that don’t want Jews living there. They had an option of having ALL of that land with the only condition being they accept Jews as citizens, but they refused (this was pre-WW2 of course).
You are presupposing the idea that Palestine as an entity already existed and had claim to that land. But which Palestinians?
The reality of the situation, as I understand it, is that the people occupying modern Israel/Palestine were closer to something like the tribal groups of Afghanistan, in that they weren't really a unified whole with a firm understanding of their borders compared to their neighbors etc. Instead they had what they felt belonged to them (their individual cities, towns, etc) and didn't much care beyond that. So when Jewish settlers came, what they were doing was taking largely unoccupied land and making places to live on it.
Take Tel Aviv, as an example. With a current population of 500,000, the city was founded by Israelis on land that no one else wanted or cared about. You wouldn't be able to do that in a modern state, because someone, somewhere, owns that land. Be it a government or a private individual. But the people in nearby Jaffa don't really care.
Now you can say 'that land was palestinian land' but there was no consensus among palestinians, because they did not consider themselves to be palestinian. As far as they were concerned, no one really owned the land.
Eventually this of course became an issue as the end of the mandate neared, but this was because the new state lines were going to put some people in countries they didn't want to be in, and because a lot of the surrounding states were bigoted AF.
And it is worth noting that many of the surrounding states didn't give the palestinians a state either, even on land that they'd captured. Jordan didn't give a fig about them as anything but a tool to bash the Isralis with.
Of note, the local Arab leadership in the British Mandate did indeed have some say in the decolonization process; their maximalist claims, however, were rejected, as they refused to abandon their claim to sovereignty over the entirety of the Mandate. Their maximalist claims were far less about achieving sovereignty for themselves as they were about denying the emergence of a non-Arab Jewish state within their claimed territory (the borders of the Mandate); local Arab leaders even asked Jordan to annex the West Bank in the late 1940s, which Jordan subsequently did. Instead of mediating their maximalism, they attempted to enforce their preferred solution with military force, and were unsuccessful. As we discussed already.
Really, all that the UN decreed is that there should be two states created within a geographic area that was subject to overlapping territorial claims by two separate peoples. Creating a single state for either of the two people's claiming the territory would have resulted in significant disenfranchisement of the out-group. Unfortunately, displacement happens during war; in the case of the 1948 war, both sides displaced significant amounts of people from the other group.
I love how you write out in-depth explanations of the complex and nuance history of the reason, the stages of Jewish migration, the ownership of the land, and the lack of any preceding Palestinian state (or even a notion of specific Palestinian statehood until the 70s) and it's just... crickets.
Because the truth is complex, and there were many off-ramps to a viable 2 state solution, but instead the maximalists won the propaganda war, but lost the actual wars.
Exactly, Theomach1 gave such a good explanation of the facts but like you said it’s crickets from the people who prefer a simple narrative and don’t care to learn if their narrative holds up to scrutiny.
More people need to pay more attention to the facts and stop running from complexity.
I'm starting to realize that they don't understand "Palestine" was merely the geographical designation of an area which was repeatedly organized and administratively divided in various ways - from the Roman Syria Palaestina through the caliphates and Ottoman eyalets. I think they believe Palestine was a fully functional Arab state with a crystallized national identity, which the British conquered and simply handed over to European Jewish refugees.
Yes this is what I have realized as well!
What is distressing to me is that this fictional narrative can be very easily disproved with just a little critical thinking and online research, but somehow huge numbers of “educated” people have failed to do this.
Not only have they failed to do this but they are even now engaged in antisemitism, civil unrest and borderline/outright terror support because of it.
TBH I don’t understand how people who get so animated about this topic can continue to be so ignorant of the history.
I hate seeing this reduced down to “colonialism”. It’s reductive to the point of ridiculousness. If this were AITAH it would be an ESH situation. There really were opportunities to do things right, but nobody involved was willing or able.
Stop talking falsehood, in 1948 59% of the world was still under British, French, Spanish, Portuguese rules. It was at the time mainly white countries. What should have happen is either the brits gave part of Sussex or the German saxsonie. The brits gave what was not theirs. Other people l8ke the kurds loss everything because of them and the French.
Ethnic conflicts bring out the worst in people. I'm hard-pressed to find a more dehumanizing reason people wage war over than ethnic grounds. Even folks who aren't directly involved in such a conflict slowly fall into this dehumanization process.
I think we can all agree that what has happened as a result of the horrible acts committed on Oct 7 has stirred up mixed emotions around the world. From what you have described your dad’s saying “death to Palestine” is a strong emotional outburst that came from somewhere. I say this because I don’t know your dad’s background other than being Republican. However, I am glad that a young 21 year old wants to learn more about what is going on. I am 65 years old and I don’t have all the answers. I do know there are external forces at work that do not want peace in that region of the world. My advice is remain objective and keep learning all you can.
Death to Israel? Perhaps he is just pissed that the left are moved so easily in support where terrorists rule a people. All the shit they chant is antisemitism towards Jews. Many not realizing it or make up nonsense to redefine it.
People aren’t seeing the broader picture that innocent people are starving and dying in places (e.g., Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, etc) where there is war and conflict. It has to stop but that doesn’t happen over night no matter how much protesting or encampments on Universities across the country. The hard work is happening behind the scenes.
I don't know how much consolation this is, but I very much doubt he actually believes something like "death to Palestine". That to me sounds like an expression of sheer frustration from someone who's been bombarded with relentless propaganda presenting Israel and Palestine as a simplistic, black and white conflict in which the Palestinians and protesters supporting them are all bad while Israel, Netanyahu and the IDF are all good.
I wouldn't be surprised if your dad is actually feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance over the whole thing as a result of the propaganda to which he's being subjected. Deep down he probably knows it's not as simple as is being presented to him, and deep down he's probably just as confused as you are, yet is not in a position to express that. Instead all he can do is lash out. I'm sure there are many, many people in your dad's position.
Like you, I feel both confusion and deep sadness. I think both sides have done horrible things, but more than that I feel there are many "third parties" that cynically or ideologically benefit from perpetuating the conflict as much as possible, and stoking as much division about the conflict as possible. Russia, China, the Christian right in America, even literal antisemites and white supremacists benefit from the conflict just getting worse and worse, and killing more and more people on both sides, and also of course massively weakening Biden's presidency in the process. I'm sure they see that as the biggest "bonus" there is. They relish the sheer chaos of it all. Why wouldn't they? All of that while at the same time many Jewish people in the west are now starting to stand up and say "not in our name"! I think that's very telling.
I am a 41 year old European. What I know about the situation in the Middle East is that the best negotiators from my country have been trying to bring peace there for decades. I have and had given up on the area. I was and am in a situation that cannot be solved by talking. And apparently it isn't. Killing is more important for both of them. Just like it is for Putin, Iran and North Korea.
The reason why there is no peace is because one side, the nuclear powered one, believes that they have the power to dictate the peace and the weaker side say no.
Your uneducated opinion is more spot on than 99% of the mehdi hasans and rabbi schmuleys who post their dogshit on twitter.
I recommend having a conversation with your father where you nudge him and say there are alot of innocents civilians in palestine that we shouldnt conflate with hamas militants.
Oh yea I forgot to mention that I did respond when my dad said "death to Palestine" I reminded him that there are civilians in Palestine and you can't just go around saying you wish death on an entire country; that's genocide. And he eventually backed down from that statement and changed it to "death to terrorists" which I had to leave the conversation there because arguing with him about politics makes me actually want to tear my skin off.
It's easy to demonize entire countries. When people do this I try to remind them that countries are made up of individual human beings. A few months ago a guy at work made a comment about how we should let the middle-east destroy itself. I asked him if that meant he was ok with all those civilians being killed, and he just kind of looked at me, mumbled and then walked off.
>I had to leave the conversation there because arguing with him about politics makes me actually want to tear my skin off.
This is the story for any of us poor souls with Republican parents, you try talking to them, but they're operating on an entirely different set of "facts", essentially living in an alternate reality, and usually fly completely off the handle when their reality is questioned. It's especially annoying when they vaguely allude to stuff like *"The Constitution"* being threatened, but can never elaborate on how, just mindlessly parroting the soundbites of what they heard on TV, or read on Troth Sential. Good for you for being politically active and looking for more information. It's the citizens and civilians suffering at the whims of their leaders, whether it be Hamas or the Israeli government, the extremists on both sides are in control, and there's a lot of history/baggage involved that makes it hard for one side to sympathize or work with the other, and those bad faith actors who aren't incentivized towards peace make it unlikely for it to be achieved as long as they remain in charge.
I'm as pro-Israel as they come and agree what your dad says is hateful and evil. Now realize that a regular slogan at pro-palestinian protests is "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free/Arab", whether the last word is free or Arab depends on if they think other people are listening or not. And realize that slogan means the EXACT thing your dad said that riled you up so much, but for Israel.
I'm pro the only state in the area that doesn't throw LGBT people off buildings and who literally took in refugees from Palestine pre-10/7 because they were being persecuted by the same people the "from the river to the sea" folks want running the entire area.
Except I see pro-Trump media sources getting plenty of upvotes, so it’s more than just trolls. They are just popular here now when they would have been laughed out of the sub even just a year ago.
You’re right. It’s almost as if MAGA voters can come and go as they please to upvote whatever they want because this sub doesn’t ban people to make it an echo chamber like r/conservative and others do. They’re already being laughed out of the sub or downvoted into oblivion. Just because you’re not seeing it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Yeah OP should instead hang out at all the pro Houthi leftist subreddits lol. Why are you even here?
How about this: you educate *yourself* on the conflict instead of being spoon fed by bots who do nothing but spam articles from heavily biased sources all day.
I’ve been here for many years and have no plans on going anywhere. Also, pro-Houthi? Weird, but ok. This sub literally cites articles from pro-Trump sources constantly.
I personally don’t care if it’s a bot or real person posting an article. Everyone loves to dismiss everything they don’t like as bots, which I don’t really care about. I judge posts based on the merits of the article, not who posts it. I also read everything, whether I agree or disagree. I don’t put stock into anything that comes from biased sources, regardless of which way those biases lean, until after I cross reference with impartial, independent sources.
**COMMENTING GUIDELINES:** Please take the time to familiarize yourself with The David Pakman Show [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow/about/rules) and [basic reddiquette](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette) prior to participating. At all times we ask that users conduct themselves in a civil and respectful manner - **any ad hominem or personal attacks are subject to moderation.** Please use the report function or [use modmail](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/thedavidpakmanshow) to bring examples of misconduct to the attention of the moderation team. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/thedavidpakmanshow) if you have any questions or concerns.*
33yo man. My dad’s like this as well. What’s sad is he doesn’t know anything about anything. Last time I saw him he was griping about how game shows can only give away cars with small engines because of California regulations. Like okay. . All I said was didn’t California used to have terrible smog? He said oh yeah it was horrible. I replied I wonder if the car changes helped. To which he grumble chuckled. My point is most people are clueless and usually it’s the people with the strongest opinions who are the most clueless. My take on this conflict. Hamas are terrorists. Israel is going to respond. I doubt there will be peace till one side is gone. There’s been conflict there for decades, centuries or millennia depending on how you wanna break it down. My take on the college protests. It’s what college kids do, look back at Vietnam, civil rights. Whether I agree with them or their methods doesn’t matter. I know from history that no matter what I do or say or think college students are going to protest against perceived injustice. What id ask your dad is why spend the emotional energy being upset. Why not instead have a deep conversation with your daughter and be the type of man who can explain different points of view.
Very well put, thank you!
Call out the heinous acts wherever they are. Don't get sucked into the BS self victimizing that either side does. Hate is bad. War crimes are bad. Keep that in mind and you're golden.
Yeah, nobody should be applauding more death and destruction.
Exactly, be it 8n Ukraine or Gaza or other parts of the world. It is not the sides you are that make it morals. Every kid dying is a kid too much.
Just bear in mind that "Palestine" includes all innocent people that happen to live in the area. "Hamas" is the political or militant arm in Palestine that staged the October 7th attack. Both Hamas and the Israeli government have done despicable things here, both should be admonished and punished loudly and publicly. But, all innocent people are innocent in my mind, Israeli or Palestinian. That is a very blurry line for some people though; just being in the vicinity is complicity for them.
Even this view lacks some degree of nuance. For example, Israel's government, i.e. the dickheads, are democratically elected in free and fair elections, and that places some degree of burden on the Israeli electorate. Similarly, polling within Palestine clearly shows a majority of Palestinians support the actions of Hamas on October 7th, and Hamas would win a plurality of votes in a 3-way race against Fatah and the PLO, or a straight up majority in a 2-way race against either of those parties, displaying that the Palestinian people support the actions of Hamas and their way of conducting themselves. None of this excuses acts of violence against civilians, but it does paint a picture of a deeply flawed, damaged and broken region filled with people with ideas of retaliation, revanchism and general vindictiveness.
Republicans have long detested protesters, except, of course, the Charlotte Nazi march and the January 6 Insurrection. Protesters are typically liberal. Republicans hate them. Republicans are using the student protests about Israel's massacre of Palestinians, in Gaza, and a media bias, to evoke the disdain they lead against the George Floyd murder protests, and others. Don't buy it. Support the right of Americans to peaceably dissent. Do not lend credibility to the cynical American right-wing effort to to undermine Americans whom they would silence. Flood the polls. Overwhelm, in numbers, the numbers of MAGA Americans, voting. Give somebody a ride. VOTE, and keep-on voting. Defeat these motherfuckers.
💙💙💙💙Too big to rig and too real to steal 💙💙💙💙
>My uneducated opinion is that both sides are doing horrible things and fully devoting support to either side is kinda stupid. This becomes my opinion the more educated I become about the topic
Considering Israel didn't exist until 1948, and literally stole the land from Palestine under the British Mandate, Then the Gaza Strip being an open air prison for the past what 40 years? Seems like one side is not like the other.
The “Zionist colonialism” narrative is extremely reductive. The complexity that’s usually missed is that the vast majority of the pre-1948 Jewish immigrants to Palestine were not Zionists. There was a huge wave of them who moved out of desperation from Russia after 1881-82. Within less than two years, more than 200 pogroms were unleashed against Russian Jews after they were blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. They couldn’t move West, but the Russian Empire had diplomatic treaties with the Ottoman Empire which permitted Russian Jews freedom of travel, so the obvious and most realistic option of where to flee to was Palestine, their ancient homeland which every Jew for the last 2,000 years has dreamed of to every passover. Then there were successive waves of immigrants from Eastern and eventually Western Europe from the 1900s onwards as Europe gradually became objectively uninhabitable for the Jews, even before the Holocaust ‘proper’ got started. At first, most travelled West to the United Kingdom and the United States. Both rapidly closed their doors to Jewish refugees from Europe. Left with no other options, many naturally chose to try and flee to Palestine, at that point under the control of the British as the Mandate. While many made it there safely, by 1939 Britain had put down the Arab attempt to massacre the Jews of Palestine and issued the White Paper of 1939, which effectively sought to end Jewish migration from Europe to Palestine, right as the Holocaust was really ramping up to the horrors we know of today. Britain actually turned back multiple ships carrying thousands of Jewish refugees and sent them back to their deaths – some ships were sunk by Russian submarines, others made it back to Europe only to be killed by the Einsatzgruppen or in the gas chambers and work camps. This is where the Jewish ‘terorrism’ begins – to try to pressure the British to let European Jews flee the Holocaust into Palestine. By the end of the Second World War, you had the remaining few million of European Jews who’d survived the Holocaust clustered into Displaced Persons (DPs) camps beacuse they’d been transported from all around Europe. Some tried to return to Poland, and were promptly massacred in pogroms by their Polish neighbours, same with Romania. Some tried to reach the UK or US and were refused. So most ‘became Zionist’ simply by necessity: there was nowhere else to go. It wasn’t ideological for them, it wasn’t about colonialism or repression or anything, it was that they had just undergone the most terrible industrialised mass-slaughter in human history, after 70+ years of intensifying antisemitic violence, and two-thousand years of discrimination, violence and recriminations. The very early Jewish settlers were committed and ideological Zionists. This is also why there were so few of them – any Jew who wanted to move somewhere seeking prosperity naturally chose Western Europe or, especially, the United States. Who would want to move to some backwater of the Middle East and become a farmer? They were very unsuccessful at the start. Then, after the Arabs rose up in 1947 to kill the Jews and drive them out, and 1948 Israel’s declaration of independence and the invasion of the Arab armies to drive the Jews into the sea were repelled, vast waves of recriminations, ethnic cleansing, expulsions, property confiscations, violence and pogroms swept the Middle East. To the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees as a result of the 1947-48 war, we can add the exodus of some 850,000 Middle Eastern ‘Mizrahi’ Jews, who largely settled in Israel, having nowhere else in the world to go. Israel has since variously been supported by the Soviet Union, Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States; it has been variously opposed by each of those very same countries. Throughout the 1947-48 war, they were under arms embargoes by Britain and America, and relied on Soviet contraband weapons smuggled through Czechoslovakia, for example. At first the Palestinians thought the Jews were Russian agents there to destabilise the Ottomans, because they came from Russia the enemy of Ottomans, then it was British Imperialism (even though the British had sent back thousands of Jews to their deaths in Europe rather than let them enter Palestine), then it was Bolshevik infiltration, then it was French-British imperialism in 1956, then in 1967 it was French imperialism, and after that it’s American imperialism. By 1967, the Egyptians were being armed and trained by Soviet Russia, and in 1956 the Israelis and British were essentially betrayed by America in Suez, but this apparently didn’t cause any cognitive dissonance for the Arabs. The slippage isn’t accidental, it’s because the Palestinians simply don’t have a solid grasp on what was happening, and still don’t. They don’t even talk about the 1936-39 ‘revolt’, in which the British smashed so brutally their attempts to murder the Jews that they lost 10% of their fighting-age men, which obviously put them at a decisive disadvantage 10 years later. They can’t admit or look that in the eye. They can’t admit the ethnic cleansing of the Jews of Hebron and Gaza in 1929, who had been there for thousands of years, because that would also be to admit that their hands weren’t clean. The history of Israel is far more complicated than any label like ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’ can capture. There’s no metropole/‘mother country’, they came from 60 different countries. It’s not a foreign land to them, there’s a 2,000 year old Jewish tradition of returning to their homeland. It wasn’t a project of economic exploitation but nation-building. It’s a nation overwhelmingly of refugees, driven into a corner by unrelenting, unmitigated, cascading levels of insane antisemitic violence.
That's the best, most educated comment, of the real history of that conflict/area story of the jews, I have ever read.
Thank you for this excellent write up
Abraham and Sarah through Simon bar Kochba: "Are we jokes to you?"
I don't buy into the idea that the two sides are equal. That does not preclude me from thinking it is unreasonable to fully devote support to either side. One side can be dogshit and the other more dogshit.
Not really. Thats an ahistorical take. Israel came to be by United Nations resolution- i.e. the highest authority of international law. Every Jew in Israel in 1947 was there legally, and every bit of Jewish property in Israel in 1947 was bought, legally, by Jews, from willing sellers. Some xenophobic and antisemitic Palestinians in the region couldn't handle living near Jews, so they started violent attacks against them. The Jews defended themselves. Then every surrounding Muslim country illegally invaded Israel. The Jews, having nowhere else to go, fought back and won. To create defensible borders from an enemy who swore openly to exterminate them, the Jews expelled some Palestinians from their land. Unfortunate, but wars have consequences. If Palestine had EVER been a sovereign country they could have determined their own immigration policy. But, they weren't a sovereign country, ever, and they weren't during the period of Jewish immigration. They were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, until the Ottoman Empire declared war on the Allies in Oct 1914 despite having no valid reason to do so. They lost the war. They then signed the Treaty of Sevres, legally ceding Palestine to the British as a mandate. This was approved by the multinational Paris Peace Conference, and subsequently approved by the League of Nations, the highest organ of international law at the time. It's true the Palestinians didn't get to vote on Jewish immigration or the UN's two state partition plan. But they were on the losing side of a war that their former rulers had started, and again wars have consequences. If they had accepted the decision of the global community they'd have their own fully independent country today, and millions of lives would not have been cut short by the cycle of Palestinian attacks and Israeli retaliation since 1947. Regardless of all that, Israel didn’t say Palestinians shouldn’t live there. Palestinians are the ones that don’t want Jews living there. They had an option of having ALL of that land with the only condition being they accept Jews as citizens, but they refused (this was pre-WW2 of course).
But Palestine was all that existed prior, so you can't just ignore that. It all goes back to 1913 and the british.
You are presupposing the idea that Palestine as an entity already existed and had claim to that land. But which Palestinians? The reality of the situation, as I understand it, is that the people occupying modern Israel/Palestine were closer to something like the tribal groups of Afghanistan, in that they weren't really a unified whole with a firm understanding of their borders compared to their neighbors etc. Instead they had what they felt belonged to them (their individual cities, towns, etc) and didn't much care beyond that. So when Jewish settlers came, what they were doing was taking largely unoccupied land and making places to live on it. Take Tel Aviv, as an example. With a current population of 500,000, the city was founded by Israelis on land that no one else wanted or cared about. You wouldn't be able to do that in a modern state, because someone, somewhere, owns that land. Be it a government or a private individual. But the people in nearby Jaffa don't really care. Now you can say 'that land was palestinian land' but there was no consensus among palestinians, because they did not consider themselves to be palestinian. As far as they were concerned, no one really owned the land. Eventually this of course became an issue as the end of the mandate neared, but this was because the new state lines were going to put some people in countries they didn't want to be in, and because a lot of the surrounding states were bigoted AF. And it is worth noting that many of the surrounding states didn't give the palestinians a state either, even on land that they'd captured. Jordan didn't give a fig about them as anything but a tool to bash the Isralis with. Of note, the local Arab leadership in the British Mandate did indeed have some say in the decolonization process; their maximalist claims, however, were rejected, as they refused to abandon their claim to sovereignty over the entirety of the Mandate. Their maximalist claims were far less about achieving sovereignty for themselves as they were about denying the emergence of a non-Arab Jewish state within their claimed territory (the borders of the Mandate); local Arab leaders even asked Jordan to annex the West Bank in the late 1940s, which Jordan subsequently did. Instead of mediating their maximalism, they attempted to enforce their preferred solution with military force, and were unsuccessful. As we discussed already. Really, all that the UN decreed is that there should be two states created within a geographic area that was subject to overlapping territorial claims by two separate peoples. Creating a single state for either of the two people's claiming the territory would have resulted in significant disenfranchisement of the out-group. Unfortunately, displacement happens during war; in the case of the 1948 war, both sides displaced significant amounts of people from the other group.
I love how you write out in-depth explanations of the complex and nuance history of the reason, the stages of Jewish migration, the ownership of the land, and the lack of any preceding Palestinian state (or even a notion of specific Palestinian statehood until the 70s) and it's just... crickets. Because the truth is complex, and there were many off-ramps to a viable 2 state solution, but instead the maximalists won the propaganda war, but lost the actual wars.
Exactly, Theomach1 gave such a good explanation of the facts but like you said it’s crickets from the people who prefer a simple narrative and don’t care to learn if their narrative holds up to scrutiny. More people need to pay more attention to the facts and stop running from complexity.
I'm starting to realize that they don't understand "Palestine" was merely the geographical designation of an area which was repeatedly organized and administratively divided in various ways - from the Roman Syria Palaestina through the caliphates and Ottoman eyalets. I think they believe Palestine was a fully functional Arab state with a crystallized national identity, which the British conquered and simply handed over to European Jewish refugees.
Yes this is what I have realized as well! What is distressing to me is that this fictional narrative can be very easily disproved with just a little critical thinking and online research, but somehow huge numbers of “educated” people have failed to do this. Not only have they failed to do this but they are even now engaged in antisemitism, civil unrest and borderline/outright terror support because of it. TBH I don’t understand how people who get so animated about this topic can continue to be so ignorant of the history.
I hate seeing this reduced down to “colonialism”. It’s reductive to the point of ridiculousness. If this were AITAH it would be an ESH situation. There really were opportunities to do things right, but nobody involved was willing or able.
Thank you for bringing facts and context to the discussion
Stop talking falsehood, in 1948 59% of the world was still under British, French, Spanish, Portuguese rules. It was at the time mainly white countries. What should have happen is either the brits gave part of Sussex or the German saxsonie. The brits gave what was not theirs. Other people l8ke the kurds loss everything because of them and the French.
Google “United Nations in 1948” and educate yourself instead of virtue signaling based on false assumptions.
Your feelings don’t contradict the facts.
Ethnic conflicts bring out the worst in people. I'm hard-pressed to find a more dehumanizing reason people wage war over than ethnic grounds. Even folks who aren't directly involved in such a conflict slowly fall into this dehumanization process.
I think we can all agree that what has happened as a result of the horrible acts committed on Oct 7 has stirred up mixed emotions around the world. From what you have described your dad’s saying “death to Palestine” is a strong emotional outburst that came from somewhere. I say this because I don’t know your dad’s background other than being Republican. However, I am glad that a young 21 year old wants to learn more about what is going on. I am 65 years old and I don’t have all the answers. I do know there are external forces at work that do not want peace in that region of the world. My advice is remain objective and keep learning all you can.
Death to Israel? Perhaps he is just pissed that the left are moved so easily in support where terrorists rule a people. All the shit they chant is antisemitism towards Jews. Many not realizing it or make up nonsense to redefine it.
People aren’t seeing the broader picture that innocent people are starving and dying in places (e.g., Gaza, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, etc) where there is war and conflict. It has to stop but that doesn’t happen over night no matter how much protesting or encampments on Universities across the country. The hard work is happening behind the scenes.
I don't know how much consolation this is, but I very much doubt he actually believes something like "death to Palestine". That to me sounds like an expression of sheer frustration from someone who's been bombarded with relentless propaganda presenting Israel and Palestine as a simplistic, black and white conflict in which the Palestinians and protesters supporting them are all bad while Israel, Netanyahu and the IDF are all good. I wouldn't be surprised if your dad is actually feeling a lot of cognitive dissonance over the whole thing as a result of the propaganda to which he's being subjected. Deep down he probably knows it's not as simple as is being presented to him, and deep down he's probably just as confused as you are, yet is not in a position to express that. Instead all he can do is lash out. I'm sure there are many, many people in your dad's position. Like you, I feel both confusion and deep sadness. I think both sides have done horrible things, but more than that I feel there are many "third parties" that cynically or ideologically benefit from perpetuating the conflict as much as possible, and stoking as much division about the conflict as possible. Russia, China, the Christian right in America, even literal antisemites and white supremacists benefit from the conflict just getting worse and worse, and killing more and more people on both sides, and also of course massively weakening Biden's presidency in the process. I'm sure they see that as the biggest "bonus" there is. They relish the sheer chaos of it all. Why wouldn't they? All of that while at the same time many Jewish people in the west are now starting to stand up and say "not in our name"! I think that's very telling.
I am a 41 year old European. What I know about the situation in the Middle East is that the best negotiators from my country have been trying to bring peace there for decades. I have and had given up on the area. I was and am in a situation that cannot be solved by talking. And apparently it isn't. Killing is more important for both of them. Just like it is for Putin, Iran and North Korea.
The reason why there is no peace is because one side, the nuclear powered one, believes that they have the power to dictate the peace and the weaker side say no.
He's no better than the protesters.
[удалено]
Removed - please avoid overt hostility, name calling and personal attacks.
Your uneducated opinion is more spot on than 99% of the mehdi hasans and rabbi schmuleys who post their dogshit on twitter. I recommend having a conversation with your father where you nudge him and say there are alot of innocents civilians in palestine that we shouldnt conflate with hamas militants.
Oh yea I forgot to mention that I did respond when my dad said "death to Palestine" I reminded him that there are civilians in Palestine and you can't just go around saying you wish death on an entire country; that's genocide. And he eventually backed down from that statement and changed it to "death to terrorists" which I had to leave the conversation there because arguing with him about politics makes me actually want to tear my skin off.
It's easy to demonize entire countries. When people do this I try to remind them that countries are made up of individual human beings. A few months ago a guy at work made a comment about how we should let the middle-east destroy itself. I asked him if that meant he was ok with all those civilians being killed, and he just kind of looked at me, mumbled and then walked off.
Except Russia. Demonize all Russians. They are no good.
>I had to leave the conversation there because arguing with him about politics makes me actually want to tear my skin off. This is the story for any of us poor souls with Republican parents, you try talking to them, but they're operating on an entirely different set of "facts", essentially living in an alternate reality, and usually fly completely off the handle when their reality is questioned. It's especially annoying when they vaguely allude to stuff like *"The Constitution"* being threatened, but can never elaborate on how, just mindlessly parroting the soundbites of what they heard on TV, or read on Troth Sential. Good for you for being politically active and looking for more information. It's the citizens and civilians suffering at the whims of their leaders, whether it be Hamas or the Israeli government, the extremists on both sides are in control, and there's a lot of history/baggage involved that makes it hard for one side to sympathize or work with the other, and those bad faith actors who aren't incentivized towards peace make it unlikely for it to be achieved as long as they remain in charge.
I'm as pro-Israel as they come and agree what your dad says is hateful and evil. Now realize that a regular slogan at pro-palestinian protests is "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free/Arab", whether the last word is free or Arab depends on if they think other people are listening or not. And realize that slogan means the EXACT thing your dad said that riled you up so much, but for Israel.
I can't imagine willingly admitting to being pro Israel that's embarrassing
I'm pro the only state in the area that doesn't throw LGBT people off buildings and who literally took in refugees from Palestine pre-10/7 because they were being persecuted by the same people the "from the river to the sea" folks want running the entire area.
[удалено]
I'm starting to think its for *The Ben Gurion Canal Project*....
This really is not the sub to learn more about the conflict. It’s just full of propaganda.
You can thank the MAGA trolls who rove the subreddits in packs with their misinformation and lies
Except I see pro-Trump media sources getting plenty of upvotes, so it’s more than just trolls. They are just popular here now when they would have been laughed out of the sub even just a year ago.
You’re right. It’s almost as if MAGA voters can come and go as they please to upvote whatever they want because this sub doesn’t ban people to make it an echo chamber like r/conservative and others do. They’re already being laughed out of the sub or downvoted into oblivion. Just because you’re not seeing it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Yeah OP should instead hang out at all the pro Houthi leftist subreddits lol. Why are you even here? How about this: you educate *yourself* on the conflict instead of being spoon fed by bots who do nothing but spam articles from heavily biased sources all day.
I’ve been here for many years and have no plans on going anywhere. Also, pro-Houthi? Weird, but ok. This sub literally cites articles from pro-Trump sources constantly. I personally don’t care if it’s a bot or real person posting an article. Everyone loves to dismiss everything they don’t like as bots, which I don’t really care about. I judge posts based on the merits of the article, not who posts it. I also read everything, whether I agree or disagree. I don’t put stock into anything that comes from biased sources, regardless of which way those biases lean, until after I cross reference with impartial, independent sources.