Gorilladrums

Therefore, Israel is a settler-colonial state. The circumstances and motivations of the individual settlers are irrelevant when the outcome is the same. Knowing this yet still claiming that Israel is not a settler-colonial state is deceitful.

I think you're misunderstanding what I actually said. So let me be clear, what I'm saying is that Israel, like any other country, has a complex history that can't be oversimplified into a singular soundbite. What this means is that there is more nuance than any online narrative would have you believe. Like I said earlier, aspects of Israel's founding did in fact revolve around it being colonial settler state, that much is true and nobody is arguing otherwise. However, what I am arguing is that the country evolved to be more than just that with time, and I demonstrated this point by giving you the exodus of Jews from the muslim world as an example this.

The point is that countries aren't static, they continuously evolve and change. A lot of countries started out as colonial settler states, but ended up evolving into being something else. Turkey, Mexico, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada, the US, and so many others fall under this category. Israel is not an exception even if some of the founding elements are still present. For example, Turkey is still colonizing and ethnically cleansing groups of people, the US is still an imperialist in its policy, Brazil still has a culture that's entrenched in racism, and so on. However, all these countries have different national identities from when they started, and Israel is no exception.

Wikipedia is not an ideal source of information, but that particular page cites more than enough quality sources that clearly show this to be the case.

The reason why I'm dismissive of Wikipedia as a source for this discussion is because this same article from a few years ago also had a lot quality sources to justify it, yet it was changed drastically nonetheless. What this implies is that are active campaigns to manipulate information on there. Regardless, the precise definition of Zionism is irrelevant to this conversation, so I don't really have much of an interest in arguing about Wikipedia.

Anyone with any sense understands that no group of people consists of identical individuals. You have made a lot of assumptions about my views. Just because I can see why something happened does not mean that I agree with it.

I originally interpreted your previous comments as tribalistic as it seemed like you were trying to push for a team rather than just making observations. However, If this is what you genuinely believe, then we're on the same page.

These issues and events existed well before Netanyahu, and whether or not the citizens like him is largely irrelevant when polls repeatedly show that the vast majority approve of the general treatment of Palestinians.

I disagree, I think Netanyahu is single handedly responsible for making things way worse. He greatly weakened Israel's democracy, he worked hard to erode the country's institutions, he went out of his way to incorporate radical fascists into his government, he aggressively pursued conflicts as a way to escape his trails, and the list goes on and on. His very presence in government does Israel a disservice as he is an icon for corruption inside and outside the country. His exit from politics will do wonders for the country and the region.

It's like Turkey with Erdogan or Hungary with Orban. There are a lot of protests and opposition there as there is in Israel against Netanyahu. Polls show whatever depending on how the questions are worded and how the results are interpreted, however, the one metric that is reliably consistent is people's confidence in the government. If people have no faith in their government then they fundamentally are at odds for what it stands for and they seek drastic change. Looking at what this current government stands for, a drastic change from is exactly what this country needs.

Will most of the major issues be solved with Netanyahu going away? Probably not, however, if he is replaced by his opposition, then that means you'll have a more sensible government in charge, and that alone is a huge change because it means that diplomacy has a real chance. When you show people a more peaceful, more reasonable path, they will always gravitate towards it. Netanyahu leaving politics is the first step to deradicalize, not just Israel but the whole damn region.

I don’t think the comment you’re referring to meant “peaceful coexistence” in the sense that there was absolutely no conflict (they did say “no major conflict”), but were more likely thinking along the lines of “peaceful enough to coexist”, whereas that is not how I would describe the current situation at all.

I feel like our conversation has split into two distinct topics. There's the topic about the evolution of Israel and the original topic of whether or not peaceful coexistence was a thing before the creation of the modern states. For the latter, I'm arguing that there wasn't. The type of discrimination, oppression, violence, war, and ethnic cleansing that we're seeing today has existed long before Israel was a thing. Just because this region was under the boot of the Ottoman Empire for centuries, that doesn't mean that things were peachy there. Can you even point to a sustained period of peace in this region that is free from the things I listed? Because no matter how far back I look, things were always tense. It's not just between Jews and muslims, but also with Christians. The point is that the people who are saying that things were better back then are referring to a time that's either undefined or doesn't exist. It's like the conservative types who say they want to make America great again, but can never define what time they want to make America back to.

You demonstrate a good enough understanding of the history that you clearly know that you are being deceitful.

I'm not being deceitful. I just stated historical facts to bring necessary context to something that you're intentionally trying to oversimplify.

Is there any colonised country that this doesn’t apply to?

Actually it goes beyond that, it applies to all the modern states. The point I was trying to make is that you can't water down history to narrative driven soundbites.

Colonisation is a core principle of Zionism. It’s so central to Zionism that it’s in the introductory paragraph on it’s Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia is not a source for anything related to modern conflicts because it's prone to manipulation. This article in particular has been edited so much that it's literally unrecognizable from a few years ago.

Many of the early Zionist leaders said that their goals could only be achieved through the displacement of Arabs, and the migration of Jews was, and still is, strongly encouraged by Zionists.

And you would be correct, and this notion that pushes ethnic cleansing is wrong. However, there's nuance that can't be overlooked. For example, Israel is a secular, democratic country, and because of this, there are a lot of people with a lot of different views. The current government of Israel is very unpopular among Israelis, and the majority of people oppose it. The current government is considered far right and extremist by Israeli standards, and the most don't support their actions.

The far right factions, like Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit and Smotrich's Religious Zionist party, are responsible for the vast majority of things people associate negatively with Israel. Here's a short list:

• They are responsible for starting unprovoked aggression against their neighbors like Syria and Lebanon (excluding the Hezbollah conflict)
• They keep sabotaging peace deals to keep the Gaza war going for as long possible
• They go to extreme lengths to defend war crimes and war criminals
• They're the ones are aggressively expanding and creating illegal settlements in the West Bank
• They're the ones who encourage and defend discrimination and bigotry
• They want to erase Israel's secular and democratic institutions so they can turn into a theocracy

They're horrible people. They follow a specific ideology called Kahanism, which is basically Jewish fascism. This ideology is so extreme that the US and Israel both designated the original founder of the ideology and his party as terrorists. The entire far right Kahanist coalition only got 10.84% of the vote in the 2022 election, and they only got 14/120 seats. A lot of their voters were the illegal settlers in the West Bank. By all accounts, these parasites shouldn't have sniffed any significant position in power, but Netanyahu, being the corrupt war criminal that he is, decided incorporate them into his wing so he could form a government with himself at the top. He also went the extra mile of giving them outsized positions of influence.

The point I'm trying to make here is that Israel is a diverse country and the people responsible for most of what's wrong with it are a small, corrupt minority that do not represent the general population. Just because the country started a certain way or has extremist politician today, that doesn't mean all 10 million people there are extremist as well. A lot of them don't support these things, and it would wrong to generalize any country in general.

Gosh, I wonder if that was in response to the treatment of Arabs in Palestine.

Are you seriously trying to defend these people getting ethnically cleansed because you think that this is somehow a justified reaction?

Just to refresh, these people who have no connection to Israel. These are people who have been living in their communities for centuries, for some it's literally thousands of years, and for no other reason than being Jewish they were expelled or chased out of their country and were forced to flee to Israel as refugees because they had nowhere else to go. These people lost their homes, their livelihoods, their property, their communities, and they're citizenship. They're just as much victims as the Palestinians you're trying to defend.

If you're going to sit here and wag your finger about the morality of Israel ethnically cleansing Palestinians and then turn around and justify the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the muslim world then you're nothing more than a hypocrite and your words mean nothing.

And they had no problem pushing out the Arabs (who had been living in their communities for hundreds, and for some, thousands, of years) on their way in.

Stop thinking like a Neanderthal. There's no "team" here. This mentality of tribalism is precisely the reason why this conflict is never ending. Instead think about it in terms of actions. There are actions that are morally good and actions that are morally bad. If an action is morally bad, like say ethnic cleansing, then you oppose it in all its forms and in all instances because that's the principled thing to do. When Israel ethnically cleansed Arabs during it's founding, that was bad. However, the muslim world ethnically cleansing Jews was also bad. Having moral consistency shouldn't be this difficult.

A majority of Australian colonists were sent there for committing petty crimes, such as theft. The industrial revolution left much of the working class without work, so theft in Britain rose rapidly. For the crime of trying to fees their family, over 100,000 people were forcibly transported to Australia. Their descendants now make up a very large chunk of the Australian population.

Okay, let's follow this logic. The original British settlers were colonial settlers sent by the British Empire to colonize Australia. The Aboriginal people there got the short end of the stick, and were ethnically cleansed from their lands. However, the Aborigines were not a monolith, there were many different nations and cultures and many them clashed. Australia prior to the arrival of European had a lot of wars, conflicts, discrimination, and disputes between different tribes (source).

Now, imagine some dingleberry today came along on the internet and started talking about how the Aboriginal people of Australia all peacefully coexisted for centuries, and the violence on the continent is a recent phenomenon brought by the British. How would you interpret this? The way I see it, this is just pure ignorance because both the premise and the conclusion are incorrect. The aboriginal people didn't all coexist peacefully, and the British didn't bring violence, they merely extending what was there. That's actually what the British were known for, divide and conquer. That's how they captured North America, South Africa, India, and so on. This strategy wouldn't even be possible if there was no tensions to exploit.

If we circle back to our topic, how does this same exact logic not apply here? The person that I replied had an incorrect premise and an incorrect conclusion based on that premise. I merely criticized it and provided context that proved otherwise. How does this make me deceitful? The answer is it doesn't.

I was being too much of an ass as well. We're all good bro

I don't

The source of this guy being muslim in the article is literally Benjamin Netanyahu...

Regardless, all I wanted was for you to provide an article that at least had a source for the claim. I don't trust anything Netanyahu says out of principle, but still this is an article that does provide something to support the claim. It's not a pure clickbait headline that's misleading. So there we go, that puts whatever this was to rest.

I'm having a hard time understanding your comment. Are you implying that media outlets don't lie in their headlines? Are you perhaps implying that claims don't require evidence for you to believe them?

That's the country of Lebanon, not the diaspora. Like I said, the country is 50/50 between muslims and Christians, but the diaspora is heavily Christian.

It’s also possible that you wouldn’t be familiar enough with Arabic names

I'm literally Arab lol

In the countries like Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, it's not uncommon for Christians in to have islamic names. For example in Southern Lebanon you'll find a lot Christian people with names like Ali, Umar, or Yusuf even though these are common islamic names.

the regional conflict between Jews and Muslims is most certainly not a persistent, perpetual, irrational animosity that has stubbornly raged on for millennia.

Using the reductio ad absurdum fallacy is not going to change the fact that what I said is true. Religion in the Middle East is NOT like what it is in the West. In the West religion is something that is private and chosen voluntarily. It is treated as another layer to someone's identity. That's not how it works in the Middle East, over there religion IS your identity. You religion defines you, your people, your culture, and your history. It's something that you can't escape, especially since secularism is not widely accepted.

Tribalism in the middle east is not ancient thing, it's still alive and well. I've seen this first hand in my home country of Iraq. Things like collective punishments, discrimination on the basis of religion, and people in power prioritizing their own religious and ethnic groups over others or specifically targeting groups they don't like are all very common.

The point of me saying all this is to say that religion in that part of the world has a different meaning. When people say different religious groups are fighting over there, they're not fighting for some mythical holy war like you seem to think. They're fighting for control, power, security, and resources like anywhere else in the world, it just that religion is primary driver to rally people. What this means is that if there's a conflict, it's usually between groups of differing religions because religion is what people there use to divide themselves. It's similar to how Americans viewed race in the 1950s but on steroids.

In this case, Israel/Palestine is a region that's claimed as the holy land by three major religions. All of which want complete control over it to give their religion legitimacy, which is a lot states in the region use to legitimize their rule. The competition for this regions goes way back and it hasn't really stopped. Before the two modern states, the Ottoman empire controlled the region, but they had to constantly shift demographics via mass displacements, forced relocations, and migratory restrictions to make sure that the muslims and Turks were on top... and even they still had to deal with a lot of rebellions. Before that, the Malmuk Sultanate and the Ayyubid Caliphate faced a lot of resistance from Jews and Christians in the region and had to carry out a lot of cultural genocide campaigns to Arabize and muslimize them. Before that, the Kingdom of Jerusalem took over the region through the bloody crusades. You get the idea.

This idea that the different religious and ethnic groups in the region were living together in peace and harmony prior to the modern Israel/Palestine conflict is nonsense. It is quite literally propaganda. That's not historically accurate, that's not reality. This region was definitely not peaceful in the 19th century, in fact this was when this region was at its bloodiest because that's when the century the Ottoman Empire started carrying out it's infamous genocides before it collapsed during WWI. I'm literally from this region (Iraq), and I can tell you that the only people who believe this in this fiction are people who have never been to this part of the world.

Whatever Palestine ever existed as a state of not is completely irrelevant. The fact is that Palestinians was living on there land and foreigners came and forced a state on them then ethnically cleanse them two and not they are ethnically cleansed a third time

It's not though. The point that I was trying to make is that this region never had sovereignty until very recently with the two modern states. Prior to this, the region was always controlled by foreign empires like the British, Ottoman, Malmuk, Ayyubid, and so on. Every one of these empires came and forced a state on to the region.

But we have to contextualize what this means. Back during the days of the Ottoman Empire, there was an infamous system in place called sürgün that kept everybody the boot and the Turks were at the top. They did this by radically shifting demographics of all the regions they conquered. They would forcibly deport entire ethnic and religious groups that they viewed as threat to their rule to other regions of the empire that they felt were safer, and vice versa.

For example, the Ottoman empire famously did this with the Christians in Southeastern Europe. The Ottomans moved millions of Christians Europeans to Anatolia and the Levant, and relocated just as many muslims and Turks to southeastern Europe. This is why countries like Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, etc have such large muslim populations and why Turkey and the Levant region have so many people who are ethnically European. This of course includes the region of Israel/Palestine. A lot of prominent figures in the Palestinian movement were ethnically European. For example, Amin al-Husseini was ethnically Bosnian.

The Israel/Palestine region meant a lot to the empire as it was a strategic location, but also contained important islamic sites that the empire uses to derive its legitimacy as the muslim empire. To ensure this, they wanted to make sure that the region stayed firmly in islamic hands, and so they tried their best change the demographics. The Empire forcibly relocated muslims and Turks from all over empire to settle in the region, they forcibly relocated Jews to other parts of the empire like Cyprus and Anatolia, they placed restrictions to prevent Jews from migrating to key cities in the region like Jerusalem and Hebron, and they use dubious reasons to depopulate Jewish areas by forcing them to evacuate from a nearby battle for example, but then the empire would give the okay for muslims to return but not Jews. They did the same to Christians in the region, but to a lesser extent. What this means is that a lot of the inhabitants of the region were moved out and replaced by other people not from the regions via imperial policy

The point is that this region was always controlled and populated by foreigners. This idea that the region of Israel/Palestine was inhabited by Natives like North America was when the Europeans arrived is simply false. The region's population was pretty cosmopolitan and dynamic, though not by choice. This doesn't excuse the ethnic cleansing campaigns that happened afterwards, but I do think there's value in maintaining a historically accurate understanding of the region rather than repeating misinformed online narratives.

You have right to hate religions but please do not excuse settler colonialism, creating famine and the murder of children because of it.

This is a very myopic and historically inaccurate view of history. While some elements of Israel's establishment can be classified as settler colonialism, it's not accurate to say that all of it is. For example, when Israel was established. The muslim world started committing pogroms in mass against their Jewish communities even though they had nothing to do with Israel. These people who been living in their communities for hundreds, and for some, thousands, of years were forced to abandon everything, including their citizenship, and flee to Israel because that's the only place that took them in. The total number of people from the exodus total around 1 million people. These people and their descendants now make up a very large chunk of the Israeli population, if not an outright majority.

The term "colonialism" implies intent, but in reality these people were refugees who ended up in Israel due to circumstance. This is a stark difference from European Jews, who were also refugees, but they actually migrated to the region with the intent of settling and creating their own state.

Let’s not also forget that the 2 world wars didn’t happen because of religion and the European colonial powers had the most bloody colonization history.

This is true, but these are also different regions with different histories.

You would not dare to infer that Europeans are natural savages that are always bloody like you are trying to portray all Muslims and jews

Except I never made such claims, I merely pointed out the historically accurate fact that this region has been fought over constantly for thousands of years. A bunch of major religions claim this region to be the holy land, and so it has always been the center of different people fighting for control.

Your reading comprehension is nonexistent. Lebanon the country has around 4 million and is half Christian, half muslim. However, the Christian diaspora is 14 million and the vast majority are Christians.

Media literacy is dead. People on here are willing to believe clickbait headlines and misinformation if it pushes a narrative they subscribe to.