[poweronselftest]

Referring to Jewish settlement in Palestine as "immigration" doesn't really paint the complete picture, generally.

Sure, some Jews immigrated to Palestine/Israel as we think of immigration. But many did not.

For example: I had a great-great uncle who was originally from Poland. Fearing the Germans, he escape Poland (on foot, alone, as a young teenager) shortly after the German invasion to live with his family in Ukraine (my direct ancestors). They survived together in Evacuation [1]. After the war, he decided to go back to Poland. What happened to him there, in 1946, was that he was forcefully removed from the country by his neighbors [2], who were pleased that Jews had been removed from their society and did not want them to return. He ended up in a DP camp, and with nowhere else to go, went to Palestine.

Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself? In his story I see a plight not very different from Syrian refugees in Europe or Guatemalan refugees in the United States. I think his story is hardly unique, and explains largely why Israel exists in the first place. If you view the presence of Jews in Palestine as European Colonialism, I think your perspective has a very limited and selective in scope.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_in_the_Soviet_Union

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom

[fortran77]

And half the population of Israel came from the mid-east. Either "Palestine" proper, or Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, etc. They were all displaced by 1948.

[Udik]

Today the issue is not the existence of Israel- right or wrong, it's the birthplace and homeland of millions. The issue is its recent and ongoing expansion in territories outside its legally recognized borders, and the violence and oppression that accompanies it. The situation in the occupied territories is one of actual apartheid, with Jews allowed to retain Israeli citizenship and subject to Israeli laws, and Palestinians basically stateless and subject to military laws.

[poweronselftest]

Thanks for answer the question I asked elsewhere on the thread [1]. I think people misunderstood what you were saying.

I appreciate your perspective that the Jewish people who were born and live in Palestine now have a right to be there, but I am not sure that this is a commonly held perspective among Palestinians. To be honest, as much as I want there to be peace, I don't expect Palestinian Arabs to give up on Palestine, because why would they? In their perspective, it's their land, and 5-6 million foreign Jews are living on it. They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state, but they did not. Had they done this, the military occupation of the West Bank would have ended 10-20 years ago. The military occupation of Gaza ended in 2006, and the territory is now under blockade by Egypt, The Palestinian Authority and Israel, due to the ruling party's perspective that with enough time and dedication they can liberate the rest of Palestine. Perhaps they will! I sincerely wish them the best in this endeavor, because you must admire tenacity, however self-destructive it may seem today.

> outside its legally recognized borders

It is also valuable to recognize that beyond its borders with Egypt and Jordan, Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders. Many entities (countries, international courts) have proclaimed Israel's borders to be this or that, but aside from settlements resulting from their formal peace treaties, Israel's "borders" today are actually war zones buffers established and governed by ceasefire agreements.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26254255

[bjourne]

That is not true, they did not have any such opportunity. The best Israel has been prepared to offer was autonomy. That is, the Bantustan option favored, by, for example, Menachem Begin. The notion that the Palestinians "oppresses themselves" by not accepting "Israel's gracious offers" is completely absurd.

The Palestinians signed the Oslo accords in 1993. What has happened since? Israel has strengthened its grip on the West Bank and more than doubled the settler population. Despite the fact that everyone in the whole world recognizes that transferring your civilian population to occupied territory is a war crime. Why? Because Israel is run by supremacists and religious nuts who think that their holy book gives then an eternal and inviolable right to "Eretz Israel". In fact, they refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria" to underscore their view that the territory belongs to the them.

[Udik]

> Israel does not actually have legally recognized borders

Let's start from this. Israel has a legally recognized border with Syria which doesn't include the Golan Heights. It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line, and which doesn't include East Jerusalem. It's that simple. The reason these borders are called "disputed" or unclear, is that Israel refuses to give up illegally annexed territories or- in the case of the West Bank- because the lack of a border allows Israel to keep expanding without officially invading a different country. In other words, the lack of borders is not a bug: it's a feature.

What I expect from Israel as a necessary sign of good will, is to relinquish most of the annexed territories and to declare, once and for all, what are its borders. So that not a single Israeli soldier or citizen could cross them without authorization from the state on the other side of the border.

> They've had several solid opportunities to accept this as reality and establish a state

No they didn't, for the reasons I stated above. In fact, at the present, Israel's government is opposing by all means the possibility of an international recognition of a Palestinian State. Why? Because that would establish a border, and with it the end of Israel's expansion in the West Bank. Since Israel removed a few thousand settlers from Gaza, it has installed hundreds of thousands in the West Bank, creating a de-facto annexation that will be almost impossible to revert.

[reissbaker]

So, I think you're mistaken here.

It also has a legally recognized border with the West Bank on the Green Line.

No, it doesn't. The GP is correct. The "Green Line" is not a legal border. It was a de facto border established along armistice lines between the armies of Israel on one side, and the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria on the other side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Line_(Israel)

There was also no country called "the West Bank" on the other side of the line. The other side of the western portion of the line in 1949 was Jordan, and it ruled there until 1967 when Israel captured the territory in the Six Day War. Jordan presently makes no claims on the West Bank and agrees its border with Israel runs along the Jordan river.

It has a legally recognized border with Syria.

Again, it doesn't. You are (perhaps unknowingly) once again referring to the Green Line, as per that same Wikipedia link. The border with Syria was a de facto border established by war. To quote Wikipedia:

The 1949 Armistice Agreements were clear (at Arab insistence) that they were not creating permanent borders. The Egyptian–Israeli agreement, for example, stated that "the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary, and is delineated without prejudice to rights, claims and positions of either Party to the Armistice as regards ultimate settlement of the Palestine question." Similar provisions are contained in the Armistice Agreements with Jordan and Syria.

Notably the border with Lebanon was the only border in 1949 that didn't include those terms, and was established as the official international borders of the State of Israel and Lebanon. Although Lebanon and Israel have gone to war since, Israel has not tried to annex territory from beyond the Lebanese/Israeli border line agreed to in 1949.

Why? Because that would establish a border

I think your present misconception as to why Israel and the Palestinians have yet to reach peace is due to your misconceptions about borders, since you believe Israel is anti-border in general and that it has repeatedly violated legal borders in the past. The GP is correct that the borders you've claimed Israel has violated were never legal borders, and were merely de facto borders established by war, which both sides agreed were not to be considered valid. When Israel has established treaties that create international borders, such as it did with Lebanon in 1949, Egypt in 1979 (in which Israel returned massive amounts of land, equivalent to larger than the entire remaining state of Israel, in exchange for a peace treaty), and Jordan in 1994, it has not sought to annex territory beyond those borders.

The root issue of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is... complicated, and a lot more complex than "Israel does not want any borders." One of the core issues that in part torpedoed the Oslo Peace Process is that both relatively-mainstream Israeli Jews and relative-mainstream Palestinian Muslims view an agreement that gives Jerusalem to the other side as a religious heresy that neither is willing to cross, and they both also have refused to share it. But it's not just as simple as that, either. The extreme religious right of Israel (e.g. the Shas political party) views any peace treaty that returns land from the original Jewish kingdom as religious heresy, and the extreme religious right on the Palestinian side (e.g. Hamas) views the entirety of Israel as an Islamic waqf [holy possession] that cannot be owned by any non-Muslim.

[hoka-one-one]

>what was he supposed to do?

Assimilate.

[poweronselftest]

You got downvoted for some reason, but that's a totally legit thing to say in my opinion.

However, the problem of Jewish assimilation in Europe was much more complicated than you might imagine. Prior to the United States, not many places in history really let Jews assimilate. A notable example is China, where Jews moved over the last few thousand years only to always vanish due to assimilation. Non-religious Jews (ie. those willing to assimilate) are vanishing in the United States, too, because the local population is not particularly intolerant of assimilation.

In Europe, however, assimilation was largely not an option, even for Jews willing to assimilate, and even after WWII. This very topic is what spurred Theodore Herzl to become a Zionist, after initially rejecting it for many years. There's a whole book about it: Theodor Herzl: From Assimilation to Zionism [1], but if you search the web you can find plenty of information about it.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Theodor-Herzl-Assimilation-Zionism-Li...

[hoka-one-one]

I like your response, and I will take a look at that book since you're probably the first Jew who's tried to argue with me in good faith on this matter.

But to respond to what I can, yeah, exactly. Your great-great uncle could try to assimilate in a non-Jewish country and hope they trust him, which they may or may not given the history of organized Judaism, or he could colonize Palestine and screw them over. He chose the latter, now some people (not me, I'm not Palestinian) hate him for it. Given human history he certainly knew there would be attempts at further expansion in the future, so they hate him for that, too. Why is any of this surprising? I feel like if you believe your great-great uncle deserves a pass you must believe that Palestinians were either uneducated or grossly immoral and bigoted for wanting to keep their land because that would have meant possible death for Jews. And if you do believe that then that could be a really interesting discussion.

Overall though it just seems easier to me to accept that he screwed someone over to get something good. My ancestors have done that plenty of times.

[Daho0n]

>Did he displace the local population there? I guess. Did he have other options? No. What was he supposed to do, drown himself?

Those were not the only two options. You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians. You are turning a sad story into a propaganda piece which helps no-one. Just like my Syrian friend, who now owns a restaurant he started with local help, one could become part of israel without being part of the forced displacement programs.

[poweronselftest]

> You mentioned the Syrian refugees. They did come here where I live but unlike in Palestine they don't displace anyone but became part of the populace. No-one is or were forcing anyone to displace Palestinians.

The displacement of Palestinian Arabs occurred as the result of a civil war that took place between them an Palestinian Jews in 1948. Prior to that, there was no displacement, at least nothing like what happened in 1948. Yes, the dynamic with Syrians in Europe is different, because they can't possibly engage in a civil war with the local population. But the Civil War between Jews and Arabs in Palestine occurred, and the result was mass displacement of Arabs as the Jews won. Had the Civil War not occurred, Arabs would have been part of the Jewish state as partitioned by the United Nations in 1947. Many Arabs are, in fact, Israeli Citizens (with a Covid vaccination rate roughly as high as Ultra Orthodox Jews).*

What I am saying is: Yes, there were aggressive Zionists who came to Palestine to fight fight fight**. But the majority of refugees who came to Palestine just wanted to be left alone, and were forced into a fight by their ethnic alignment that was decided for them at birth, the same ethnic alignment that forced them to Palestine in the first place.

[*] And why are these Arabs citizens of Israel? More often than not, because their ancestors who were alive in 1948 had a history of peaceful enough co-existence with Jews, or their village was location geographically such that they did not pose a perceived threat during the civil war. As bad as population displacement is, the Jews by and large did not arbitrarily displace people in 1948. The perspective was at the time that either a strategic foothold is established, or the opposing Arab armies will finish Hitler's job, which would have certainly been the case.

[**] For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ze'ev_Jabotinsky

[DSingularity]

Why do you say that the Arabs would have finished Hitlers job? Jews had been living for centuries in the Middle East alongside Arabs. Even today Morrocan Jews in Israel talk warmly of their past lives as Morrocans.

I once met a Lebanese whose friend growing up was Jewish. Later he grew up and moved to Israel only to come back to Lebanon as a military commander. He saw him at a military checkpoint in the city they grew up in.