Comment by busterarm
2 years ago
The specific place is important for historical reasons and there have been migrations of Jews back to the area (after being expelled from Spain/Portugal, etc) since the 1490s.
The population was small, up to about 5% of the region during the Ottomans (after heavy losses due to multiple Black Plague outbreaks), but the reason that specific area was chosen (as opposed to alternatives) was because there was already a community of Jews there.
Keep in mind that the vast majority of the area was uninhabited swamps until the 1940s and huge numbers of people died from malaria every year before resettling Jews completely changed the local terrain.
Look up details about the the late 1880s and the distinctions marking the difference between the Old Yishuv and New Yishuv.
Political aspirations of the Old Yishuv were pretty low due to the fact that they were broke as shit and depended on handouts from abroad, whereas New Yishuv resettlers came with money and dreams.
Jews were a majority of Jerusalem even in 1850. Some communities have existed since roman times. Its a complicated story that doesn't start within anyone's living memory.
I largely agree but the community was pretty persecuted and dispersed from the early 5th century through basically the 1200s.
The biggest problem I find with the collective understanding people have of the conflict is that people largely think nothing of note happened before 1900 but the prior history determines a ton of why later decisions were made that people attribute to the start of conflict.
I kind of take the opposite position. History is complicated, always. However, the basic problem of Israel and Palestine is that Palestinians either live under military law (the West Bank) or in a big prison (Gaza). That's obviously not a democratic, dignified, or otherwise morally defensible situation.
Ultimately, the security needs of Israel need to be balanced against the rights of the Palestinians, and as it stands, the Palestinians have no negotiating power, so they get nothing. If politicians around the world made it clear you cannot be 'the only democracy in the middle east' while having millions of people subject to military law, I expect the Palestinians would have enough negotiating room to force some kind of reasonable settlement.
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If this is true (I don't know), a good percentage of the European settler Jews would have had to converge upon Jerusalem. In 1800, before the European Zionist settler colonialist project began, there were only 7000 Jews in all of historic Palestine. A large increase from the period ending just 20 years prior where there were only 2000 Jews in all of Palestine.
You have to go back to the 4th century, and earlier, for Judaism to have a significant presence in Palestine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...
Note: The original European Zionist Jews called their own project settler colonialism back then, and they were opposed by Orthodox Jews, at the time.
You might want to note that the rulers of the holy land at the time that you are referring to specifically enacted laws to encourage settling the nearly-empty holy land. Ottoman law since the 1850's stated that anyone who settles land (houses, farms, factories) owns it - Muslims and Jews and Christians alike.
You'll also note that League of Nations (and UN) mandates can not change the laws of the lands they administer - then can only issue temporary orders (usually limited to three years). So British orders are not valid in the holy land today. Likewise, military occupation (Jordanian, Israeli) also can not change the laws but rather can issue temporary orders. So the law of the land in the West Bank even today remains Ottoman law, modulo "temporary" Israeli military orders that are actually renews (for the most part) every three years or so.
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>Keep in mind that the vast majority of the area was uninhabited swamps until the 1940s
Not saying you're necessarily wrong, but I find this hard to believe because the majority of the area was not uninhabited swamps back during the time of the Roman Empire, so why would it have become uninhabited swamps at some point between then and the 1940s? Of course terrain does change over time, but I've never heard of the Levant turning into swamps in post-Roman times.
> The 17th century saw a steep decline in the Jewish population of Palestine due to the unstable security situation, natural catastrophes, and abandonment of urban areas, which turned Palestine into a remote and desolate part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman central government became feeble and corrupt, and the Jewish community was harassed by local rulers, janissaries, guilds, Bedouins, and bandits. The Jewish community was also caught between feuding local chieftains who extorted and oppressed the Jews. The Jewish communities of the Galilee heavily depended on the changing fortunes of a banking family close to the ruling pashas in Acre. As a result, the Jewish population significantly shrank.
https://www.amazon.com/Zionism-Creation-Society-Studies-Hist...
For a couple of hundred years prior there were tens of thousands of Jews in the region, including at one point 30,000 counted just in Safed by the end of the 16th century.
Also keep in mind that in 1800 populations were an order of magnitude smaller than they are now.
> Keep in mind that the vast majority of the area was uninhabited swamps until the 1940s
Citation needed. Nearly 2M people called Palestine their home in the 1940s, the majority Muslim.
We also know that the Palestinian villages bulldozed by the Israeli European Jewish settler colonialists over the last 75 years had existed for many hundreds of years-- many of the parks in Israel are built on top of the ruins of these destroyed Palestinian villages, to hide these crimes from the world. We know that the Palestinian olive orchards bulldozed by the Israelis were filled with trees that were hundreds of years old. Gaza itself, was a prosperous ancient city that once stood upon a crossroads of trade. Besides the 10s of thousands of civilians majority women and children murdered by Israel (war crimes) in this latest massacre of the many massacres by the Israelis, the Israelis are destroying all the buildings and civilian infrastructure in Gaza (war crimes), there may be no more Gaza when the Israelis are finished.
Short version, you are spreading falsehoods in defense of genocidal behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...
European Jews do not make up the majority of Israeli citizens. More Jewish Israelis are Mizrahi than Ashkenazi. It's notable when people only talk about "Israeli European Jewish settler colonialists", while ignoring all the MENA Jews who migrated or already lived in the region. It's notable because it's framing the issue as Israel being a modern European colony, which is misleading and incorrect.
I address Mizrahi here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38576719
Zionism is and was a European project. Here is a challenge for you, name a single Mizrahi in a position of power in Israel; it is all Europeans.
It's funny because people scream "citation, citation" but these numbers are all over any wikipedia page covering the population and history of the region, with adequate citations. I've done little more beyond quote some pages.
That's even putting aside the absurdity of calling the flight of Jews from Europe "colonialism" in the first place.
Just because Hitler blew his brains out, doesn't mean everything was hunky dory fine again. There were pogroms against people who had survived the concentration camps, Stalin was now in charge of the majority of nations where Jews had lived, local authorities that had collaborated with the Nazis were still in charge in many places...
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