Comment by sillystuff
2 years ago
> 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...
Does one crime against humanity justify another? The Jews escaped the holocaust then immediately displaced 700,000 people during the formation of their state. That included the massacre of several villages.
I do think simply calling Israel a colonial state is insufficient. The Jewish people didn't have a place they could return to like the British or the French, and the contemporary events obviously created an extremely dire situation. I'm not sure that makes what was done to the native Muslim population in Palestine okay, and there were certainly elements of a colonial project on display that continue to this day (notably, the formation of Jewish settlements in the west bank in violation of international law). The zionist movement also pre-dates the rise of the Nazis. That they were vindicated doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't a colonial project.