Comment by rendall
2 years ago
> The only way for Israel to exist as an ethnostate is through an ethnic cleansing.
I don't understand that logic. Would you mind explaining?
Do you live in North America? I identify this perspective with Americans and Canadians and not, say, Norwegians.
This one seems very straightforward to me, so to make an explanation useful, perhaps we need some shared definitions
1. ethnostate: a country that values/prioritizes residents being of a particular ethnicity defined in law and either forbids people of other ethnicities from living there or discourages them by denying them equal rights
2. ethnic cleansing: (EU definition) Rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group
Perhaps you are saying that legal discrimination doesn't count as intimidation and therefore denying rights based on ethnicity is not ethnic cleansing? (I would disagree). Or are you using different definitions altogether?
What makes discussion of this difficult is that whenever someone neutrally discusses this, someone invariably jumps in, angry, with an uncharitable whatabout. Please ignore it when it happens.
When you dig into the history of the region, as an interesting topic in its own right, without reference to any current conflict, without motivation to prove any particular side right or wrong, just letting history tell its own story, some patterns emerge. I'll give you the Cliff Notes the way it seems to me, a non-Jew American, culturally leftists. If I'm wrong I'll hear a calm, considered, good-faith-well-sourced-not-weird fact I may not be aware of.
To answer your question, when Israel started, the new state invited its Arab neighbors to participate and this invitation was sincere. This fact is elided quite a lot, but it's true and I can show you receipts. This directly relates to your point. As you might imagine, Zionist Jews were really not interested in fighting. Many Arabs agreed to participate in the new state, stayed, were peaceful and their descendents are full Israeli citizens today. There was no intention for an "ethno-state" by point 2 of your definition at this time, but there was a Zionist desire to defend themselves. The borders of the new democratic state did demographically put Jews in charge, but there wasn't a desire to expel Arabs. I know, hard to fathom, but it's true.
Nevertheless, Arabs were expelled. From the Zionist perspective, they weren't expelled because they were Arabs, but because they participated in a genocidal war with the stated intention to expell and kill Jews.
Where did that intention come from? Surely the Zionists did something to deserve that hate? Stole land?
After really looking at it, from my Western, American perspective, they did no more than Jews did when they immigrated to my own country: start businesses, purchase land, prosper to the envy of some of their neighbors. If you can demonstrate that Zionists literally stole land, lmk. However, instead of emigrating to the Lower East Side, which was rough but still more or less had the rule of law, Zionists immigrated to a lawless backwater of the dying Ottoman Empire where they were were the target of explicitly genocidal attacks by Muslim Arabs. These attacks spilled over to historically Jewish villages, such as Hebron.
So, when I hear "Zionists stole land" I hear "Micks stole our jobs" and not "Boers violently displaced native tribes from fertile farmland". It's a better analogy for what actually happened.
Today, Israel controls lands, the West Bank and Gaza, populated by the descendents of the people who tried to ethnically cleanse them on first go. No one else wants that land and its people. Not Egypt, not Jordan, not Lebanon. Now it's on Israel to try to deal with this.
Are you responding to the comment I posted?
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