Comment by skrebbel
1 year ago
Yeah it's never OK but do you also think Finland should get Viipuri back? That was the second-largest city of Finland, the Soviets took it in WWII and kicked out all the Finns and that was that. It's now Vyborg, a sleepy Russian town of little importance. That was a catastrophe too.
Do you also think Lviv should be Polish? And Wrocław German? And Trabzon Greek? No wait I mean Armenian, which do we even pick, seriously everybody wants Trabzon! Should the entire Arabian peninsula be Turkish again?
Where does it stop? Why should Palestine be restored to its one-time borders but not the rest? All this happened in a time when moving populations around at the whim of a few imperialist rulers was considered a super normal thing to do. That doesn't make it right, but the Nakba isn't a particularly unique historical event. Get over it, and focus on the actual current events that are also bad, such as the settlements, decades of effective imprisonment of everybody in Gaza, and so on. There's plenty of good arguments! But "from the river to the sea" is a far right revisionist talking point and in my opinion it does an enormous disservice to the Palestinian case.
The issue is that after the Winter war there was still a Finland, after WWII there was still a Poland, and a Germany and a Turkey and a Greece and an Armenia.
There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic prospect of one. Somewhere between 5 and 8 million Palestinians are now condemned to be extremely unwilling subjects of an endless military occupation by a hostile state and reduced to second class status in their own homeland.
_That_ is the crucial difference.
>There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic prospect of one.
There was never a real Palestinian state. Locally there were Egypt and Jordan, two states that still exist in the same way that Finland does.
I don't think that's a crucial enough difference to be in favour of destroying an entire country and deporting or killing the people in it. You can totally be in favour of freedom for Palestine, for a one or two state solution, in all kinds of configurations, without supporting the "kill or deport the Jews" argument.
It's really not very nuanced at all - if you want to kill or deport all the Jews, even when formulated in fluffy terms like "give those poor Palestinians their homeland back", you're not really trying to make the world a better place are you? You'd be just like those far right Israelis who seem to want to kill or deport all the Palestinians. It's the exact same vibe, just aimed in the other direction. They're both the baddies. Don't be like them.
> to be in favour of destroying an entire country and deporting or killing the people in it.
woah! dial it back there. I advocated no such thing
please take a few deep breaths and read slowly over the thread making note of who said what. then please reconsider slinging accusations like that around.
I'm in favour of a two state solution.
My main point is that the long term actions of the Israeli state, especially in the West Bank, have made the viability of a Palestinian state (i.e. one in coexistence with Israel) completely impossible.
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What you forget to mention is that, in many cases, a lot of those moves are indeed still contested.
And in fact, the Zionist argument is exactly that one: "because there were some Jews here 2000 years ago, this land must be a Jewish ethnostate". Why is that argument ok, but "there were Arabs here 80 years ago" is not?
Because, in reality, both arguments are stupid and tribal to a level rarely seen after 1950. Both should join modernity and move to a shared state - not based on XIX century racism, but on XXI century respect for democracy, religious equality, etc etc.
Unfortunately, the side with (atomic) power refuses to even countenance the possibility, because of a tribalistic ideology that shames some of their magnificent ancestors. And so we continue with an eye for an eye, like in the darkest of times.