Comment by kilolima
1 year ago
For every Israeli Jewish civilian, there is an equivalent Palestine refugee living in a camp (~7mil). Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced. So the Gazans are probably not going to be pro-Israeli any time soon.
I find this argument to be problematic. The world contains an enormous number of descendants of displaced people. I imagine that most of the US population is in this category, for example. (Most people of Native American heritage. The descendants of the Puritans. Most American Jews (displaced from different places, even). The Palestinian-Americans. Descendants of slaves. Many others.)
Yet most of these people do not consider themselves to still be displaced! I certainly feel no particular desire to reconquer the (multiple!) places from which my ancestors were displaced. (There’s a lot of nuance here. Plenty of people, for example, think that Native Americans and their descendants should have better treatment, especially in land that remains Native American.)
But somehow Palestinian refugees, in particular, have unusual, highly politicized issues. The UN agency involved is a different agency than the one that nominally handles every other refugee situation worldwide. There are multigenerational Palestinian refugee camps in countries that do not grant citizenship to the refugees, and there are people who argue that granting citizenship would do them a disservice. (I don’t know whether the people arguing this are doing so in good faith.)
Also…
> Israeli can only exist as a Jewish majority state as long as the original inhabitants remain displaced.
Stories and written records about the Israel go back a long time. If the stories are all true, essentially all Jews worldwide are the descendants of those displaced from Israel. Control of Jerusalem in particular has changed quite a few times, and there are surely plenty of people around, Jews and otherwise, whose ancestors have been displaced multiple times, hundreds of years apart, from the area. (It’s not just Jews and Arabs. Jesus was killed in Jerusalem. Wars have been fought there repeatedly: the Muslim Conquest of the Levant, the Crusades, etc.)
Trying to keep score of the number of living descendants of the various groups who have been displaced from Israel seems unlikely to give any sensible moral answer for who ought to control what part of it, except insofar as maybe the entire place would be better off with a genuine non-religious government, along the lines of how the US nominally works. Good luck!