Comment by robertoandred
4 days ago
Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?
4 days ago
Going to pretend that Jews haven’t lived there for thousands and thousands of years, before the Arabs arrived?
It was more about local residents becoming Arabs than Arabs migrating in large numbers. Palestinian Arabs are mostly descended from ancient Canaanites. More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age. Most conquerors just replaced or took over the old elites. Many people died in the process, and the survivors would often adopt a new culture, language, and/or religion.
> More generally, the demographics around the Eastern Mediterranean have changed surprisingly little since the Bronze Age.
This type of claims only shows lack of understanding of history as a science. It is actually impossible right now to make claims about this with any significant degree of confidence.
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Without being overly facetious, the foundations of the modern University system have a significant role to play in that; e.g. the first university in Europe was established by Arab Muslims in the year 841 in Salerno, Italy.
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The downvoters are telling on themselves.
Zionism is a colonial ideology created by Europeans in the late 1800s.
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Yes, but it only happened after 1946.
The worse part for Mizrahi Jews is that they endured tons of suffering for things they had nothing to do with, and that even in today's Israel they are kind of second-class citizens facing discrimination by Ashkenazi.
thats not true. before the declaration of independence, there was hardly any abar jews migration to Israel for several reasons:
1. Arab jews lived peacefully among muslims and coexisted just fine, they were not subject to european disrimination and pogroms
2. Iraqi jews did not want to immigrate to Israel, so Mossad planted bombs and organized false flags to scare them and force them to immigrate (https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iraq-jews-attacks-zionist...)
3. Other arab countries also did not want to emigrate, Ben Gurion paid a lot of money for each family to encourage immigration. It is laughable to claim that arabs prosecuted jews, when in fact they coexisted for millennia and lived in the same neighborhoods without any segregation (that existed in Europe)
4. Mizrahi jews who immigrated to Israel suffered from severe discrimination by european ashkenazi. Only low paid jobs were given to Arab jews due to racism. Same racism is towards yemeni jews who were even subject to illegal sterilization
after the Nakba situation in arab countries changed, but it was reactionary to Nakba
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Herzl, Zionism’s founder explicitly described Zionism as colonialism in the 1890s:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_coloniali...
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> Colonialism is a leftist ideology created by college professors in the 1970s
And that matters because…?
> Furthermore, there is no colony without a mother country.
I think you’re picking and choosing a definition of colony that fits your argument. Here’s a more applicable one:
“ a body of people who settle far from home but maintain ties with their homeland; inhabitants remain nationals of their home state but are not literally under the home state's system of government”
Instead of making ad hominem attacks and playing semantics, why not argue against the actual ideas?
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> Also, in what upside-down universe is a forcibly expelled indigenous people returning home 'colonial'?
Because they weren't forcibly expelled from Palestine!
If I get unlawfully evicted from my new apartment that doesn't give me the right to go take my old apartment by force.
By your logic I can use my 23 and me to prove the whole world belongs to me (excluding Australia and Antartica). That's not how this works.
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In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.
The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi. Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD. Even from this population, there is a bottleneck around 600 to 800 years ago where the population was down to 350 individuals [1].
By and large very very few Jews in Palestine/Israel are able to claim Levantine/Semitic genetic ancestry.
Many Palestinians and other Levantine people in Palestine who now practice Islam are far more likely have to have ancestors that were once Jewish that actually lived in historical kingdom of Israel prior to 70 AD when Titus and Vespasian crushed a revolt there.
The ancestors of these folks that today practice Islam in Palestine likely converted to Islam sometime after 637 AD when Arabs started to settle in Palestine.
It's pretty commonly accepted all over the world since basically forever that ownership is bequeathed from parents to children. This means that those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land than folks who have no genetic ancestry to the Kingdom of Israel and instead have ancestry with no genetic relationship that converted to Judaism about 1105 to 1285 years ago.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-descend-from-35...
> those who are Islamic today but whose genetic ancestors practiced Judaism in the past and lived in the historical kingdom of Israel have far greater claim to the land
Broadly speaking, any philosophy that rests on an oldest-claims-first metric are guaranteed to cause violence.
Information degrades the further we go back; you’re prioritising the wishy-washiest sources of truth. And the nature of human migration and interbreeding means the further you go back, the less likely you are to find genetic ancestors of the people who currently control the land. The people alive on the land you want them off. People with guns.
(The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong. Immigrants to America have less claim than white Americans, who have less claim than natives, except for all the natives who were conquered each other because they moved around too.)
It's not about the certainty of the information. The fact is that humans have always and will always migrate in large numbers for a vast number of reasons, and these migration movements are the main sources of cultural and linguistic change. So, any ideology with historical justification, based on how people in a region lived a long time ago is going to create wars because other groups lived there at other times, and ethnic and linguistic groups constantly change and evolve. Named regions, ethnic group boundaries, countries, and their delimitations change over time.
> The theory is also fundamentally based on the notion that racial migration is wrong.
There are no human races, though, at least not ones based on phenotypical traits. Genetic analysis can reveal indications of regions and ethnic origins but these are barely linked to phenotypical traits and cannot be inferred from the latter. Linguistic communities are the bearers of a shared culture, not anything related to the bogus and outdated concept of "human races." It's also worth pointing out that the claim that "racial migration is wrong" does not follow from any of the other considerations, nor is it needed to support them in any way. I suppose you meant to say the opposite, that the view that racial migration is wrong cannot be morally justified because historical justifications are wrong? Otherwise I don't get the final remark.
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> Information degrades the further we go back
Exactly. Otherwise, anyone could claim anything since we all share the same ancestry, going back to the same primates or something[0]. We should focus on the issues at hand and work to avoid making the situation worse. Forcing all Israelites or Palestinians to leave is not a feasible solution. The problem needs to be addressed through peaceful negotiations and immediate support for those in need.
[0]: Dumbed down on purpose.
> The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi
Wrong, Mizrahi are the majority.
> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria
I don't know hope you did it, but wrong again, DNA studies show Ashkenazim have a large Canaanite DNA component. The other part is largely Italian due to admixture within the Roman Empire which forcibly annexed Judea.
if you trust DNA study, you should know that the same DNA studies show that Palestinians are the ones who are native to the land of Palestine, not ashkenazi!
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Thanks for the correction.
> Ashkenazis are from Khazaria and converted to Judaism between 740 and 920 AD
Probably not worth reading your comment past this sentence.
You’re confusing something…
They are from Eastern Europe through the way of Germany and probably Italy (where they likely did quite a bit of mixing with the local before becoming mostly genetically isolated) prior to that.
leading jewish scholars in Israel have published research in support of Khazarian theory, for example Shlomo Sand: Invention of jewish people
https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...
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>The vast vast majority of Jews in Israel now are Ashkenazi.
That's simply untrue.
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/noah/files/2018/07/Ethnic...
The Khazar hypothesis is b.s. peddled by a white supremacist (Ernest Renan).
Genetic studies have found no substantive evidence of a Khazar origin among Ashkenazi Jews.
False, there is a lot of wiggle room open for interpretation in your “DNa studies”.
I need to tell Israeli professor of history Sholomo Sand from Tel-Aviv University that he is a white supremacist antisemite for pushing his Khazarian theory and bringing all the receipts in his book
https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/d...
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I don't think this "claim to land" works in the modern age.
Countries were established and fought for in blood all thorough history, and the winners kept their land. End of story.
Unless we are talking about some remote village, every single country was funded on blood and violence, and after a certain point it just makes no sense to track it.
By that logic, the claim that the land is exclusively(!) Jewish because this used to be the territory of the Jewish state ~2000 years ago works even less though.
Fair enough. With that in mind, at what point does it no longer make sense to track it?
There must be some principled position where you can argue when it does and or does not make sense. In the case of this conflict, we're talking about a conflict where a few folks that directly experienced it are still alive and that many folks whose parents experienced it are still alive.
The Nakba is more recent than the Holocaust by a few years. Should it get the same treatment? Countries like Germany are still paying reparations.
In the US, we constantly have discussions about the institution of slavery in the US that ended in 1865. Jim Crow laws are more recent injustice however and only ended in 1865.
The Ukraine likewise had the Holodomor. There's actually a fascinating video of Abe Foxman of the ADL speaking with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, telling him that it would be unproductive to talk about "your genocide, our genocide", but at the end of the day that's what we have here and it only seems fair to give comparable treatment for comparable catastrophes.
Speaking of catastrophe, I've always found it somewhat ironic that the word Nakba and the word Shoah (the original vernacular used to describe the Holocaust before it was replaced in the late 60s) both have the same meaning. Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe and Shoah is the Yiddish word for catastrophe.
I'm not saying where that line should or should not be, but it only seems fair that if we're going to draw a line that victims of different but comparable injustices should be given comparable treatment.
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Genealogical research shows the strongest link between the ancient Canaanites and the current middle east population is with the Palestinians and Lebanese. There are some genetic links between Palestinians and the ancient Israelites with this theory that many converted to Islam after the invasion.
However, you are correct in that many historians describe the population was added to, and never replaced. Supporting the DNA links.
From this I would conclude that the Palestinians are indigenous through the pre-colonial link. Most Jews in Israel are not indigenous but they share cultural links and lets not forget the wars they won in 1948 and 1967.
What is bizarre, is the ban on genetic testing for Palestinians and this pseudo-history in Israel that Palestinians never existed. Something distorted is being taught in Israel at many levels.
You’re conflating two theories: one widespread, and one fringe. The theory that the Ashkenazi population experienced a bottleneck is widely accepted; claiming that Ashkenazim are actually a remnant of the Khazar Khanganate[1] is both fringe and typically associated with antisemitic conspiracies.
(Note that I say antisemitic, and not in a manner that involves conflation with Zionism: going against the overwhelming majority of generic evidence to make a claim about a Jewish ethnic group that doesn’t even majority reside in Israel reeks of a blood-and-boden anger against Jews because of who they are.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi...
Fair enough. I didn't realize that the Khazar hypothesis was fringe. I've seen it pretty widely cited and assumed it was more commonly accepted.
What is still fair to say is that many Jews in Israel do not actually have a continued occupation of that land going back thousands of years as was claimed by the person I was originally responding to.
4% in 1872 is a very low number. Absent the mass immigration that diluted the local population and a Nakba that expulsed many, that 4% population there in 1872 would still be about 4% of the population today give or take a few percentage points assuming the fertility rate of that 4% and the 96% percent that were not Jewish were comparable.
Many of the Jews that are in Israel today are of European descent (i.e. no thousands of years of continued occupation of Palestine) and many of the Jews that are in Israel today that are of Arabic descent are there due to Zionist terrorism from the Irgun, Lehi, and Haganah prior to 1948 and the mass migration from around the Arab-Israeli war. For example, Avi Shlaim from Oxford University has given numerous interviews on the terrorism committed by Zionists in Iraq to coerce the Middle Eastern Jewish populations to concentrate in Palestine as part of the Zionist project.
What is indisputable is that the claim of a continued presence of Israel/Palestine by Jews going back thousands of years really only applies to a very small percent of Jews in Israel. The reality is that that number is most certainly dwarfed by the quantity of Palestinians in Israel/Palestine that can claim to have "lived there for thousands and thousands of years" per the person I was replying to.
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> In 1872, less than 4% of Palestine was Jewish. It was 17% in 1931. 33% in 1948 when Israel was formed.
Where's the issue ? I thought you Woke people wanted to see more diversity and empowerment of minority groups in the world
I think you're confusing me with other folks on HN. I value cohesive high trust societies so I'm personally in favor of assimilation and much more gradual changes to any culture.
I think a change from 96% to 67% in 76 years is a catastrophe for culture indigenous to a region, and it's not a surprise that the Nakba followed such a rapid change without assimilation. The rate should be one where outsiders coming into a society become part of that society instead of splintering the society.
In chemistry terms, it's the difference between a solution, emulsions, suspensions and mixtures. In my mind, the goal should be cultural "solutions". If the rate of change is such that you end up with enclaves that resist mixing, then that leads to decline of trust and civic engagement. You end up with a society that is highly political and fragmented and liable to balkanize and potentially engage in armed civil conflict.
Let me break this down in terms you can understand.
The DEIsraelis are doing a genocide.
Do you see the problem now?
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Arab is not a race. Most Arabs never arrived from anywhere, they were locals who adopted (often violently, sometimes not) large parts of Arab culture for long enough to consider themselves Arabs.
The Arabians never had the resources or population to engage in settler colonialism you are thinking of. Even if they wanted to (and perhaps they did), they just couldn't go around replacing anyone. So from the start the conception of Arab is about peoples slowly becoming Arab, not being replaced by arriving Arabs, in large part.
This is true of most old empires. Romans, Persians, Arabs, Mongols, early Ottomans generally don't setttle areas they conquer. They don't engage in industrial extraction either. They form a ruling class and collect taxes. Any cultural influence that have was because of longevity rather than any interest in forced conversion. People project their impressions of more modern empires to pre-industrial ones that didn't have the same aspirations or even institutions to accomplish those aspirations.
That's really not true, e.g. the wikipedia page on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[1]. This dates way back to the Assyrian and Persian empries explicitly moving conquered peoples around in their empires in order to safeguard their rule. This book on population transfer in the Ottoman empire[2] explicitly states, with references, that the Ottomans habits were inherited from the steppe Turks, the Byzantines (=the Romans) and the Arabs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Population_transf... [2] https://websites.umich.edu/~gocek/Work/ja/Gocek.Muge.ja.popu...
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They are one and the same people. Only through the lens of ethnocentric histories is any distinction made.
there are several flaws in your typical zionist argument:
1. jews as a minority have lived in the lands of Filistine and Jerusalem peacefully and coexisted just fine for millennia, before the zionist project.
2. the fact that small minority of jews lived there does not give an excuse to ethnically cleanse the local population of arabs.
3. the claim that modern european jews from Rhine and pale of settlement (AshkeNazi) have any connection to ancient Israelites from 2000+ years ago is laughable. Most genetic analysis proved that it is Palestinians, Jordanian Christians are native to the land, not european settlers from Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine with last names like Mileikowsky (Bibi's actual name), Mabovitch (golda's name) etc.
4. Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.
5. All studies have shown that Israel/zionism is a colonial settler project created by Brits to secure Suez Canal from the ottomans. Later it would become American "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the middle east to bomb and murder oil rich countries in the middle east
> Filistine and Jerusalem did not have a problem with antisemitism and jew hate, UNTIL european settlers showed up. Antisemitism is purely european concept imported into Middle East.
Read about the granada massacre.
Oy vey, granada is in Spain, you just proved my point that antisemitic pogroms are purely european thing.
Iraqi jews did not even want to migrate to Israel and leave Iraq. Mossad had to organize several bombings and false flags to scare the Iraqi jews and force them to migrate[1]
in other arab states, Ben Gurion paid money to encourage jews to immigrate and settle Filistine. Moroccan king begged jewish community to stay and not to immigrate
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4283249?seq=1
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Everything else about this aside: the reason most European Jews have Europeanized last names is because they were forced to adopt them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries[1].
(Also, why spell it “AshkeNazi”? That seems inflammatory with no connection to reality, since the root is Ashkenaz.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_surname
I would argue there is connection to nazi regime:
1. ICC and ICJ's accusations of genocide by israel
2. israeli government led by Kahanite leaders like bezalel smotrich and ben gvir. Kahanism was recognized by USA and EU as a terrorist organization with fascist ideology and is named after terrorist meir kahane
3. public announcements by israeli leaders and journalists about "Israel needs Lebensraum"[a], dreams of conquering greater israel from Nile to Euphrates[b] stealing land from 6 other countries
There are way too many similarities between nazi germany and the zionist regime
a. https://archive.ph/NGnNv#selection-1153.44-1153.113
b. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241120-smotrich-has-conf...
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When you ethnically cleanse a population, that population tends to go down. The opposite has happened to Arabs living in and around Israel.
I agree that it's not ethnic cleansing, but that's an awful support. Just because you're bad at evil doesn't make you not evil. Like, I assume Israel's population has gone up since October 7, which doesn't make it any less attempted genocide.
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