Comment by dotancohen
1 month ago
Serious question, what do you think is their own land? And what exactly makes you think it is their land?
Are you aware that most of the Arabs of the Holy Land came around the same time period as the Jews? There were Arabs living here previously, of course, as were there living here Jews. Half a century before the British mandate, Jerusalem was already Jewish majority.
> where they've lived for thousands of years.
The only reason that Jews in the West Bank are called settlers is because the Jews were ethnically cleansed from the West Bank in 1948, and that territory was free of Jews for 19 years. Other than those 19 years, the Jews had been here far longer than the Arab colonizers had been.
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There are quite a few inaccuracies here.
Palestine is not in Arabia but in the Levant, which was conquered by Arabs from the Byzantine Empire in the 7th c. as part of the Arab-Byzantine wars, and came under the Rashidun Caliphate, the first incarnation of the Arab Empire (which also conquered parts of Europe, BTW, not to mention that people in Morocco or Tunisia speak Arabic for pretty much the same reason people in Peru or Mexico speak Spanish). Warfare in the Levant obviously preceded the crusades by centuries and millenia, and included not only European conquests such as Greek and Roman, but also Persian and Arab conquests.
While it is true that modern Zionism originated in Europe, most Jews living in Israel have no European ancestry whatsoever. Most Jews in Israel have a recent ancestry in the Middle East and North Africa.
Even Ashkenazi Jews of a recent European ancestry (who are a minority in Israel) have genetics pointing to Middle Eastern ancestry. While it is hard to tie any group to ancient Jews, it isn't unlikely that Jews of all origins as well as Palestinian Arabs have ancient Jewish ancestry.
Just as European nationalism excluded Jews as Europeans, Arab nationalism excluded Jews as Arabs, and if there's any group that identifies as Jewish-Arab today, it is vanishingly small.
What Zionism is has not only changed considerably over time, but now, as in the past, there's great disagreement among those considering themselves Zionist on what it means. For example, as recently as a decade ago you could find a small but not negligible group of Israelis who identified as Zionsists yet were in favour of a single multi-national (or non-national) Jewish/Arab state, i.e. the same position was regarded as both Zionist and anti-Zionist by different people simultaneously. Today, many (perhaps even most) of those identifying as Zionists favour a two-state solution.
> not to mention that people in Morocco or Tunisia speak Arabic for pretty much the same reason people in Peru or Mexico speak Spanish
Not really. The European colonization of Latin America (and North America in general) was extremely bloody, and rooted in eradication and subjugation and erasure of the local culture. The native languages in the Americas are all but gone and been replaced with Spanish/Portugese/etc. We also saw what they did in the Levant, India, Africa, etc.
On the other hand, the Islamic (not Arab) conquests preserved the local culture. This is why Berber is still spoken in North Africa for example. And this is also why an extremely significant number of famous and prominent Islamic scholars came from Persia and the surrounding region (like Abu Hanifa, Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, and many more to list here). Not to mention countries further east like India and Indonesia as Islam spread. As a matter of fact, there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims.
I attended a lecture by a Chinese Muslim who talked about the history of Islam in China - one amusing point he mentioned was how a local martial art was influenced by Wudhu' (Ablution) in Islam. This points to how there was an assimilation and acceptance between Islam and the locals, and was not an eradication.
We are seeing the genocidal calls by the israelis government officials (and polls show a majority of their population agree with them).
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This is such a perversion of the history of the holy land that I don't even see fit to correct any of it. Any reader here is welcome to read about the Muslim conquests, of which the Muslims are extremely proud.
In fact, part of that pride is calling it an the Arab conquest, even though the colonizer - Salah AlDin - was a Kurd and not an Arab.
We learned about the Islamic conquests, not the Arab conquests. I don't know where you got the latter from.
Salahuddin was a liberator, not a colonizer.
Jews are an ethnicity and are genetically the same. Even those from Europe and those from Muslim countries (who now live in Israel after getting kicked out of Muslim countries). Stop making stuff up.
Ohhh and Muslims didn’t treat Jews “peacefully”. They were second class citizens and often massacred. Read some history.
No, Jews of today are ethnically quite diverse and have mixed significantly. There are several recognized heritages of Jews of today with known populations from North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, and also Europe. I don't deny the "Jewishness" of anyone, but say "The Jews" as if this covers all of them is wrong. There are huge swaths of Jews today that are anti-Zionist and consider Israel an abomination on religious grounds. That it is a religious goal to have a nation of Israel is a new idea driven by Christian Zionists more than Jewish ones and the political, areligious Jewish Zionists enjoy their support and will play any role to achieve their own goals. The recent newly emerging religious Jewish Zionists are a divergence from mainstream Judaism and a recent development that relies on a lot of creative interpretation and ignorance of Jewish religious texts.
And yes, Muslims and Jews lived over 1000 years far more peacefully than any time before. Jerusalem and the rest of the Palestine was at peace under Muslim rule except for the Crusades which, surprise, came from Europe.
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Jewish historian Shelomo Dov Goitein admits that Jews lived under the Islamic ruling better than they ever lived anywhere else in the world.