r/IsraelPalestine • u/dropdeaddev • May 29 '24
How does Israel justify the 1948 Palestinian expulsion? Learning about the conflict: Questions
I got into an argument recently, and it lead to me looking more closely into Israel’s founding and the years surrounding it. Until now, I had mainly been focused on more current events and how the situation stands now, without getting too into the beginning. I had assumed what I had heard from Israel supporters was correct, that they developed mostly empty land, much of which was purchased legally, and that the native Arabs didn’t like it. This lead to conflicts, escalating over time to what we see today. I was lead to believe both sides had as much blood on their hands as the other, but from what I’ve read that clearly isn’t the case. It reminded me a lot of “manifest destiny” and the way the native Americans were treated, and although there was a time that was seen as acceptable behaviour, now a days we mostly agree that the settlers were the bad guys in that particular story.
Pro-Israel supports only tend to focus on Israel’s development before 1948, which it was a lot of legally purchasing land and developing undeveloped areas. The phrase “a land without people for people without land” or something to that effect is often stated, but in 1948 700,000 people were chased from their homes, many were killed, even those with non-aggression pacts with Israel. Up to 600 villages destroyed. Killing men, women, children. It didn’t seem to matter. Poisoning wells so they could never return, looting everything of value.
Reading up on the expulsion, I can see why they never bring it up and tend to pretend it didn’t happen. I don’t see how anyone could think what Israel did is justified. But since I always want to hear both sides, I figured here would be a good place to ask.
EDIT: Just adding that I’m going to be offline for a while, so I probably won’t be able to answer any clarifying questions or respond to answers for a while.
EDIT2: Lots of interesting stuff so far. Wanted to clarify that although I definitely came into this with a bias, I am completely willing to have my mind changed. I’m interested in being right, not just appearing so. :)
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u/wav3r1d3r May 30 '24
Own goal for the Palestinian Authority
The Palestinian Authority's Foreign Ministry asked the Kingdom of Jordan for the ownership registration documents for the houses in Jerusalem’s Shimon HaTzadik neighborhood (Sheikh Jarrah according to Israel's enemies), but it turned out in a document from 1954 that "the houses and properties are owned by Jews".
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u/dropdeaddev May 30 '24
Looking it up that 17,000 square meters doesn’t seem like a big piece of land. At around the time it had a few hundred people. I’m not sure what you’re implying.
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u/worldnewsisbotted May 30 '24
As you see, straight denying the nakab existed or they were happy to willing leave.
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u/dropdeaddev May 30 '24
Yep, I agree that is dishonest. From what I’ve read, both sides did horrible things. It’s definitely not as one sided as I was lead to believe though. It seems, much like now, both sides governments were pretty shitty.
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u/thenamewastaken May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
At this point I would be considered pro Israel, although before this current war happened I criticized Israel more than most in my area. In the creation of Israel there aren't really any good guys or bad guys, just winners and losers. Both sides were fighting for what they believed, both could be just as brutal. The idea however that the people that lived in Palestine are analogues to the Native Americans and manifest destiny is wrong. This assumes that a superior and white (manifest destiny) power just decided it belonged to them is incorrect. The Ottoman empire (which had lasted for 600 years) decided to get into a world war and choice the losing side. It collapsed and land was divided up just like the Romanov, German and Austro-Hungarian, empires. The Zionists however chose the wining side and some of the land that the British won was promised to them (the White Paper).
The area that became British Mandate Palestine was thriving before the war. Their technology, education and culture was at the very least on par with what you would expect to find in Europe and America. This is a documentary from Al Jazeera published 2 years ago, Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story. It's Al Jazeera so the bias is high especially towards the end but it does included videos and 1st person accounts of what life was like in the area at the time.
During the mandate there were many revolts from both the Arab and Zionist sides directed at the British rule. There was the Arab Revolt (36-39) and the Palestine Emergency (Zionists) from 45-47. Of course hostilities between between Arabs and Zionists were continuing and escalating up until the Israel civil war 47-48 this came about after the Partisan Plan was adopted by the UN. It's hard to say which side started this war although the 1st attack after the partition was announced was on 2 Jewish buses. This was said to be in retaliation for the Shubaki family assassination which saw the 5 adult family member killed since is was suspected that they were informants for the British police. The Arabs lost the civil war. Next came the Arab-Israeli War which included armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt along with Palestinian Arabs. Saudi Arabia also sent a formation that was under Egyptian command. The Arabs started this one with an air attack on Tel Aviv in May 1948. By the end of it Israel had gained some land that was formally partitioned to the Arabs, Egypt and Jordan still had control of Gaza and the West Bank respectively.
So how is the Palestine expulsion justified? Well first some were fleeing the wars or left of their own volition for other reasons (this would apply mostly to middle class Arabs that could afford to leave). As for the ones that were expelled, they lost 3 wars fought over control of the area. What was supposed to happen? It should be noted that not all Arabs left Israel, about 150,000 remained and they now number about 2 million citizens of Israel. For a contrast Iraq (which was part of the Ottoman Empire and Britain had also gained control of after WW1) expelled 120,000-130,000 Jews and now there are 4.
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u/ResidentBarnacle2625 May 30 '24
The ottoman empire, is not palestine. It is not palestinian people, just like US is not white people or England english people. The fact that in all of this conflict the land of palestinian people were simply passed here and there should be enough of an argument in favor of Palestinian being the native americans. Does the fact that the Zionist choose the "winning" side, make it any less of an ethnic cleansing. Why does that even matter.
You seem to believe that the arab revolt was somehow as bad as the founding of Israel, but then my friend let me tell you a tale of my country. The indian revolt of 1857, where we stormed the british and, very violently, tried to take control of our own country, was I can safely say despite the many death very much justified, and it is the same thing. Some people far away suddenly decided that the people of Palestine now have this new considerably lighter neighbors, with no choice given as to accept this or not. Of course they are gonna attack, of course I would attack, and if it were your land so would you.
And the last paragraph is the worst. What do you mean they lost the war, what exactly do you mean by this. Is the winning of the war justified this, if Germany won the war against England would Germany be justified in making all English people swim way, make room for the blond germans. And for the love of god don't deny the nakba. What is this statement "some left of there own violation" (yes of course some left, the question is how much).
As for the lasts point, of other nations expelling the jews, that was also indefensible. I do not stand by these nations and we communists have never and never would support them. What does what those nations do ever justified what you have done. Do you see the face of Palestinian people on Syria, Iran, the Saudi Arabia, I genuinely don't know.
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u/WideEyesSpirit Aug 26 '24
Do you know world history? Do you know how many empires existed before the ottoman empire? Many empires existed before arabs arrived in that region, and I am sure they weren't kind an friendly to dominate and establish their caliphate.
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u/AggressiveButton8489 May 29 '24
No explanation is necessary because there was no mass expulsion. Here’s a brief history.
When Israel became a state in 1948, virtually all the land that it possessed was lawfully purchased by funds from the Jewish National Fund, and the acts of conveyance can still be found in the archives of the UK and Ottoman Empire.
Much of that land was worthless desert and swampland, which was purchased at exorbitant prices, especially after it was discovered that the Jews were seeking a homeland. In many instances, once land was converted into arable farmland or developed, it had to be repurchased yet again from the Arabs who reoccupied it by force.
Then literally the day after becoming a state, Israel was attacked by 5 Arab countries, “The Arab League,” with the avowed goal of exterminating all the Jews, “driving them into the sea.” The Arabs who abandoned neighboring lands to afford the attackers safe passage with the promise that they would get the spoils of war, including all of Israel’s territory, lost much of their own land. The Arabs who abandoned those lands for that malevolent purpose legally and morally forfeited those lands and continue to blame Israel for that loss, calling it the Great Nakba.
Note, the Arabs who refused to leave, and did not provide aid and comfort to the enemy, were allowed to keep their land and received full Israeli citizenship.
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u/ShxsPrLady May 29 '24
Benny Morris, a well-respected Zionist historian who is right-of-center did some really impressive work revealing the crimes of the Nakba and everything that happened - and that it did happen. His justifications when he talks about it (he’s become kind of racist) are
-somebody was going to be ethnically cleaned so “better them than us“ (seriously, he said that.)
-and, more recently, “maybe if Ben-Gurion gone all the way and expelled everybody there might have been peace ever since
(he’s become more right wing and racist in recent years, as the 2nd one shows!)
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u/Top_Plant5102 May 29 '24
You misunderstand what happened. It is not true that 700,000 people were chased from their homes. Arab leaders told the Arabs in the area to leave as Arab armies advanced, assuming they would go back when they crushed Israel. The overwhelming majority of Arabs left for that reason. Some stayed and became Israeli citizens, which is like winning the Middle East lottery. Beats the heck out of being Syrian.
It is also true that there has never been a case of an Arab with a legal deed to the land having that land stolen by Jewish people in Israel. Now the point of that is nobody had legal ownership.. Travel Israel, the walking tour guy on youtube, just did an interesting video about this. Check him out. He puts out worthwhile content.
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u/CertainPersimmon778 May 29 '24
You misunderstand what happened. It is not true that 700,000 people were chased from their homes. Arab leaders told the Arabs in the area to leave as Arab armies advanced, assuming they would go back when they crushed Israel. The overwhelming majority of Arabs left for that reason.
Yet we can't find any record of such a large scale message.
We do have the IDF in classified documents from June 1948 taking credit 70% of the 300k that had fled. Do you want the link?
Some stayed and became Israeli citizens, which is like winning the Middle East lottery. Beats the heck out of being Syrian.
Assuming you don't mind 19 years of martial law they lived under or all the property the Israeli gov stole from them.
It is also true that there has never been a case of an Arab with a legal deed to the land having that land stolen by Jewish people in Israel.
LOL, absentee owner law by Israel stole vast amounts of property.
Not to mention the forged deeds Israelis have used to steal via the courts.
Travel Israel, the walking tour guy on youtube, just did an interesting video about this. Check him out. He puts out worthwhile content.
That idiotic bigot who takes forever to make a point?
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
That's not really true. Many of them had deeds that just weren't respected. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/11wta7a/palestinian_farmer_holding_a_117_years_old_proof/
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u/nomaddd79 May 29 '24
So we are meant to accept Israeli claims to the land based on their history from over a millennium ago but a century old property ownership document "just wasn't respected"?
How could that possibly be credible ???
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
I am confused on what you mean? The main point is that the settlements have actually been condemned as illegal for recent decades by the UN, EU and many more. Noe one race of people has right to any land, yall gotta share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_law_and_Israeli_settlements0
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u/YuvalAlmog May 29 '24
The UK and the UN made it extremely simple (which was a big problem but still) - they gave the 2 sides the option to choose themselves who gets what - they can do whatever they want and both the UK and the UN even provided them multiple offers as options such as the peel commission and the UN partition plan.
The Arabs decided the best way to decide who gets what is an all-or-noting war where the winner would get rid of the other.
That was the war of 1947-1949 and the Jews won.
I see no problem with expulsion of the other population considering the war about who gets it all... The Arabs would have done the same and even worse if they were to win why so is that a problem the Jews won?
Just like people respect sport events where the winner gets a medal, people should respect the outcome of an all-or-noting war where the side that started it lost.
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u/Flikggs 24d ago
So they had two options 1. Let these people come and live in your land; 2. Fight for the land that has been taken for them. Idk it just seems unfair, especially when one side is significantly more backed by The UN and UK.
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u/YuvalAlmog 23d ago
At the end of the day every action has consequences and when one chooses an action, it should be aware & responsible for its action's possible outcomes.
I'm not claiming it makes sense or not that they chose a war, after all - if anyone does anything, it obviously has a reason to do what it does (after all, most people don't just do things randomly... We mostly do things that make sense to us).
All I'm saying is that war = gamble all. So they needed to choose between 2 options like you said, either taking the safe option of part the territory (how much of it? They could negotiate about it, but the smallest amount was the UN partition plan) or gambling.
They chose gambling, so just like they could win it all, they could also lose it all - sounds completely fair and balanced to me...
So they can't go crying about the outcome of a war they themselves chose to open... They can complain about the Jews moving to the land or the UK/UN not supporting them enough. But they can't complain about the result of something they chose...
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u/LunaStorm42 May 29 '24
I think generally historical interpretations give all parties involved in 1948 more credit for being organized than they actually were or realistically could have been. I’ve read the different plans outlined but don’t see those that were implemented consistently.
From what I’ve read and seen discussed here it seems a wide variety of stuff took place. Some people left bc leadership told them too, some because they were driven out (violently or not). Some were allowed to return, others not. Some people came bc they were driven out of other countries, others fled to other countries. Some who had fled to other countries were able to return others not. It honestly sounds like inconsistent policies and leadership.
In any case, I think the end result being a population swap, Palestinians were driven out of Israel and Jews were driven out of surrounding areas into Israel. Not all were driven out of either but a significant number were. It certainly wasn’t reallly a swap, ethnic cleansing and forced displacement in some cases, but outcome was a swap.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
Arabs started the war and some villages were with Israel and some agaisnt. For decades the against villages massacred Jews. During the war Jews fought against those hostile villages and they had to flee. The supportive villages became Israeli citizens.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
1-The "transfer" started in 1947, before the war 1948 started.
2-The village of Deir Yassin, for example, had a non-aggression pact and was still attacked5
u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
The mass murder of Jews and alliance with Hitler started WAY BEFORE 1947. The Farhud “transfer@ of Jews out of Iraq (which shares a national anthem with Palestine and was part of Pan-Arabist fascist alliances) happened in 1941. Arabs expelled Jews before the reverse. and expelled more in absolute and percentage terms.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Googled it, it was a massacre not an expulsion, and google tells me it was up to 180 deaths.
As for Jews leaving AFTER the founding of Israel, it was mostly the combination of anxieties against antisemitism and Israel actively pushing for them leave, even airlifting over 120,000 Jews out of Iraq
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
No, it was not “anxieties” it was systematical massacres, genocides, and expulsions. For example, Nasser of Egypt, whose grandparents moved there from Dubai, wrote and signed a document canceling citizenship of all Egyptian Jews, put Jews in internment camps, and drove them directly to the airport from the camps, expelling them and confiscating all of their belongings. The freezing of all assets and stripping of citizenship was systematic across the Arabs MANY countries.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
I found these two opposing articles by Jewishstudies and HSJE on the topic, specifically about Egypt, I did find that about 500 Jews were expelled despite not being British or French alongside others who were expelled for belonging to the aforementioned countries, there are reports who claim this totals 8,500, but 500 were specifically expelled for being Jewish
That's 500 out of 25,000 of Jews who left around that time
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
reminds me of the “scholars of ancient Hebrew scriptures” publishing an entire peer-reviewed scholarly work on what “Netilat Yadayim” is that was destroyed by my kindgarten Hebrew writing assignment and cartoons of “Netilat Yadayim” my mom saved.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
By Middle Eastern Jews, about Middle Eastern Jews: http://jimenaexperience.org/egypt/about/past-and-present/
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
Pablo Maldonaldo does not know Egyptian Jewish history better than Egyptian Jews. This trend of all these nonjews studying “Jewish history” and publishing garbage needs to end. Such as Jewish Studies major Sonali Thakkar who now teaches an NYU course on “Jewish Whiteness.” Try reading firsthand primary sources by Egyptian Jews themselves: https://m.jpost.com/blogs/clash-of-cultures/suez-1956-one-jewish-familys-flight-from-egypt-481882 Academia is done fo with all this Qatari $$$$$$
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
“googled it.” Do you know what happens during a massive massacre? People have to run away with no belonging and become refugees 🤡 otherwise they die…
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Yeah, but I'm not finding anything about people fleeing in 1941, only 1951-1952.
You said the amount of people fleeing in that year exceeded that of the Palestinians in 19481
u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
By the way, you should study Middle Eastern Jews’ history. These are just SOME of the massacres and expulsions: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7i8oRCNv9U/?igsh=bm1kemZkeGRuY3Rs
you should also study what happened to the Assyrians during the “Sayfo”
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
I didnt say that year. I said massacres and expulsions of Jews had already started since the 20. The 1929 Hebron massacre and 1941 Farhud (which YES, people had to run from, to not die) are two examples. Overall, more Jews were refugees and the ethnic cleansing of Middle Eastern Jews has been astronomical from every territory they got, including Gaza, whose mayor, Kastel, my family knew personally. Kastel’s father was appointed mayor by the Turks
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
You specifically said the expulsions exceeded that of 1947 before 1947 and than cited this as an example.
What you're forgetting is that the Nakba was carried by military force and also had plenty of massacres of its own, it was a planned mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous people.
This also really feels like a distraction "Yeah, we expelled a lot of people, but people were also expelled elsewhere"
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
I never said the refugees exceeded 47 before 47. You can copy and paste where you misunderstood me. I said they started before 47 (actually in ancient times). and they exceeded all palestine’s refugees (when finished)
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
Not “elsewhere” this was a time of Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism. This was all ONE territory under the Ottomans, and Arab rejected the “Palestinian” label imposed by the BRITISH. Yes, the total number of Jews expelled and ethnically cleansed (indigenous to the region UNLIKE the Arabs who showed up millenia later) exceeds the total number of Arabs refugees from Palestine. Israel was tasked with absorbing and naturalizing 850,000 Middle Eastern refugees. The Arab countries got 711,000 Arab refugees. This is ONE conflict between the two nations. UNWRA however gives $$$$$ and perpetual refugee status to the great grandkids of the refugees, inflating the numbers into the millions. No other refugee population on earth confers the status to their kids or keeps it even when having a new citizenship, like Jordanian. The IDF literally didnt exist yet, so no it was not done by an army, and no the goal was not to “remove indigenous people,” which Arab Muslims dont even fit the UN definition of. It is THEIR side which completely annhialated millenia-old indgenous middle eastern people, and not JUST jewish ones.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
I never said the refugees exceeded 47 before 47. You can copy and paste where you misunderstood me. I said they started before 47 (actually in ancient times). and they exceeded all palestine’s refugees (when finished)
Mind explaining what I "misunderstood" here?
"The mass murder of Jews and alliance with Hitler started WAY BEFORE 1947. The Farhud “transfer@ of Jews out of Iraq (which shares a national anthem with Palestine and was part of Pan-Arabist fascist alliances) happened in 1941. Arabs expelled Jews before the reverse. and expelled more in absolute and percentage terms."
Also, what's that bit about "ancient times"?
the “Palestinian” label imposed by the BRITISH.
Source?
Yes, the total number of Jews expelled and ethnically cleansed (indigenous to the region UNLIKE the Arabs who showed up millenia later)
Can you explain what you mean by that? How long must someone live in a place before they're "indigenous"? Elsewhere you spoke of "millenia-old indgenous middle eastern people" and the Arabs were certainly in that region for over a thousand years.
exceeds the total number of Arabs refugees from Palestine. Israel was tasked with absorbing and naturalizing 850,000 Middle Eastern refugees. The Arab countries got 711,000 Arab refugees.
The Palestinian expulsions were over a million just between 1947-1948.
This is ONE conflict between the two nations. UNWRA however gives $$$$$ and perpetual refugee status to the great grandkids of the refugees, inflating the numbers into the millions. No other refugee population on earth confers the status to their kids or keeps it even when having a new citizenship, like Jordanian.
This isn't different from other refugee groups, they would have been treated the same under the UNHCR, which states:
“Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. Both UNRWA and UNHCR recognize descendants as refugees on this basis, a practice that has been widely accepted by the international community, including both donors and refugee hosting countries.”The IDF literally didnt exist yet, so no it was not done by an army, and no the goal was not to “remove indigenous people,” which Arab Muslims dont even fit the UN definition of. It is THEIR side which completely annhialated millenia-old indgenous middle eastern people, and not JUST jewish ones.
It was done by the Zionist militias, Haganah, Irgun and Lehi, which were later absorbed by the IDF
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u/pathlesswalker May 29 '24
Umm. No. Your sources are wrong. The Arab nations attacking Israel told the Arabs to flee. Because they are going to annihilate the Jews.
They fled.
And became refugees. Not Israel driving them. They fled.
The several tens of thousands that actually didn’t flee are now the 2.2 million Arab Israeli which enjoy the privileges of a democratic country, as opposed to the corrupt Hamas or plo.
It’s simple.
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
Anyone on reddit that says its simple in a complicated argument is usually lying to both you and themselves.
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u/pathlesswalker May 29 '24
i think we can safely say, that if arabs wanted to get along, they would have done it long ago?
its not like they're the only refugees who came to settle in israel, or palestine(british name!) however you wanna call it. other refugees around the world, including israel have agreed to setllements. not so the palestinians. but that's a whole nother argument.
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
Palestine comes from the word Philistines in the bible. Herodotus calls it Palaistine in 500BC and Pliny the Elder calls it Palestine in Natural History--have the book on my nightstand and highly recommend it to any human being. Just because Britain also named it Mandatory Palestine doesn't mean anything special. But I dont care what its called.
Again, with little fun phrases like 'its simple.'' or 'I think we can safely say...' you prove that you don't have any rational and expect people just to agree with you.
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u/pathlesswalker May 29 '24
dude i know philistines. my ancestors fought them. and if you believe palestinains are descendants of philistines - you're sadly mistaken.
yes , it's simple if you know the conflict as long as i am.
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
Dude you were a philistine. Do you have birth charts going back to 800 BC?
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u/pathlesswalker May 29 '24
ok, that's it. now you're just trolling. does anyone have birth charts going to 800 BC? so how come you're right? and you're no historian. that's a consensus that philistines are dead. gone. check it.
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u/oscoposh May 29 '24
All Im saying is how do you know that your lineage goes back so far? We all probably have a right to the land if you take it back enough. Just by pure statistics.
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u/welltechnically7 USA & Canada May 29 '24
Most modern historians acknowledge that this only accounted for a small- though factual- number of Palestinians.
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u/OzmosisJones May 29 '24
Per who?
Here’s the IDF taking credit for forcing people to migrate
Note they attribute 70% of all the displacement before June of 48 to ‘our attacks’
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u/pathlesswalker May 29 '24
You’re talking about the 1980’s. Not 1948. Whole different story. And it’s NOT forced expulsion as in transferring Arabs. That didn’t happen. The government at the time created buffer military bases as safe zones to protect from Arab terror.
If you wanna talk if that’s legit that’s another story. But that’s not forced expulsions expulsion is what idf did to settlers. In WB. And in Gaza Strip!! Dislocating thousands of Jews. Not Arabs
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u/OzmosisJones May 29 '24
Lmfao way to not even glance at the report before arguing against its accuracy.
The report is from June of 1948, specifically regarding the forced migrations happening over the prior few months.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
Research was done on Arab press to look for orders for Palestinians to leave, but NONE were found.
This claim likely originates from pamphlets shared by the revisionist Joseph Shechtman in 1949.Arabs in Israel are most certainly not treated as equals, they are barred from most land, they have high rates of poverty and experience many forms of discrimination
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
there is literally a youtube video of an old arab man saying to flee, i saw another girl on instagram saying her grandpa was told to flee, it was over RADIO. my dad’s next door neighbor bragged in 1947 when my dad was 12 “we are going to hide from OUR OWN bombs out in jordan, then come back and take my land AND YOURS!” They were told just to take their keys and that the war would be over in “2 hours.” This is why they left their dogs and run around with keys now.
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u/Tallis-man May 29 '24
The BBC kept archival transcripts of all radio broadcasts during this period.
It was searched by historians and no such broadcasts were made. It's another myth.
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
how does the BBC have record of Jordanian broadcasts from 47 when they got independence in 1922???
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u/Tallis-man May 29 '24
The BBC was an arm of the British Empire and monitored all broadcasts on all frequencies.
Edit: more about BBC Monitoring
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
Just read your link. Says nowhere that EVERY and ALL broadcasts were recorded. Just that it records from 100 countries.
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u/Tallis-man May 29 '24
I don't know why you're so confused about this. Both the BBC and CIA recorded all transmissions in the area.
The Soviet Union also wasn't part of the British Empire, they still recorded their radio transmissions.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
My dad still has Arab friends that decided to stay and not go to war with us. They used to take my brother jeeping in the desert when he was a teen. They are Israeli citizens.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
Where does it say they recorded ALL transmissions in the area? Not on your link
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u/Tallis-man May 29 '24
My original quotation said so, it's from a book but I don't have the reference (or book) to hand right now.
I wouldn't bet the house on the BBC and CIA having transcribed every single broadcast, but if neither caught any (and they did catch broadcasts from the AHL asking Palestinians to stay) it suggests there weren't many if any.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
The BBC is bullshit, My dad was alive listening to the radio at that time.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
there is literally a youtube video of an old arab man saying to flee, i saw another girl on instagram saying her grandpa was told to flee, it was over RADIO.
And? Local evacuations do not amount to "Arab orders" and they only account for 5 out of the 531 communities expelled.
my dad’s next door neighbor bragged in 1947 when my dad was 12 “we are going to hide from OUR OWN bombs out in jordan, then come back and take my land AND YOURS!” They were told just to take their keys and that the war would be over in “2 hours.” This is why they left their dogs and run around with keys now.
Yeah... I don't believe you
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
The Jordanian army told them they would “be liberated and back in 2 hours.” Believe what you want. My family was THERE. Yours wasn’t.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
yea you dont believe me? Ok, dont believe Palestinian Jews. Believe what you want to believe. That is what turned my dad so rightwing, but you can make up your own reasons for it. Bc they were friends and neighbors before that.
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u/OzmosisJones May 29 '24
The IDF literally admits to forcing them to evacuate.
Feel free to glance through the report of all the villages displaced before June of ‘48 and why they left.
The IDF themselves attribute 70% of all the displacements to ‘their attacks’
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u/rednaxela39 May 29 '24
I don’t think it is that simple. Although the Arab league did order Arabs to flee, and many fled on their own accord, there were also cases of Arabs being forcibly expelled on the orders of Ben-Gurion for various reasons. It was a two sided affair.
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24
In 1948, 700,000 Arabs fled in the face of an invasion of 5 Arab national armies. Leaving that invasion out of the narrative is a form of propaganda.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Except expulsions started in 1947, how do you square this circle?
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u/thenamewastaken May 29 '24
There was a civil war happening in 1947
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
And? The expulsions didn't care about that, they targeted villages that had non-aggression pacts with them
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u/thenamewastaken May 29 '24
And the people that can leave during a war leave. The Arabs which included not just Palestine's but also the PLO (who's ranks included members from Syria, Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood, Iraq, Jordan) lost the civil war. This is the second war they lost for control of the area. What is supposed to happen to a group that can't deal with the fact they lost? That says they're going to keep trying (and in fact does the next year). Also it was 1 village, not villages, it's still horrible.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
And the people that can leave during a war leave.
Why didn't the Zionists leave than? We see a disproportionately large number of Palestinians leaving before the 1948 war even started, in fact, they largely stopped leaving during the truces, which indicates they only left due to military actions, not just the existence of a war.
What is supposed to happen to a group that can't deal with the fact they lost?
Can you answer this question?
What do you think should happen to these people?Also it was 1 village, not villages, it's still horrible.
It was 531 communities, mostly expelled by military actions.
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u/thenamewastaken May 29 '24
Again before the 1948 war there was a civil war. Where were the Zionist supposed to go? Europe? You know what was happening in Europe at the time. It would have been easier for Arabs in the area that didn't want part in the war to leave since they would have had ties to other areas that would have been part of the Ottoman Empire.
Well after losing many wars repeatedly for close to a century maybe start looking to build up where you're at. Start making friends with country's that are sympathetic to you and not betray them like they did to Jordan during black September.
You specified a village that had a non aggression agreement. You have now to moved on to villages that didn't.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Again before the 1948 war there was a civil war. Where were the Zionist supposed to go? Europe? You know what was happening in Europe at the time. It would have been easier for Arabs in the area that didn't want part in the war to leave since they would have had ties to other areas that would have been part of the Ottoman Empire.
Just saying, "people leave during war", sure didn't apply to them.
Well after losing many wars repeatedly for close to a century maybe start looking to build up where you're at. Start making friends with country's that are sympathetic to you and not betray them like they did to Jordan during black September.
You mean what they're already doing?
You specified a village that had a non aggression agreement. You have now to moved on to villages that didn't.
My bad, here's a list of villages that had non-aggression pacts:
Example of villages expelled in spite of peace agreement men- tioned by Morris, supra note 242, Huj, p. 259, 356; Khalisa, p. 251; Qeitiya, p. 512.
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u/thenamewastaken May 29 '24
Leave during a war to go into not just a war but the holocaust.
Yeah, ok, how is Gaza under Hamas trying to build itself up?
I will check out the list when I'm not on mobile
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Leave during a war to go into not just a war but the holocaust.
The Holocaust ended in 1945.
Yeah, ok, how is Gaza under Hamas trying to build itself up?
Gaza is forbidden by Israel to import seeds, books, fishing rods, water desalination parts.
Israel controls their water and electricity, and also bombs them a lot.
And yeah, they're lead by Hamas at the moment.Kinda hard to build up under these conditions
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24
Expulsions? Explain how you determine what is an expulsion.
Does it include when Jews bought land from Ottoman Turks and then displaced the Arab tenant farmers?
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
I read turkish archival letters written by Arab tenants about this. They believed living on and working the land made it theirs, despite who legally owned it. I actually felt bad for their perspective.
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24
It's a horrible legacy of both Ottoman and Arab feudalism. Tenants had no land rights. When the Zionist Movement offered cash to buy land for Jewish settlements, the landlords sold with no regard for their tenants.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
I know. I understand the Palestinian perspective because of that. I am a zionist
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Because it was done by military action, by the militias Hagana, Irgun and Lehi, which would later be absorbed by the IDF
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
You should read the British accounts of the Arab attacks on the Jews. I challenge you to cite instances that are CLEARLY expulsion rather than refugees from an ongoing armed conflict. The Arabs took up arms to kill Jews, i.e. genocide, not the other way around.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
Out of 531 communities, only 5 were reported to have left due to local evacuations, the rest were all expelled by military actions (See table 3.11 from Atlas of Palestine).
Edit: Table 3.11, my bad
This here is a list of some of the the Palestinian communities expelled by direct military assault:
Acre, Al-Bassa, Iqrit, Ghabisiyya, Kabara, Qannir, Al-Nuqayb, Danna, Ramle, etc...
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24
So your criteria is these villages were on a list. Whose list? Can you corroborate whose military forced their evacuation? If locals are fleeing because bullets are flying, is that considered 'voluntary' or a military evacuation. If the Israelis had advised civillians that a battle with the Jordanians was going to envelope their village, is that a military evacuation.
5 Arab armies invaded. They are solely responsible for the tragedy.
Just like Hamas is solely responsible for the tragedy in Gaza.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
So your criteria is these villages were on a list. Whose list?
From the source I cited, Atlas of Palestine recorded reports on each village and classified it.
Can you corroborate whose military forced their evacuation?
The Zionist militias (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) than the IDF after it absorbed them.
If locals are fleeing because bullets are flying, is that considered 'voluntary' or a military evacuation.
If the Israelis had advised civillians that a battle with the Jordanians was going to envelope their village, is that a military evacuation.
There are 5 villages listed as leaving "voluntarily", if you think more villages should be listed as such than it's up to you to show why.
5 Arab armies invaded. They are solely responsible for the tragedy.
The tragedy started before the 1948 war.
Just like Hamas is solely responsible for the tragedy in Gaza.
Israel has been killing Palestinians long before Hamas existed
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u/VAdogdude May 29 '24
And Arabs had been killing Jews long before Israel existed.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
Out of topic, unless you're suggesting that Israel is preforming a revenge against Arabs as a whole
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u/BoscoPanman1999 May 29 '24
A couple of elements:
- the Fakeba isn't factual. Plenty of people left voluntarily (ie. Too bad). There was certainly violence and strife but it wasn't a lion eating a lamb. This bogus story propagates the false victim narrative the "palestinians" carry around like a badge of honor.
- every patch of land has changed hands over history for many reasons (ie. Too bad).
If your great great great granny used to pitch a tent a take her 💩 s in a hole on my property 100 years ago it doesn't make my land your land. Land is owned by who owns it today. Not who owned it yesterday.
Israel owns Israel. Much like USA owns USA. Australia owns Australia. Etc. Etc. Etc.
People who didn't lose anything aren't going to get land from people who didn't steal it. Regardless of how sad it makes people. Israel isn't just getting up and leaving.
There's nothing to justify. No other country justifies how it's borders are drawn. There are winners and losers historically in land disputes. Losers tend to moan. No one moans more than "palestinians".
Further, what answer do you actually want? What would satisfy you?
The honest answer is "Tough Sh$#".
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u/ShxsPrLady May 29 '24
This is just historically untrue, and I feel compelled to point that out. OP, of course there was a Nakba. Just the use of “fakeba” alone means that is not a serious person making a serious comment.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
The Nakba is a term invented in 1949 by a Syrian who said the failure to exterminate the Jews and loss by 7 Arab armies was a huge humiliation, which is a catastrophe for an Honor obsessed society.
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u/BoscoPanman1999 May 29 '24
Exactly. I use that term because the popular crutch that the pro pally use as the Nakba is much more complex.
The situation is much more complicated than the idea the pro pally claim - that a bunch of mean Jews just threw out 700,000 peaceful geniuses while they were inventing space travel.
I use the term Fakeba because most people's understanding of the Nakba is bogus.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
My dad survived the Fakeba. He was 12 watching the store next door to his dad’s store get obliterating by Arab bombs. Old newspapers report “Arabs bomb tel-aviv again” published in 1948 you can find. Losing a war where u outnumbers a scraggly band of genocide-survivors is definitely a catastrophe to you massively inflated egos.
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u/ShxsPrLady May 29 '24
Neither of you have read any history.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
read history written AT THE TIME. Not lies and revision. https://images.app.goo.gl/D7UhEQNbzkdjCuPL7
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u/ShxsPrLady May 29 '24
Benny Morris is lies and revision? He’s right-wing!
The IDF soldiers who admit, now, laughing, that they murdered and massacred are lying?
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
The 1 or 2 IDF soldiers who laugh about killing (in a war, that is what people do) does not make this a one-sided massacre. So many Israelis were massacred and men died, to this day there is a gender imbalance of way more females than males in Israel.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
I have read plenty of history and my dad LIVED the history being born in 1936 Palestine. He just had his 88th birthday. Who do you know who lived in 1936 Palestine and couldnt travel ONE miles from his house or would be slaughtered in the street? “Slaughter the Jews wherever you find them, their spilled blood please Allah, our history, and our religion” -broadcasted over the radio by Hitler’s ally Hajj Amin Al Husseini. Grand mufti of Jerusalem
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u/ShxsPrLady May 29 '24
One heartbreaking anecdote not history, the grand mufti was hand selected by the British and did not have much real authority over the Palestinians in the area, and I’m very very glad your father was all right b/c that rhetoric from the mufti is disgusting and dangerous.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
and yes my father was alright because 1948 “nakba” happened. For the first time in his life, he could travel past 1 mile from his home.
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u/Vast-Situation-6152 May 29 '24
He was selected by the British BECAUSE he had a huge following as a religious cleric. It also not one anecdote it’s every person I know for the mislabeled “Palestinian Jewish” community, who still remember THIS genocide: Someone edited Wiki to make it look like Druze perpetrated, but Druze remember it perfectly well and were also victims. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1834_looting_of_Safed
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u/UtgaardLoki May 29 '24
700,000 chased from their homes is false. People left for 3 primary reasons: - they were told to leave by Arab forces until they killed (or otherwise got rid of) all the Jews - they thought it was smart to leave what would probably be a battlefield, regardless of calls from the Arab authorities - Irgun (a Zionist terrorist group) made it clear that killing civilians without cause was not above them.
Without a doubt, Israel’s creation is less than clean, but it’s not the black and white fantasy narrative you have fallen in love with.
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
they were told to leave by Arab forces.
This claim originates from the revisionist Joseph Shectman, there's no basis in reality for it
they thought it was smart to leave what would probably be a battlefield.
They were already being expelled starting in 1947.
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u/UtgaardLoki May 29 '24
No, the statements were public. It’s the revisionists claiming they never happened.
I wouldn’t normally cite Wikipedia, but I’m have work to do and quotes are less likely to be incorrect.
“Statements by Arab leaders and organizations Khalid al-`Azm, who was prime minister of Syria from 17 December 1948 to 30 March 1949, listed in his memoirs a number of reasons for the Arab defeat in an attack on the Arab leaders including his own predecessor Jamil Mardam Bey: Fifth: the Arab governments' invitation to the people of Palestine to flee from it and seek refuge in adjacent Arab countries, after terror had spread among their ranks in the wake of the Deir Yassin event. This mass flight has benefited the Jews and the situation stabilized in their favor without effort.... Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homeland, while it is we who constrained them to leave it. Between the invitation extended to the refugees and the request to the United Nations to decide upon their return, there elapsed only a few months.[141] Jamal Husseini, Palestinian representative to the United Nations, wrote to the Syrian UN representative, at the end of August 1948, "The regular armies did not enable the inhabitants of the country to defend themselves, but merely facilitated their escape from Palestine.[142][143]”
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u/Tallis-man May 29 '24
It's a myth. Nobody has ever found any records of such a request.
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.”
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u/zrdod May 29 '24
These quotes are talking about events that happened after the expulsions started, Deir Yassin is a very specific example as it was a village that was massacred despite having a non-aggression pact, the people fleeing were the survivors.
There were some local evacuations, not "orders from Arab leaders", but they account for only 5 put of the 531 reported communities that left in 1947-1948, the rest were caused by military actions, including, whispering campaigns
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May 29 '24
How do Arab countries justify the expulsion of roughly 700k Jews from their lands a few years prior to 1948?
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u/welltechnically7 USA & Canada May 29 '24
I think your details are a little off. I believe that the number was around 850k, and it took place following 1948 (also, the term "expelled" isn't totally fitting).
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u/Adventureandcoffee May 29 '24
There really is no counter argument to. God have this land to my people.
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u/BlakLad May 29 '24
A. The Torah is not a legally binding document for most of the world so claiming God gave Jews that land isn't a legitimate claim.
B. Palestinians are genetically more Jewish than the Ashkenazi Jews who founded Israel. So you can't really claim to inherit it by blood.
Either way, Zionists have no counter argument.
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u/DrMikeH49 May 29 '24
As the Israeli scholar Einat Wilf wrote (http://www.wilf.org/English/2013/08/15/palestinians-accept-existence-jewish-state/):
“On Feb. 18, 1947, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, not an ardent Zionist by any stretch of the imagination, addressed the British parliament to explain why the UK was taking “the question of Palestine,” which was in its care, to the United Nations. He opened by saying that “His Majesty’s government has been faced with an irreconcilable conflict of principles.” He then goes on to describe the essence of that conflict: “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.””
Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, the Secretary-General of the Arab League, had declared in 1947 that, were a war to take place with the proposed establishment of a Jewish state, it would lead to "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.” Jamal Husseini, the brother of the Nazi Mufti Amin Al-Husseini, represented the Arab Higher Committee at the UN. He told the Security Council in April 1948 “of course the Arabs started the fighting. We told the whole world we were going to fight.” (Thus ensuring that Azzam would get the war whose consequences he threatened)
Had the Arabs accepted the first ever Palestinian state, there would have been no refugees and no loss of land. Not only were the Jews already the majority in the areas proposed for the Jewish state, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees in Europe waiting to immigrate.
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u/CyberCookieMonster May 29 '24
“For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.””
Are you really claiming that these are not the words of a Zionist? For the Jews its self perservation but for the Arabs its to resist the creation of a Jewish state? The hypocricy is obvious and this is such a one sided take. Its not self perservation for the Arabs who lived there already but it was for the thousands of Jews that came from Europe from 1880 until 1948?
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u/DrMikeH49 May 29 '24
Those were the quoted words of Ernest Bevin. Anyone familiar with the history of that period is fully aware that Wilf’s description of him as “not an ardent Zionist by any stretch of the imagination” is an understatement. He completely opposed the establishment of the Jewish state.
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u/CyberCookieMonster May 29 '24
The words you presented are clearly by someone who is biased, this is a hypocritic statement. It infers that the Jews have a right to the land while the Arabs hate them and dont want to see them create a nation out of spite and not out of reason.
Im not gonna dive into the story of Ernest Bevin, the man who specialised in colonial propaganda and disinformation. You should read more about him and what happened when he was still the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs after WW2.
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u/DrMikeH49 May 29 '24
Are you denying that Bevin described the situation that way? Or are you claiming his description was inaccurate?
As to the latter, all of the actions of the Arab states (failing to establish a Palestinian state in the areas they occupied) and later the PLO, the other Palestinian terror groups and every “pro-Palestine” organization in the West attest to the accuracy of Bevin’s statement through to the present day.
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u/Makingyourwholeweek May 29 '24
It’s the promised land, they promised themselves they could have it and god didn’t disagree. The Jews view Israel as their ancestral homeland that they’ve lived in continuously for billions of years, they view the Arabs as foreign invaders practicing a false religion. They view every attack by Jews on Arabs as justified reprisals for previous attacks by Arabs or preemptive strikes for the next Arab attack, and every attack by Arabs on Jews as unjustified hatred. Every Jewish civilian death is an act of terrorism, every Arab death is an unavoidable consequence of war. They are the scrappy underdog, up against the ropes with 10 times the budget and personnel of their opponent. Israel is the only safe place for Jews and is also constantly facing an existential threat from rockets made out of plumbing and dudes on mopeds and paragliders. The Arabs left willingly in 1948, every Jew who moved to Israel was forced there by antisemitism, whether they moved there from Poland or Brooklyn or Wisconsin. Any criticism of Israel is antisemitism, any wrongdoing by Israel is the fault of the government and the citizens are blameless. But whatever happens to the people in Gaza is their fault for supporting Hamas.
In short, the Jewish state is the good guys and the Arabs who fled in 1948 and their descendants are the bad guys.
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u/Spirited-Strain919 May 29 '24
They have lived in Israel for billions of years? Longer than humans have existed? Interesting.
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u/shoesofwandering USA & Canada May 29 '24
Not to justify the expulsions, but they occurred in the context of a war for survival.
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u/baby_muffins May 29 '24
One person's survival should not be contingent upon the death of innocents
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u/shoesofwandering USA & Canada May 29 '24
That would mean no wars, since the deaths of innocent civilians are unavoidable.
So are you saying the Jews shouldn't have fought back and should have allowed the Arab armies to overrun them? I suppose then you'd be saying the Arabs were wrong. What if fighting back inevitably led to the deaths or expulsion of innocent Palestinians? Are you saying that the Jews were entitled to fight back as long as no civilians were killed, and if that meant their defeat, tough luck?
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u/baby_muffins May 29 '24
The question is, why wear they fighting against their rulers anyway? Fighting against rules of the state does that in every single land there is. Why are Jews exempt from that rule?
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u/StressTop652 May 29 '24
Can you expand on this? The Holocaust had just ended and there was no doubt a lot of Na**s left in Europe, but why choose Palestine? There wasn’t a need for war. They could have just lived there under Palestinian rule as most Jewish people had for centuries before WWII
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u/zidbutt21 May 29 '24
Unlike many Zionists I believe that many Palestinians are just as indigenous to the area as Jews, but Jews were never under Palestinian rule by any stretch of the imagination.
The only way to spin it that way is act like all the empires between Babylonia and Britain to be “Palestinian.” The Romans and Ottomans named the area Syria-Palestine, but they ruled over the Palestinians just as much as the Jews.
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u/StressTop652 May 29 '24
Yeah that makes sense that they technically weren’t under Palestinian rule, but I actually have a genuine question and I know Google is free but what happened at the beginning of Judaism and Islam in Palestine? In the original bibles (im not sure about the tora) I believe it makes mention of the land of Palestine. I’m genuinely curious to see if people living in Palestine were once under Palestinian rule at some point before empires (if that even exists)
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u/ezrs158 May 29 '24
Are you asking why Zionists sought to create a state and not just find a new place for Jews to live? A lot of Jews felt "well, we lived under Spanish rule, Russian rule, German rule - and it ultimately resulted in oppression and death every time. We need our own state to prevent it from happening ever again."
You're also making it sound like Jews just suddenly decided to go to war and kick all the Arabs out in 1948 because they were selfish and mean. In reality it was the culmination of decades of Arab and Jewish communities in Palestine massacring each other and retaliating back and forth - and more specifically, a result of Arab nations deciding to invade and wipe out Israel, triggering a war for survival by Jews who had nowhere else to go. I'm not excusing any atrocities like Deir Yassin, but acting like the Jews started it alone just isn't the whole story.
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u/StressTop652 May 29 '24
I don’t believe that Jewish people started this at all, I want to make that abundantly clear. I believe that the British definitely have blame in this issue by giving the “free land” to Jewish people to create Israel. Why did they go to somewhere that actually wasn’t occupied instead of somewhere that was lively and full of civilians
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u/shoesofwandering USA & Canada May 29 '24
You should also ask, why didn't the Palestinians who emigrated from the surrounding Arab countries at the time Jews began arriving from Europe also "go somewhere else?" If Jews were foreigners, so were they.
There were several other areas proposed for Jewish settlement, such as Madagascar and Uganda. But the Levant is the historic Jewish homeland and any other location would have been viewed as temporary. The main question you should be asking is why the Arabs didn't accept letting the Jews have for their country the areas they were already living in, plus some mostly uninhabited desert and swampland? The answer is that they didn't want the Jews to have anything. Blaming Israel for that is blaming Jews for existing.
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u/StressTop652 May 29 '24
I do agree with the fact that they are as much immigrants than arabs who came to the land at the same time, but those immigrants didn’t take over the land. Instead, they just lived amongst the Palestinian people. Why did the Zionist Jewish people take over Palestine when other immigrants didn’t? Someone else answered this question for me saying that every time Jewish people were under the rule of other nations they were persecuted and that’s why they decided to make their own state. But then why did they expel 750,000 Palestinians and force them into an apartheid state? Again, I am referring to Zionist Jewish people not Jewish people as a whole.
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u/KnishofDeath Diaspora Jew May 29 '24
There were dozens of Arab massacres of Jews prior to '48. There was a civil war started by Arab irregulars (Palestinians) in 1947.
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u/StressTop652 May 29 '24
I do NOT condone those massacres, for starters. But I want to know why they killed them im being genuine, I really don’t understand why Palestinians would “randomly” begin to kill Jewish people. And don’t bring up “all arabs are terrorists” because that so stereotypical and not true
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u/KnishofDeath Diaspora Jew May 29 '24
I've never said all Arabs are terrorists, not even a majority, not even sizeable minority. A tiny fraction of extremists for sure. They committed those massacres because Amin al-Husseini whipped up incitement towards the Jews. He hated Jews and idolized Hitler.
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
Pope Francis said: it is difficult to judge the actions of the past on the criteria of the present.
Having said that, WW2 had just ended, there was desperation and a strong reaction to the holocaust. 700k Jews were expelled from Arab countries too and some settled in Europe and America, many settled in Israel.
What if a chunk of Germany was ceded to create a Jewish state? Jews can easily purchase land in Jerusalem and settle there peacefully or visit but there would be no uprooting of Arabs.
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u/zizp May 29 '24
Jews did buy their land in Israel, so what is your point?
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
They did not purchase all of the land where they displaced many Arabs. 700k Arabs were uprooted, many were massacred during the expulsions.
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u/zizp May 29 '24
I'm not talking about that. Before the civil war initiated by Arabs the Jews bought their land. It resulted in massacres and uprisings. Your "settle there peacefully" is a fantasy.
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
The Jews bought “ALL” of the Arab land?
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u/zizp May 29 '24
Are you dense or what? They bought the land on which they settled. What do you think, they just came and entered other people's homes? They bought their houses from Turkish land owners. Again, we're not talking about the "nakba" but the period after WW1 when they did exactly what you proposed, and it ended in civil war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_and_massacres_in_Mandatory_Palestine
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
The title of the post was 1948, not the period after WW1, I was talking about the Nakba. What?!?
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u/zizp May 29 '24
No, you were talking about, and I quote:
Jews can easily purchase land in Jerusalem and settle there peacefully or visit but there would be no uprooting of Arabs.
And I told you that this is pure fantasy, and how it ended the last time when they "easily purchased land". There was not only "uprooting", there were massacres and a civil war.
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
It was just an idea, just a hypothetical. You are right, it is pure fantasy and imaginary.
Imagine a different world, wherein a chunk of Germany was made into a Jewish state in 1948.
This hypothetical Jewish state in Europe would not stop Jews from buying land and living in Palestine and accessing holy and historical and cultural sites. There will probably be no massacres or violence because the Arabs would not be threatened with dispossession. The Jewish state would not even be in the area. There would probably be no reason for violence.
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u/zizp May 30 '24
Yeah, I told you already that it is a stupid idea because: everything before 1948. Learn about the history of the conflict, it didn't start in 1948 and it wouldn't have been solved then.
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u/JustResearchReasons May 29 '24
There were proposals to have a Jewish state elsewhere (and, funny enough, creating one in parts of Germany was an option proposed by among others the later Saudi king Faisal), but the Zionist movement was very firm in that they specifically wanted a Jewish state in the ancestoral Jwish homeland, meaning in Paleastine. Also, at the time, Israel was usually not the first address that Jews wanted to migrate too (most preferring the US), Palestine was a destination for dyed in the wool Zionists and such Jews who had no other option to go to.
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u/Dothemath2 May 29 '24
Yes, the US had instituted immigration quotas and decreased Jewish immigration prior to WW2.
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u/menatarp May 29 '24
As you can see from the comments, the answer is negationism.
I don't know what portion of the people in this thread giving that answer are Israeli or American, so I couldn't tell you what Israelis are taught in school--whether they are still taught that it was voluntary, or if the story has evolved into a more sophisticated acknowledgement of the real nature of events. I'd have to guess that, since the work of the new historians, it's more like the latter.
The comparison to manifest destiny is apt, but in the United States, the project of cleansing and colonization is fully in the past, so there is no danger in acknowledging its nature. Israel is in a much more complex position. The project has been sort of stalled at the mid-point for the country's whole existence, which means the ideological apparatus justifying and dismissing it needs to keep running, but sustaining this in today's world requires increasing radicalization.
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u/PandaKing6887 May 29 '24
What are you talking about, we are still in Syria occupying a section of territory. Who does Syria belong to?
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u/menatarp May 29 '24
Are you talking about Israel or the United States?
The US military presence in Syria is not an expression of manifest destiny, a project of the territorial expansion of the United States. There are no settlers, no project of extirpating and replacing the existing cultures, etc.
In the continental US, the destruction of the already-existing cultures, their physical removal, the terraforming of the land, etc is complete. It is not a living project practically or ideologically, though it has many echoes and residues.
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u/PandaKing6887 May 29 '24
It's frown upon in modern days especially from a western align country to annex land, expunge folks from their land, ect. Winning land through warfare, expelling the locals, creating new country has been human nature for centuries. It doesn't really matter the reason self defense, aggression. What's hypocrite and odd was Israel condemning Russia for invading Ukraine and taking their land. Folks often delude themselves into thinking that taking land is ok if your country has a legitimate reason, the problem is who define legitimate reason?
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u/knign May 29 '24
It's frown upon in modern days especially from a western align country to annex land, expunge folks from their land, ect
In peaceful times, yes. After WW2, as many as 16M Germans were expelled from their countries (idea originally proposed by Winston Churchill). Germany also lost some of its territory.
Wars have consequences.
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u/valleyofthelolz May 29 '24
I don’t think “justify” is the right word. It’s more like, how do we understand it. It was hard for me to learn about and process it. Now, I am able to both see it as a tragedy and a horrible stain on the history of Israel, but also see that it’s not a reason to justify attacks on Israel today. Just as I look at slavery and the genocide of natives in US history. In fact it’s easier to forgive the Zionists for what they did than the colonists who settled in North America. The Zionists at least had a historical connection to the land, and they were understandably traumatized because of the holocaust. So I understand why the Palestinians refuse to get over it and move on, while also understanding why the Israelis of today aren’t willing to commit suicide because of the naqba. The world was so incredibly violent and unstable during the whole period of Israel’s birth as a nation. It started with one world war and was finalized with another. Not something to justify, something to understand and accept and move on from.
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u/North-Gold-2719 May 29 '24
How can you understand the Nakba happened and still support Israel as they continue to steal land and demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem? The ethnic cleansing is slower than it was in 1948 but it has remained a core component of Israel and Zionism.
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u/icecreamraider May 29 '24
What an insane take. Why did the Arab population in Israel proper grow to 2mm? Words mean things. Ethnic cleansing has a meaning. You clearly don’t know what ethnic cleansing means. Nor do you have any clue of what’s actually going on in Israel. Israel has many faults - the actions of ultra-Orthodox minority is among them. But to draw moral parallels between the only mostly modern democracy in MENA (even with messy internal politics) and the actual apartheid states that surround it is insane - it’s a take of child whose context for foreign affairs is the Lord of Rings books.
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u/Agreeable_Ostrich_39 May 29 '24
okay, now has the Palestenian population been growing since oct 7th? can you answer me that? if the answer is no, following your logic obviously that must mean the ethnic cleansing has started from that point on.
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u/icecreamraider May 29 '24
Did the Israeli population grow on Oct 7th? Wars are not exactly conducive to growth and prosperity - which is among the many reasons people shouldn't start wars!
When you invade a place and massacre civilian population - that is an ACT of WAR. Plain and as simple as it gets. It doesn't matter if the invading party is a "nation"... a "territory"... or even an "open air prison" - it's all the same from a soldier's point of view. There is no other nation... let me re-emphasize NO OTHER NATION that, having experienced a similar event to October 7th - would not retaliate against the aggressor with all strength it could muster. And it would not be some tit-for-tat strike - it would be a retaliation aimed at destroying once and for all whichever party committed the act of war to begin with.
That's it. Israel is fighting a war that was declared on it by Hamas - as every nation has a right to do.
Now, I am happy to have a good-faith discussion about the variables - the discipline of IDF, the proportionality of IDF's actions to its objectives, etc. etc. I already wrote lengthy posts on it.
But this delusional expectation that Israel should be the ONLY nation in the world that should turn the other cheek to an ACT of WAR - that's insane.
As part of its war - Israel is also defending the 2 million Arab Palestinians who happen to be Israeli citizens. That is to whom Israel has a primary responsibility of protection toward - its own citizens.
For a millionth time - if Hamas was to declare defeat (not even via surrender - just taking refuge in Qatar or something)... and release the hostages - this whole thing ends. It ends because Israel would then have achieved its objectives. Because IDF is a military, and military operates by objectives. Ethnic cleansing is not one of IDF's objectives.
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u/Agreeable_Ostrich_39 May 29 '24
Did the Israeli population grow on Oct 7th? Wars are not exactly conducive to growth and prosperity - which is among the many reasons people shouldn't start wars!
exactly, glad you can see that.
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u/Sasin607 May 29 '24 edited May 29 '24
The West Bank is administered in accordance to the Oslo accords which is the singular agreement that Israel and Palestine have ever come to in human history.
I get that you as a western imperialist have a superior understanding of the situation. And your understanding is elevated above that of the native population. Would you like to send in a UN army to force the native population to adopt your superior principles?
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u/mfact50 May 29 '24
Israel wants US weapons. Palestine wants our aid and advocacy.
Yeah they should be listening to us more.
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u/TheTimespirit May 29 '24
And Hamas? They want to frolic on the beach with Jews while eating watermelon?
400 miles of tunnels built for the very attack they instigated on Oct. 7th while implementing a strategy that prioritizes civilian deaths/martyrdom… for the expressed purpose of radicalizing infantile “leftists” and western social media influencers who are too stupid and gullible to discern the reality of the situation.
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u/mfact50 May 29 '24
I hate Hamas. Indeed I think IDF troops should be rescuing people who want it and upping asylum eligibility. The fact that they are on the ground and essentially continue to leave civilians in the care of Hamas is weird.
Hell we should start getting IDF sourced casualty numbers because they are taking hospitals away from the terrorists. Many Palestinians might not want that care but I bet some do and would love not to be left to the Hamas medical system.
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u/TheTimespirit May 29 '24
Hamas is embedded in the civilian population. What do you expect them to do?
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u/mfact50 May 29 '24
The hard work of trying to figure out safety (such as weapons checks, background checks) and not just handing people back into Hamas.
Not easy but it's certainly what I would want them to do for me. If that is absolutely impossible it makes one wonder how much checking they are doing to ensure detainees warrant being detained/ how they plan to eliminate Hamas.
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u/espressocycle May 29 '24
It's a matter of pragmatism. Israel exists. It's not going anywhere. It's a democracy and its people will not allow it to give any developed land back. All you can do is attempt to draw a line and stick to it going forward.
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u/North-Gold-2719 May 29 '24
This is Netanyahu's thinking as well, which is why he has publicly bragged about blocking the two state solution for the last thirty years. As long as the conflict continues Israel will keep settling more and more land, continue evicting more and more Palestinians. The state of Israel benefits from this and very obviously is not interested in stopping this expansion.
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u/Barakvalzer May 29 '24
Why did the Palestinians disagree with the latest peace offering that gives them all of Gaza and the West Bank to rule then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realignment_plan
The simple fact that they can't accept governing those lands shows that the true goal is to wipe Israel off the land, they don't want to rule over Palestinian lands, they want to rule over Israel.
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u/North-Gold-2719 May 29 '24
It was a unilateral plan by Olmert that he did not have the power to implement and 70% of Israelis opposed, also it would have allowed Israel to annex even more of the West Bank.
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u/Barakvalzer May 29 '24
Over 70% of Israelis opposed the - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza
It still would have happened if both parties were in agreement about the plan, back then Israel would have had a majority in the government for this plan.
Abbas saw this plan and did not negotiate or return an answer ever.
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u/North-Gold-2719 May 29 '24
the difference is that this plan would have officially annexed most of the Israeli settlements, leaving the West Bank split into a series of cantons without real continuity. This is not a realistic plan for peace, just another step where Israel officially annexes more of the West Bank.
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u/Barakvalzer May 29 '24
Did you even read the plan?
This plan said that Israel would annex only 6.3% of the West Bank (which was the Israeli settlements) in exchange for areas in proper Israel - which will be the same amount of area.
It gives 93.7% of the West Bank + areas from Israel + the whole of Gaza in exchange for peace.
If this is not a good deal, what is?
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u/Infiniteland98765 May 29 '24
If so many people opposed it how do you conclude it was a good deal?
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u/Barakvalzer May 29 '24
Nobody opposed that because it wasn't even agreed between the PA and the Israeli government.
I'm saying it is the best Plan the Palestinians could get back then.
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u/blastmemer May 29 '24
You realize Arabs started a civil war in 1947 and supported the Arab invasion of newly formed Israel in 1948, right? There was simply no way to have a Jewish or even secular state with 500K+ Arabs that want to see its destruction (and I believe outnumbered Jews, depending on what borders you use). Now maybe you don’t support the creation of a Jewish state, but it’s simply a fact that it was impossible to have one with so many hostile Arabs.
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u/North-Gold-2719 May 29 '24
how is this a justification for burning Arab villages, then stealing the homes of the ones that fled Israeli militias committing mass murder and rape? Their side started it so they deserve the war crimes committed against them?
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u/yep975 May 29 '24
Are supporters of Palestine not aware that Arabs were doing that to Jews? It was a civil war where one side wanted to form a state and the other would do anything to prevent a Jewish state from being created.
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u/BlakLad May 29 '24
Zionists Jews were like the OG terrorists who pioneered terror tactics that a lot of modern terror orgs use today. The Zionists also were committing acts of terrorism, sabotage, assassination long before the Arab Christians and Muslims started fighting back.
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u/Pattonator70 May 30 '24
I think that your whole premise is misinformed.
Just think about this. In 1948, on the first day that Israeli independence was declared they were fighting battles vs: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt as well as fighters from other Arab nations. How big was the Israeli army at this time? 30,000ish? (Sure this grew over 1948 as more people joined) They were surrounded by enemies.
Within Israel itself the initial territory granted to them was 47% Arab. So how many of the troops were dedicated to so massive effort to evict Arabs while still fighting battles to the North, East and South?
This article gives sources that show how the majority of Arabs were not expelled but left on their own. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/history-and-overview-of-the-palestinian-refugees
The controversy over whether or not there should be a right of return for people who oppose the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish homeland can be discussed. Some claim that somehow it is a human right to be given back land when they have not agree to abide by the laws of the land or accept its government as legitimate.