To be fair, they were not asked if they wanted a new nation state without them there…
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Whether or not Israel has the right to exist is not the issue at hand here. It’s whether the government of Israel has the right to evict people on land that they’re occupying and give it to others. And whether people who are living on this occupied land have the rights that are afforded to people who live in free societies.
If they wanted to, Israel could unilaterally declare that the land they’re controlling is part of Israel and that all the people living on it have the same rights as other Israeli citizens. That wouldn’t be a perfect solution but it would be way better than what they’re doing now.
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That price shouldn’t involve Israelis treating Palestinians in captured territories like they do. Israel was a bad idea in its current location from the get-go. Regardless of the tale of a lovable underdog succeeding against overwhelming odds, the actual truth is that the government there is now grossly creating an apartheid state.
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Which is one position (ie Greater Israel)… just without the second part (instead completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians).
One solution I’ve seen floated is making overlapping states on the same area - a single border, but with two states instead of one.
I don’t see how anyone thinks that gets Israel to being more safe and more stable… It can’t. Apartheid states are inherently violent, brutal places, because they are built on violence and brutality.
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Agreed. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone credible say that Israel shouldn’t exist. I’m sure that’s not your intent, but the fact that we tend to discuss Israel/Palestine in maximalist and binary terms is a problem in itself. There is a two-state solution (or there was) because there has to be.
And conversely, that Israel success has informed Israel’s attitude, defense posture and laws ever since. It’s not enough to coexist, Israel must proactively crush any hint of a threat. Unfortunately, we are so far removed from that actual aggression that it has become nothing more than dogma completely lacking nuance. As people upthread has pointed out, they are left drawing equivalencies between teenagers throwing rocks and mortars with an organized, aggressive and well funded modern military. It’s absurd on its face.
Like, what is the long game for Israel right now other than the complete eradication of the Palestinian people? Do they think that one day they’ll just say “Ok, you won! Enjoy our land!”
ETA: ninja’ed by a few people.
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Which is a little bit like saying “The Seminole people took a gamble in the 1830s that they could retain control of Florida instead of allowing the United States government to peacefully relocate them to Oklahoma, they were wrong and have been paying the price ever since.”
Having ancestors who resisted a new occupying government should not condemn anyone to life as a second-class citizen.
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Or, in the case of many Palestinians in occupied lands, not citizens at all.
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I have noticed and been frustrated by the refusal by anyone I know in the more pro-Israel camp, to discuss the long game. I can only imagine the worst – that it involves a form of “Greater Israel” speckled with bantustans. Also, I suspect there are maximalists on both sides – it wouldn’t take even a lot of them, maybe 15% of the population who dream of eliminating altogether the other side. Even that many make compromise, no matter how minor, very difficult. And note that Israel is approximately 20% each, Arab, Haredi, Russian, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi (+small numbers of “other”). That’s 80% of Israel that is culturally used to authoritarian rule. That leaves the “can’t we call get along” faction a powerless minority. Particularly back in the era of school-bus and café bombings, they lost all credibility, because their solution to horrific scenes of carnage was “we should negotiate” or “hit back, but not too hard.” So Israel has turned into an armed camp, with the accompanying siege mentality. Of course, the reason there is relative safety in Israel, I suppose Likudniks would say, is that it is an armed camp with a seige mentality. That the day nice liberals took over and relaxed security, Israel would be flooded with Palestinians in bomb-vests.
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Shouldn’t that tell you something?
That’s the same BS argument used to justify colonialism and the current backing of authoritarian regimes, almost always made by white people talking about non-white people. It’s not an excuse trotted out when discussing Europeans ever.
Or, maybe, they could actual NEGOTIATE with the Palestinians instead of taking their land and treating every single last Palestinian like a terrorist…
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I think you’re either reading too fast, or perhaps I should have been more careful to use quotation marks after “Likudniks would say…”. Also, Haredim and Russians are white, and one might argue (some do) that so are Mizrahim. And they are all used to authoritarian rule whether it is from their Rebbe, the Politburo, or the Emir.
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Okay, thanks for clarifying. I still don’t think that matters, though, as being from an authoritarian country does not mean one can’t live in a democratic one, if that was the point you were making (or the Lukiudnik would make). In this case, since Israel has some democratic practices, they are not culturally unable to live in a democracy, they are making a choice to live in way theocratic way if they embrace it. And others with less choice (women, children, etc) are forced to live that way. Of course, plenty of people would and have made that exact same argument about ALL Jews, too, which is antisemitic claptrap.
And yes, that is an argument regularly levelled AT Palestinians (and Arabs, and Africans, and Asians, and Latinx people, and sometimes Slavic people, etc), that they culturally (which in this case is a stand in for race) can’t handle democracy. I reject that notion out of hand for ANYONE.
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The declarations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority both state that their goal is the elimination of the state of Israel. “From the mountains to the sea”. That’s a pretty straightforward statement that Israel should not exist.
Also, where is any accountability from the greater Arab world for this situation? The countries surrounding Israel chose to refuse to provide assistance or resettlement when Israel was created. And let’s not get into who was living here when arguments, they go back 5,000 years and are never settled. The current government of Israel is wrong in its dealing with Palestinians, especially in not controlling the fundamentalist settler movement. Alas, one genuine fear is that if you expand citizenship to the Palestinians then there will no longer be a functionally Jewish state.
It’s kind of funny how the players in this are always America and Israel and the Palestinians. The Arab world is completely out of the picture, as far as any political moves are concerned.
And as for what would I do if some hostile government came and took my families house and gave to some one else-they already did that to my grandparents and most of them were killed in the process. I’m not standing in rural Poland expecting to get the land my grandfather’s house stood on.
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Not since the 1990s and Oslo.
How would YOU feel if a new nation-state was summarily dropped in the middle of your community, without your input or consent, and then you and most of your neighbors were violently pushed out of your home, whether or not you were involved in the war against the new state, but simply due to your ethnicity, and then denied the basic human right of returning to that home. Why is that not a question most people ask? How precisely would YOU react in that situation? Would you accept it? Would you be angry? Would you resist? Of course, we can’t answer that question, because none of us know how we would react, until that is what we find ourselves in.
Israel bears the brunt of responsibility here in the current environment, as there has been a continued effort to take land that was not originally part of the Israeli state via settlements that rest on land that the Palestinians would very much like to be part of their own state. they are being denied basic human rights here, by a vastly more powerful state, backed by the most powerful state on earth. The Israelis have not been negotiating in good faith since Netanyahu came into power and everyone knows it’s because he is (secretly) in favor of greater Israel with NO state for the Palestinians.
They have very much removed themselves for the price of arm sales, with the exception of Jordan, who continues to try and advocate for the Palestinian people in any and all negotiations.
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Given the history of oppression (and worse) of Jewish people it’s completely understandable that Jewish folks would want a friendly homeland that guarantees respect for their religion and ethnicities. There are ways that such respect can and should be enshrined and guaranteed in the fundamental laws of a country. But any country that guarantees that there’s one specific official religion and that the majority of its citizens will be members of that religion for all time, regardless of demographic shifts, etc, is a theocracy, not a democracy, and shouldn’t pretend to be one.
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So Palestinians should shut up and quietly acquiesce to losing their land and housing?
Let’s say you currently live in a house in the U.S.
By your logic, if I am able to overpower you and take over your house, or demolish it and build a new “settlement,” I have every right to do so. After all, other people lived there before you and were also pushed away, right?
By your logic, Native Americans had no more right to live there then you do, and you have no more right to live there then I do.
You seem quite all right with Palestinians having been pushed off land and out of houses to make way for Israelis, but I can’t imagine you being all right with me doing that to you. 
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We are not talking about reversing a wrong that happened generations ago. We are talking about something that is happening to Palestinian people right now.
Even more crucially we’re talking about something that is within the power of contemporary governments to stop from happening.
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Why, exactly should that matter? That’s just another way to perpetuate the dishonest framing that this is a “Jews vs Arabs/Muslims” issue. It is not. It is a state enacting genocide upon an indigenous population. It has far more to do with Western Europe’s colonial era than faith or ethnicity.
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