There's violence on both sides, Israel is well equipped and financially well supported from various countries (US) to defend themselves and have the upper hand.
It's not like Palestine is constantly getting attacked and just standing there doing nothing, they are also violent and engage in terroristic activities killing mass civilians and innocent Israeli people as well.
I see it as Israel defending itself, and others see it as Palestine defending itself. Like I said, it's a very controversial topic.
I believe with the whole Middle East, majority of Africa, and some Asian countries/Islands (e.g. Indonesia) that are filled with a massive Islamic population, a land about the size of New Jersey inhabited by Jews (the smallest religious population that have always been hatefully targeted) being constantly under attack sounds like hate.
Historically, the Jewish people have been under exile or thrown out of land plenty of times, especially the land of Israel. Yeah Israel was "founded" in 1948, but historically, way back in biblical times in Judea (present-day Israel) this was the home of the Jews known as Israelites who spoke ancient Hebrew. They were driven out after a Roman conquest where the Roman empire named it Palestina after Phillistia which is a figure in the Hebrew bible. The reason I am explaining this is because the Jews have had a very long and ancient connection with the land of present day Israel, it is very sacred to these people, and it has historically always been their land. The Jewish people have struggled all throughout history, not to mention WW2 holocaust genocide. That's why I, perhaps irrationally, sometimes feel that it is antisemitic to stop these people in living in a land that was technically historically theirs that they were taken away from in ancient times. When Israel became a state in 1948, they were immediately attacked on the FIRST day by Palestinians throwing an air missile.
Many Palestinians, such as the Hamas, feel VERY strongly about Israel and will not stop until Israel is gone, and they are supported by Islamic countries in their fight against Israel. If Israel stops defending themselves, if they stop receiving aid, they will lose their land and they will experience the murder of their people.
Peace has tried to be done, Palestine really doesn't wish to negotiate if it means Israel won't go away.
Take for example the now deceased Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister of Israel. He tried to cooperate with Palestine and gave them more land, known as Gaza. This land is now a big area of violence, where the Hamas send missiles across to Israel. It's very hard to cooperate with Palestinian groups such as Hamas, who have said they will stop at nothing until they wipe out the state of Israel.
Israel is one of the only few democratic countries in the Middle East offering suffrage for all citizens (INCLUDING their Palestinian citizens). I personally have not been to Israel but many of my friends have as well as my mother, with no apartheid that they have ever observed. Palestinian citizens can attend university, can vote, can do anything Israeli citizens have the right to do.
Personally, I see a never ending conflict because Israel wants to exist and Palestine wants Israel to go away. There's nothing to negotiate with such polar opposite views that both parties feel extremely strong and deep about.
Oh geez, we're gonna go
there. Alright, lemme start alllll over, from the beginning.
When I say I'm anti-Isreal, I mean I don't support their military or government. They’re disgusting racists who mistreat Israeli Jewish folks of color in addition to treating Palestinians with a shocking amount of violence and systematic oppression. Israel’s government is run by right-wing religious extremists who need to be ousted if they ever want to end the mess.
Now on to the main problem: Zionism. Zionism is a European colonial endeavor that sought to deprive and demean the native population of Palestine of land and dignity and continues to do so.
Zionism was a product of European colonialism. It was birthed during a time when Europeans were colonizing the majority of the world, and regardless of what one thinks about the underlying socialist implications of Zionism, it was inherently racist. How? I gotcha, lemme explain.
Nineteenth century colonialism sought to transplant European ideals in so-called "backward" nations around the world, with no regard to the native populations. The Arabs of Palestine were seen as backward, in European terms. So yes, the whole Zionist tag-line of "A people without a land for a land without people," is colonist language and disregards the native populations of Palestine. Zionists, in European eyes, were seen as establishing western ideals in the Orient.(Psst, if the results today don't show it, it went
very badly.)
Chaim Weizmann(the Zionist leader at the time) even states in this quote, to prove my point:
"It seems as if God has covered the soil of Palestine with rocks and marshes and sand, so that its beauty can only be brought out by those who love it and will devote their lives to healing its wounds."
He says this as if the Arabs of Palestine weren’t even there because he sees them as lessers, nonhumans. Similar to how colonists spoke of Native Americans before, in fact, to make the connection. Edward Said also explains this in
The Question of Palestine:
"His language [Weizmann] was shot through with the rhetoric of voluntarism, with an ideology of will and new blood that appropriated for Zionism a great deal of the language (and later the policies) of European colonialists attempting to deal with native backwardness."
Also, a wake up call to all the ahistorical drones defending Israel, touting the myth that "it just wanted peace" in 1948 but all the "evil Arabs" invaded...
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began before the 1948 war. There are three especially important massacres that the Zionist gangs carried out against Palestinians in that period. These massacres were not a coincidence, they were not a "reality of war", they were calculated and designed to instill terror in the Palestinian population, and as a result, drive as many to flee their lands as possible.
The Deir Yassin Massacre, in which over 107 unarmed civilians were murdered with cold blood, happened in April 1948. The Tantura Massacre, in the north, after the fall of Haifa. It resulted in over two hundred and forty Palestinian deaths. When did this happen? April 1948.
The Arab-Israeli war began in May 1948. These massacres happened before the war even started. They were in fact one of the main reasons for the intervention of the Arab armies in the first place. The third massacre, is the Al-Dawayima Massacre, in the middle regions of Palestine. It resulted in over four hundred and fifty Palestinian deaths. two hundred and eighty men, and the rest women and children. This happened in October the same year. Notice that these areas were chosen specifically in every populated region, so that the news travels as fast as possible to every Palestinian.
The Zionists would let a few children "escape" to tell everyone about the massacres. There is evidence of rape and mutilation of corpses. These three massacres created so much terror, that many Palestinians abandoned their lands and hoped to seek refuge in territories under Arab control. Those who did not move, were of course, removed by force eventually.
This is the birth of the state of Israel. And no amount of Green energy initiatives and Gay Pride parades can cover up the blood seeping from its very roots.
So now that we got the basic stuff out of the way, let's dwell into the deeper things.
Let's start by pointing out that Israel has only existed for only near seventy years. That actually
isn’t a very long time, hell, I've even got family members still living who're older than that, and even folks reading this might as well. Although Zionist settlement in Palestine began in as early as the 1880s, in 1946, two years before Israel was fully established, Jewish folks in Palestine amounted to only about thirty two percent of the population. Despite that fact, when Israel was created, the Jewish population was awarded with
56% of the land from Palestine, and a disproportionate portion of fertile land and natural resources. What has occurred since the establishment of Israel is called
ethnic cleansing, and has created a situation where some nine million Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons, where thousands upon thousands have been killed, and where the Palestinian people are still denied self-determination, freedom of movement, equal legal status, and other basic human rights by the Israeli government.
Israel has been able to maintain and expand its settler-colonial project (or, as put by apologists, "modernizing their people") in Palestine thanks to aid from the United States government, among others. An extremely conservative estimate of US aid to Israel thus far is a hundred and twenty three billion dollars, and the US currently gives Israel about three billion per year, as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, free or discounted weaponry, and research agreements which spur Israel’s modernization. Because surprise surprise, imperialist superpowers help one another.
...and so what happens to the Palestinians?
Palestine is an illegally occupied country, and Israel is the occupying force. Under international law, Israel - as the occupying power - has the legal and ethical obligation to protect its occupied Palestinian population, and does not have the "self-defense." International law also affirms the right of occupied people (or the Palestinians in this case) to resist occupation - including the right to armed resistance against the occupying power.
Also, prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948, Jews, Muslims, and Christians lived in relative harmony within Palestine. While there are absolutely fundamentalist groups within the Middle East generally, and even within Palestine itself (in far, far less numbers than the US media would have you believe), fundamentalism is neither the sole domain of Islam or even necessarily religious in origin and intent. Fundamentalism is a
political issue - perpetuating right-wing ideologies like nationalism, racism, xenophobia, and control over the life and choices of others by cloaking these more easily identifiable methods of hate in religious doctrine. Equating fundamentalist outliers with the whole of a population is basically like saying that every single Christian in the world is an active participant of the Westboro Baptist Church.
In fact, the Palestinian resistance group called Hamas is reacting to this fundamentalism itself - the Zionist interpretation of Jewish fundamentalism (and to be clear, this is not representative of Jewish folks or Judaism in the least, as I've clarified). Zionism is a right-wing, settler-colonial, fundamentally racist ideology which necessitates ethnic cleansing to establish a state for the Jewish people, in which only Jews have full rights of citizenship and where at least one hundred and fifty Jewish-only settlements currently exist on Palestinian land. A Jewish person whose family has lived in another country for centuries can move to Israel, and the moment they step off the plane they receive full citizenship rights. Meanwhile, a Palestinian whose family has always lived in Palestine is treated as a second-class citizen in Israel.
Hamas is fighting with homemade rockets which don’t have warheads or guidance systems. They fire mostly from Gaza, a one hundred and thirty nine square mile patch of land with a population of almost two million (nearly half of which is children). There is no place Hamas could fire rockets from in Gaza that is
not densely populated, The allegations of human shields and storing weapons in schools are false and majorly misrepresented, respectively. In the two instances where weapons were found at UNRWA schools, both times the schools were abandoned - which can hardly be used as evidence that Hamas stores weapons in the occupied schools being bombed.
Israel has full military control of Gaza. Israel has plundered Palestine’s natural resources, and Israeli settlers have burned an estimated eight hundred thousand olive trees, which Palestinian farmers depend on to live. Specifically because of Israel’s control and treatment of Palestinian land and people, the UN has stated that, "Gaza will not be livable by 2020."
The people of Gaza are facing not extinction, but termination at the hands of Israel. Hamas has offered a ten year truce provided Israel meets ten pretty basic demands - many of which the international community has been calling for for decades now. They are:
- Withdrawal of Israeli tanks from the Gaza border.
- Freeing all the prisoners that were arrested after the killing of the three youths.
- Lifting the siege and opening the border crossings to commerce and people.
- Establishing an international seaport and airport which would be under U.N. supervision.
- Increasing the permitted fishing zone to ten kilometers.
- Internationalizing the Rafah Crossing and placing it under the supervision of the U.N. and some Arab nations.
- International forces on the borders.
- Easing conditions for permits to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque.
- Prohibition on Israeli interference in the reconciliation agreement.
- Reestablishing an industrial zone and improvements in further economic development in the Gaza Strip.
And unlike Israel, Palestine actually has a much better record of honoring their truces.
Palestinians want basic human rights. They want to be able to live in the land that they live in. They want to be able to live. Around a thousand Palestinians have been killed in this most recent round of Israeli aggression, thousands more have been injured without the needed medical supplies to tend their wounds, and tens of thousands have been displaced.
I repeat from before: This is not self-defense on Israel’s part, it is ethnic cleansing.
Here's a little infodump: [
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Also, here's a little fun fact: There are about a hundred and eighty nine thousand Holocaust survivors living in Israel. Forty five thousand Israeli holocaust survivors live below the poverty line. What the Israeli government gives their survivors is not sufficient for them to live on. Just a little thing to throw out there.
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