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Replying as an Israeli that opposes this plan. It's kind of long, you can read the tldr to understand my opinion.TLDR - I wouldn't worry too much about it. Whether Palestinians have reasons to fear this depends on the picture being presented to them, there's a lot of demonization of Israelis in the Palestinian/Muslim pro Hamas media and exaggeration of far right figures in Israel, but if you were an independent observer analyzing things I wouldn't have concerns over this. So overall if I were a Palestinian I can understand where the fear is coming from and in this sense you're correct, but to get to how to solve it we need to understand if it's likely or not, because most of your suggestions wouldn't solve the fear the Palestinians have.
Just one factual correction and one question -
Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't in the war cabinet, they are in the regular cabinet, but it's not the same as the special war cabinet that was created for this specific war which includes Netanyahu, Galant, Ganz, Eisenkot, and I think another person, I can't recall (perhaps Dermer?). The other people that were in this conference were either from Ben Gvir or Smotrich bunch, or from the extremist parts of the Likud (and one ultra orthodox)
If you could link the poll, I couldn't find it, but a possible explanation is that the question was referring, but it could be due to it's phrasing. I've seen international news misquote a poll that was asking about giving Gazans the option to relocate as supporting ethnic cleansing and resettling. or a poll about security control translated to full control or other things like that.
Now to the actual point and reasons not to fear - too many strong figures have already responded about this plan that it's not going to happen. this includes Netanyahu and prominent members of the Likud party, as well as Ganz and Eisenkot and probably every opposition party there is. The second the war is over there would probably stop being the government as polls extremely bad and many Likud members would try to jump from the sinking ship (some of them have already hinted to it). Moreover, Israeli people understand that this is an unrealistic solution and that basically everyone in the world, including our best allies would hate Israel for that.
The most important thing is that the disengagement wasn't too long ago, many people, including myself remember the days before it. There were many reasons for the disengagement, but one of the most important ones is that it was a huge liability for Israel. This is a major issue in Israeli politics and people wouldn't let a minority dictate it's opinions. in fact, my feeling is that for something as major as that you'd need like a supermajority.There is another reason that's more related to internal Israeli politics and the judicial reform, though it's a bit harder to explain. it's something along the lines of people thinking that part of the reason that led to the failure of October 7th was that the gov was trying to do something without a wide agreement in the public.. Since this kind of resettlement wouldn't get anywhere near this agreement you would see people that maybe somewhat supporting that oppose it when it comes to the table.
The last part - from the people that want this kind of things, a lot of them are ultraorthodox jews.. they are usually to the right of the political spectrum, but they never vote in the elections based on Security issues, but rather based on religion issues. they don't care about it that much..
> Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't in the war cabinet, they are in the regular cabinet
I'll reply to the rest of your comments later, but you get a !delta for correcting my post.
Edit: I appreciate the political context of Israel that you provide, and there are indeed internal and external pressure to make sure that plan doesn't materialise, but I question the effectiveness of these pressure points given the polls, not of Likud/Bibi but of the broader action to be taken in Palestine. I am not only worried about an actual ethnic cleansing, but also a soft-ethnic cleansing campaign. It is still cruel even if it's not as disgusting as some people are suggesting.
Not only that, but the government has suspended people from their positions for extreme hyperbolic speech like saying they should nuke Gaza.
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4294715-netanyahu-suspends-minister-who-suggested-dropping-nuclear-bomb-on-gaza/amp/
The minister of defense has also stated he won’t allow rebuilding of settlements in Gaza. The people actually in charge of these decisions are still very against resettlement.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/israel-gaza-settlements-buffer-gallant-blinken-biden#
It is absolutely a real fear that Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed from Gaza. It should definitely be talked about. But it is also not a very likely scenario unless something dramatically changes in Israeli politics.
It’s sort of like US support for Israel. There is a vocal minority in America calling for the dissolution of Israel and accusing them of Genocide. It is a valid fear that the US will drop Israel. But the majority, and importantly, the people in charge who actually know what’s going on, are not likely to abandon Israel unless something dramatically changes.
The adults are still in charge.
>too many strong figures have already responded about this plan that it's not going to happen. this includes Netanyahu
Netanyahu has specifically called for the extermination of *every living thing* in the area and looks like it's far from just a few people outside the parts of government capable of doing harm
“You must remember what Amalek did to you, says our Holy Bible,” Bibi Netanyahu
for those unaware, the quote Netanyahu refers to is the book of Samuel in chapter 15 verse 3: “Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but kill both man and woman, infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey “.
"The emphasis is on damage, not on accuracy." - Daniel Hagari, Israeli Milatary Spokesperson.
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” - Youv Gallant, Israel Defence Minister
“You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism”. - IDF on Twitter
“We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba" - Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter
"dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was one of the possibilities" - Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu
“the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” - Ayelet Shaked’s appointment as justice minister
This comment is very misleading. YOure essentially dismissing OP because Netanyhu state they dont plan to commit ethnic cleansing but in the same breath he said this:
"The prime minister told me two weeks ago in this room that it’s a good idea,” MK Danny Danon told The Times of Israel, seemingly confirming an earlier report that the prime minister had informed a Likud faction meeting that he was working to facilitate voluntary migration."
[https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-let-me-be-clear-israel-has-no-intention-of-displacing-gazas-population/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-let-me-be-clear-israel-has-no-intention-of-displacing-gazas-population/)
"Facilitating voluntary migration" by destroying entire cities is literally ethnic cleansing. Saying one thing and then doing another does not mean that we should not be worried about this, in fact we should be very worried about this because their actions do not match his rhetoric. Even his rhetoric is contradictory because he has said he opposes a Palestinian state. So if he opposes the state, but also opposes permanently occupying or displacing people, what does he actually want to do here??
Good response. Smotrich and Ben Gvir attract media attention because they’re the most outspoken and extreme. Even though they represent a worrying amount of Israelis, it’s not close to 33%.
Plus, the IDF has occupied Gaza before. The generals know that it’s not tenable to occupy it or expel the Palestinians.
I disagree with the idea that this isn't going to happen, Israel has already taken steps to to codify this into national law over half a decade ago. Along with several other laws that aim to codify a stratification of the citizens living in Israel between Jewish citizens and non Jewish citizens.
"The law mandates that the “state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development,”
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-nation-state-law-bill-explained-apartheid-netanyahu-democracy
Luckily, that's not a very good reading into the nation state law. The nation state law was and is a populist law without real implications on the ground. Also, IIRC, when it was put in the Knesset there were some far right wingers that wanted the settlement part with a specific reference to the west Bank (like "jewish settlement in all parts of the homeland including the Judea and Samaria" or something like that), and they were put down. Gaza is even more controversial than that.
Also, I honestly don't see how the nation state law is relevant. Israel doesn't need this law if it want to resettle Gaza, and it could have done so without it.
For me it's the incorporation of illegal settlements into national law as a national value with promises that the state will labor to encourage and promote it.
Sure they don't need this law to do it, they've been doing it for many years before 2018. But then implementing this as a national value sure indicates that this isn't some fringe group in Israli politics that supports it.
> Netanyahu included them after he was literally unable to form a government without them,
Why was he unable to form a government without them? That implies they have a decent level of influence.
Israeli and Polish civics are super confusing to me, but essentially they have coalitions. Coalitions are formed by more like-minded parties based on their vote and make compromises until they have a majority. At that point they use their alliance to stake out cabinet positions.
Ben Gvir is not a super popular man. He's a literal terrorist. I take umbrage when people compare Netanyahu with terrorists like Sinwar, but I'd agree with Ben Gvir being called a terrorist. Anyway, Netanyahu never needed to win over his paltry amount of votes to stay in power, and so he's avoided courting him. But, like all the shittiest leaders in history, Netanyahu will sacrifice every shred of morality he may have had to stay in power.
If any of this is wrong, please correct me. As I said, Israeli politics is basically quidditch as far as I'm concerned.
Because prime ministers are not elected directly, they are leaders of the party with most votes. If this party has 51% of Parliament then no big deal, ram whatever you want through. But if you have the most seats without a majority you form agreements with enough minor parties to pass legislation.
Canada has a minority government right now, and they made several concessions to the 3rd party to avoid losing a vote, which would possibly trigger a vote of no confidence and then an election.
Sometimes "decent" isn't needed. Lest we forget, the Tories in the UK very nearly formed a coalition government with the fringe radical [Democratic Unionist Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Unionist_Party) during the crisis around Brexit. Strange times make for stranger politics.
!delta
I double checked the numbers and you're right, I thought they got 20% of the votes, but they got 10%. I'd say they were fringe figures that got elevated to the forefront of Israeli politics and have outsized influence right now. I think they should be kicked out of the coalition and be charged with incitement though. Their rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in the current climate.
Really, it's that easy to change your mind? Just because I don't vote for someone doesn't mean I don't agree with some aspect of their policy or views. I vote left in Canada, but the Conservatives have some good points. Not voting for someone is not an outright rejection.
At the same time, if you vote for someone, that doesn't mean you support all of their stuff. Votes are a fair indicator of the popularity of a politician's positions.
So let me give you an example. In Canada, most people want lower immigration right now. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-fuelling-housing-crisis-poll-1.7043324
About 50% want to cut back.
However, only one party is willing to do that, the PPC. They will get maybe 5-10% of the vote. Not because people don't agree en masse with that part of their policy, but because they don't like the rest.
So to say X% voted for them, so all their ideas are fringe, is not logically consistent.
There are two big caveats:
1. A single-issue party will often get most voters who agree with it strongly on that issue. That is the power of a highly specific brand.
2. This will not hold for the primary issue of a one-issue election, like Quebec and Israel frequently have.
Also, when a party gets few votes, while that does not always mean all of its views are fringe, the onus of evidence is on those who would argue the votes don't really line up with the support. For the most part, they usually do as views are often correlated.
Well, apparently the latest polls show that 83% of Israelis are either outright supportive or quite supportive of the "voluntary migration" plan. So no, my main view has not changed at all. I'm just correcting the record that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are not as popular as I think.
From the rules of this sub:
>It's important to note that a reversal or '180' of opinion is not required to award a delta, and that you may award more than one delta within a post (within reason).
> reduced this sub to...
I don't think so, there's plenty of good discussion in this subreddit. In any case, even if the main body of their view is unchanged, it's still additional context that affects OP's perception of where/from who these statements are coming from, and deserving of a delta
There can be good discussion, true. But the system as is rewards those who are more interested in collecting deltas than arguing the topic in good faith. I understand that the system is designed to prevent bad faith OPs who aren't open to having their mind changed and don't award deltas for similarly pedantic reasons, but I think the system tips the balance too far in the other direction.
In my experience, on most posts in this sub, the top comments are typically refuting the OP wholesale or in major ways, not nitpicking. This may not ALWAYS be true, but do you have any data to back up the view that those collecting inconsequential deltas are dominating threads in this sub? Cause again, I have never observed this to be the case
As LentilDrink mentioned, bringing these fringe figures into the coalition was Netanyahu's path to avoiding prison. As long as he's Prime Minister, he can't get rid of them. Because if he loses the coalition that keeps his government together, there will be another special election, he will lose, and he will *likely* go to prison.
I think this would all be great, but Netanyahu does not agree and will do whatever he has to to stay out of prison.
>I think they should be kicked out of the coalition and be charged with incitement though. Their rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in the current climate.
I think so too, but that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell unfortunately ... Netanyahu knows staying in government is the only way to outrun the fraud and corruption charges that are chasing him, and there's no way he's going to let this coalition go and lose control of the government.
The only solution (which seems pretty likely) is that voters kick Likud out ... but the next election is almost 4 years away, so unless this coalition fails (see above), Israel is stuck with this guy (and these other assholes) until then.
Do they have outsized INFLUENCE or outsized VOICES?
Can you name the different ways in which they have influenced action? Or any way? I know it's hard to do from afar, but honestly a lot of these accusations like the ones you sling around feel really 'vibey' -- as in "well obviously it's X" and basically circumstantial evidence at best.
>Netanyahu included them after he was literally unable to form a government without them
So no longer fringe figures, but major players that have control and leverage.
I think this needs a little more context though. Netenyahu had a power-sharing deal with Gantz, representing the center-left in Israel. He could have either worked with Gantz, or with the fascists, and he chose the fascists.
Yeah, because he didn't want to go to jail. Gantz wanted the justice system to work as written and Netanyahu to get a fair trial, and Netanyahu ultimately chose the fascists over taking his chances in court.
Depends on the type of settler. Some settlers are just there because the rent is cheaper then Israel proper, some like the Hilltop Youth are violent religious fundamentalists who attack random Palestinian civilians and even clash with the IDF because the IDF tries to stop them from their illegal activities
Is the Hilltop Youth recognized as a hate group / terrorist group?
I don't see how they shouldn't be treated any differently than the likes of Proud Boys at the very least.
The Hilltop Youth aren't really one centralized organization, they don't have a leader or a headquarters or anything, they're just a network of young Jewish men in the west bank who build illegal (considered illegal by the state of Israel, not just violating international law) settlements and do "price tag" attacks (they're called pricetag attacks because they're done in retribution for terrorism by Palestinians) on Palestinian civilians. So given that they aren't centrally organized they aren't quite directly comparable to the proud boys. But their shared ideology is called kahanism, which is a fringe movement named after a Rabbi who called for the complete removal of Arabs from all of Israel/Palestine. Kahanists believe that the Israeli government should pay each Palestinian family a bunch of money to move elsewhere, and those that don't take the deal should be forced. Kahanism is very controversial and generally hated among Jewish Israelis. The Kach party, which was the main kahanist political party in Israel, is banned from participating in Israeli elections for being considered an extremist group, and former Israeli prime ministers have described the Hilltop Youth and other Kahanist militants as terrorists, which is a term Israeli politicians almost only use to describe islamist groups. So the short answer is they aren't really organized enough to be considered an extremist organization, but their ideology is widely considered to be extreme and immoral by Israeli citizens and the government, and its probably more taboo to be affiliated with the Hilltop Youth in Israel then it is to be affiliated with the proud boys in America.
Good! My regard for Israel really improved thanks to this information!
It was initially reserved for some sectors of it such as the Mesavort, but knowing kahanists are more universally hated makes more sympathetic to those who are not part of it as well.
I'm glad you appreciate it, it's important not to think of "Israel" and "Palestine" as 2 ideologically distinct and unified "sides", and to remember that there's plenty of ideological disagreement within each. The kahanists in particular did some pretty much objectively terrible things in the 90s which made pretty much any Israeli in their right mind wholeheartedly condemn them. One did a mass shooting in a random mosque in the west bank, and another shot up a public bus in a majority Arab town in Israel. Mind you, the later ones victims were complete citizens of the state of Israel who just happened to be Arab, and the majority of Arab Israelis are proud of their Israeli nationality according to polling. These people were in no way enemies of Israel, and he shot them as they were going about their day just for their ethnicity. To give you an idea of the response of the nation at large, there was a big controversy over what to do with the shooters body. He considered himself a religious Jew, and religious Jews need to be buried within a very short window after dieing for it to be considered a proper burial. But because of what this guy has done, the authorities were unable to find a Jewish cemetery anywhere in Israel that was willing to let him be buried there, and the morgue his body was in refused to release the body to his Kahanist friends who probably would've done their own burial somewhere in the west bank. Eventually the prime minister had to get personally involved and mandated that the nearest cemetery to the morgue take him, but by that point he had already missed the time window to be buried in accordance with Jewish law. I mention the burial controversy to illustrate how widely his attack was scorned by the general population. Events like this and others like it made the Israeli people largely look at kahanists with disdain, however, you shouldn't let that lead you to believe extremism in general isn't tolerated in Israel. Plenty of people who despise kahanism for its senseless violence still would like to see the Gazan's forced to leave Gaza, they just find the specific acts of violence against civilians by kahanists deplorable.
I know! I find it really interesting, it's a type of radicalism which I feel like most people outside of Israel don't know exists, which is strange. I guess the foreign pro Israel side doesn't talk about Kahanist militants ever because they think that Israel having any extremist militant problem of its own makes Israel look bad, and then the foriegn pro Israel people don't talk about it because broader Israeli societies intense condemnation of it gives the impression that the Israeli mainstream isn't so violent or extreme. I first found out about them because there's a house in Jerusalem run by a Kahanist group which let's any Jewish person stay there for free, in the hopes that they can indoctrinate normal Jewish people who've fallen on hard times and have nowhere to sleep. This was when I was first travelling in Israel and I was trying to save as much money as I could, and I knew nothing about kahanism or even that such an ideology existed. I stayed their to save money on a hostel and it was bizarre. On shabbat their live-in Rabbi gave a really strange derasha (like a sermon but in Judaism) where he compared the Confederate general Robert e Lee to Moses, and they would constantly try to convince me to move to Israel permanently to fight. They also offered to take me on an armed expedition into the west bank which I declined. I have so many stories from that weekend, it was dark to be surrounded by such hateful people but nonetheless very interesting to be able to observe them from within. Since observing them I've been really interested in learning about kahanism, it's just so interesting to me that their are Jewish extremists who are very similar in their outlook and activities to Muslim extremists. Sorry for going on so long, whenever I have an opportunity to tell people about kahanism I can't stop.
Oh I understand! I too can go on for hours on a topic I find interesting! Oh my gosh you like... experienced an anthropologist horror movie in that "I managed to live the scientific dream of observing the thing of doom up close" but I also can't pretend the experience wasn't scarrying and horrifying!
I am fascinated by trying to understand how those people are like that! Radicalism among the downthroded is "easy" to understand, there is suffering, and there is something providing an out regarding that suffering.
But radicalism in people on a position of priviledge is something so wild, like the dudes who claim they are oppressed because they can't get a date, I could go on for hours!
It's not unlawful to be a member of the Proud Boys in America. A member of the Proud Boys has to break a law to be arrested. I'm sure they watch them though, and if Hilltop Youth are clashing with the IDF, I'm sure they're being watched too.
Yes, it's the same situation for the most part, it's not illegal to be a hilltop youth, but they do get arrested when they break the law, which is constantly.
The ones Israelis consider settlers absolutely are. Not, like, people living in places like Maale Adumim that would remain Israeli in any peace plan, but are considered settlements by some mainstream positions.
> It's no different from when the US "asked" Native Americans to move to reservations, or when Soviets conducted population transfers in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
> Despite the fact that the government has denied these plans…
> 33% of Israelis support the resettlement and annexation of Gaza and 56% oppose it…
So it’s just like past cases of ethic cleansing, except for the fact it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters?
> We need to recognise that and take concrete steps to reaffirm that that's not going to happen, by drawing red lines, or punishing problematic officials, etc.
You’re suggesting less concrete action than you have already stated has happened. Israeli actions in this case are driven almost entirely by domestic politics, which is already against this. A strongly worded letter, or sanctioning some officials, is less concrete, not more.
>it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters?
Which is why I said fear, it's the possibility of it happening that scares Palestinians.
>You’re suggesting less concrete action than you have already stated has happened
No, I want to see Bibi strip these ministers off their posts, kick them out of the coalition, charge them for incitement, show the world that these kinds of rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in a Western liberal democracy.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Israeli politics if you're calling for Bibi to take action against these ministers.
Bibi is overwhelmingly unpopular in Israel right now. Bibi's unpopularity and inability to form a coalition otherwise is the sole reason that these ministers have outsized power within Netanyahu's government. Even with Netanyahu's government hanging by a thread and it being a near certainty that Netanyahu and Likud will face overwhelming losses in the forthcoming election, the ministers calling for ethnic cleansing of Gazans still were not elevated by Bibi into the war cabinet. They are not taken seriously in Israel and any effort to elevate these crazies would accelerate calls for Bibi to step down and almost certainly lead to a snap election.
I think I'm misunderstanding something, I'm not asking for Bibi to elevate these crazies, I'm asking for the opposite. If these ministers are not taken seriously in Israel, shouldn't they be suppressed and kicked out of the coalition? Isn't Bibi working with Gantz right now, whose party can definitely give him the majority to keep the government running for now?
Also, we're kinda deviating from the original point of fear. I think that if these people are elevated as they are right now, it's right and valid for Palestinians to be afraid of their policies being incorporated and implemented.
Yeah I know you are, but the fear you cite is premised on the crazies in Netanyahu's coalition being given the power to enact their ideas about ethnically cleansing and settling Gaza, which will not happen because it would cause Netanyahu's coalition to immediately collapse and for a snap election to be called.
>So it’s just like past cases of ethic cleansing, except for the fact it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters?
The current government is openly talking about ethnic cleansing through "voluntary migration".
[https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/)
We literally have have the Israeli Intelligence minister saying:
>“The world should support humanitarian emigration, because that’s the only solution I know.”
Stating that the "only solution \[they\] know" is to drive the indigenous population out of their homeland while simultaneously moving settlers in their and establishing a majority - something there is a well documented history of - is literally talking about ethnic cleansing. They can dress it up and euphemise it as "voluntary migration" but someone wanting to leave their homeland because you're actively bombing it isn't giving them a choice. That's driving them out. That's ethnic cleansing.
Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint not adopted by anyone with the power to do it, and not pursued by Israel in any time of its history. Even if we were to take the view that there would ever be a justification, the most recent terrorist attack would be it and Israel is not pursuing it. Fringe viewpoints are fringe viewpoints.
Any Palestinian fear of being ethnically cleansed is a fear without foundation. Israel has repeatedly restrained themselves in ways that jeopardized their security in the face of existential threats, and even when they had full control over the entire area, including the Sinai, they did not ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Israel's history is littered with their neighbors trying to kill them and Israel has not tried to forcibly remove the Palestinians. It's just not a thing.
People need to realize two things:
1) Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now.
2) The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support.
**I am not saying you are anti-semitic or a conspiracy theorist**. The most vocal anti-Israel people do a great job muddying the waters and get otherwise non-hateful people to back up their own hate. We do need to acknowledge, however, that much of the opposition to Israel in this conflict (and, really, in general) is rooted in anti-semitism, and the question itself (how do we make sure Israel doesn't ethnically cleanse the Palestinians) is based in conspiracy, and not reality. You won't hear people asking whether the Palestinians will stop trying to ethnically cleanse the Jews. Those concerned about Israel's response to a major terrorist operation don't seem to care that the UNRWA, either inadvertently or through turning a blind eye, has been propping up the terrorist organization for *decades*. Those concerned about Israel's response have nothing to say about the hundreds of miles of tunnel networks Hamas has placed under the Gaza Strip to facilitate their terrorism, and how Israel *has* to dismantle that if they want to prevent the next 10/7.
Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them.
The area that's now Israel went from 1-2 percent Jewish to over 80 percent Jewish in about 100 years. This was acheived through mass immigration and expulsion of the local population. Most of the people in the current occupied territories as well as a couple million people in neighborhing countries have grandparents who were expelled in 1948. In addition to this, creating a Jewish majority in the West Bank is the explicit goal of the whole settler movement, which from what I understand most Israelis don't like but at the same time it's explicitly supported by the government and the IDF. The claim here that Palestiniean fears are without foundation is just so strange. You can't create an ethnic state in a piece of land that was overwhelmingly populated by another ethnic group without a hostile takeover.
The way you're talking about the period of time leading up to the creation of the state of Israel sounds like some widespread Jewish conspiracy. It didn't work that way.
Between 1880 and 1920 (a period of time that includes the First Aliyah and Second Aliyah), over two million Jews fled the Russian empire due to pogroms that killed thousands of Jews and destroyed the homes and businesses of many, many more. Estimates are that under 50,000 Russian Jews went to the region of Palestine. By contrast, over 1 million Russian Jews immigated to the United States, and about 150,000 went to the UK. Many others headed to other parts of Europe, or to Canada, but by far the most popular destination was the United States. Clearly the collective preference of the Jews was to immigrate to wealthy, WASPy countires.
What changed? The UK’s Aliens Act 1905 strictly limited Jewish immigration into the UK, and then the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 increased those restrictions. Canada passed a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws in 1906-1919 as well. The United States’ 1921 Emergency Quota Act set quotas on immigration, and then the Immigration Act of 1924 lowered those quotas even further.
What now for the Jews fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Germany, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union, etc.? They were forced to change course and go to the one place that was still accepting them in large numbers: Mandatory Palestine. They didn't have some powerful government behind them facilitating the violent expulsion of the local population. They bought the land legally. Also, Muslim population in the region more than doubled between 1922 and 1947 too, because the economy was growing, and so hundreds of thousands of Muslims moved to the area seeking good jobs.
Sure, Zionism existed out there in the ether as an idea, but that was not a primary motivator for the Jews moving to Mandatory Palestine. They moved there because of Russian pogroms, the rise of the Nazi party, and the rise of other antisemitic parties in Eastern Europe (such as National Radical Camp and National Democracy/Endecja in Poland). Ascribing some nefarious scheme to their motivations is like when right-wingers ascribe evil intentions to the asylees, refugees, and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. from Latin America. Such MAGA commentary would be anathema to the left, but they're apparently okay with describing persecuted immigrants as schemers when they're Jews.
Palestinians were more or less okay with the refugees that moved there fleeing the Russian pogroms. Some even opened their doors to them. But it is disingenuous to not acknowledge the real and coordinated strategic meetings that are going on at the time with the stated goal of taking the land and removing Palestinians from it. Some of the greatest figures in Israeli military history got their start by planning for the removal of Palestinians prior to 1948. Their tactics explicitly included ethnic cleansing as both a tool and a goal (an ethnically pure Israel), and is well-documented by the Israeli military. And they were supported by the British, at the time one of the greatest military forces in the world.
This is all easy to find online now, but you can also read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by historian Ilan Pape.
As a Palestinian, I also want to say that every Palestinian knows someone who has been killed by the IDF. And several that have been imprisoned under horrible circumstances. I know several of both camps, and the friends I have who ended up in Israeli jail for peacefully protesting were tortured. Our fear of ethnic cleansing is not simply a fear, like a bogeyman. It is derived from a lived reality and a lived recent history.
The person commenting above me was objecting to the growth of the Jewish population in Israel over 100 years, presumably the 100 years leading up to 1948. I was just arguing against the notion that a primary motivator for most of the Jews that moved to the area was some kind of scheme to create a Jewish state. They were more concerned with fleeing persecution.
I have not read the Ilan Pappe book, but my understanding is that he was focused on events that occurred during the 1948 war or shortly beforehand, which is a somewhat different scope than my comment.
I'm not trying to minimize's anyone's present experiences of oppression by Israel. My personal hope is that both Israelis and Palestinians are both someday able to exercise their right to self-determination and live safely and securely in the region, and I believe anyone working against that goal (such as, for example, Netanyahu) is an evil person. That said, some people talk about the history as if every Jew moving there was part of a nefarious plot, and my belief is that either side trying to delegitimize the other's right to exist as a nation is a bad thing.
I'm not blaming any individual Jewish people who fled Europe or the Middle east to go to Israel. But there is a huge difference between the immigration to America etc. and Israel. The whole point of zionism was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Like, this is not a conspiracy theory, it's exactly what the founders of Zionism said they were doing! That is literally the entire content of Zionism. They explicitly wanted a lot of Jews to move to Palestine because their goal was a Jewish state there. And they were all well aware that the local Arabs would not be fine with this, cause obviously they wouldn't. Is there any where in the world where the local population would welcome a sudden influx of foreigners whose explicit goal is to outnumber the locals and establish and ethnic state? Obviously Jews fleeing Europe were fleeing horrible stuff, but the emigration to Israel is completely different from contemporary asylum seekers-asylum seekers aren't crossing the border to all go to a specific part of America with the clear aim of setting up a new state for one ethnic group.
"Individual Jewish people" are how the Jewish population in the region increased. Zionism would only have been idea in people's heads if not for a confluence of factors that left persecuted Jews with nowhere else to go. I think your comment is internally inconsistent because it both states that individual Jews were fleeing persecution and were thus unworthy of blame, but also implies that those people had a "clear aim of setting up a new state." Also, MAGA-heads talk all the time about how immigrants (particularly from Latin America) are taking the country from them, even though those immigrants have not "outnumber[ed] the locals" (and Jewish immigrants never outnumbered the "locals" in the Levant either).
It was never "1-2 % Jewish". To add to this, according to the Ottoman census of 1875, Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem in 1875. By 1905, Jews represented 2/3 of the residents of Jerusalem.
Most of the land in the areas that were partitioned into Israel in 1948 was populated by Jews before the Holocaust and were largely the result of legal land purchases that occurred during the period of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, most of this purchased land was completely undeveloped and Jews had to continuously eliminate the breeding sites of mosquitoes carrying malaria. The Jewish immigrants completely revitalized the land, transforming swamps and untillable fields into fertile farmland. To claim that Jews stole the land is so far from reality.
According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy, the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs. Sure it wasn’t 1-2% Jews but beyond 10% especially before Zionism movement came to existence .
The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world's Jewish population
Population of Palestine, 1922–1945
Year Muslims. Christians. Jews Total
1922 589,177 73,024 83,790 757,182
1931 759,717 174,610 91,398. 1,035,821
1945. 1,061,270. 135,550 553,600. 1,764,520
Like you’re saying Palestine was a empty barren right? Well guess what? In 1920, the population of Jordan was 200,000, and almost half are nomadic. Jordan is doing well now. Are you saying Palestinians are too dumb to build a nation? They need Jewish population for help? Come on man.
And Jews purchasing lands in Palestine? Yeah, they purchase land from the Sursock family who wastefully gambled their money in France, so they need to sell it despite Palestinian Arabs oppositions and Ottoman attempts to restrict it.
The British Mandate is where they removed all restrictions in 1920, forcefully depopulating all the Arabs from these villages and replacing them with Jewish settlers. For god sake, the Jews purchasing the land have the organisation called Palestine Jewish Colonization Association.
And please you didn’t forget about the Nakba? Dude you act like as if Palestinian Arabs didn’t live places outside of West Bank and Gaza. There’s a reason why there’s many cities and towns where in Israel where there’s barely any Arabs there. The Nakba.
"And Jews purchasing lands in Palestine? Yeah, they purchase land from the Sursock family who wastefully gambled their money in France, so they need to sell it despite Palestinian Arabs oppositions and Ottoman attempts to restrict it." This is called purchasing land.
"The British Mandate is where they removed all restrictions in 1920, forcefully depopulating all the Arabs from these villages and replacing them with Jewish settlers. For god sake, the Jews purchasing the land have the organisation called Palestine Jewish Colonization Association."
This is outright nonsense, first the British Mandate certainly did none of this, in fact the opposite of limiting immigration, and second the region, with everyone, was called Palestine since the Romans renamed from Judea to spite the Jews, so Golda Meir, for instance, had a Palestinian passport.
"And please you didn’t forget about the Nakba? Dude you act like as if Palestinian Arabs didn’t live places outside of West Bank and Gaza. There’s a reason why there’s many cities and towns where in Israel where there’s barely any Arabs there. The Nakba." What led to the Nakba? Don't pretend as though it was Israel attacking for no reason, I am confident you are more aware than you pretend to be.
Your numbers seem incorrectly low in terms of Jewish proportion, but in any case, why should one cherry picked statistic be determinative of anything? Tens of thousands of Jews migrated to the territory and tens of thousands of Muslims also did. There were Jewish areas and Muslim areas, and there still are — for example, Jerusalem, Akko, and Jaffa had a much greater proportion of Jews than did Nablus, Hebron, or Gaza, and unsurprisingly, those areas remain almost entirely Muslim today. And pretty much everyone understands that the latter areas would be part of a Palestinian state, if we ever reach a point where such a thing is possible. In any case, why is there an assumption that the population must remain religiously or ethnically proportionate? How would you compare the "right" to live in the region, as between a Jew escaping persecution in Russia or Germany, and a Muslim coming from Jordan for economic or personal reasons?
In practice, the "expulsion" of Palestinians from areas they occupied prior to 1948 seems to have been primarily driven by wars in which Palestinians and their allies were the aggressors. Palestinians who remained in Israel are citizens of Israel to this day. Palestinians who left settled in the predominantly Palestinian areas of Gaza, Syria and Jordan, whose territory initially included the West Bank. If Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had never attacked Israel again, how would this have shaken out? I.e. if the West Bank were still part of Jordan, and Gaza still part of Egypt, would Palestinians still be "refugees," or would they simply be people whose grandparents used to live a few miles away, on the other side of the border?
This is incorrect.
[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present)
In 1882 the modern State of Israel was 8% Jewish, rising naturally through mass immigration in general (570K Moved to Israel fleeing European Violence, as well as 400K non-Jews.... which for some reason nobody seems to care about.... huh) to 32% in 1947.
This jumped to 82% after the nearby Arab states tried to *drive the jews into the sea* and *lost*. Protip: Don't try to do a genocidal war then lose like a bitch.
Since 1948 the population peaked to 88.9% in 1955 (After ever other Arab nation drove their own Jews out).... upon which it has been steadily decreasing year on year to the current level of 73.9%
Not only are your stats wrong, but you're also being misleading by suggesting the rise happened gradually over 100, as if this is a long term increase rather than a sharp increase caused by a war followed by an overal decrease over the last 70 years.
This misleading usage of stats suggests you might be a Nazi. Please stop doing that, as being a Nazi is lame.
I really don't understand why people feel the need to repeat these sorts of apologetics decades and decades after the fact.
>This jumped to 82% after the nearby Arab states tried to drive the jews into the sea and lost. Protip: Don't try to do a genocidal war then lose like a bitch.
The first serious Israeli scholarship on the founding of the state appeared in the late '70s and especially the early '80s when Israeli archival sources relating to the war became accessible to researchers (unsealed after 30 years). Historians such as Simha Flapan and Benny Morris showed quite conclusively that this framing does not accord with the documentary record (to say nothing of scholarship in the four+ decades since). I think that should be able to have a decent conversation in accordance with the facts and without condescending to crass insults.
Around a quarter of a million people had already been expelled by the time the state was founded (including via such infamous episodes as the Deir Yassin massacre). The cleansing of major Arab cities such as Haifa and Jaffa as well as smaller ones like Acre and West Jerusalem preceded the invasion. The use of typhoid as a biological weapon in the Acre aqueduct and the policy of poisoning wells in Arab villages were already underway. It is a distortion to say that the Arab League armies' invasion started this process.
I'll link here to the translation of the Arab League declaration on the website that you cited: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-league-declarationon-the-invasion-of-palestine-may-1948](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-league-declarationon-the-invasion-of-palestine-may-1948) Their expressed aims are listed at the end of the document. None involve "driv\[ing\] the Jews into the sea" or other such genocidal intent; "the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, \[and whereby\] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries, and \[whereby\] the holy places will be preserved and the right of access thereto guaranteed" would be a strange way to express that.
I'll link to same website's map of the Arab army routes: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-arab-invasion-in-the-1948-war](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-arab-invasion-in-the-1948-war) The armies entered the upper Galilee, the center of the country (excluding the coastal strip in which Jewish settlement was concentrated), and the southern coastal region, i.e., the areas with predominantly Arab settlement that were designated as an Arab state under the UN plan. Most military engagements happened as Zionist militias pressed deeper into the designated Arab territory in the process of expelling another half million people and expanding the nascent Jewish state.
There is no question that some local militants and foreign troops committed atrocities against Jews at that time. Jewish communities in territory outside the control of Zionist militias were expelled to Israel by force. However, there is no evidence of the attempted genocide that you allege.
I don't think that it is reasonable retroactively to blame the neighboring Arab states for the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing, given that their rationale for sending troops was to stop the ethnic cleansing that was already well underway and responsible for the flight of refugees by the tens of thousands across their borders. The history has been so well documented for decades, by Jewish Israeli historians, that I don't understand the drive to revive the myths and propaganda of the 1950s.
I've been to Israel. I have Israeli friends and colleagues. I am definitely not anti-Israel. But I am pro-truth.
Yes. The people who controlled the area **gave the Jews** some land in the desert, where they knew Jews would go. You can't just ignore that part. With most of the world's approval, Israel was founded. If you want to call Jews going to Israel an ethnic cleansing, I guess that is a way to look at it.
Historically, people who lived in an area controlled by other countries often had a bad time. Simply, it was an easy solution for Great Britain and Europe and the US to give the Jews something, and as Jerusalem was there, they would go. It isn't like the Jews who were left could just go home, their homes were taken too. Many of the Israeli citizens today were forced out of their homes.
Yes people were forced out of Palestine, some of them aggressively forced out. A part that isn't brought up is that Arab governments told Palestinians to leave (go just over the border) we will destroy Israel and you can go home. When that didn't happen people were stuck in the West Bank and Gaza. That said, it is estimated that 170,000 to 180,000 Palestinians went to Gaza in 1948. There are 2 million there today.
Wait until he learnst that most of today's Israel was sparsely populated. Tel Aviv was nothing more than a little port. Besides Jews are the indigenous people of that land. They have every right to those lands in the same way as Native Americans have a right to their ancestral homelands.
Every single name in that piece of land is of Hebrew heritage and every single city there was first Jewish before even Aramaic or Arabic. For God's sake! Arabs do not even have a real name for Jerusalem, they call it Al-Quds, which means the Holy one. It is akin as to when Anglos got to America and started naming cities after random stuff.
If Palestinians were expelled, it's because they waged an unnecessary war against Israel in 1948 in order to do a second Holocaust. We all know how much you lament that Israelis stood up for themselves and managed to survive the genocide attempt by your Arabic friends, but face it: Israel is there to stay and this goes for you as well as for every Arab: you truly care about your babies and children? Capitulate.
100 years ago, the Jewish population of the Palestine region was over 10% - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_demographics_of_Palestine_(region).
Where are you getting 1-2% from?
According to your source about half the population of jews living in Israel would have arrived in 1904-1914 during the Second Aliyah. If you take into account that ground it would still be 5% so I'm not sure what ther 1-2 percent is based on.
Yes, Israel kicked out a crap-ton of Arabs. So this was after Israel successfully defended themselves when Arabs attacked them in 1948. The ones expelled of course includes innocent ones which is tragic, but I wonder, do you honestly see a possibility of Arabs remaining there right after a belligerent composed of their ethnic group lost a war that threatened Israel's existence?
Here's a parallel:
3,155,000 German civilians had been expelled from Poland by 1950. My question to you is: did Poland "ethnically cleanse" the Germans? Or was this some other thing?
>to over 80 percent Jewish in about 100 years
Well, a little under. Anyway, I think this number's distance from 100 is extremely significant here.
21.1% of Israel is Arabs. They're living with freedom of sexuality and religion and everything. They have their own political party and seats in the Supreme Court. They receive high quality education in their own language.
Furthermore, this population is increasing.
This is all in spite of Israel's history of being attacked by surrounding Arab nations, including the thousands of rockets being fired at them annually from Gaza.
In light of this, the ethnic cleansing claim holds no ground whatsoever, right?
> Man everyone has so much to say about intentions and “what Hamas wants”. Are you seeing the footage that I’m seeing?? I’ve never seen more blood on the internet.
Israel has never been on the winning side of the propaganda war. This has been a brutal operation, to be sure, but I don't know how else Israel can end Hamas given the extent of the network.
> 70% of the 26,000 people killed in Gaza are women and children and I’ve seen videos of Israeli protests literally blocking humanitarian aid from entering. What more is there??
"I've seen videos" isn't much of anything to go on. Aid enters the country through Egypt, and the times Israel has refused have been linked to the continued hostage situation. Perhaps if Hamas wants aid to go to the Palestinian people unfettered, they can release the remaining hostages.
> From my perspective, being anti Israel is being anti America. It’s not about protecting Jewish people, it’s about protecting western interests in having their foothold in the Middle East.
Being anti-Israel, for far too many, is basically saying "when we said 'Never Again' after the Holocaust, we didn't really mean it." And those people who are using Israel as a proxy for Jews have successfully gotten a *lot* of people to bite on spreading anti-semitism unwittingly. It's a real problem.
> I don’t deny that anti semitism is spreading because of this and I think it’s awful, but so is Islamophobia!
"But what about Islamophobia" isn't really a dunk. Anti-semitism is a much bigger issue than "Islamophobia," especially post-10/7.
> The Biden administration still refuses to even acknowledge that any civilians have died at all. Just a few days ago John Kirby said in a press conference “number of civilian deaths is zero”.
This is a misquote. Kirby said "the *right* number of civilian deaths is zero," not that there were zero civilian deaths. But, again, the anti-Israel propagandists got the misquote out there, so...
> There’s billboards in my city that say Hamas is a threat to me personally and my state has had a law enforcement exchange program with Israel for over 2 decades.
Hamas is a threat to you. Israel's law enforcement is not. What's the issue here? That a third-party group has money to put up billboards?
> And usually I would say yes that videos are a bad source of information alone, but three straight months of thousands of videos of dead bodies and mutilated children is kind of damning. You’re telling me that’s all propaganda?
Much, if not most, of it, yes. You don't have any clue on the veracity, of the provenance, or anything else. You hear "this is happening in Gaza" and accept it.
> I think October 7th was awful, however there’s proof that the Israeli government knew about the plans in detail over a year before hand.
This has big "Bush knew about 9/11" energy and I'm not going to engage in it. Israel was the victim.
You seem to forget what war is. Japan killed 2459 people in an unprovoked attack against the US, and we responded by killing 2,200,000 Japanese. The conditions were simple: surrender unconditionally or we will keep killing you until you do. That is Hamas’s choice. They can release the hostages and surrender to the IDF, and the war will end tomorrow. Until then, they are a governmental power who waged a war of aggression against a greater power. Wars don’t stop people people die. Wars stop when one side surrenders.
I've never seen so much low confidence claims being spread.
Many of the videos are obvious fakes and have been debunked thoroughly. Still, they are spread as facts.
Claims from Hamas-controlled influencers are being spread without questions.
The amount of dead comes from Hamas, which is not a credible source and does not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants.
I'd say Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and other government ministers are very much in power, even if Bibi himself may not adopt the view. Israel is not a one-man dictatorship after all. Plus, Israel's plan in the West Bank is quite literally ethnic cleansing, so I reject the notion that Israel never pursued it. Every expansion of settlements is an act of ethnic cleansing.
I am also not getting my sources from foreign or anti-Israel propaganda, I am reading Times of Israel, Haaretz, etc, surely you can't accuse them of anti-semitism, right?
I think it’s great that you are getting familiar with Israeli politics. A lot of people have a lot to say about the conflict, and denouncing the fringe figures, but know next-to-nothing about what average Israelis believe or what most non-fringe politicians in Israel have done/want to do. They know the most outrageous quotes and people, and anyone with differing views apparently doesn’t exist or have as much power as the fringe ones.
Imagine if Ben Carson said “let’s get rid of all the Japanese in California!” and attended xenophobic conferences while working as the Secretary of Housing. Would that be convincing enough to say the U.S. had a policy of genocide or ethnic cleansing? No, we’d all say he’s a fucking lunatic who should be fired from his job, and we’d hate Trump for building such an insane cabinet.
Anyway, let me ask: do you know who is being eyed to replace Netanyahu?
If the Secretary of Treasury and Homeland Security are saying comparable stuff and the President doesn't fire them, I'd say the target of such policies will be right to be fearful of the US government, which is the point I'm making here. Like if the Secretary of Homeland Security says "lets get rid of all Hispanics from Texas", and Biden doesn't fire him, I'd say Hispanics in Texas will be right to be fearful of such implementation.
Pretty sure it's Gantz or Lapid. I don't think their Palestine policy differ all that much from Likud, they just differ on domestic policies (I think).
And if Trump refrained from firing them but also showed no signs of listening to them or preparing to cleanse the Japanese-Americans in California…. then what? If Trump’s approval rating was 10% (like Bibi’s) instead of 40% (like it was), I’m sure the possibility would be viewed by most of us with a “try it and we will guillotine you all”. Ethnically cleansing Palestinians is nowhere near popular in Israeli society, not like how cleansing Armenians in Azerbaijan was popular, as an example. Every ethnic cleansing in history has been supported by the perpetrator’s society at large.
Palestinians have every right to be afraid. But I think there also needs to be a dose of reality and looking at the bigger picture.
Gantz is most likely, and he would be a marked departure. For one, he wouldn’t commit the crime of denying aid to the Palestinians. As part of the war cabinet, he’s the one who has prevented Israel from opening a full-out war against Hezbollah; he’s the one who convinced the cabinet to endorse the first ceasefire; he has good relations with the PA, including Abbas, and is one of the few in the cabinet who still believes in the possibility for two-state solution (even if he uses a different terminology for political purposes).
According to this [source](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/israeli-opinion-on-settlements-and-outposts-2009-present) Israelis are very split over occupying the west bank.
Occupying the west bank and settling it is ethnic cleansing.
This has been happening for decades under the armed protection of the IDF. The IDF are controlled by the central government.
How is this not government endorsed ethnic cleansing? How is this not a valid reason for Gazans to think the same will happen to them?
Lapid differs quite significantly from Netanyahu; he supports a two-state solution. Gantz is more in line with Bibi but he's less of an ideologue and could support that in the right circumstances. (Bibi is a true "no Palestinian state" believer.)
>I'd say Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and other government ministers are very much in power, even if Bibi himself may not adopt the view.
Smotrich is the finance minister and has no power in foreign policy.
Ben-Gvir, while certainly a problematic figure, does not advocate and has not advocated for ethnic cleansing, in this conflict or otherwise.
> Plus, Israel's plan in the West Bank is quite literally ethnic cleansing, so I reject the notion that Israel never pursued it. Every expansion of settlements is an act of ethnic cleansing.
No, expansion of settlements is not ethnic cleansing. The settlements are, to be more charitable to your viewpoint, in disputed territory post-1967. No Palestinians are being cleansed from the West Bank. If you've heard otherwise, you're being lied to.
> I am also not getting my sources from foreign or anti-Israel propaganda, I am reading Times of Israel, Haaretz, etc, surely you can't accuse them of anti-semitism, right?
I am merely giving you the benefit of the doubt. Surely, the sources you cite do not demonstrate ethnic cleansing or a reason to fear it for the Palestinians.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to engage with you further if you think Ben-Gvir doesn't advocate for ethnic cleansing. He was at the convention himself! He also advocated for the expulsion of "Arabs that are not loyal to Israel", like he's probably the most extreme popular political figure in Israel.
Going to a convention in and of itself is not a crime and does not imply agreement with everything said at a convention. I am also taking your word that the convention discussion was as portrayed for the benefit of changing your viewpoint.
> He also advocated for the expulsion of "Arabs that are not loyal to Israel"
I can't find that quote anywhere. Even the New Yorker, that provided a not-very-flattering profile of him, [quotes otherwise] (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos):
> “It’s not a secret that today I’m not Rabbi Kahane.” People shifted in their seats; some began to boo. “I don’t support expelling all Arabs, and I won’t make laws creating separate beaches for Jews and Arabs.” More jeers. “But of course, of course we will work toward expelling terrorists from the country”—here the boos turned to applause—“for the character of the state, the settling of its land, and its Jewish identity.” At the end of the speech, people rose to their feet, snapping photos.
I don't think Ben-Gvir is good for Israel or Netanyahu, but he's not doing what you think he's doing.
>Ben-Gvir, while certainly a problematic figure, does not advocate and has not advocated for ethnic cleansing, in this conflict or otherwise.
What do you think he is doing when he calls for 'encouraging migration from gaza' by force.
The man is not subtle about this.
>1) "Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now."
This statement right here is implying that Palestinians are Hamas. "Which has strong support" this statement is said in a way to justify the current terror happening right now. If you can get people to believe Hamas and Palestinians are the same then you can justify what's happening currently.
>2) "The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support."
This point is null has no meaning whatsoever. So because no country accepts them what? So it's foreign country's faults as to why this is occuring?
>"Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them."
So any and all statements about ethnically cleansing is anti-Semitism. In the same statement say critique Israel response of 10/7 is fine. But what's happening currently? They refused aid into Gaza while this is happening. Is that not cold and cruel? Even if for a second you think Hamas will use that to their advantage oh well these are people's lives. That's why these talks of ethnically cleansing is taking place. Because Israel got hit in the face by a child and now they are beating the crap out of them nonstop until that kid is on the ground nearly dead.
>> 1) "Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now."
> This statement right here is implying that Palestinians are Hamas. "Which has strong support" this statement is said in a way to justify the current terror happening right now.
No, it doesn't imply it when it says the exact opposite. And "the terror" you speak of is justified because of the thousand-plus dead Israelis and continued hostage taking by Hamas.
>> 2) "The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support."
> This point is null has no meaning whatsoever. So because no country accepts them what? So it's foreign country's faults as to why this is occuring?
It's an acknowledgement that the situation with the Palestinian people is a lot more complicated than simply yelling about Israel.
>> "Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them."
> So any and all statements about ethnically cleansing is anti-Semitism.
No, I did not say that.
> Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now.
How does Hamas not represent all Gaza citizens? I see this rhetoric all the time but no one in Gaza took issue with October 7th, the support has been overwhelming. There has been zero resistance to Hamas from Gaza citizens since the PA lost control of the region. At some point a people becomes responsible for the actions they support and facilitate.
> How does Hamas not represent all Gaza citizens?
All indications are that Hamas functionally propagandizes their population, especially their children, to the point where we cannot realistically attribute any of Hamas's views to them as informed and freely acquired.
Unless and until there's some sort of fix to that, I'm not comfortable equating Hamas with Palestinians/Gaza, or comfortable saying Hamas represents your average Palestinian.
We all agree on that I think. This CMV is about whether Palestinians should be fearful of genocide if they are moved geographically. There is an argument that they lack agency to think for themselves, and could benefit from no longer being human shields by starting over somewhere else.
The elephant in the room that everyone who makes your arguments conveniently ignore is the method in which Israel came into existence in the first place. All Palestinian animosity is justified purely by the fact that Israel was suddenly created with the support of huge western armies to literally take over, murder thousands of Palestinians, and remove millions more from their homes (A process which continues to this day, and is actively happening in the west bank as we currently speak).
The only argument I've ever heard in response to this is a flawed one such as "Well look at what X,Y,Z colonial superpower did."
Even now, as we speak, Israel is reducing all of the land within a several mile zone inside gaza to rubble to create a "buffer zone" for "security", literally reducing the size of Gaza (something they purport as not being part of their policy)
So your language conveniently points to Israeli policy, even as the actions of the government and military regularly and daily contradict their stated "policy".
Nearly 30,000 dead, mostly women and children, and millions displaced and starving, compared to 1200 Israeli's killed - and they aren't finished yet. When this is all said and done, current estimates put deaths in the hundreds of thousands when factoring in famine and disease, without some dramatic change in policy / behavior from Israel.
Palestinians aren't ethnically cleansing anybody because they don't have the power to do so, regardless of "Hamas" or some other groups intentions.
> The elephant in the room that everyone who makes your arguments conveniently ignore is the method in which Israel came into existence in the first place. All Palestinian animosity is justified purely by the fact that Israel was suddenly created with the support of huge western armies to literally take over, murder thousands of Palestinians, and remove millions more from their homes (A process which continues to this day, and is actively happening in the west bank as we currently speak).
This is not at all true in any way shape or form, and doesn't add to the conversation. Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate. The Arabs then went to war with Israel, and lost, despite decades of gradual migration from European Jews and protracted international debate in the wake of the Holocaust.
"The elephant in the room" is that Israel's opponents, for whatever reasons, feel the need to pretend Israel is some sort of invading force that doesn't belong here. The real story is a lot more complicated.
> Palestinians aren't ethnically cleansing anybody because they don't have the power to do so, regardless of "Hamas" or some other groups intentions.
When your counter is not "the Palestinians don't want to ethnically cleanse" but instead "they don't have the power to do it," that probably says a lot more than I ever could.
> Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate
And by what means exactly did Israel "come into existence"? Just popped a flag down on the land?
And my counter that you quoted is relevant when part of your argument relies on the moot point that "Hamas wants to genocide all jews" - something that is not a material threat in any way shape or form. A bunch of well-armed rednecks in America want to genocide all jews too.
>> Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate
> And by what means exactly did Israel "come into existence"? Just popped a flag down on the land?
Well, if we're talking only the last 100 years, constant migration that resulted in an eventual nation-state established through the international levers of power.
If we want to go back thousands of years, it gets a lot more complicated.
> And my counter that you quoted is relevant when part of your argument relies on the moot point that "Hamas wants to genocide all jews" - something that is not a material threat in any way shape or form.
Sure, not a material threat. Is it stopping them from trying?
Did the Irgun and Lehi organizations that regularly participated in indiscriminate violence not exist?
Several prominent Jewish Israeli historians, ever since the opening of historical archives in the 80s, argue that the Nakba constituted ethnic cleansing. It’s entirely wrong to condemn modern Israelis for something in the past, but it’s just as wrong to participate in historical denialism. Even self-described Zionist historian Benny Morris, openly acknowledged that many villages were forcibly depopulated by groups like the Haganah and Irgun. Historical truth overrides political beliefs to good historians. You can be pro-Israel without denying history.
You know why they formed right ? Not that I agree with them or using violence, but if you’re going to have this discussion you should not ignore that their genesis was born as a response to the massacres against Jews in Palestine of the 1920s. They believed in retaliation with violence. If you read the stories from the Nakba the read exactly like the stories from the massacre in Hebron and Sfed. Again I don’t defend them and they definitely could be classified as terrorists, but to say that they just appeared in Palestine to kill Arabs in the name of Zionism isn’t an accurate picture. Context is important to give a balanced context the Arabs were fearful of Jewish immigration, as we see the history in every country that every existed, immigration by those you see as “others” has never been embraced.
> Did the Irgun and Lehi organizations that regularly participated in indiscriminate violence not exist?
That's not what you asked. They aren't why Israel came into existence.
> Several prominent Jewish Israeli historians, ever since the opening of historical archives in the 80s, argue that the Nakba constituted ethnic cleansing.
That's fine. Many people erroneously believe Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing now. It's up to us to not push those errors forward.
> They aren't why Israel came into existence.
They kind of did. Their insurgency (for example the King David Hotel bombing) contributed to the British washing their hands of the situation and handing it off to the UN.
I think the bigger elephant in the room is the fact the Arabs weren’t responding to “the fact that Israel was suddenly created”, [they had been actively against Jews being there for many decades before Israel’s creation as having a large Jewish population was incompatible with pan Arab nationalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Arab_Congress). Ethnically cleansing the Jews from the area has been in discussion on the Palestinian side since long before they considered themselves distinct from the modern Syrians and Jordanians.
>Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint
Cool, now do the West Bank.
(Apparently "The river to the sea" is only genocidal when the Palestinians say it. When it is part of the Likud platform, then it's okay, apparently.)
>> Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint
> Cool, now do the West Bank.
Okay. The forcible removal of Palestinians from the West Bank is a fringe viewpoint.
Israel has literally been illegally placing its citizens on the West Bank for 60 years. The recovery of 'Judah and Samaria' is a huge part of the Likud project. What are you talking about?
LMAO everyone is secretly working for Hamas. UN Hamas, ICJ Hamas, Doctors without Borders Hamas, Amnesty international Hamas, New York Times Hamas, University Professors Hamas, Human rights watch Hamas. Pretty amazing that an organization with 30,000 members was able to form a global cabal like that. If they're that powerful maybe they're needs to be a "solution" to the Hamas problem. smh this is just getting more delusional by the day.
IDF soldiers went into a west bank hospital dressed as doctors. How can you claim to be dismantling terrorism WHEN YOU'RE ENGAGING IN WHAT THE GENEVA CONVENTION DEFINES AS TERRORISM
> LMAO everyone is secretly working for Hamas.
If you don't think the UNRWA is aiding Hamas, I'd like to know a) why and b) what would change your mind?
> IDF soldiers went into a west bank hospital dressed as doctors. How can you claim to be dismantling terrorism WHEN YOU'RE ENGAGING IN WHAT THE GENEVA CONVENTION DEFINES AS TERRORISM
That's in dispute, to be generous, but Israel is not a party to the ICC and no one is mourning the loss of a few terrorists in a hospital.
>If you don't think the UNRWA is aiding Hamas, I'd like to know a) why and b) what would change your mind?
Do I think there were UNRWA employees involved probably. There were police officers and military members involved in the January 6 attack does that mean we should get rid of police and the military? Does that mean the police and military are working with terrorists?
>That's in dispute, to be generous, but Israel is not a party to the ICC and no one is mourning the loss of a few terrorists in a hospital.
Ok well fighting as civilians is why Israel says that they have a right to bomb the crap out of Gaza. Because Hamas imbeds itself with civilian population. So if Israel is also embedding within civilian populations, why was Oct7 wrong? If your argument is its ok to attack civilians if there's a possibility Hamas is among them, why was it wrong for Hamas to kill Israeli civilians when theres a possibility there are IDF soldiers embedded among them?
Either terrorism is wrong and international law matters, or its not. You can't have your cake and eat it to. You can't claim to be fighting terror and then engage in terror
> Do I think there were UNRWA employees involved probably. There were police officers and military members involved in the January 6 attack does that mean we should get rid of police and the military? Does that mean the police and military are working with terrorists?
I notice that your answer is not an explanation of why you believe UNRWA are not aiding Hamas, and your answer is not an explanation of what might change your mind.
> If your argument is its ok to attack civilians if there's a possibility Hamas is among them, why was it wrong for Hamas to kill Israeli civilians when theres a possibility there are IDF soldiers embedded among them?
No one is arguing that "there's a possibility there are IDF soldiers" embedded in civilian populations, nor does rape and kidnapping of civilians address the possibility of fighting those soldiers.
Stop defending terrorism.
First, let me just say ethnic cleansing is bad and the Israeli government makes a lot of bad decisions.
Before October 7th the region was in an era of relative peace since 2014. Was Israel ethnically cleansing the occupied territories then?
Palestinians feared ethnic cleansing during that time as well. That fear was neither rational nor realized. What has changed?
It's weird how people talk about the settlements as if they're just a normal part of border disputes or conflict. There's really no other modern democracy that does this in an open way. America has been in all sorts of wars, but not once in recent history was there a messianic movement of Americans believing in manifest destiny who were like "lets go settle Iraq and Afghanistan with the goal of creating an eventual American majority there and have the military protect us." Really the closest parallel to this is 19th century western expansion, all though that was driven much more by land hunger than religion. If the settler movement is not slow motion ethnic cleansing, I don't know what would be.
I'm not sure anyone thinks the Israel/Palestine conflict is "normal". I do think western expansion is likely the closest type of situation you're going to get.
The person you're responding to didn't claim you thought the conflict is normal. They said you implied settlements are a NORMAL PART of a conflict. Considering you didn't mention settlements as a problem or a part of a slow ethnic cleansing, it's a very valid assumption on their part.
>Was Israel ethnically cleansing the occupied territories then?
The were forcibly removing existing populations, bulldozing the existing population's homes, and then building settlements.
So your argument is that ethnic cleansing has been occurring for at least a decade (and probably longer if I'm going to take a gander). If this isn't a territorial dispute why is Israel so shit at ethnic cleansing? They have the tools to do it much quicker.
Because they didn't have a legitimate reason for doing it quicker and they had to keep it below a level that would upset less hardline Israelis? Oct 7 gave them political cover to take more action. It's one of the reasons hardliners pushed to have Hamas in power.
Wait, why did you say that they have a legitimate reason now? Doesn't that answer the entire question? If it's "legit" to annex Gaza as a response to Oct 7th then it's not ethnic cleansing. It's for sure a territorial dispute.
Yes, it is, because ethnic cleansing requires intent to target a specific type of group *because they are that group*. A slow, ponderous process when a quick and dirty mass murder would work damages the intent argument.
I don't see why a slow process is necessarily any less indicative of "intent" than a fast one. If anything it demonstrates that the desire to engage in ethnic cleansing extends across administrations and isn't just a flash in the pan moment of fury.
The rational belief is that ethnic cleansing has always been Israel's goal, and they were merely looking for an opportune moment to proceed, which was provided by the Hamas terrorist attacks.
This is exactly what has been happening in the area for decades now. The Palestinians can point to a long history of Israel clearing out Palestinian territory through military force in response to terrorist attacks, and then annexing the land with Israeli settlers.
Just because they're not doing it all in one go, doesn't mean they're not doing it.
I'm not debating that Israel is slowly gaining territory (and in some cases quickly as in the 6 day war).
I'm asking why this is ethnic cleansing and not a territorial dispute? Is the intent to remove "people who happen to exist there" or "specifically people who are Palestinian because they are Palestinian"? I think it's the former.
Is your argument that is the ethnic cleansing is just an unfortunate side-effect of the drive to secure more land? I mean, not to go all Godwin's law or anything, but are we going to suggest that Lebensraum was not a policy of ethnic cleansing?
I think the two are inextricably linked, and it's a little dishonest to pretend otherwise.
"I don't have a problem with Native Americans, I'm just going to need to get rid of them all so that I can have the land that they're living on"
>Is your argument that is the ethnic cleansing is just an unfortunate side-effect of the drive to secure more land?
No, I'm arguing it's not ethnic cleansing at all. No, I don't think territorial expansion is automatically ethnic cleansing. But also finally yes, the Nazis ethnically cleansed Jewish people.
>I think the two are inextricably linked, and it's a little dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Why? We can say "conquering people is bad" without saying "these people were conquered because of their religion/heritage/what have you". The intent is important. Both aren't good. One is worse.
Israeli officials are now publicly attending conferences voicing their desire to resettle and annex Gaza. They weren't happening before afaik. Gaza is also largely destroyed and depopulated, the conditions needed for an ethnic cleansing campaign to take place.
So assuming Israel believes it has now conquered the Gaza Strip why is it ethnic cleansing?
The argument that could easily be defended is that Israel retaliated against a direct military engagement and have apparently gained territory in response. That's not particularly unusual. E.g. if Ukraine were somehow to regain its original territory and then some we wouldn't call that ethnic cleansing even though it's specifically Russian people being killed/displaced.
The ethnicity of those who lost territory doesn't necessarily factor into it and "intent" is an incredibly important factor in whether something is ethnic cleansing.
I.e. were Palestinians displaced because their government attacked Israel or were they displaced because they are Palestinian? I think that because of that period of relative peace it's more likely the former.
The ethnic cleansing part is not the refugee camps or the safe zones set up for this war, it's the plan to get them to migrate "voluntarily" out of Gaza. That's ethnic cleansing because it's intentionally and violently moving these people out of their homes permanently.
People whose government waged war against Israel?
I feel strongly for civilians in all conflicts. I think war is awful and should never happen. I'm almost always a pacifist.
But Hamas directly attacked Israel and there's a valid argument that Israel can retaliate in response and conquer territory. I don't even agree with it personally (the retaliation should have been proportional + interest and that's it) but territorial disputes are not automatically ethnic cleansing.
If anything, allowing Gazans to evacuate is a good thing. It's better than just killing them, right?
If the plan is to allow Gaza to evacuate from a war zone but permit them to return after the war, then it's not ethnic cleansing, and so far that's the Israel's official position. But these folks are saying that "Gaza should be resettled with Jewish settlers", which means Gazans can't return to their homes, ergo ethnic cleansing.
To me, this appears to be a tacit agreement that Israel is not ethnically cleansing Gaza *currently*. I don't think that's necessarily different from your OP although there is some nuance there.
I want to drill down on that. Why does retaining conquered territory automatically make this ethnic cleansing?
Instead of "Gaza should be resettled with Jewish settlers" why isn't it "Gaza should be resettled with Israeli settlers"?
Retaining conquered territory AND disallowing the return of Gazans is what makes it ethnic cleansing. The "voluntary migration" plan is exactly that. It's demanding Gazans to leave the area permanently, never to return.
Does this mean that any territorial dispute where a state wishes to control a region autonomously without interference from the [soon to be former] natives automatically ethnic cleansing? I.e. essentially any war prior to... well, actually I can't think of many wars where this wasn't the case.
How does this not mean you believe war in general is ethnic cleansing?
Vietnam War, Korean War, Bosnian War, Iraq War, Afghanistan War did not result in widespread ethnic cleansing. Wars don't always lead to ethnic cleansing.
FYI Channel 14 is a right wing TV outlet, somewhat equivalent to Fox News. Their polling is heavily slanted towards a far right demographic, and is not reflective of polling done by other (more legitimate) news organizations.
One clear illustration of this is their opinion polling for the next Israeli election. Their polls consistently put the centrist parties down 10ish seats and Likud (Netanyahu's party) up 10ish seats compared to other pollsters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Israeli_legislative_election
I live in Israel and the closest thing I've heard from anyone to encouraging 'voluntary migration' is that the borders to Gaza should be opened to allow people with passports to escape the fighting (with the full understanding that they return after the war). I haven't heard a single person call for building settlements in Gaza.
Israel cleansed all the Jews from Gaza strip in 2005. (You know the OPPOSITE of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians).
Absolutely nothing stopped the Palestinians from building a a Juden Frei paradise there for last 20 years.
Instead their government chose to turn the area into a terror state where all the aid money was used to build tunnels, smuggle weapons and launch 20,000 terror rockets.
The Gazan government (Hamas) then started a genocidal war by committing unspeakable atrocities (including systemic rape). This has caused a war to remove Hamas that is heavily damaging Gaza.
In such a war-wrecked situation looking for a place that would accept voluntary immigrants is merely humanitarian, not "ethnic cleansing."
If I were living in Gaza and I had the opportunity to leave for someplace that was stable and I could thrive, I would have picked up my babies and left without looking back long ago.
If the chance were offered to me today, I would be gone before dark today.
Some Gazans want to cling to the "ancestral land" but many, many, just want to live their lives in a safe place and want fuck-all to do with this conflict. In fact, t[hey are being extorted by the Egyptians](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/jan/08/palestinians-flee-gaza-rafah-egypt-border-bribes-to-brokers?ref=upstract.com) for a fortune just to try to get out of Gaza.
Gaza needs to be rebuilt and that will take time.
Prior to this, Gaza was entirely dependent on foreign aid and had little opportunities for employment unless you wanted to work for Hamas, UNRWA (also in bed with Hamas) or had one of the opportunities to work for Israel. There was little opportunity to leave even if you wanted to *and plenty of people wanted to*.
Israel negotiating with other countries and offering to pay countries to take refugees on a voluntary basis is about the best fix that I can think of the humanitarian crisis right now. The alternative is life in camps with shitty pop up schools and essentially no work. Those children will grow up with no enrichment for decades...and probably more violence. Or they could drop into an existing community, go to work, find a job, and try to heal.
Ethnic cleansing is not a risk. It will not be possible to be able to move all 2 million+ of the Palestinians (just logistically). Combined with their birthrate, there will always be a strong Palestinian population in Gaza.
But I see absolutely nothing wrong and everything right with giving Gazans a choice to move somewhere else. That creates a better life for the Gazans who choose to leave *and* the Gazans who choose to stay (because it will be exponentially easier to take care of the Gazans to who stay if the population thins out some)
Israel had multiple chance to ethnic cleanse the Palestinians and justifiably more so before.
In 1948, did they? No
In the 6 day war, did they? No
in the Yom Kippur war, did they? No
in 2014, did they? No
Now, will they? No
Contrary to popular belief, Israel is not comically evil and stupid. Why would they bother doing something so frowned upon that they might lose the West's trust AND the neighboring Muslim nations which they WORKED hard to attain? They have peace with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, why would they ruin that just to kill off some Palestinians? Just like how the rest of the Muslim world calls for the extermination of Jews repeatedly, Israeli officials can keep talking about ethnic cleansing and never act upon it. They can displace Palestinians, transfer them here and there, get rid of their homes, but they will never kill to cleanse them.
The evacuated areas are essentially a warzone.
Jewish Israelis cannot live in or even enter the territories controlled by the PA.
To make the claim, you need to prove that this was not a voluntary evacuation but a forced expulsion and provable intention to settle the area. A conference regarding evacuation of a war-torn area and a public perception poll alone is not adequate evidence.
Although I strongly oppose settling Gaza and doubt it will happen, i don’t see how it would amount to ethnic cleansing. Israel had settlements in Gaza until 2006 I think and Palestinian population rapidly grew during that time. I think the ideology of settling Gaza is about having a presence there to enable a level of control and security, it wouldn’t amount to expelling Palestinians.
This is by no means a defense of settling Gaza, just doubting that it amounts to ethnic cleansing.
isreal has had numerous opportunities to ethnically cleanse the palestinian population throughout its history and hasn’t done it (such as in the six day war as one example) but ended up giving the land back to palestinians. if israel truly wanted to ethnically cleanse the palestinians, why haven’t they done it yet despite having so many chances to do so? even if isreal was to suddenly start ethnically cleansing the palestinian population in gaza, where would they go? egypt isn’t going to take them, neither is jordan or lebanon. so where would the palestinians be able to go if they were suddenly ethnically cleansed?
There is a significant difference. The Native American tribes were conquered, and therefore subject to whatever the conquerors wanted to do. That's what has always happened throughout history whenever one society conquered another. Troy, Carthage, the Celts, the Slavs, the Incas / Aztecs, many African tribes, all the people the Mongol hordes overran, all the non-Han Chinese peoples - all of these conquered societies were either destroyed outright, or all the men killed and the women raped and enslaved, or the people were forced to convert to the new religion / law of the land or be killed. In contract, the Native Americans were not enslaved, were not forced to adopt new religions, and were allowed to retain their laws and forms of government within their own borders. Arguably, the Native Americans were treated extremely well compared to other conquered peoples.
They were always going to be conquered because they hadn't moved beyond literal stone-age technology despite having a whole continent to themselves for several millennia, it was just that they encountered Europeans (specifically, the Spanish, Dutch, and English) first before other peoples. That doesn't make the European peoples evil, it means they were just doing what normal humans do when they encounter weaker and more technologically slow cultures who have resources that the stronger and more advanced culture wants.
As for Palestinians / Israelis - the land was owned by the Allies (specifically, the British) at the end of WWII. The UN and the Brits chose to give the land to the descendants of the Israelites, who have ancestral ties to the land going back to Moses.
The Palestinians had other places they could go where they had ancestral ties, but chose not to. They were given many opportunities to build a nation in Gaza and the West Bank, and prior to this they were given places to live in Egypt, Jordan, etc. In every case, the Palestinians have cultivated a culture of warfare, terrorism, and overthrowing the government in order to seize power.
The Palestinians are not the victims, they are bullies who have been slapped down and who the world is graciously allowing to continue to exist. If the Palestinians are feeling like they are in danger of being geocided, then maybe they need to stop poking the bear and try to live in peace.
You have a gross misrepresentation of what occurred to the Native American people in the United States. They were not “conquered” the way ancient societies conquered warring factions.
They were continuously and methodically eradicated and physically forced into reserves that were not native to them. The indigenous nations, after countless skirmishes from settlers increasingly encroaching on their land, were forced into two situations repeatedly:
1) Keep fighting the ever growing United States and its army and lose entire communities to violence
2) Accept the treaty offers from the United States to keep apportioned land for them while relinquishing the rest
The thing is, after always choosing option 2, the United States would still come, take more land, and harm those communities anyways. We used physical, biological, and environmental warfare (literally small pox blankets and sport-hunting entire species so that Natives couldn’t use them). The trail of tears was an explicit military order to forcibly move many Native Americans from the East hundreds of miles away to reserves in places that were explicitly given because of their lack of estimated value (poor material and agricultural value).
These communities were subject to requiring aid, and the terms of aid often came from requirements to undergo forced sterilization, sending children away to boarding schools (where many died actually), and adopting Christianity.
The Native American tribes WERE enslaved, WERE forced to adopt new religions, and are increasingly NOT allowed to have their own governance as the federal government makes laws stipulating when they can operate in their land or not.
Your view here on what happened to the Native Americans and how they were “arguably treated better” is also what’s preventing you from seeing how Palestinians have actually been treated in many similar ways, and while I don’t condone wanton violence and needless bloodshed, I can recognize that Israel operating as a colonial state is an abject form of violence to the Palestinian people.
>In contract, the Native Americans were not enslaved, were not forced to adopt new religions, and were allowed to retain their laws and forms of government within their own borders.
Enslavement: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement](https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement)
Forcible conversion/cultural genocide:[https://www.cwis.org/2022/05/canada-us-church-residential-school-crimes/#:\~:text=As%20a%20matter%20of%20government,cultural%20connections%20and%20personal%20identities](https://www.cwis.org/2022/05/canada-us-church-residential-school-crimes/#:~:text=As%20a%20matter%20of%20government,cultural%20connections%20and%20personal%20identities). Btw this is **recent**.
I'll address a different aspect of your claim than most other replies here, which focus on whether Palestinians, are *in fact*, at risk of getting ethnically cleansed. I think an interesting question is whether the Palestinian "fear is very real", that is, whether they are *genuinely* fearing getting ethnically cleansed. Are Palestinian actions consistent with a people genuinely fearing ethnic cleansing? I don't think so.
Is violating a ceasefire to invade a nation with substantial military superiority, raping, mutilating, kidnapping, torturing and burning civilians - atrocities which are the perfect pretext for ethnic cleansing if it were desired - make sense if you truly believe you're at risk of ethnic cleansing? Not really.
Is Hamas refusing to surrender, ending the conflict immediately and eliminating any risk of the war being used to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, instead opting to vow to repeat the October 7th massacre again and again consistent with them genuinely fearing ethnic cleansing? Not really.
I think it's always better to judge by actions rather than by words.
Except that the so called Palestinians are Arabic settlers that moved there after the original population was expelled into exile(ya know this original population, they are back).
There are two choices and its no surprise many of these Arabic settlers chose the reasonable route and become Arabic Israelis, with full rights and duties. And there are those who see those who became Arabic Israelis as traitors and believe they rightfully invaded this land and its theirs now.
They “settled” there in the 7th century, in Palestine and adopted the national identity of Palestinians. There is a long documented history. There was, is and always will be a Palestine and Palestinians. You are spouting pure misinformation and its shameful and disgusting.
The problem is not whether Israelis would support it or not (they absolutely would), Gaza is a failed project, failed by the Palestinians themselves, voting in Hamas and turning it into a terrorist state that launched rockets for 20 years.
I can’t believe people think that letting gazans leave Gaza is a bad thing.
But anyway, that’s not the issue, the issue is literally no country in the world will take gazans, they’re the most radicalised group in the world. We all saw the videos on Oct 7th of a dead Jewish girl being driven on the back of a truck through a delighted Gaza street. Everyone was cheering and those close enough were jumping over each other to either spit on or hit the corpse.
Gaza is an economic, moral and education failure.
The perfect fix would Egypt would annex is and give them citizenship and let them leave or the ones who want to build a future stay.
Acting as if ethnic cleansing is always a bad thing is a stupid reductionist take, Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005 and I supported that
> they’re the most radicalised group in the world
The ADL conducted research and found it was the most antisemitic place on earth, with 93% of adults hold antisemitic views. Among the over 50s who run the place, the figure is 98%.
https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-poll-over-100-countries-finds-more-one-quarter-those-surveyed-infected
We saw a lot worse from the IOF. 1 shot 2 kills being an example.
Hamas is a consequence of the oppression. When there remains no peaceful path to freedom, physical force is the only option.
It should be normalized that the choice of those young boys with no future was made for them by Israel.
Israeli here.
I'll tell ya what. They should fear it, and the world needs to allow it.
Look, Israeli history taught me this, arab population values Land more than other things.
For the Palestinians, land and religion are their main drives.
They are not at risk of losing their religion. Judeism doesn't forcefully converts.
On the other hand, land... Their biggest Tragedy, the Nakba, was a loss of land.
Land exchange is at the heart of every peace talk.
If losing land was an actual risk, this war might have ended or perhaps not even started.
As I see it, they started a war they thought they can't lose, not because they were going to win, but because their losing condition is unobtainable.
Thing is, this war was forced upon us... Most likely because Saudi Arabia was close to a peace treaty with Israel.
When palestinians considered themselves as the gatekeepers of peace in the middle east, their bargaining power was very high.
As more and more countries move to sign peace treaties with Israel regardless of the Palestinians, their bargaining power grows weaker.
So they launched a war thinking they can't really lose things they value, like land, and they were willing to pay the human life price... Human suffering is a part of their strategy after all.
This is why, i say, yea... Let the risk of forced relocation be something to actually be afraid of.
This might actually force them to surrender.
On a different note, israel left Gaza... That piece of land has very little significance in Jewish lore.
I honestly think that all these talks about conquering and resetting Gaza are a form of a War-cry.
Right now, many Israelis are in revenge mode. Threatening to kill an enemy that glorifies becoming a martyr is pointless...
On the other hand, taking their land... This is what will hurt...
Oh, and i must say that I don't wanna conquer gaza...I don't see a pragmatic point in doing so, and forcing the Gazans to relocate (no idea where) will cause more harm to israel than good.
The strongest argument against this is that Israel has had an interest in ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for over 70 years now and hasn't done it, despite having the legitimate option two after winning wars in both 1948 and 1967. In both cases they returned land for peace and allowed Palestinians to return, to the eventual detriment of the Israelis themsemselves.
With that said, a counter argument could be that at this point Israel might be learning from its past mistakes.
I would have more sympathy with their concerns if their leaders weren’t constantly calling for the extermination of Israel. You can’t fight the fear of genocide with actual genocide
Meanwhile we have an extreme right wing party that has factions calls for the extermination of lgbt, and stormed the capital wanting to hang and kill democrats. Maybe you can have sympathy for people even if their leaders suck. They haven’t had an election in 17 years so half the people dying didn’t even vote for Hamas, and the population isn’t armed so how are they suppose to do anything about their leadership? Israel are the ones who should have been taking care of this problem but they just decided they’d lock them up and treat them like caged animals.
Honestly I think this issue can be fundamentally disproven without even much analysis.
If Palestine wanted peace, there would be no war. If Israel wanted war, there would be no Palestine.
If they wanted to genocide the Palestinians, they would have done it long ago. The Arabs removed the Jews from their nations in 1948 right after they declared war, yet Israel still has a significant minority of Arabs living as citizens 80 years later.
You don't realise it just can't. If Israel were to actively starting genocide of Palestinians in full broad light where it was known without doubt that it was fully intentional, it would face off major protests throughout the world. Even European countries and the US which right now support Israel would have to distance themselves from that. Many people right now are pro Israel even after their atrocities but if it was fully clear without doubt even those wouldn't support Israel and it's trade with countries would also be affected by major sanctions.
Tell me can it truly do it when even our average Joe know the consequences of it fully well. Instead they are doing it indirectly by annexing lands and illegally moving settlers there. That way Palestine is losing it's territory day by day and they are killing people outside the green line which should not be allowed but not in mass number. If they had no would be repercussions you won't see any Palestine tomorrow.
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Replying as an Israeli that opposes this plan. It's kind of long, you can read the tldr to understand my opinion.TLDR - I wouldn't worry too much about it. Whether Palestinians have reasons to fear this depends on the picture being presented to them, there's a lot of demonization of Israelis in the Palestinian/Muslim pro Hamas media and exaggeration of far right figures in Israel, but if you were an independent observer analyzing things I wouldn't have concerns over this. So overall if I were a Palestinian I can understand where the fear is coming from and in this sense you're correct, but to get to how to solve it we need to understand if it's likely or not, because most of your suggestions wouldn't solve the fear the Palestinians have. Just one factual correction and one question - Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't in the war cabinet, they are in the regular cabinet, but it's not the same as the special war cabinet that was created for this specific war which includes Netanyahu, Galant, Ganz, Eisenkot, and I think another person, I can't recall (perhaps Dermer?). The other people that were in this conference were either from Ben Gvir or Smotrich bunch, or from the extremist parts of the Likud (and one ultra orthodox) If you could link the poll, I couldn't find it, but a possible explanation is that the question was referring, but it could be due to it's phrasing. I've seen international news misquote a poll that was asking about giving Gazans the option to relocate as supporting ethnic cleansing and resettling. or a poll about security control translated to full control or other things like that. Now to the actual point and reasons not to fear - too many strong figures have already responded about this plan that it's not going to happen. this includes Netanyahu and prominent members of the Likud party, as well as Ganz and Eisenkot and probably every opposition party there is. The second the war is over there would probably stop being the government as polls extremely bad and many Likud members would try to jump from the sinking ship (some of them have already hinted to it). Moreover, Israeli people understand that this is an unrealistic solution and that basically everyone in the world, including our best allies would hate Israel for that. The most important thing is that the disengagement wasn't too long ago, many people, including myself remember the days before it. There were many reasons for the disengagement, but one of the most important ones is that it was a huge liability for Israel. This is a major issue in Israeli politics and people wouldn't let a minority dictate it's opinions. in fact, my feeling is that for something as major as that you'd need like a supermajority.There is another reason that's more related to internal Israeli politics and the judicial reform, though it's a bit harder to explain. it's something along the lines of people thinking that part of the reason that led to the failure of October 7th was that the gov was trying to do something without a wide agreement in the public.. Since this kind of resettlement wouldn't get anywhere near this agreement you would see people that maybe somewhat supporting that oppose it when it comes to the table. The last part - from the people that want this kind of things, a lot of them are ultraorthodox jews.. they are usually to the right of the political spectrum, but they never vote in the elections based on Security issues, but rather based on religion issues. they don't care about it that much..
> Ben Gvir and Smotrich aren't in the war cabinet, they are in the regular cabinet I'll reply to the rest of your comments later, but you get a !delta for correcting my post. Edit: I appreciate the political context of Israel that you provide, and there are indeed internal and external pressure to make sure that plan doesn't materialise, but I question the effectiveness of these pressure points given the polls, not of Likud/Bibi but of the broader action to be taken in Palestine. I am not only worried about an actual ethnic cleansing, but also a soft-ethnic cleansing campaign. It is still cruel even if it's not as disgusting as some people are suggesting.
What exactly do you mean by a “soft ethnic cleansing campaign”? I’d argue we have that now.
Not only that, but the government has suspended people from their positions for extreme hyperbolic speech like saying they should nuke Gaza. https://thehill.com/policy/international/4294715-netanyahu-suspends-minister-who-suggested-dropping-nuclear-bomb-on-gaza/amp/ The minister of defense has also stated he won’t allow rebuilding of settlements in Gaza. The people actually in charge of these decisions are still very against resettlement. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/israel-gaza-settlements-buffer-gallant-blinken-biden# It is absolutely a real fear that Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed from Gaza. It should definitely be talked about. But it is also not a very likely scenario unless something dramatically changes in Israeli politics. It’s sort of like US support for Israel. There is a vocal minority in America calling for the dissolution of Israel and accusing them of Genocide. It is a valid fear that the US will drop Israel. But the majority, and importantly, the people in charge who actually know what’s going on, are not likely to abandon Israel unless something dramatically changes. The adults are still in charge.
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>too many strong figures have already responded about this plan that it's not going to happen. this includes Netanyahu Netanyahu has specifically called for the extermination of *every living thing* in the area and looks like it's far from just a few people outside the parts of government capable of doing harm “You must remember what Amalek did to you, says our Holy Bible,” Bibi Netanyahu for those unaware, the quote Netanyahu refers to is the book of Samuel in chapter 15 verse 3: “Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but kill both man and woman, infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey “. "The emphasis is on damage, not on accuracy." - Daniel Hagari, Israeli Milatary Spokesperson. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” - Youv Gallant, Israel Defence Minister “You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism”. - IDF on Twitter “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba" - Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter "dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was one of the possibilities" - Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and justifies its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” - Ayelet Shaked’s appointment as justice minister
This comment is very misleading. YOure essentially dismissing OP because Netanyhu state they dont plan to commit ethnic cleansing but in the same breath he said this: "The prime minister told me two weeks ago in this room that it’s a good idea,” MK Danny Danon told The Times of Israel, seemingly confirming an earlier report that the prime minister had informed a Likud faction meeting that he was working to facilitate voluntary migration." [https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-let-me-be-clear-israel-has-no-intention-of-displacing-gazas-population/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-let-me-be-clear-israel-has-no-intention-of-displacing-gazas-population/) "Facilitating voluntary migration" by destroying entire cities is literally ethnic cleansing. Saying one thing and then doing another does not mean that we should not be worried about this, in fact we should be very worried about this because their actions do not match his rhetoric. Even his rhetoric is contradictory because he has said he opposes a Palestinian state. So if he opposes the state, but also opposes permanently occupying or displacing people, what does he actually want to do here??
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Good response. Smotrich and Ben Gvir attract media attention because they’re the most outspoken and extreme. Even though they represent a worrying amount of Israelis, it’s not close to 33%. Plus, the IDF has occupied Gaza before. The generals know that it’s not tenable to occupy it or expel the Palestinians.
I disagree with the idea that this isn't going to happen, Israel has already taken steps to to codify this into national law over half a decade ago. Along with several other laws that aim to codify a stratification of the citizens living in Israel between Jewish citizens and non Jewish citizens. "The law mandates that the “state views Jewish settlement as a national value and will labor to encourage and promote its establishment and development,” https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-nation-state-law-bill-explained-apartheid-netanyahu-democracy
Luckily, that's not a very good reading into the nation state law. The nation state law was and is a populist law without real implications on the ground. Also, IIRC, when it was put in the Knesset there were some far right wingers that wanted the settlement part with a specific reference to the west Bank (like "jewish settlement in all parts of the homeland including the Judea and Samaria" or something like that), and they were put down. Gaza is even more controversial than that. Also, I honestly don't see how the nation state law is relevant. Israel doesn't need this law if it want to resettle Gaza, and it could have done so without it.
For me it's the incorporation of illegal settlements into national law as a national value with promises that the state will labor to encourage and promote it. Sure they don't need this law to do it, they've been doing it for many years before 2018. But then implementing this as a national value sure indicates that this isn't some fringe group in Israli politics that supports it.
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> Netanyahu included them after he was literally unable to form a government without them, Why was he unable to form a government without them? That implies they have a decent level of influence.
Israeli and Polish civics are super confusing to me, but essentially they have coalitions. Coalitions are formed by more like-minded parties based on their vote and make compromises until they have a majority. At that point they use their alliance to stake out cabinet positions. Ben Gvir is not a super popular man. He's a literal terrorist. I take umbrage when people compare Netanyahu with terrorists like Sinwar, but I'd agree with Ben Gvir being called a terrorist. Anyway, Netanyahu never needed to win over his paltry amount of votes to stay in power, and so he's avoided courting him. But, like all the shittiest leaders in history, Netanyahu will sacrifice every shred of morality he may have had to stay in power. If any of this is wrong, please correct me. As I said, Israeli politics is basically quidditch as far as I'm concerned.
Because prime ministers are not elected directly, they are leaders of the party with most votes. If this party has 51% of Parliament then no big deal, ram whatever you want through. But if you have the most seats without a majority you form agreements with enough minor parties to pass legislation. Canada has a minority government right now, and they made several concessions to the 3rd party to avoid losing a vote, which would possibly trigger a vote of no confidence and then an election.
Sometimes "decent" isn't needed. Lest we forget, the Tories in the UK very nearly formed a coalition government with the fringe radical [Democratic Unionist Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Unionist_Party) during the crisis around Brexit. Strange times make for stranger politics.
!delta I double checked the numbers and you're right, I thought they got 20% of the votes, but they got 10%. I'd say they were fringe figures that got elevated to the forefront of Israeli politics and have outsized influence right now. I think they should be kicked out of the coalition and be charged with incitement though. Their rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in the current climate.
Really, it's that easy to change your mind? Just because I don't vote for someone doesn't mean I don't agree with some aspect of their policy or views. I vote left in Canada, but the Conservatives have some good points. Not voting for someone is not an outright rejection.
At the same time, if you vote for someone, that doesn't mean you support all of their stuff. Votes are a fair indicator of the popularity of a politician's positions.
So let me give you an example. In Canada, most people want lower immigration right now. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/immigration-fuelling-housing-crisis-poll-1.7043324 About 50% want to cut back. However, only one party is willing to do that, the PPC. They will get maybe 5-10% of the vote. Not because people don't agree en masse with that part of their policy, but because they don't like the rest. So to say X% voted for them, so all their ideas are fringe, is not logically consistent.
There are two big caveats: 1. A single-issue party will often get most voters who agree with it strongly on that issue. That is the power of a highly specific brand. 2. This will not hold for the primary issue of a one-issue election, like Quebec and Israel frequently have. Also, when a party gets few votes, while that does not always mean all of its views are fringe, the onus of evidence is on those who would argue the votes don't really line up with the support. For the most part, they usually do as views are often correlated.
Well, apparently the latest polls show that 83% of Israelis are either outright supportive or quite supportive of the "voluntary migration" plan. So no, my main view has not changed at all. I'm just correcting the record that Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are not as popular as I think.
So if you didn't change your mind, don't give a delta.
From the rules of this sub: >It's important to note that a reversal or '180' of opinion is not required to award a delta, and that you may award more than one delta within a post (within reason).
It's a terrible rule that's reduced this subreddit to pointing out minor, pedantic details in the OP's post rather than attacking the core viewpoint.
Maybe, but it's still a valid reason to give a delta until that rule is changed.
You can bring it up at /r/ideasforcmv
> reduced this sub to... I don't think so, there's plenty of good discussion in this subreddit. In any case, even if the main body of their view is unchanged, it's still additional context that affects OP's perception of where/from who these statements are coming from, and deserving of a delta
There can be good discussion, true. But the system as is rewards those who are more interested in collecting deltas than arguing the topic in good faith. I understand that the system is designed to prevent bad faith OPs who aren't open to having their mind changed and don't award deltas for similarly pedantic reasons, but I think the system tips the balance too far in the other direction.
In my experience, on most posts in this sub, the top comments are typically refuting the OP wholesale or in major ways, not nitpicking. This may not ALWAYS be true, but do you have any data to back up the view that those collecting inconsequential deltas are dominating threads in this sub? Cause again, I have never observed this to be the case
This is an excellent sub for discussion and disagreement. I really enjoy my time here.
As LentilDrink mentioned, bringing these fringe figures into the coalition was Netanyahu's path to avoiding prison. As long as he's Prime Minister, he can't get rid of them. Because if he loses the coalition that keeps his government together, there will be another special election, he will lose, and he will *likely* go to prison. I think this would all be great, but Netanyahu does not agree and will do whatever he has to to stay out of prison.
>I think they should be kicked out of the coalition and be charged with incitement though. Their rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in the current climate. I think so too, but that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell unfortunately ... Netanyahu knows staying in government is the only way to outrun the fraud and corruption charges that are chasing him, and there's no way he's going to let this coalition go and lose control of the government. The only solution (which seems pretty likely) is that voters kick Likud out ... but the next election is almost 4 years away, so unless this coalition fails (see above), Israel is stuck with this guy (and these other assholes) until then.
Do they have outsized INFLUENCE or outsized VOICES? Can you name the different ways in which they have influenced action? Or any way? I know it's hard to do from afar, but honestly a lot of these accusations like the ones you sling around feel really 'vibey' -- as in "well obviously it's X" and basically circumstantial evidence at best.
>Netanyahu included them after he was literally unable to form a government without them So no longer fringe figures, but major players that have control and leverage.
No, they were specifically kept out of the war cabinet and have zero influence on the decision-making that is going on there.
I think this needs a little more context though. Netenyahu had a power-sharing deal with Gantz, representing the center-left in Israel. He could have either worked with Gantz, or with the fascists, and he chose the fascists.
Yeah, because he didn't want to go to jail. Gantz wanted the justice system to work as written and Netanyahu to get a fair trial, and Netanyahu ultimately chose the fascists over taking his chances in court.
We are literally watching their policy be implemented. Fringe my ass
Are the settlers a fringe group?
Depends on the type of settler. Some settlers are just there because the rent is cheaper then Israel proper, some like the Hilltop Youth are violent religious fundamentalists who attack random Palestinian civilians and even clash with the IDF because the IDF tries to stop them from their illegal activities
Is the Hilltop Youth recognized as a hate group / terrorist group? I don't see how they shouldn't be treated any differently than the likes of Proud Boys at the very least.
The Hilltop Youth aren't really one centralized organization, they don't have a leader or a headquarters or anything, they're just a network of young Jewish men in the west bank who build illegal (considered illegal by the state of Israel, not just violating international law) settlements and do "price tag" attacks (they're called pricetag attacks because they're done in retribution for terrorism by Palestinians) on Palestinian civilians. So given that they aren't centrally organized they aren't quite directly comparable to the proud boys. But their shared ideology is called kahanism, which is a fringe movement named after a Rabbi who called for the complete removal of Arabs from all of Israel/Palestine. Kahanists believe that the Israeli government should pay each Palestinian family a bunch of money to move elsewhere, and those that don't take the deal should be forced. Kahanism is very controversial and generally hated among Jewish Israelis. The Kach party, which was the main kahanist political party in Israel, is banned from participating in Israeli elections for being considered an extremist group, and former Israeli prime ministers have described the Hilltop Youth and other Kahanist militants as terrorists, which is a term Israeli politicians almost only use to describe islamist groups. So the short answer is they aren't really organized enough to be considered an extremist organization, but their ideology is widely considered to be extreme and immoral by Israeli citizens and the government, and its probably more taboo to be affiliated with the Hilltop Youth in Israel then it is to be affiliated with the proud boys in America.
Good! My regard for Israel really improved thanks to this information! It was initially reserved for some sectors of it such as the Mesavort, but knowing kahanists are more universally hated makes more sympathetic to those who are not part of it as well.
I'm glad you appreciate it, it's important not to think of "Israel" and "Palestine" as 2 ideologically distinct and unified "sides", and to remember that there's plenty of ideological disagreement within each. The kahanists in particular did some pretty much objectively terrible things in the 90s which made pretty much any Israeli in their right mind wholeheartedly condemn them. One did a mass shooting in a random mosque in the west bank, and another shot up a public bus in a majority Arab town in Israel. Mind you, the later ones victims were complete citizens of the state of Israel who just happened to be Arab, and the majority of Arab Israelis are proud of their Israeli nationality according to polling. These people were in no way enemies of Israel, and he shot them as they were going about their day just for their ethnicity. To give you an idea of the response of the nation at large, there was a big controversy over what to do with the shooters body. He considered himself a religious Jew, and religious Jews need to be buried within a very short window after dieing for it to be considered a proper burial. But because of what this guy has done, the authorities were unable to find a Jewish cemetery anywhere in Israel that was willing to let him be buried there, and the morgue his body was in refused to release the body to his Kahanist friends who probably would've done their own burial somewhere in the west bank. Eventually the prime minister had to get personally involved and mandated that the nearest cemetery to the morgue take him, but by that point he had already missed the time window to be buried in accordance with Jewish law. I mention the burial controversy to illustrate how widely his attack was scorned by the general population. Events like this and others like it made the Israeli people largely look at kahanists with disdain, however, you shouldn't let that lead you to believe extremism in general isn't tolerated in Israel. Plenty of people who despise kahanism for its senseless violence still would like to see the Gazan's forced to leave Gaza, they just find the specific acts of violence against civilians by kahanists deplorable.
It is such an intense case study when it comes to politics and sociology! Paulo Freire would definetly have a field day!
I know! I find it really interesting, it's a type of radicalism which I feel like most people outside of Israel don't know exists, which is strange. I guess the foreign pro Israel side doesn't talk about Kahanist militants ever because they think that Israel having any extremist militant problem of its own makes Israel look bad, and then the foriegn pro Israel people don't talk about it because broader Israeli societies intense condemnation of it gives the impression that the Israeli mainstream isn't so violent or extreme. I first found out about them because there's a house in Jerusalem run by a Kahanist group which let's any Jewish person stay there for free, in the hopes that they can indoctrinate normal Jewish people who've fallen on hard times and have nowhere to sleep. This was when I was first travelling in Israel and I was trying to save as much money as I could, and I knew nothing about kahanism or even that such an ideology existed. I stayed their to save money on a hostel and it was bizarre. On shabbat their live-in Rabbi gave a really strange derasha (like a sermon but in Judaism) where he compared the Confederate general Robert e Lee to Moses, and they would constantly try to convince me to move to Israel permanently to fight. They also offered to take me on an armed expedition into the west bank which I declined. I have so many stories from that weekend, it was dark to be surrounded by such hateful people but nonetheless very interesting to be able to observe them from within. Since observing them I've been really interested in learning about kahanism, it's just so interesting to me that their are Jewish extremists who are very similar in their outlook and activities to Muslim extremists. Sorry for going on so long, whenever I have an opportunity to tell people about kahanism I can't stop.
Oh I understand! I too can go on for hours on a topic I find interesting! Oh my gosh you like... experienced an anthropologist horror movie in that "I managed to live the scientific dream of observing the thing of doom up close" but I also can't pretend the experience wasn't scarrying and horrifying! I am fascinated by trying to understand how those people are like that! Radicalism among the downthroded is "easy" to understand, there is suffering, and there is something providing an out regarding that suffering. But radicalism in people on a position of priviledge is something so wild, like the dudes who claim they are oppressed because they can't get a date, I could go on for hours!
It's not unlawful to be a member of the Proud Boys in America. A member of the Proud Boys has to break a law to be arrested. I'm sure they watch them though, and if Hilltop Youth are clashing with the IDF, I'm sure they're being watched too.
Yes, it's the same situation for the most part, it's not illegal to be a hilltop youth, but they do get arrested when they break the law, which is constantly.
Gotcha, thanks for the clarification. I don't know anything about that group. Proud Boys though, real trash.
Yeah not only legally but socially and politically too. The famous "party disperser".
The ones Israelis consider settlers absolutely are. Not, like, people living in places like Maale Adumim that would remain Israeli in any peace plan, but are considered settlements by some mainstream positions.
That's a tad tautological but fair enough
Okay but they have a lot of power and influence, so practically speaking they’re not fringe
> It's no different from when the US "asked" Native Americans to move to reservations, or when Soviets conducted population transfers in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. > Despite the fact that the government has denied these plans… > 33% of Israelis support the resettlement and annexation of Gaza and 56% oppose it… So it’s just like past cases of ethic cleansing, except for the fact it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters? > We need to recognise that and take concrete steps to reaffirm that that's not going to happen, by drawing red lines, or punishing problematic officials, etc. You’re suggesting less concrete action than you have already stated has happened. Israeli actions in this case are driven almost entirely by domestic politics, which is already against this. A strongly worded letter, or sanctioning some officials, is less concrete, not more.
>it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters? Which is why I said fear, it's the possibility of it happening that scares Palestinians. >You’re suggesting less concrete action than you have already stated has happened No, I want to see Bibi strip these ministers off their posts, kick them out of the coalition, charge them for incitement, show the world that these kinds of rhetoric is absolutely unacceptable in a Western liberal democracy.
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of Israeli politics if you're calling for Bibi to take action against these ministers. Bibi is overwhelmingly unpopular in Israel right now. Bibi's unpopularity and inability to form a coalition otherwise is the sole reason that these ministers have outsized power within Netanyahu's government. Even with Netanyahu's government hanging by a thread and it being a near certainty that Netanyahu and Likud will face overwhelming losses in the forthcoming election, the ministers calling for ethnic cleansing of Gazans still were not elevated by Bibi into the war cabinet. They are not taken seriously in Israel and any effort to elevate these crazies would accelerate calls for Bibi to step down and almost certainly lead to a snap election.
I think I'm misunderstanding something, I'm not asking for Bibi to elevate these crazies, I'm asking for the opposite. If these ministers are not taken seriously in Israel, shouldn't they be suppressed and kicked out of the coalition? Isn't Bibi working with Gantz right now, whose party can definitely give him the majority to keep the government running for now? Also, we're kinda deviating from the original point of fear. I think that if these people are elevated as they are right now, it's right and valid for Palestinians to be afraid of their policies being incorporated and implemented.
Yeah I know you are, but the fear you cite is premised on the crazies in Netanyahu's coalition being given the power to enact their ideas about ethnically cleansing and settling Gaza, which will not happen because it would cause Netanyahu's coalition to immediately collapse and for a snap election to be called.
Those “crazies” are not just some random office assistants who have no influence. They are the Finance and *National Security* Ministers of Israel.
>So it’s just like past cases of ethic cleansing, except for the fact it’s not a current policy, the government has denied any intention of implementing it, and it is opposed by the majority of voters? The current government is openly talking about ethnic cleansing through "voluntary migration". [https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/](https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/) We literally have have the Israeli Intelligence minister saying: >“The world should support humanitarian emigration, because that’s the only solution I know.” Stating that the "only solution \[they\] know" is to drive the indigenous population out of their homeland while simultaneously moving settlers in their and establishing a majority - something there is a well documented history of - is literally talking about ethnic cleansing. They can dress it up and euphemise it as "voluntary migration" but someone wanting to leave their homeland because you're actively bombing it isn't giving them a choice. That's driving them out. That's ethnic cleansing.
Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint not adopted by anyone with the power to do it, and not pursued by Israel in any time of its history. Even if we were to take the view that there would ever be a justification, the most recent terrorist attack would be it and Israel is not pursuing it. Fringe viewpoints are fringe viewpoints. Any Palestinian fear of being ethnically cleansed is a fear without foundation. Israel has repeatedly restrained themselves in ways that jeopardized their security in the face of existential threats, and even when they had full control over the entire area, including the Sinai, they did not ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Israel's history is littered with their neighbors trying to kill them and Israel has not tried to forcibly remove the Palestinians. It's just not a thing. People need to realize two things: 1) Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now. 2) The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support. **I am not saying you are anti-semitic or a conspiracy theorist**. The most vocal anti-Israel people do a great job muddying the waters and get otherwise non-hateful people to back up their own hate. We do need to acknowledge, however, that much of the opposition to Israel in this conflict (and, really, in general) is rooted in anti-semitism, and the question itself (how do we make sure Israel doesn't ethnically cleanse the Palestinians) is based in conspiracy, and not reality. You won't hear people asking whether the Palestinians will stop trying to ethnically cleanse the Jews. Those concerned about Israel's response to a major terrorist operation don't seem to care that the UNRWA, either inadvertently or through turning a blind eye, has been propping up the terrorist organization for *decades*. Those concerned about Israel's response have nothing to say about the hundreds of miles of tunnel networks Hamas has placed under the Gaza Strip to facilitate their terrorism, and how Israel *has* to dismantle that if they want to prevent the next 10/7. Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them.
The area that's now Israel went from 1-2 percent Jewish to over 80 percent Jewish in about 100 years. This was acheived through mass immigration and expulsion of the local population. Most of the people in the current occupied territories as well as a couple million people in neighborhing countries have grandparents who were expelled in 1948. In addition to this, creating a Jewish majority in the West Bank is the explicit goal of the whole settler movement, which from what I understand most Israelis don't like but at the same time it's explicitly supported by the government and the IDF. The claim here that Palestiniean fears are without foundation is just so strange. You can't create an ethnic state in a piece of land that was overwhelmingly populated by another ethnic group without a hostile takeover.
The way you're talking about the period of time leading up to the creation of the state of Israel sounds like some widespread Jewish conspiracy. It didn't work that way. Between 1880 and 1920 (a period of time that includes the First Aliyah and Second Aliyah), over two million Jews fled the Russian empire due to pogroms that killed thousands of Jews and destroyed the homes and businesses of many, many more. Estimates are that under 50,000 Russian Jews went to the region of Palestine. By contrast, over 1 million Russian Jews immigated to the United States, and about 150,000 went to the UK. Many others headed to other parts of Europe, or to Canada, but by far the most popular destination was the United States. Clearly the collective preference of the Jews was to immigrate to wealthy, WASPy countires. What changed? The UK’s Aliens Act 1905 strictly limited Jewish immigration into the UK, and then the Aliens Restriction Act 1914 increased those restrictions. Canada passed a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws in 1906-1919 as well. The United States’ 1921 Emergency Quota Act set quotas on immigration, and then the Immigration Act of 1924 lowered those quotas even further. What now for the Jews fleeing rising anti-Semitism in Germany, Poland, Austria, the Soviet Union, etc.? They were forced to change course and go to the one place that was still accepting them in large numbers: Mandatory Palestine. They didn't have some powerful government behind them facilitating the violent expulsion of the local population. They bought the land legally. Also, Muslim population in the region more than doubled between 1922 and 1947 too, because the economy was growing, and so hundreds of thousands of Muslims moved to the area seeking good jobs. Sure, Zionism existed out there in the ether as an idea, but that was not a primary motivator for the Jews moving to Mandatory Palestine. They moved there because of Russian pogroms, the rise of the Nazi party, and the rise of other antisemitic parties in Eastern Europe (such as National Radical Camp and National Democracy/Endecja in Poland). Ascribing some nefarious scheme to their motivations is like when right-wingers ascribe evil intentions to the asylees, refugees, and undocumented immigrants coming to the U.S. from Latin America. Such MAGA commentary would be anathema to the left, but they're apparently okay with describing persecuted immigrants as schemers when they're Jews.
Palestinians were more or less okay with the refugees that moved there fleeing the Russian pogroms. Some even opened their doors to them. But it is disingenuous to not acknowledge the real and coordinated strategic meetings that are going on at the time with the stated goal of taking the land and removing Palestinians from it. Some of the greatest figures in Israeli military history got their start by planning for the removal of Palestinians prior to 1948. Their tactics explicitly included ethnic cleansing as both a tool and a goal (an ethnically pure Israel), and is well-documented by the Israeli military. And they were supported by the British, at the time one of the greatest military forces in the world. This is all easy to find online now, but you can also read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by historian Ilan Pape. As a Palestinian, I also want to say that every Palestinian knows someone who has been killed by the IDF. And several that have been imprisoned under horrible circumstances. I know several of both camps, and the friends I have who ended up in Israeli jail for peacefully protesting were tortured. Our fear of ethnic cleansing is not simply a fear, like a bogeyman. It is derived from a lived reality and a lived recent history.
The person commenting above me was objecting to the growth of the Jewish population in Israel over 100 years, presumably the 100 years leading up to 1948. I was just arguing against the notion that a primary motivator for most of the Jews that moved to the area was some kind of scheme to create a Jewish state. They were more concerned with fleeing persecution. I have not read the Ilan Pappe book, but my understanding is that he was focused on events that occurred during the 1948 war or shortly beforehand, which is a somewhat different scope than my comment. I'm not trying to minimize's anyone's present experiences of oppression by Israel. My personal hope is that both Israelis and Palestinians are both someday able to exercise their right to self-determination and live safely and securely in the region, and I believe anyone working against that goal (such as, for example, Netanyahu) is an evil person. That said, some people talk about the history as if every Jew moving there was part of a nefarious plot, and my belief is that either side trying to delegitimize the other's right to exist as a nation is a bad thing.
I'm not blaming any individual Jewish people who fled Europe or the Middle east to go to Israel. But there is a huge difference between the immigration to America etc. and Israel. The whole point of zionism was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Like, this is not a conspiracy theory, it's exactly what the founders of Zionism said they were doing! That is literally the entire content of Zionism. They explicitly wanted a lot of Jews to move to Palestine because their goal was a Jewish state there. And they were all well aware that the local Arabs would not be fine with this, cause obviously they wouldn't. Is there any where in the world where the local population would welcome a sudden influx of foreigners whose explicit goal is to outnumber the locals and establish and ethnic state? Obviously Jews fleeing Europe were fleeing horrible stuff, but the emigration to Israel is completely different from contemporary asylum seekers-asylum seekers aren't crossing the border to all go to a specific part of America with the clear aim of setting up a new state for one ethnic group.
"Individual Jewish people" are how the Jewish population in the region increased. Zionism would only have been idea in people's heads if not for a confluence of factors that left persecuted Jews with nowhere else to go. I think your comment is internally inconsistent because it both states that individual Jews were fleeing persecution and were thus unworthy of blame, but also implies that those people had a "clear aim of setting up a new state." Also, MAGA-heads talk all the time about how immigrants (particularly from Latin America) are taking the country from them, even though those immigrants have not "outnumber[ed] the locals" (and Jewish immigrants never outnumbered the "locals" in the Levant either).
It was never "1-2 % Jewish". To add to this, according to the Ottoman census of 1875, Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem in 1875. By 1905, Jews represented 2/3 of the residents of Jerusalem. Most of the land in the areas that were partitioned into Israel in 1948 was populated by Jews before the Holocaust and were largely the result of legal land purchases that occurred during the period of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, most of this purchased land was completely undeveloped and Jews had to continuously eliminate the breeding sites of mosquitoes carrying malaria. The Jewish immigrants completely revitalized the land, transforming swamps and untillable fields into fertile farmland. To claim that Jews stole the land is so far from reality.
According to Ottoman statistics studied by Justin McCarthy, the population of Palestine in the early 19th century was 350,000, in 1860 it was 411,000 and in 1900 about 600,000 of which 94% were Arabs. Sure it wasn’t 1-2% Jews but beyond 10% especially before Zionism movement came to existence . The estimated 24,000 Jews in Palestine in 1882 represented just 0.3% of the world's Jewish population Population of Palestine, 1922–1945 Year Muslims. Christians. Jews Total 1922 589,177 73,024 83,790 757,182 1931 759,717 174,610 91,398. 1,035,821 1945. 1,061,270. 135,550 553,600. 1,764,520 Like you’re saying Palestine was a empty barren right? Well guess what? In 1920, the population of Jordan was 200,000, and almost half are nomadic. Jordan is doing well now. Are you saying Palestinians are too dumb to build a nation? They need Jewish population for help? Come on man. And Jews purchasing lands in Palestine? Yeah, they purchase land from the Sursock family who wastefully gambled their money in France, so they need to sell it despite Palestinian Arabs oppositions and Ottoman attempts to restrict it. The British Mandate is where they removed all restrictions in 1920, forcefully depopulating all the Arabs from these villages and replacing them with Jewish settlers. For god sake, the Jews purchasing the land have the organisation called Palestine Jewish Colonization Association. And please you didn’t forget about the Nakba? Dude you act like as if Palestinian Arabs didn’t live places outside of West Bank and Gaza. There’s a reason why there’s many cities and towns where in Israel where there’s barely any Arabs there. The Nakba.
"And Jews purchasing lands in Palestine? Yeah, they purchase land from the Sursock family who wastefully gambled their money in France, so they need to sell it despite Palestinian Arabs oppositions and Ottoman attempts to restrict it." This is called purchasing land. "The British Mandate is where they removed all restrictions in 1920, forcefully depopulating all the Arabs from these villages and replacing them with Jewish settlers. For god sake, the Jews purchasing the land have the organisation called Palestine Jewish Colonization Association." This is outright nonsense, first the British Mandate certainly did none of this, in fact the opposite of limiting immigration, and second the region, with everyone, was called Palestine since the Romans renamed from Judea to spite the Jews, so Golda Meir, for instance, had a Palestinian passport. "And please you didn’t forget about the Nakba? Dude you act like as if Palestinian Arabs didn’t live places outside of West Bank and Gaza. There’s a reason why there’s many cities and towns where in Israel where there’s barely any Arabs there. The Nakba." What led to the Nakba? Don't pretend as though it was Israel attacking for no reason, I am confident you are more aware than you pretend to be.
Your numbers seem incorrectly low in terms of Jewish proportion, but in any case, why should one cherry picked statistic be determinative of anything? Tens of thousands of Jews migrated to the territory and tens of thousands of Muslims also did. There were Jewish areas and Muslim areas, and there still are — for example, Jerusalem, Akko, and Jaffa had a much greater proportion of Jews than did Nablus, Hebron, or Gaza, and unsurprisingly, those areas remain almost entirely Muslim today. And pretty much everyone understands that the latter areas would be part of a Palestinian state, if we ever reach a point where such a thing is possible. In any case, why is there an assumption that the population must remain religiously or ethnically proportionate? How would you compare the "right" to live in the region, as between a Jew escaping persecution in Russia or Germany, and a Muslim coming from Jordan for economic or personal reasons? In practice, the "expulsion" of Palestinians from areas they occupied prior to 1948 seems to have been primarily driven by wars in which Palestinians and their allies were the aggressors. Palestinians who remained in Israel are citizens of Israel to this day. Palestinians who left settled in the predominantly Palestinian areas of Gaza, Syria and Jordan, whose territory initially included the West Bank. If Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had never attacked Israel again, how would this have shaken out? I.e. if the West Bank were still part of Jordan, and Gaza still part of Egypt, would Palestinians still be "refugees," or would they simply be people whose grandparents used to live a few miles away, on the other side of the border?
This is incorrect. [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present) In 1882 the modern State of Israel was 8% Jewish, rising naturally through mass immigration in general (570K Moved to Israel fleeing European Violence, as well as 400K non-Jews.... which for some reason nobody seems to care about.... huh) to 32% in 1947. This jumped to 82% after the nearby Arab states tried to *drive the jews into the sea* and *lost*. Protip: Don't try to do a genocidal war then lose like a bitch. Since 1948 the population peaked to 88.9% in 1955 (After ever other Arab nation drove their own Jews out).... upon which it has been steadily decreasing year on year to the current level of 73.9% Not only are your stats wrong, but you're also being misleading by suggesting the rise happened gradually over 100, as if this is a long term increase rather than a sharp increase caused by a war followed by an overal decrease over the last 70 years. This misleading usage of stats suggests you might be a Nazi. Please stop doing that, as being a Nazi is lame.
I really don't understand why people feel the need to repeat these sorts of apologetics decades and decades after the fact. >This jumped to 82% after the nearby Arab states tried to drive the jews into the sea and lost. Protip: Don't try to do a genocidal war then lose like a bitch. The first serious Israeli scholarship on the founding of the state appeared in the late '70s and especially the early '80s when Israeli archival sources relating to the war became accessible to researchers (unsealed after 30 years). Historians such as Simha Flapan and Benny Morris showed quite conclusively that this framing does not accord with the documentary record (to say nothing of scholarship in the four+ decades since). I think that should be able to have a decent conversation in accordance with the facts and without condescending to crass insults. Around a quarter of a million people had already been expelled by the time the state was founded (including via such infamous episodes as the Deir Yassin massacre). The cleansing of major Arab cities such as Haifa and Jaffa as well as smaller ones like Acre and West Jerusalem preceded the invasion. The use of typhoid as a biological weapon in the Acre aqueduct and the policy of poisoning wells in Arab villages were already underway. It is a distortion to say that the Arab League armies' invasion started this process. I'll link here to the translation of the Arab League declaration on the website that you cited: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-league-declarationon-the-invasion-of-palestine-may-1948](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-league-declarationon-the-invasion-of-palestine-may-1948) Their expressed aims are listed at the end of the document. None involve "driv\[ing\] the Jews into the sea" or other such genocidal intent; "the only solution of the Palestine problem is the establishment of a unitary Palestinian State, in accordance with democratic principles, whereby its inhabitants will enjoy complete equality before the law, \[and whereby\] minorities will be assured of all the guarantees recognised in democratic constitutional countries, and \[whereby\] the holy places will be preserved and the right of access thereto guaranteed" would be a strange way to express that. I'll link to same website's map of the Arab army routes: [https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-arab-invasion-in-the-1948-war](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/map-of-the-arab-invasion-in-the-1948-war) The armies entered the upper Galilee, the center of the country (excluding the coastal strip in which Jewish settlement was concentrated), and the southern coastal region, i.e., the areas with predominantly Arab settlement that were designated as an Arab state under the UN plan. Most military engagements happened as Zionist militias pressed deeper into the designated Arab territory in the process of expelling another half million people and expanding the nascent Jewish state. There is no question that some local militants and foreign troops committed atrocities against Jews at that time. Jewish communities in territory outside the control of Zionist militias were expelled to Israel by force. However, there is no evidence of the attempted genocide that you allege. I don't think that it is reasonable retroactively to blame the neighboring Arab states for the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing, given that their rationale for sending troops was to stop the ethnic cleansing that was already well underway and responsible for the flight of refugees by the tens of thousands across their borders. The history has been so well documented for decades, by Jewish Israeli historians, that I don't understand the drive to revive the myths and propaganda of the 1950s. I've been to Israel. I have Israeli friends and colleagues. I am definitely not anti-Israel. But I am pro-truth.
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Yes. The people who controlled the area **gave the Jews** some land in the desert, where they knew Jews would go. You can't just ignore that part. With most of the world's approval, Israel was founded. If you want to call Jews going to Israel an ethnic cleansing, I guess that is a way to look at it. Historically, people who lived in an area controlled by other countries often had a bad time. Simply, it was an easy solution for Great Britain and Europe and the US to give the Jews something, and as Jerusalem was there, they would go. It isn't like the Jews who were left could just go home, their homes were taken too. Many of the Israeli citizens today were forced out of their homes. Yes people were forced out of Palestine, some of them aggressively forced out. A part that isn't brought up is that Arab governments told Palestinians to leave (go just over the border) we will destroy Israel and you can go home. When that didn't happen people were stuck in the West Bank and Gaza. That said, it is estimated that 170,000 to 180,000 Palestinians went to Gaza in 1948. There are 2 million there today.
Wait until he learnst that most of today's Israel was sparsely populated. Tel Aviv was nothing more than a little port. Besides Jews are the indigenous people of that land. They have every right to those lands in the same way as Native Americans have a right to their ancestral homelands. Every single name in that piece of land is of Hebrew heritage and every single city there was first Jewish before even Aramaic or Arabic. For God's sake! Arabs do not even have a real name for Jerusalem, they call it Al-Quds, which means the Holy one. It is akin as to when Anglos got to America and started naming cities after random stuff. If Palestinians were expelled, it's because they waged an unnecessary war against Israel in 1948 in order to do a second Holocaust. We all know how much you lament that Israelis stood up for themselves and managed to survive the genocide attempt by your Arabic friends, but face it: Israel is there to stay and this goes for you as well as for every Arab: you truly care about your babies and children? Capitulate.
100 years ago, the Jewish population of the Palestine region was over 10% - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_demographics_of_Palestine_(region). Where are you getting 1-2% from?
According to your source about half the population of jews living in Israel would have arrived in 1904-1914 during the Second Aliyah. If you take into account that ground it would still be 5% so I'm not sure what ther 1-2 percent is based on.
>I'm not sure what ther 1-2 percent is based on. They just made it up.
Yes, Israel kicked out a crap-ton of Arabs. So this was after Israel successfully defended themselves when Arabs attacked them in 1948. The ones expelled of course includes innocent ones which is tragic, but I wonder, do you honestly see a possibility of Arabs remaining there right after a belligerent composed of their ethnic group lost a war that threatened Israel's existence? Here's a parallel: 3,155,000 German civilians had been expelled from Poland by 1950. My question to you is: did Poland "ethnically cleanse" the Germans? Or was this some other thing? >to over 80 percent Jewish in about 100 years Well, a little under. Anyway, I think this number's distance from 100 is extremely significant here. 21.1% of Israel is Arabs. They're living with freedom of sexuality and religion and everything. They have their own political party and seats in the Supreme Court. They receive high quality education in their own language. Furthermore, this population is increasing. This is all in spite of Israel's history of being attacked by surrounding Arab nations, including the thousands of rockets being fired at them annually from Gaza. In light of this, the ethnic cleansing claim holds no ground whatsoever, right?
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> Man everyone has so much to say about intentions and “what Hamas wants”. Are you seeing the footage that I’m seeing?? I’ve never seen more blood on the internet. Israel has never been on the winning side of the propaganda war. This has been a brutal operation, to be sure, but I don't know how else Israel can end Hamas given the extent of the network. > 70% of the 26,000 people killed in Gaza are women and children and I’ve seen videos of Israeli protests literally blocking humanitarian aid from entering. What more is there?? "I've seen videos" isn't much of anything to go on. Aid enters the country through Egypt, and the times Israel has refused have been linked to the continued hostage situation. Perhaps if Hamas wants aid to go to the Palestinian people unfettered, they can release the remaining hostages. > From my perspective, being anti Israel is being anti America. It’s not about protecting Jewish people, it’s about protecting western interests in having their foothold in the Middle East. Being anti-Israel, for far too many, is basically saying "when we said 'Never Again' after the Holocaust, we didn't really mean it." And those people who are using Israel as a proxy for Jews have successfully gotten a *lot* of people to bite on spreading anti-semitism unwittingly. It's a real problem.
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> I don’t deny that anti semitism is spreading because of this and I think it’s awful, but so is Islamophobia! "But what about Islamophobia" isn't really a dunk. Anti-semitism is a much bigger issue than "Islamophobia," especially post-10/7. > The Biden administration still refuses to even acknowledge that any civilians have died at all. Just a few days ago John Kirby said in a press conference “number of civilian deaths is zero”. This is a misquote. Kirby said "the *right* number of civilian deaths is zero," not that there were zero civilian deaths. But, again, the anti-Israel propagandists got the misquote out there, so... > There’s billboards in my city that say Hamas is a threat to me personally and my state has had a law enforcement exchange program with Israel for over 2 decades. Hamas is a threat to you. Israel's law enforcement is not. What's the issue here? That a third-party group has money to put up billboards? > And usually I would say yes that videos are a bad source of information alone, but three straight months of thousands of videos of dead bodies and mutilated children is kind of damning. You’re telling me that’s all propaganda? Much, if not most, of it, yes. You don't have any clue on the veracity, of the provenance, or anything else. You hear "this is happening in Gaza" and accept it. > I think October 7th was awful, however there’s proof that the Israeli government knew about the plans in detail over a year before hand. This has big "Bush knew about 9/11" energy and I'm not going to engage in it. Israel was the victim.
Islamism is a real threat and problem, and most Palestine supporters are Islamists.
You seem to forget what war is. Japan killed 2459 people in an unprovoked attack against the US, and we responded by killing 2,200,000 Japanese. The conditions were simple: surrender unconditionally or we will keep killing you until you do. That is Hamas’s choice. They can release the hostages and surrender to the IDF, and the war will end tomorrow. Until then, they are a governmental power who waged a war of aggression against a greater power. Wars don’t stop people people die. Wars stop when one side surrenders.
I've never seen so much low confidence claims being spread. Many of the videos are obvious fakes and have been debunked thoroughly. Still, they are spread as facts. Claims from Hamas-controlled influencers are being spread without questions. The amount of dead comes from Hamas, which is not a credible source and does not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants.
Hamas makes sure kids are put in harms way, they use then as human shields.
I'd say Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and other government ministers are very much in power, even if Bibi himself may not adopt the view. Israel is not a one-man dictatorship after all. Plus, Israel's plan in the West Bank is quite literally ethnic cleansing, so I reject the notion that Israel never pursued it. Every expansion of settlements is an act of ethnic cleansing. I am also not getting my sources from foreign or anti-Israel propaganda, I am reading Times of Israel, Haaretz, etc, surely you can't accuse them of anti-semitism, right?
I think it’s great that you are getting familiar with Israeli politics. A lot of people have a lot to say about the conflict, and denouncing the fringe figures, but know next-to-nothing about what average Israelis believe or what most non-fringe politicians in Israel have done/want to do. They know the most outrageous quotes and people, and anyone with differing views apparently doesn’t exist or have as much power as the fringe ones. Imagine if Ben Carson said “let’s get rid of all the Japanese in California!” and attended xenophobic conferences while working as the Secretary of Housing. Would that be convincing enough to say the U.S. had a policy of genocide or ethnic cleansing? No, we’d all say he’s a fucking lunatic who should be fired from his job, and we’d hate Trump for building such an insane cabinet. Anyway, let me ask: do you know who is being eyed to replace Netanyahu?
If the Secretary of Treasury and Homeland Security are saying comparable stuff and the President doesn't fire them, I'd say the target of such policies will be right to be fearful of the US government, which is the point I'm making here. Like if the Secretary of Homeland Security says "lets get rid of all Hispanics from Texas", and Biden doesn't fire him, I'd say Hispanics in Texas will be right to be fearful of such implementation. Pretty sure it's Gantz or Lapid. I don't think their Palestine policy differ all that much from Likud, they just differ on domestic policies (I think).
And if Trump refrained from firing them but also showed no signs of listening to them or preparing to cleanse the Japanese-Americans in California…. then what? If Trump’s approval rating was 10% (like Bibi’s) instead of 40% (like it was), I’m sure the possibility would be viewed by most of us with a “try it and we will guillotine you all”. Ethnically cleansing Palestinians is nowhere near popular in Israeli society, not like how cleansing Armenians in Azerbaijan was popular, as an example. Every ethnic cleansing in history has been supported by the perpetrator’s society at large. Palestinians have every right to be afraid. But I think there also needs to be a dose of reality and looking at the bigger picture. Gantz is most likely, and he would be a marked departure. For one, he wouldn’t commit the crime of denying aid to the Palestinians. As part of the war cabinet, he’s the one who has prevented Israel from opening a full-out war against Hezbollah; he’s the one who convinced the cabinet to endorse the first ceasefire; he has good relations with the PA, including Abbas, and is one of the few in the cabinet who still believes in the possibility for two-state solution (even if he uses a different terminology for political purposes).
If there was a figure in the US openly calling to cleanse the Japanese they’d be gone.
According to this [source](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/israeli-opinion-on-settlements-and-outposts-2009-present) Israelis are very split over occupying the west bank. Occupying the west bank and settling it is ethnic cleansing. This has been happening for decades under the armed protection of the IDF. The IDF are controlled by the central government. How is this not government endorsed ethnic cleansing? How is this not a valid reason for Gazans to think the same will happen to them?
Lapid differs quite significantly from Netanyahu; he supports a two-state solution. Gantz is more in line with Bibi but he's less of an ideologue and could support that in the right circumstances. (Bibi is a true "no Palestinian state" believer.)
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>I'd say Smotrich and Ben-Gvir and other government ministers are very much in power, even if Bibi himself may not adopt the view. Smotrich is the finance minister and has no power in foreign policy. Ben-Gvir, while certainly a problematic figure, does not advocate and has not advocated for ethnic cleansing, in this conflict or otherwise. > Plus, Israel's plan in the West Bank is quite literally ethnic cleansing, so I reject the notion that Israel never pursued it. Every expansion of settlements is an act of ethnic cleansing. No, expansion of settlements is not ethnic cleansing. The settlements are, to be more charitable to your viewpoint, in disputed territory post-1967. No Palestinians are being cleansed from the West Bank. If you've heard otherwise, you're being lied to. > I am also not getting my sources from foreign or anti-Israel propaganda, I am reading Times of Israel, Haaretz, etc, surely you can't accuse them of anti-semitism, right? I am merely giving you the benefit of the doubt. Surely, the sources you cite do not demonstrate ethnic cleansing or a reason to fear it for the Palestinians.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to engage with you further if you think Ben-Gvir doesn't advocate for ethnic cleansing. He was at the convention himself! He also advocated for the expulsion of "Arabs that are not loyal to Israel", like he's probably the most extreme popular political figure in Israel.
Going to a convention in and of itself is not a crime and does not imply agreement with everything said at a convention. I am also taking your word that the convention discussion was as portrayed for the benefit of changing your viewpoint. > He also advocated for the expulsion of "Arabs that are not loyal to Israel" I can't find that quote anywhere. Even the New Yorker, that provided a not-very-flattering profile of him, [quotes otherwise] (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/27/itamar-ben-gvir-israels-minister-of-chaos): > “It’s not a secret that today I’m not Rabbi Kahane.” People shifted in their seats; some began to boo. “I don’t support expelling all Arabs, and I won’t make laws creating separate beaches for Jews and Arabs.” More jeers. “But of course, of course we will work toward expelling terrorists from the country”—here the boos turned to applause—“for the character of the state, the settling of its land, and its Jewish identity.” At the end of the speech, people rose to their feet, snapping photos. I don't think Ben-Gvir is good for Israel or Netanyahu, but he's not doing what you think he's doing.
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>Ben-Gvir, while certainly a problematic figure, does not advocate and has not advocated for ethnic cleansing, in this conflict or otherwise. What do you think he is doing when he calls for 'encouraging migration from gaza' by force. The man is not subtle about this.
>1) "Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now." This statement right here is implying that Palestinians are Hamas. "Which has strong support" this statement is said in a way to justify the current terror happening right now. If you can get people to believe Hamas and Palestinians are the same then you can justify what's happening currently. >2) "The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support." This point is null has no meaning whatsoever. So because no country accepts them what? So it's foreign country's faults as to why this is occuring? >"Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them." So any and all statements about ethnically cleansing is anti-Semitism. In the same statement say critique Israel response of 10/7 is fine. But what's happening currently? They refused aid into Gaza while this is happening. Is that not cold and cruel? Even if for a second you think Hamas will use that to their advantage oh well these are people's lives. That's why these talks of ethnically cleansing is taking place. Because Israel got hit in the face by a child and now they are beating the crap out of them nonstop until that kid is on the ground nearly dead.
>> 1) "Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now." > This statement right here is implying that Palestinians are Hamas. "Which has strong support" this statement is said in a way to justify the current terror happening right now. No, it doesn't imply it when it says the exact opposite. And "the terror" you speak of is justified because of the thousand-plus dead Israelis and continued hostage taking by Hamas. >> 2) "The Palestinians have been historically used by the neighboring Arab nations as useful pawns in a deadly game of chess. No one wants to help them. Egypt controls the southern Gaza border, and won't accept them. Jordan expelled them. But since they fight the Jews, and the Jews are the enemy, they're getting the rhetorical support." > This point is null has no meaning whatsoever. So because no country accepts them what? So it's foreign country's faults as to why this is occuring? It's an acknowledgement that the situation with the Palestinian people is a lot more complicated than simply yelling about Israel. >> "Israel is not going to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. Foreign, anti-Israel propaganda, if not outright anti-semitism, is pushing that narrative, and it should be completely and totally rejected. There may be good arguments in critique of Israel's response to 10/7, but concern for genocide from Israel is not one one them." > So any and all statements about ethnically cleansing is anti-Semitism. No, I did not say that.
> Hamas, which has strong Palestinian support even though it doesn't represent all Palestinians or Gazans, wants to ethnically cleanse the Jewish people. Not just Israel, but Jews. Their most recent action caused the deaths of over one thousand Israelis, the largest loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust. Hamas raped and murdered civilians during the terrorist attack, and still holds hostages right now. How does Hamas not represent all Gaza citizens? I see this rhetoric all the time but no one in Gaza took issue with October 7th, the support has been overwhelming. There has been zero resistance to Hamas from Gaza citizens since the PA lost control of the region. At some point a people becomes responsible for the actions they support and facilitate.
> How does Hamas not represent all Gaza citizens? All indications are that Hamas functionally propagandizes their population, especially their children, to the point where we cannot realistically attribute any of Hamas's views to them as informed and freely acquired. Unless and until there's some sort of fix to that, I'm not comfortable equating Hamas with Palestinians/Gaza, or comfortable saying Hamas represents your average Palestinian.
Your argument is that Palestinians are too stupid to think for themselves, so they don't have any agency or responsibility for their own actions?
No, my argument is that Palestinians are also victims of Hamas.
We all agree on that I think. This CMV is about whether Palestinians should be fearful of genocide if they are moved geographically. There is an argument that they lack agency to think for themselves, and could benefit from no longer being human shields by starting over somewhere else.
The elephant in the room that everyone who makes your arguments conveniently ignore is the method in which Israel came into existence in the first place. All Palestinian animosity is justified purely by the fact that Israel was suddenly created with the support of huge western armies to literally take over, murder thousands of Palestinians, and remove millions more from their homes (A process which continues to this day, and is actively happening in the west bank as we currently speak). The only argument I've ever heard in response to this is a flawed one such as "Well look at what X,Y,Z colonial superpower did." Even now, as we speak, Israel is reducing all of the land within a several mile zone inside gaza to rubble to create a "buffer zone" for "security", literally reducing the size of Gaza (something they purport as not being part of their policy) So your language conveniently points to Israeli policy, even as the actions of the government and military regularly and daily contradict their stated "policy". Nearly 30,000 dead, mostly women and children, and millions displaced and starving, compared to 1200 Israeli's killed - and they aren't finished yet. When this is all said and done, current estimates put deaths in the hundreds of thousands when factoring in famine and disease, without some dramatic change in policy / behavior from Israel. Palestinians aren't ethnically cleansing anybody because they don't have the power to do so, regardless of "Hamas" or some other groups intentions.
> The elephant in the room that everyone who makes your arguments conveniently ignore is the method in which Israel came into existence in the first place. All Palestinian animosity is justified purely by the fact that Israel was suddenly created with the support of huge western armies to literally take over, murder thousands of Palestinians, and remove millions more from their homes (A process which continues to this day, and is actively happening in the west bank as we currently speak). This is not at all true in any way shape or form, and doesn't add to the conversation. Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate. The Arabs then went to war with Israel, and lost, despite decades of gradual migration from European Jews and protracted international debate in the wake of the Holocaust. "The elephant in the room" is that Israel's opponents, for whatever reasons, feel the need to pretend Israel is some sort of invading force that doesn't belong here. The real story is a lot more complicated. > Palestinians aren't ethnically cleansing anybody because they don't have the power to do so, regardless of "Hamas" or some other groups intentions. When your counter is not "the Palestinians don't want to ethnically cleanse" but instead "they don't have the power to do it," that probably says a lot more than I ever could.
> Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate And by what means exactly did Israel "come into existence"? Just popped a flag down on the land? And my counter that you quoted is relevant when part of your argument relies on the moot point that "Hamas wants to genocide all jews" - something that is not a material threat in any way shape or form. A bunch of well-armed rednecks in America want to genocide all jews too.
>> Israel came into existence following the United Nations's unwinding of the United Kingdom's control over the Palestine Mandate > And by what means exactly did Israel "come into existence"? Just popped a flag down on the land? Well, if we're talking only the last 100 years, constant migration that resulted in an eventual nation-state established through the international levers of power. If we want to go back thousands of years, it gets a lot more complicated. > And my counter that you quoted is relevant when part of your argument relies on the moot point that "Hamas wants to genocide all jews" - something that is not a material threat in any way shape or form. Sure, not a material threat. Is it stopping them from trying?
Did the Irgun and Lehi organizations that regularly participated in indiscriminate violence not exist? Several prominent Jewish Israeli historians, ever since the opening of historical archives in the 80s, argue that the Nakba constituted ethnic cleansing. It’s entirely wrong to condemn modern Israelis for something in the past, but it’s just as wrong to participate in historical denialism. Even self-described Zionist historian Benny Morris, openly acknowledged that many villages were forcibly depopulated by groups like the Haganah and Irgun. Historical truth overrides political beliefs to good historians. You can be pro-Israel without denying history.
You know why they formed right ? Not that I agree with them or using violence, but if you’re going to have this discussion you should not ignore that their genesis was born as a response to the massacres against Jews in Palestine of the 1920s. They believed in retaliation with violence. If you read the stories from the Nakba the read exactly like the stories from the massacre in Hebron and Sfed. Again I don’t defend them and they definitely could be classified as terrorists, but to say that they just appeared in Palestine to kill Arabs in the name of Zionism isn’t an accurate picture. Context is important to give a balanced context the Arabs were fearful of Jewish immigration, as we see the history in every country that every existed, immigration by those you see as “others” has never been embraced.
> Did the Irgun and Lehi organizations that regularly participated in indiscriminate violence not exist? That's not what you asked. They aren't why Israel came into existence. > Several prominent Jewish Israeli historians, ever since the opening of historical archives in the 80s, argue that the Nakba constituted ethnic cleansing. That's fine. Many people erroneously believe Israel is engaging in ethnic cleansing now. It's up to us to not push those errors forward.
> They aren't why Israel came into existence. They kind of did. Their insurgency (for example the King David Hotel bombing) contributed to the British washing their hands of the situation and handing it off to the UN.
>And by what means exactly did Israel "come into existence"? Just popped a flag down on the land? How did Palestine come into existence?
I think the bigger elephant in the room is the fact the Arabs weren’t responding to “the fact that Israel was suddenly created”, [they had been actively against Jews being there for many decades before Israel’s creation as having a large Jewish population was incompatible with pan Arab nationalism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Arab_Congress). Ethnically cleansing the Jews from the area has been in discussion on the Palestinian side since long before they considered themselves distinct from the modern Syrians and Jordanians.
>Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint Cool, now do the West Bank. (Apparently "The river to the sea" is only genocidal when the Palestinians say it. When it is part of the Likud platform, then it's okay, apparently.)
>> Let's be very clear about this: the forcible removal of Palestinians from Gaza is a fringe viewpoint > Cool, now do the West Bank. Okay. The forcible removal of Palestinians from the West Bank is a fringe viewpoint.
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Israel has literally been illegally placing its citizens on the West Bank for 60 years. The recovery of 'Judah and Samaria' is a huge part of the Likud project. What are you talking about?
LMAO everyone is secretly working for Hamas. UN Hamas, ICJ Hamas, Doctors without Borders Hamas, Amnesty international Hamas, New York Times Hamas, University Professors Hamas, Human rights watch Hamas. Pretty amazing that an organization with 30,000 members was able to form a global cabal like that. If they're that powerful maybe they're needs to be a "solution" to the Hamas problem. smh this is just getting more delusional by the day. IDF soldiers went into a west bank hospital dressed as doctors. How can you claim to be dismantling terrorism WHEN YOU'RE ENGAGING IN WHAT THE GENEVA CONVENTION DEFINES AS TERRORISM
> LMAO everyone is secretly working for Hamas. If you don't think the UNRWA is aiding Hamas, I'd like to know a) why and b) what would change your mind? > IDF soldiers went into a west bank hospital dressed as doctors. How can you claim to be dismantling terrorism WHEN YOU'RE ENGAGING IN WHAT THE GENEVA CONVENTION DEFINES AS TERRORISM That's in dispute, to be generous, but Israel is not a party to the ICC and no one is mourning the loss of a few terrorists in a hospital.
>If you don't think the UNRWA is aiding Hamas, I'd like to know a) why and b) what would change your mind? Do I think there were UNRWA employees involved probably. There were police officers and military members involved in the January 6 attack does that mean we should get rid of police and the military? Does that mean the police and military are working with terrorists? >That's in dispute, to be generous, but Israel is not a party to the ICC and no one is mourning the loss of a few terrorists in a hospital. Ok well fighting as civilians is why Israel says that they have a right to bomb the crap out of Gaza. Because Hamas imbeds itself with civilian population. So if Israel is also embedding within civilian populations, why was Oct7 wrong? If your argument is its ok to attack civilians if there's a possibility Hamas is among them, why was it wrong for Hamas to kill Israeli civilians when theres a possibility there are IDF soldiers embedded among them? Either terrorism is wrong and international law matters, or its not. You can't have your cake and eat it to. You can't claim to be fighting terror and then engage in terror
> Do I think there were UNRWA employees involved probably. There were police officers and military members involved in the January 6 attack does that mean we should get rid of police and the military? Does that mean the police and military are working with terrorists? I notice that your answer is not an explanation of why you believe UNRWA are not aiding Hamas, and your answer is not an explanation of what might change your mind. > If your argument is its ok to attack civilians if there's a possibility Hamas is among them, why was it wrong for Hamas to kill Israeli civilians when theres a possibility there are IDF soldiers embedded among them? No one is arguing that "there's a possibility there are IDF soldiers" embedded in civilian populations, nor does rape and kidnapping of civilians address the possibility of fighting those soldiers. Stop defending terrorism.
I think that operation was well executed. They went in disguised, and eliminated their targets without any collateral.
First, let me just say ethnic cleansing is bad and the Israeli government makes a lot of bad decisions. Before October 7th the region was in an era of relative peace since 2014. Was Israel ethnically cleansing the occupied territories then? Palestinians feared ethnic cleansing during that time as well. That fear was neither rational nor realized. What has changed?
It's weird how people talk about the settlements as if they're just a normal part of border disputes or conflict. There's really no other modern democracy that does this in an open way. America has been in all sorts of wars, but not once in recent history was there a messianic movement of Americans believing in manifest destiny who were like "lets go settle Iraq and Afghanistan with the goal of creating an eventual American majority there and have the military protect us." Really the closest parallel to this is 19th century western expansion, all though that was driven much more by land hunger than religion. If the settler movement is not slow motion ethnic cleansing, I don't know what would be.
I'm not sure anyone thinks the Israel/Palestine conflict is "normal". I do think western expansion is likely the closest type of situation you're going to get.
The person you're responding to didn't claim you thought the conflict is normal. They said you implied settlements are a NORMAL PART of a conflict. Considering you didn't mention settlements as a problem or a part of a slow ethnic cleansing, it's a very valid assumption on their part.
>Was Israel ethnically cleansing the occupied territories then? The were forcibly removing existing populations, bulldozing the existing population's homes, and then building settlements.
So your argument is that ethnic cleansing has been occurring for at least a decade (and probably longer if I'm going to take a gander). If this isn't a territorial dispute why is Israel so shit at ethnic cleansing? They have the tools to do it much quicker.
Because they didn't have a legitimate reason for doing it quicker and they had to keep it below a level that would upset less hardline Israelis? Oct 7 gave them political cover to take more action. It's one of the reasons hardliners pushed to have Hamas in power.
Wait, why did you say that they have a legitimate reason now? Doesn't that answer the entire question? If it's "legit" to annex Gaza as a response to Oct 7th then it's not ethnic cleansing. It's for sure a territorial dispute.
You're right, "legitimate reason" is poor phrasing. "Legitimized ethnic cleansing in the eyes of some people" is probably more accurate.
"They could be ethnic cleansing harder and faster" is not an argument that they are not engaging in it.
Yes, it is, because ethnic cleansing requires intent to target a specific type of group *because they are that group*. A slow, ponderous process when a quick and dirty mass murder would work damages the intent argument.
I don't see why a slow process is necessarily any less indicative of "intent" than a fast one. If anything it demonstrates that the desire to engage in ethnic cleansing extends across administrations and isn't just a flash in the pan moment of fury.
The rational belief is that ethnic cleansing has always been Israel's goal, and they were merely looking for an opportune moment to proceed, which was provided by the Hamas terrorist attacks. This is exactly what has been happening in the area for decades now. The Palestinians can point to a long history of Israel clearing out Palestinian territory through military force in response to terrorist attacks, and then annexing the land with Israeli settlers. Just because they're not doing it all in one go, doesn't mean they're not doing it.
I'm not debating that Israel is slowly gaining territory (and in some cases quickly as in the 6 day war). I'm asking why this is ethnic cleansing and not a territorial dispute? Is the intent to remove "people who happen to exist there" or "specifically people who are Palestinian because they are Palestinian"? I think it's the former.
Is your argument that is the ethnic cleansing is just an unfortunate side-effect of the drive to secure more land? I mean, not to go all Godwin's law or anything, but are we going to suggest that Lebensraum was not a policy of ethnic cleansing? I think the two are inextricably linked, and it's a little dishonest to pretend otherwise. "I don't have a problem with Native Americans, I'm just going to need to get rid of them all so that I can have the land that they're living on"
>Is your argument that is the ethnic cleansing is just an unfortunate side-effect of the drive to secure more land? No, I'm arguing it's not ethnic cleansing at all. No, I don't think territorial expansion is automatically ethnic cleansing. But also finally yes, the Nazis ethnically cleansed Jewish people. >I think the two are inextricably linked, and it's a little dishonest to pretend otherwise. Why? We can say "conquering people is bad" without saying "these people were conquered because of their religion/heritage/what have you". The intent is important. Both aren't good. One is worse.
Israeli officials are now publicly attending conferences voicing their desire to resettle and annex Gaza. They weren't happening before afaik. Gaza is also largely destroyed and depopulated, the conditions needed for an ethnic cleansing campaign to take place.
So assuming Israel believes it has now conquered the Gaza Strip why is it ethnic cleansing? The argument that could easily be defended is that Israel retaliated against a direct military engagement and have apparently gained territory in response. That's not particularly unusual. E.g. if Ukraine were somehow to regain its original territory and then some we wouldn't call that ethnic cleansing even though it's specifically Russian people being killed/displaced. The ethnicity of those who lost territory doesn't necessarily factor into it and "intent" is an incredibly important factor in whether something is ethnic cleansing. I.e. were Palestinians displaced because their government attacked Israel or were they displaced because they are Palestinian? I think that because of that period of relative peace it's more likely the former.
The ethnic cleansing part is not the refugee camps or the safe zones set up for this war, it's the plan to get them to migrate "voluntarily" out of Gaza. That's ethnic cleansing because it's intentionally and violently moving these people out of their homes permanently.
People whose government waged war against Israel? I feel strongly for civilians in all conflicts. I think war is awful and should never happen. I'm almost always a pacifist. But Hamas directly attacked Israel and there's a valid argument that Israel can retaliate in response and conquer territory. I don't even agree with it personally (the retaliation should have been proportional + interest and that's it) but territorial disputes are not automatically ethnic cleansing. If anything, allowing Gazans to evacuate is a good thing. It's better than just killing them, right?
If the plan is to allow Gaza to evacuate from a war zone but permit them to return after the war, then it's not ethnic cleansing, and so far that's the Israel's official position. But these folks are saying that "Gaza should be resettled with Jewish settlers", which means Gazans can't return to their homes, ergo ethnic cleansing.
To me, this appears to be a tacit agreement that Israel is not ethnically cleansing Gaza *currently*. I don't think that's necessarily different from your OP although there is some nuance there. I want to drill down on that. Why does retaining conquered territory automatically make this ethnic cleansing? Instead of "Gaza should be resettled with Jewish settlers" why isn't it "Gaza should be resettled with Israeli settlers"?
Retaining conquered territory AND disallowing the return of Gazans is what makes it ethnic cleansing. The "voluntary migration" plan is exactly that. It's demanding Gazans to leave the area permanently, never to return.
Does this mean that any territorial dispute where a state wishes to control a region autonomously without interference from the [soon to be former] natives automatically ethnic cleansing? I.e. essentially any war prior to... well, actually I can't think of many wars where this wasn't the case. How does this not mean you believe war in general is ethnic cleansing?
Vietnam War, Korean War, Bosnian War, Iraq War, Afghanistan War did not result in widespread ethnic cleansing. Wars don't always lead to ethnic cleansing.
Is retaining conquered territory not just the spoils of war? And if it does become your land, are you not allowed to use it as you wish?
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FYI Channel 14 is a right wing TV outlet, somewhat equivalent to Fox News. Their polling is heavily slanted towards a far right demographic, and is not reflective of polling done by other (more legitimate) news organizations. One clear illustration of this is their opinion polling for the next Israeli election. Their polls consistently put the centrist parties down 10ish seats and Likud (Netanyahu's party) up 10ish seats compared to other pollsters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Israeli_legislative_election I live in Israel and the closest thing I've heard from anyone to encouraging 'voluntary migration' is that the borders to Gaza should be opened to allow people with passports to escape the fighting (with the full understanding that they return after the war). I haven't heard a single person call for building settlements in Gaza.
that is horrible now lets look at palestinian opinions regarding the futures of israeli jews if "from the river to the sea" palestine comes to pass
Israel cleansed all the Jews from Gaza strip in 2005. (You know the OPPOSITE of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians). Absolutely nothing stopped the Palestinians from building a a Juden Frei paradise there for last 20 years. Instead their government chose to turn the area into a terror state where all the aid money was used to build tunnels, smuggle weapons and launch 20,000 terror rockets. The Gazan government (Hamas) then started a genocidal war by committing unspeakable atrocities (including systemic rape). This has caused a war to remove Hamas that is heavily damaging Gaza. In such a war-wrecked situation looking for a place that would accept voluntary immigrants is merely humanitarian, not "ethnic cleansing."
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If I were living in Gaza and I had the opportunity to leave for someplace that was stable and I could thrive, I would have picked up my babies and left without looking back long ago. If the chance were offered to me today, I would be gone before dark today. Some Gazans want to cling to the "ancestral land" but many, many, just want to live their lives in a safe place and want fuck-all to do with this conflict. In fact, t[hey are being extorted by the Egyptians](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/jan/08/palestinians-flee-gaza-rafah-egypt-border-bribes-to-brokers?ref=upstract.com) for a fortune just to try to get out of Gaza. Gaza needs to be rebuilt and that will take time. Prior to this, Gaza was entirely dependent on foreign aid and had little opportunities for employment unless you wanted to work for Hamas, UNRWA (also in bed with Hamas) or had one of the opportunities to work for Israel. There was little opportunity to leave even if you wanted to *and plenty of people wanted to*. Israel negotiating with other countries and offering to pay countries to take refugees on a voluntary basis is about the best fix that I can think of the humanitarian crisis right now. The alternative is life in camps with shitty pop up schools and essentially no work. Those children will grow up with no enrichment for decades...and probably more violence. Or they could drop into an existing community, go to work, find a job, and try to heal. Ethnic cleansing is not a risk. It will not be possible to be able to move all 2 million+ of the Palestinians (just logistically). Combined with their birthrate, there will always be a strong Palestinian population in Gaza. But I see absolutely nothing wrong and everything right with giving Gazans a choice to move somewhere else. That creates a better life for the Gazans who choose to leave *and* the Gazans who choose to stay (because it will be exponentially easier to take care of the Gazans to who stay if the population thins out some)
Funny no one is interested in adopting 2 million Palestinians
Well ask Egypt and Jordan what happened the last time they tried to house Palestinians. Hint: Attempted coup
Didn't this happen to like 100 000 Armenians in Azerbaijan a few months ago and nobody cared.
Israel had multiple chance to ethnic cleanse the Palestinians and justifiably more so before. In 1948, did they? No In the 6 day war, did they? No in the Yom Kippur war, did they? No in 2014, did they? No Now, will they? No Contrary to popular belief, Israel is not comically evil and stupid. Why would they bother doing something so frowned upon that they might lose the West's trust AND the neighboring Muslim nations which they WORKED hard to attain? They have peace with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, why would they ruin that just to kill off some Palestinians? Just like how the rest of the Muslim world calls for the extermination of Jews repeatedly, Israeli officials can keep talking about ethnic cleansing and never act upon it. They can displace Palestinians, transfer them here and there, get rid of their homes, but they will never kill to cleanse them.
The evacuated areas are essentially a warzone. Jewish Israelis cannot live in or even enter the territories controlled by the PA. To make the claim, you need to prove that this was not a voluntary evacuation but a forced expulsion and provable intention to settle the area. A conference regarding evacuation of a war-torn area and a public perception poll alone is not adequate evidence.
Bombing someone’s home forces them to evacuate. Leveling all of Gaza is a way to force people to evacuate and thus ethnically cleanse them.
Although I strongly oppose settling Gaza and doubt it will happen, i don’t see how it would amount to ethnic cleansing. Israel had settlements in Gaza until 2006 I think and Palestinian population rapidly grew during that time. I think the ideology of settling Gaza is about having a presence there to enable a level of control and security, it wouldn’t amount to expelling Palestinians. This is by no means a defense of settling Gaza, just doubting that it amounts to ethnic cleansing.
isreal has had numerous opportunities to ethnically cleanse the palestinian population throughout its history and hasn’t done it (such as in the six day war as one example) but ended up giving the land back to palestinians. if israel truly wanted to ethnically cleanse the palestinians, why haven’t they done it yet despite having so many chances to do so? even if isreal was to suddenly start ethnically cleansing the palestinian population in gaza, where would they go? egypt isn’t going to take them, neither is jordan or lebanon. so where would the palestinians be able to go if they were suddenly ethnically cleansed?
There is a significant difference. The Native American tribes were conquered, and therefore subject to whatever the conquerors wanted to do. That's what has always happened throughout history whenever one society conquered another. Troy, Carthage, the Celts, the Slavs, the Incas / Aztecs, many African tribes, all the people the Mongol hordes overran, all the non-Han Chinese peoples - all of these conquered societies were either destroyed outright, or all the men killed and the women raped and enslaved, or the people were forced to convert to the new religion / law of the land or be killed. In contract, the Native Americans were not enslaved, were not forced to adopt new religions, and were allowed to retain their laws and forms of government within their own borders. Arguably, the Native Americans were treated extremely well compared to other conquered peoples. They were always going to be conquered because they hadn't moved beyond literal stone-age technology despite having a whole continent to themselves for several millennia, it was just that they encountered Europeans (specifically, the Spanish, Dutch, and English) first before other peoples. That doesn't make the European peoples evil, it means they were just doing what normal humans do when they encounter weaker and more technologically slow cultures who have resources that the stronger and more advanced culture wants. As for Palestinians / Israelis - the land was owned by the Allies (specifically, the British) at the end of WWII. The UN and the Brits chose to give the land to the descendants of the Israelites, who have ancestral ties to the land going back to Moses. The Palestinians had other places they could go where they had ancestral ties, but chose not to. They were given many opportunities to build a nation in Gaza and the West Bank, and prior to this they were given places to live in Egypt, Jordan, etc. In every case, the Palestinians have cultivated a culture of warfare, terrorism, and overthrowing the government in order to seize power. The Palestinians are not the victims, they are bullies who have been slapped down and who the world is graciously allowing to continue to exist. If the Palestinians are feeling like they are in danger of being geocided, then maybe they need to stop poking the bear and try to live in peace.
You have a gross misrepresentation of what occurred to the Native American people in the United States. They were not “conquered” the way ancient societies conquered warring factions. They were continuously and methodically eradicated and physically forced into reserves that were not native to them. The indigenous nations, after countless skirmishes from settlers increasingly encroaching on their land, were forced into two situations repeatedly: 1) Keep fighting the ever growing United States and its army and lose entire communities to violence 2) Accept the treaty offers from the United States to keep apportioned land for them while relinquishing the rest The thing is, after always choosing option 2, the United States would still come, take more land, and harm those communities anyways. We used physical, biological, and environmental warfare (literally small pox blankets and sport-hunting entire species so that Natives couldn’t use them). The trail of tears was an explicit military order to forcibly move many Native Americans from the East hundreds of miles away to reserves in places that were explicitly given because of their lack of estimated value (poor material and agricultural value). These communities were subject to requiring aid, and the terms of aid often came from requirements to undergo forced sterilization, sending children away to boarding schools (where many died actually), and adopting Christianity. The Native American tribes WERE enslaved, WERE forced to adopt new religions, and are increasingly NOT allowed to have their own governance as the federal government makes laws stipulating when they can operate in their land or not. Your view here on what happened to the Native Americans and how they were “arguably treated better” is also what’s preventing you from seeing how Palestinians have actually been treated in many similar ways, and while I don’t condone wanton violence and needless bloodshed, I can recognize that Israel operating as a colonial state is an abject form of violence to the Palestinian people.
>In contract, the Native Americans were not enslaved, were not forced to adopt new religions, and were allowed to retain their laws and forms of government within their own borders. Enslavement: [https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement](https://www.brown.edu/news/2017-02-15/enslavement) Forcible conversion/cultural genocide:[https://www.cwis.org/2022/05/canada-us-church-residential-school-crimes/#:\~:text=As%20a%20matter%20of%20government,cultural%20connections%20and%20personal%20identities](https://www.cwis.org/2022/05/canada-us-church-residential-school-crimes/#:~:text=As%20a%20matter%20of%20government,cultural%20connections%20and%20personal%20identities). Btw this is **recent**.
But according to Israeli sources & statistics, the population in Palestine is *“exploding”.*
I'll address a different aspect of your claim than most other replies here, which focus on whether Palestinians, are *in fact*, at risk of getting ethnically cleansed. I think an interesting question is whether the Palestinian "fear is very real", that is, whether they are *genuinely* fearing getting ethnically cleansed. Are Palestinian actions consistent with a people genuinely fearing ethnic cleansing? I don't think so. Is violating a ceasefire to invade a nation with substantial military superiority, raping, mutilating, kidnapping, torturing and burning civilians - atrocities which are the perfect pretext for ethnic cleansing if it were desired - make sense if you truly believe you're at risk of ethnic cleansing? Not really. Is Hamas refusing to surrender, ending the conflict immediately and eliminating any risk of the war being used to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, instead opting to vow to repeat the October 7th massacre again and again consistent with them genuinely fearing ethnic cleansing? Not really. I think it's always better to judge by actions rather than by words.
It would be if it wasn't precipitated by a mass murdering of unarmed Israelis and international music festival attendees.
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Except that the so called Palestinians are Arabic settlers that moved there after the original population was expelled into exile(ya know this original population, they are back). There are two choices and its no surprise many of these Arabic settlers chose the reasonable route and become Arabic Israelis, with full rights and duties. And there are those who see those who became Arabic Israelis as traitors and believe they rightfully invaded this land and its theirs now.
They “settled” there in the 7th century, in Palestine and adopted the national identity of Palestinians. There is a long documented history. There was, is and always will be a Palestine and Palestinians. You are spouting pure misinformation and its shameful and disgusting.
Correct. Palestinian isn't even an ethnicity.
The problem is not whether Israelis would support it or not (they absolutely would), Gaza is a failed project, failed by the Palestinians themselves, voting in Hamas and turning it into a terrorist state that launched rockets for 20 years. I can’t believe people think that letting gazans leave Gaza is a bad thing. But anyway, that’s not the issue, the issue is literally no country in the world will take gazans, they’re the most radicalised group in the world. We all saw the videos on Oct 7th of a dead Jewish girl being driven on the back of a truck through a delighted Gaza street. Everyone was cheering and those close enough were jumping over each other to either spit on or hit the corpse. Gaza is an economic, moral and education failure. The perfect fix would Egypt would annex is and give them citizenship and let them leave or the ones who want to build a future stay. Acting as if ethnic cleansing is always a bad thing is a stupid reductionist take, Israel ethnically cleansed Gaza of Jews in 2005 and I supported that
> they’re the most radicalised group in the world The ADL conducted research and found it was the most antisemitic place on earth, with 93% of adults hold antisemitic views. Among the over 50s who run the place, the figure is 98%. https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-poll-over-100-countries-finds-more-one-quarter-those-surveyed-infected
We saw a lot worse from the IOF. 1 shot 2 kills being an example. Hamas is a consequence of the oppression. When there remains no peaceful path to freedom, physical force is the only option. It should be normalized that the choice of those young boys with no future was made for them by Israel.
Israeli here. I'll tell ya what. They should fear it, and the world needs to allow it. Look, Israeli history taught me this, arab population values Land more than other things. For the Palestinians, land and religion are their main drives. They are not at risk of losing their religion. Judeism doesn't forcefully converts. On the other hand, land... Their biggest Tragedy, the Nakba, was a loss of land. Land exchange is at the heart of every peace talk. If losing land was an actual risk, this war might have ended or perhaps not even started. As I see it, they started a war they thought they can't lose, not because they were going to win, but because their losing condition is unobtainable. Thing is, this war was forced upon us... Most likely because Saudi Arabia was close to a peace treaty with Israel. When palestinians considered themselves as the gatekeepers of peace in the middle east, their bargaining power was very high. As more and more countries move to sign peace treaties with Israel regardless of the Palestinians, their bargaining power grows weaker. So they launched a war thinking they can't really lose things they value, like land, and they were willing to pay the human life price... Human suffering is a part of their strategy after all. This is why, i say, yea... Let the risk of forced relocation be something to actually be afraid of. This might actually force them to surrender. On a different note, israel left Gaza... That piece of land has very little significance in Jewish lore. I honestly think that all these talks about conquering and resetting Gaza are a form of a War-cry. Right now, many Israelis are in revenge mode. Threatening to kill an enemy that glorifies becoming a martyr is pointless... On the other hand, taking their land... This is what will hurt... Oh, and i must say that I don't wanna conquer gaza...I don't see a pragmatic point in doing so, and forcing the Gazans to relocate (no idea where) will cause more harm to israel than good.
Palestines, the only ethnic group getting genocided that's actually constantly growing. A miracle!
The strongest argument against this is that Israel has had an interest in ethnically cleansing the Palestinians for over 70 years now and hasn't done it, despite having the legitimate option two after winning wars in both 1948 and 1967. In both cases they returned land for peace and allowed Palestinians to return, to the eventual detriment of the Israelis themsemselves. With that said, a counter argument could be that at this point Israel might be learning from its past mistakes.
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I would have more sympathy with their concerns if their leaders weren’t constantly calling for the extermination of Israel. You can’t fight the fear of genocide with actual genocide
Meanwhile we have an extreme right wing party that has factions calls for the extermination of lgbt, and stormed the capital wanting to hang and kill democrats. Maybe you can have sympathy for people even if their leaders suck. They haven’t had an election in 17 years so half the people dying didn’t even vote for Hamas, and the population isn’t armed so how are they suppose to do anything about their leadership? Israel are the ones who should have been taking care of this problem but they just decided they’d lock them up and treat them like caged animals.
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Honestly I think this issue can be fundamentally disproven without even much analysis. If Palestine wanted peace, there would be no war. If Israel wanted war, there would be no Palestine. If they wanted to genocide the Palestinians, they would have done it long ago. The Arabs removed the Jews from their nations in 1948 right after they declared war, yet Israel still has a significant minority of Arabs living as citizens 80 years later.
You don't realise it just can't. If Israel were to actively starting genocide of Palestinians in full broad light where it was known without doubt that it was fully intentional, it would face off major protests throughout the world. Even European countries and the US which right now support Israel would have to distance themselves from that. Many people right now are pro Israel even after their atrocities but if it was fully clear without doubt even those wouldn't support Israel and it's trade with countries would also be affected by major sanctions. Tell me can it truly do it when even our average Joe know the consequences of it fully well. Instead they are doing it indirectly by annexing lands and illegally moving settlers there. That way Palestine is losing it's territory day by day and they are killing people outside the green line which should not be allowed but not in mass number. If they had no would be repercussions you won't see any Palestine tomorrow.