The last two thousand years? The Ottoman Empire was a refuge for Jewish people for a long time. It wasn’t just a neverending massacre or they wouldn’t have kept settling there from other places. It gave then some restrictions, but it did the same to Christians. And comparatively, they lived pretty good lives and thrived, especially compared to the oppression and massacred they faced elsewhere in Europe. It had the largest Jewish population by the end of the 16th century. They came from Russia, Prussia, ran from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Portugal, etc. It was way better than living under Christians for a long time. They would encourage each other to move there. It wasn’t until the 19th century that antisemitism started to ramp up there. And most scholars agree the attitude was imported from Christian Arabs, so it’s not just a Muslim thing. It sucks that it started to rise again then, but nationalism does that. It made it worse on both sides, since around that time Zionism started picking up steam, too, and they were buying land and kicking off the native tenants to make a country. Not to excuse the antisemitism, because obviously that is horrible, and there’s a long history of it happening all over the world. But the point is, so many immigrated there because of things like the Holocaust in Germany or the Russian pogroms, then started fighting completely unrelated people and kicking them off their land, like was done to them somewhere else. Same reason that even though I respect the struggle of slaves, I don’t approve of the colonial way Liberia was founded and the way the colonists treated the indigenous people.
Israel is barely a democracy. There are millions of people under their control who don’t get a vote. Their leader is stoking a war and nationalistic fervor to avoid corruption trials. They jail people for criticism, require military service, and have killed more journalists than any recent conflict. They’re an apartheid, settler colonial ethnostate that only exists because of racist and antisemitic Western interests. Gaza is not a failed state, because every attempt to become a state is stymied by Israel, the country that actually controls all their infrastructure, food, travel, sea, and air. Israel as a nation state could easily disappear and be replaced by an actual state with equal rights and equality for everyone in the area, without a single person being killed in the process, if the US and the Israeli people or government wished it. And that would be a good thing for both the Palestinians who could live free, and the Israelis who don’t want to have to worry about being threatened by actual attacks from rightfully pissed people all the time.
More, but I don’t think it gives them the right to genocide innocent people. And it can definitely still be improved, a lot. We should have a higher bar than that.
They require military service to build roads and bridges. Many, many places do it also. Seems like a lot of people criticize only Israel for this, like it’s only a problem when it’s Jewish people having a military.
You’re right, Gaza is not a failed state. It would have to have been a state to be a failed state. The correct terms for it are irredenta or unincorporated territory, a lawless shithole with stakeholders that don’t care ahout it (unless it is killing Jews). Literally the only concievable future for Gaza that isn’t a complete humanitarian catastrophe is going to look a lot like five to ten years of martial law. Gaza has zero capabilitynor capacity to rebuild itself and literally nobody else cares about it enough to do it for Gaza except the one country you would have a problem doing it. So your plan really is to condemn Gaza. If you wanted to save Gaza you’d be in Gaza pointing out who Hamas is and where they are hiding. See, even Gaza doesn’t care to save Gaza.
Israel doesn’t care about Gazans either. If they did, they wouldn’t be bombing every hospital and refugee camp and preventing aid from coming in. Nor would they be preventing them from making a state and having self-rule at every opportunity. Gaza is already condemned when Israel decided to reduce it all to rubble and make public statements about reducing the population from millions to a few thousands. Hamas is just an excuse to raze and then take the land. Without Hamas, you get something like the government in the West Bank, which hasn’t done anything to prevent Israel from taking more land, imprisoning and killing more Palestinians, and failed at every opportunity to get them their own state or a good quality of life, either, because they have no power against the US and Israel. It’s the same state of affairs but slower. So no, Hamas isn’t the cause of Gaza people suffering, it’s Israel.
The West Bank is slowly falling to Hamas and Iranian* corruption too. There are tunnels there now, Islamic State fighters, Islamic Jihad fighters, etc.,. etc. If Palestinians care about Palestinians, point them out and point out the tunnels, stop turning every public institution into instrumentalities of international terrorism, they’d still have their ports and hospitals, if not the direct consequences of their own actions. You think everyone is oblivious to the massive underground construction when they are busting out walls into the surgical wing to sink a new shaft? Please.
The last two thousand years? The Ottoman Empire was a refuge for Jewish people for a long time. It wasn’t just a neverending massacre or they wouldn’t have kept settling there from other places. It gave then some restrictions, but it did the same to Christians. And comparatively, they lived pretty good lives and thrived, especially compared to the oppression and massacred they faced elsewhere in Europe. It had the largest Jewish population by the end of the 16th century. They came from Russia, Prussia, ran from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Portugal, etc. It was way better than living under Christians for a long time. They would encourage each other to move there. It wasn’t until the 19th century that antisemitism started to ramp up there. And most scholars agree the attitude was imported from Christian Arabs, so it’s not just a Muslim thing. It sucks that it started to rise again then, but nationalism does that. It made it worse on both sides, since around that time Zionism started picking up steam, too, and they were buying land and kicking off the native tenants to make a country. Not to excuse the antisemitism, because obviously that is horrible, and there’s a long history of it happening all over the world. But the point is, so many immigrated there because of things like the Holocaust in Germany or the Russian pogroms, then started fighting completely unrelated people and kicking them off their land, like was done to them somewhere else. Same reason that even though I respect the struggle of slaves, I don’t approve of the colonial way Liberia was founded and the way the colonists treated the indigenous people.
Israel is barely a democracy. There are millions of people under their control who don’t get a vote. Their leader is stoking a war and nationalistic fervor to avoid corruption trials. They jail people for criticism, require military service, and have killed more journalists than any recent conflict. They’re an apartheid, settler colonial ethnostate that only exists because of racist and antisemitic Western interests. Gaza is not a failed state, because every attempt to become a state is stymied by Israel, the country that actually controls all their infrastructure, food, travel, sea, and air. Israel as a nation state could easily disappear and be replaced by an actual state with equal rights and equality for everyone in the area, without a single person being killed in the process, if the US and the Israeli people or government wished it. And that would be a good thing for both the Palestinians who could live free, and the Israelis who don’t want to have to worry about being threatened by actual attacks from rightfully pissed people all the time.
In your mind, is Israel more or less of a democracy than any nearby country’s immamate or caliphate?
More, but I don’t think it gives them the right to genocide innocent people. And it can definitely still be improved, a lot. We should have a higher bar than that.
I agree.
They require military service to build roads and bridges. Many, many places do it also. Seems like a lot of people criticize only Israel for this, like it’s only a problem when it’s Jewish people having a military.
You’re right, Gaza is not a failed state. It would have to have been a state to be a failed state. The correct terms for it are irredenta or unincorporated territory, a lawless shithole with stakeholders that don’t care ahout it (unless it is killing Jews). Literally the only concievable future for Gaza that isn’t a complete humanitarian catastrophe is going to look a lot like five to ten years of martial law. Gaza has zero capabilitynor capacity to rebuild itself and literally nobody else cares about it enough to do it for Gaza except the one country you would have a problem doing it. So your plan really is to condemn Gaza. If you wanted to save Gaza you’d be in Gaza pointing out who Hamas is and where they are hiding. See, even Gaza doesn’t care to save Gaza.
Israel doesn’t care about Gazans either. If they did, they wouldn’t be bombing every hospital and refugee camp and preventing aid from coming in. Nor would they be preventing them from making a state and having self-rule at every opportunity. Gaza is already condemned when Israel decided to reduce it all to rubble and make public statements about reducing the population from millions to a few thousands. Hamas is just an excuse to raze and then take the land. Without Hamas, you get something like the government in the West Bank, which hasn’t done anything to prevent Israel from taking more land, imprisoning and killing more Palestinians, and failed at every opportunity to get them their own state or a good quality of life, either, because they have no power against the US and Israel. It’s the same state of affairs but slower. So no, Hamas isn’t the cause of Gaza people suffering, it’s Israel.
The West Bank is slowly falling to Hamas and Iranian* corruption too. There are tunnels there now, Islamic State fighters, Islamic Jihad fighters, etc.,. etc. If Palestinians care about Palestinians, point them out and point out the tunnels, stop turning every public institution into instrumentalities of international terrorism, they’d still have their ports and hospitals, if not the direct consequences of their own actions. You think everyone is oblivious to the massive underground construction when they are busting out walls into the surgical wing to sink a new shaft? Please.