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Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

This is a huge oversimplification of the conflict.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is not like US native American conflict where we landed somewhere we'd never lived before, killed as many people as possible, and broke treaty after treaty.

The Jews has been living there for 2000+ years. The Ottoman empire was the last empire in control of that area. It lost a war and gave up that land to the British. The British proposed a break up. That was rejected. The UN proposed a break up of the area into Jewish and Arab land. The Arabs did not agree with he division of land and went to war with Israel, Israel won. This happened a few times until we ended up with today's boarders.

Now neither the Israelis nor Palestinians believe in a two state solution. And you have two groups of people bent on the others destruction.

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>The Jews has been living there for 2000+ years.

No, the area currently named Israel had not been a jewish state in centuries when the British occupiers gave it to a new set of jewish colonizers of what was an occupied Arab state.

The jewish population of the area label Israel was less than 10% jewish until 1910 or so (after Britain had control and started encouraging colonization before explicitly assigning it to a specific group of Jews). At that point a mass colonization was started. To claim that because "jews have always lived there" means that 10s to 100s of thousands of immigrants moving to an area in which they had not lived in generations are not colonizers is patently false. Especially when the people migrating to the area are the group that have all the financial, military, and political power.

> Now neither the Israelis nor Palestinians believe in a two state solution

you mean the two groups in an apartheid state do not believe that they have equal rights? Remember again, fundamentally the two state solution is "you were colonized, and should be happy to lose half your country". In terms of peace it's probably the only path forward, but don't pretend the victims of colonization should be happy with that outcome.

It wasn’t colonization. It was a partition. Arabs colonized the area first. Then Turks. After the Ottomans were defeated, the British created multiple countries that hadn’t existed before. Arabs were given several: Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. There was also to be a Palestine. Jews were to be given one small piece of the overall territory. Then the Arab countries tried to wipe out Israel and it was only then you had the occupation of what was supposed to become Palestine.

It was similar to the partition of India, which was also something that had only ever existed in that form due to millennia of colonization.

If Jews who moved to the area Arabs occupied are colonizers, what are Arabs who move to Europe?

> Now neither the Israelis nor Palestinians believe in a two state solution. And you have two groups of people bent on the others destruction.

Out of sheer exasperation at this point I would propose forcing a one-state solution on them as a less-bad option. We've tried two state solution for decades and it just plain hasn't worked.

>Out of sheer exasperation at this point I would propose forcing a one-state solution on them as a less-bad option. We've tried two state solution for decades and it just plain hasn't worked.

That would require an external powers go to war with both and conquer them,and then somehow suppress terrorists from both sides.

The idea is soo misguided, it just the kind of intervention the US might attempt

The one state solution would be majority Arab, and they would expel the Jews, or worse. There are no majority Arab states where Jews are safe.

Don’t forget that the Arab countries expelled a million Jews in retaliation for the creation of Israel.

Not a bad idea. But if Palestinians are incorporated into Israel as citizens with full voting rights, Israel will at some point cease to be majority-Jewish. (Or so I have read.) Identity crisis. This is a tough nut to crack.

It wouldn’t be an “identity crisis.” It would be catastrophic for the safety of Jews in the country. There is not a single Muslim Arab country in the world where Jews are first-class citizens. Nearly a million Jews were expelled from Arab countries after the creation of Israel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

Well then I guess it's gotta be two states. Not one-and-a-rump.

“Two-state solution” is an ambiguous concept. Westerners think it means Israel and a Palestinian state. Arabs think it means an Arab state in Palestine and a multi-ethnic, Arab-majority state in Israel. And Israel only exists until Arabs can muster enough arms to expel Jews from that country, like they have done in all the other Arab countries.

We know this because that’s what they keep doing. They have repeatedly tried to wipe out Israel. Thats why Qatar hosts the leadership of Hamas. Even if Palestinians genuinely accepted a two-state solution, the other Arab countries wouldn’t.

> Out of sheer exasperation at this point I would propose forcing a one-state solution on them as a less-bad option. We've tried two state solution for decades and it just plain hasn't worked.

The trouble there is that Israel is specifically a Jewish state. If we ended up with a one-state situation, it wouldn't have a Jewish majority. While many of us might be OK with that, lots of the Jewish inhabitants wouldn't be.

There's a reason that this situation hasn't been resolved, and it's not because people aren't trying.

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