Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

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I don't agree with your characterization of what happened (you keep saying "stole the land" but that's just not true).

But even if I did - why is this the root problem here, and yet not a problem for the millions of other people displaced in the world around the same time, and since then? There have been tens of millions of refugees around the world since 1948, they've all resettled elsewhere and stopped being refugees, not kept the idea of endless resistance until they reclaim their land, despite there being no way to achieve this without causing just as big a humanitarian disaster now, if not bigger.

You're right that if you consider the central issue to be the existence of Israel, everything else is "propaganda". But in no other case is it considered legitimate to wage endless war built on the idea of completely destroying a country that is recognized by almost every other country in the world.

So a more correct thing to say is that the central issue is that the Palestinians have never agreed to any form of living side-by-side with Israel, despite having several opportunities to do so, and have demands that are quite simply illegitimate.

My take on this is that unlike other "refugees", Muslims were in power for 1200 years, and when that was taken away in 1920, they simply could not come to terms that they were now peer level with non-muslims.

50 generations of political, legal, social, and economic supremacy does not go away quickly, and it has only been about 100 years. Imagine if the US as a nation was forcibly disbanded overnight, and the various ethnic groups (Europeans, Mexicans, blacks, native Americans) were all given an area of land to call their own. It does not take much to imagine the wars that would ensue, and the ethnic and racist hatred they would be based on.

It has been 160 years since just part of the US (southern slavery) was ended, and no lands were divided up into nations, and yet, even today, there are still white people who cannot accept that blacks are peers and have equal rights, have been violently opposed to their equality, and would look forward to going to war to address this "crime against nature".

I think it is too optimistic to expect that ethnic hostility would end after only 100 years after 1200 of oppression.

There is hope - 2M Arabs live peacefully in Israel, are treated equally legally, and mostly equally on a practical basis. And they live safe and productive lives. It is the Arabs that did not stay in Israel, those that either left or stayed in what was supposed to be their nation state (Gaza/West Bank) and have been under the indoctrination, for decades, of those who want to bring back the Caliphate that are the problem. They should be wearing green MIGA hats - Make Islam Great Again

And this is what I find so ironic -those in America that would be gleeful if the Native Americans were to somehow get part of their land back and create a sovereign state, even through violence, are the same people that are appalled that Jews have done exactly that for themselves in Israel.

The Zionist terrorist groups went around murdering villagers and after villagers fled Zionists took their land.

You strike me as a person who repeats the “a land without a people for a people without a land” lies. You just leave out why you didn’t find people in one of the oldest continually inhabited land on earth: you displaced them.

No, I don't say stupid things like that, and probably very few people ever said it (well, except critics of Israel claiming that Zionists said that).

So to be clear, by "stole the land" you're only referring to the Nakba that happened because of the war? Those are the only cases of what you're talking about that I'm aware of (until 1948, I'm not talking about the despicable acts currently happening in the WB).

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