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Reparations - Israel would love nothing more than that. Pay Palestinians to leave? That’s the easiest way about it! Bibi would be delighted. Unfortunately it’s a non starter. The fight was always about the land, and Palestinians have been losing since 1948. There is a complex history of “whose fault was it” - neither side has clean hands.
I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing. I think there were paths to peace that could have worked early on. Call it bad luck. I think Palestinian leadership failed its people by failing to secure them a diplomatic end to the conflict. Fighting a lost war for decades seems a bad plan. I also do blame Israeli leadership, for not always offering the olive branch without condition.
Edit: i will also address your initial question directly: “Is there any acknowledgement in Israel that Nakba and the very formation of the country is to blame?” - a very, very small fringe of the far left phrases it like this. I’m not trying to be dismissive, just pointing out that it’s a really tiny minority. I, as a self-described center left, disagree with the premise.
That’s not what reparations are, that’s ethnic cleansing.
As is true in every war.
The question is who started it.
In the rare cases where adults have prevailed, the question has been “what will it take to end it”.
This is perhaps one of the most obviously immutable conflicts that at the same time, everyone thinks there is some simple solution to. Usually thinly veiled, "it will be over when my side wins".
But I agree that those with the power and the weapons do seem to only believe in simple, violent solutions.
There might be complex solutions to be had, but it will take different leaders, and that seems unlikely in the short term.
But if you’re attempted to draw a parallel between Hitler’s use of an ethnic minority as a nationalist punching bag and the situation in the Middle East, that I totally reject.
Zionists. Their ideology, created in Europe in the late 1800s, has the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians at its very core.
Calling it "bad luck" is extremely charitable. To international observers the problems with Zionism were already obvious as early as 1919:
For “a national home for the Jewish people” is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” [0]
[0] https://britainpalestineproject.org/recommendations-of-the-k...
The problem is that the historical timeline doesn't match up. Zionism started way earlier, and tried to found a "Jewish homeland" in 1820 in New York, and in 1903 in Uganda, and there are literally dozens of other examples throughout history. Even if we look solely at modern-day Israel, it dates back all the way to the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The first settler violence started decades before the Holocaust ever begun.
> I don’t agree with the conflation of Zionism to ethnic cleansing.
How do you propose Zionists could've established an ethnically Jewish country on land already occupied by Palestinians without ethnic cleansing? Why didn't the Zionists migrate to Palestine by integrating in the already-present culture and society, rather than by displacing it?
Jews have been doing that for hundreds of years. By 1922 when the British did a census of Palestine, Jerusalem was majority Jewish.
Only after the Arab revolt the British started severely restricting Jewish immigration, including shutting the doors for Jews trying to escape the Holocaust.
There was enough room in Palestine for everyone. It had a lot of empty space. It still has a lot of empty space. You can go on Google satellite and look around how much empty space there is in both Israel and the West Bank (more than half empty).
Most of Israel’s major population centers were built on empty land that Jews paid for and bought legally - and many of its biggest cities were founded in the 19th century, long before the Balfour declaration.
It was never about space. It was about Arab hatred of the Idea of a Jewish presence and country in Israel, even alongside an Arab one.
Their leadership failing the people feels like a heavy burden to place on the average person, especially in a society where there is no meaningful democracy, but even then.
There appears to be no end to what’s happening three years on. October 7th was a horror of horrors, but to visit that on an entire people day after day for years upon years as revenge, when almost none of the people suffering participated or planned it? What’s the point?
I have always supported Israel, but these last few years have gone into a zone of inhumanity towards their fellow man that is shocking to the soul of any person with human compassion.
There appears to be no condition to end the suffering other than their death. That’s genocide. Evicting them from their homes by relocation, appropriation, settlement, destruction, is the definition of ethnic cleansing. These are disturbing things that we all agreed should never happen again after WWII. It disturbs me that Israel gets a free pass because of what happened to the Jews - the horror of the past doesn’t entitle anyone to visiting their own horrors.
Am I wrong? I’ve struggled with how to discuss this with my Israeli friends.
EDIT: how is anyone downvoting thos. Who thinks it's a good idea?
They do not share Western social values.
The existence of Israel as an ethnostate is more down to the ethnic preferences of others in Russia¹, Germany, multiple middle eastern countries², and elsewhere³, than the ethnic preferences of jews.
Most of the jews I have known in my life are liberals who see Israel as a refuge against illiberals, not supremacist weirdos that get attention on the internet.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
It's clearly bad to specifically re-engineer the ethnic composition of an existing state to create one, particularly violently, but I don't know that it necessarily follows that a naturally occurring ethno-state is conceptually abhorrent as you seem to be suggesting. Japan is very much such a state - is Japan bad for existing?
You have it backwards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
The history section has an example of a passport in the Old Testament and a lot of other examples where people needed travel documents and were limited in their travels way before the First World War.
Hang on though, isn't it Palestine who keeps accepting peace deals and then Israel keeps rejecting them and dropping a few more missiles? Do they not teach you that part? E.g. on October 7 Hamas released 3 Israeli hostages. Israel shot them dead, so Hamas didn't release any more.