cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20133666
By Melanie Goodfellow, Nancy Tartaglione September 7, 2024 12:04pm
““As a Jewish American artist working in a time-based medium, I must note, I’m accepting this award on the 336th day of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and 76th year of occupation,” said U.S. director Sarah Friedland as she accepted the Luigi de Laurentiis prize for best first film for Familiar Touch.”
Why shouldn’t the Jewish people have a homeland or their own country?
Zionism is a settler colonialism project was able to start with the support of British Imperialism. Zionism as a political movement started with Theodore Herzl in the 1880s as a ‘modern’ way to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ of Europe.
Adi Callai, an Israeli, does a great analysis of how Antisemitism has been weaponized by Zionism during its history.
Since at least the 1860’s, Europe was increasingly antisemitic and hostile to Jewish people. Zionism was explicitly a Setter Colonialist movement and the native Palestinians were not considered People but Savages by the Europeans. While Zionist Colonization began before it, the Balfor Declaration is when Britain gave it’s backing of the movement in order to ‘solve’ the ‘Jewish Question’ while also creating a Colony in the newly conquered Middle East after WWI in order to exhibit military force in the region and extract natural resources.
That’s when Zionist immigration started to pick up, out of necessity for most as Europe became more hostile and antisemitic. That continued into and during WWII, European countries and even the US refused to expand immigration quotas for Jewish people seeking asylum. The idea that the creation of Israel is a reparation for Jewish people is an after-the-fact justification. While most Jewish immigrants had no choice and just wanted a place to live in peace, it was the Zionist Leadership that developed and implemented the forced transfer, ethnic cleansing, of the native population, Palestinians. Without any Occupation, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, there would not be any Palestinian resistance to it.
Herzl himself explicitly considered Zionism a Settler Colonialist project, Setter Colonialism is always violent. The difficulty in creating a democratic Jewish state in an area inhabited by people who are not Jewish, is that enough Palestinian people need to be ‘Transferred’ to have a demographic majority that is Jewish. Ben-Gurion explicitly rejected Secular Bi-national state solutions in favor of partition.
Quote
Page 8, The Concept of Transfer 1882-1948
10 myths of Israel by Ilan Pappe, summerized and full book
Transfer Committee and the JNF led to Forced Displacement of 100,000 Palestinians throughout the mandate.
Thanks I know this, but you have to go back to when the region was settled by the Jewish people to really get any context
The video by Adi Callai does, as does the Ilan Pappe book referenced.
The book Palestine A Four Thousand Year History - Nur Masalha also goes into that part of the history of Palestine. At that time, Israelites were also considered Palestinian. Zionism is a separate concept from Judaism.
Why should it be at the cost of someone else’s homeland?
That’s why a two state solution is the most ethical and humanitarian way forward
Ethical for whom?
Quite simply, the hope is that it ends up being more ethnical for the Palestinians living in the West Bank - who currently are subject to Israel control - to be fully in control of their own territory.
read the history of how Palestine was formed, people have been treating each other like shit forever. The future can be better… hopefully idk
Don’t dodge my question.
In what way is a two-state solution ethical and for whom exactly?
lol I didn’t dodge anything, I am saying that given the historical context of how we’ve arrived at this conflict, there’s really one reasonable option
You think it’s reasonable to expect a population of people who have been oppressed, displaced, and murdered by foreign colonizers for decades to happily be neighbors with them all of a sudden? And on top of that, you think that’s ethical?
I’d say that the ethical part comes in more on the side of “hey at least they got a govt of their own now, and are running their own country instead of being forced into part of someone else’s” as we see (for example) in the upper two countries of North America.
No. I’d consider giving these folks land and territory that they can form into their own country as a required first step in a very long process.
I’m curious though - if not a two state solution, then what is your preferred or recommended solution to resolve things here?