Asking Palestinians to say that Israel has a right to exist is like asking Native Americans to say the USA has a right to exist. What about Israel exists and has the right to continue to exist?
Asking Palestinians to say that Israel has a right to exist is like asking Native Americans to say the USA has a right to exist. What about Israel exists and has the right to continue to exist?
That offer has been made multiple times in the form of the Arab Peace Initiative.
And was followed by the first intifada iirc. Its not only about the rights of Palestinian people but obviously about "chasing the Jews into the sea".
I hate the current government of Israel for being right wing, religious and downright populist. The settlers policies are plain provocation. That doesn't influence my conviction that the state Israel absolutely must keep existing and that the people are not the same as their government (also worth remembering this when you hear people speaking Russian omnthe streets right now).
This brings up the very important distinction between nation and state. We think of them now interchangeably, but as I understand it, the Peace of Westphalia created the modern system of nation-states that comprises the international order. It was very recent, historically speaking, such that even Germany didn't unify into one until the early 20th century.
It's important, because while various nations existed in Palestine, the region got integrated into the Westphalian system under outside, colonial powers, rather than as a nation-state. That allowed room for the Zionist slogan, "a land without a people for a people with a land." That was a clever distortion—there was not "a people" in the sense of the new international order, but there certainly were people who lived there, and had lived there for generations.
The bottom line is that the Israeli state must absolutely be distinct and separate from the nation of Israel—and that the nation of Israel must be allowed to exist in peace in the region. The current state can go kick rocks, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm talking about the meaning of those statements to different different people. Take a look at this video interviewing Elisha Wiesel from the Elie Wiesel Foundation and Michal Cotier-Wunsh, Special Envoy for Combating Antisemitism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQn5X4ra8KY
She says that Anti-zionism is Anti-semitism. To many people, Anti-Zionism is a value statement on the history of the creation of the modern Israeli state by the British, the UN, and America in the 1940s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionism I think people who hold the view that creating a the modern state of Israel as a Western colonial action (one could have simply opened up immigration to Jewish folk and ensuring that one state guaranteeing the protection and safety of Jews and declaring it the ancestral home of Israelites and the Jewish religion and Palestinians (who are also Canaanites like the Lebanese) was created, as opposed to having some asshole somewhere else draw a border (like they did in India between India and Pakistan), and unleashing the subsequent ethnic cleansing that ensued (like it did in India and Pakistan)), but don't hold Hamas's views that Israel and Israelis should be driven off the land (or the equivalent that Pakistan or India should be destroyed and the subcontinent reunited) can be called anti-zionist but not anti-semitic.
My point is that if we change the statement from Israel has the right to exist to Israel exists (like the US exists) and has the right to continue exist separates the folks who think the creation of Israel in its form was a historical mistake (mostly because of all the suffering that's resulted from it) from the folks who think it and its people should be driven off the map. That statement that Israel has the right to continue to exist is something I think both Israelis and many Palestinians can agree on and can clarify what the goal of peace should be.
The other thing in that video is declaring Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, blaming Israel for the bombing of the Gazan hospital based on early news report, as blood libel is weaponizing the label of anti-semitism against a person who I don't believe is Anti-semetic (she's not declaring the Jews are trying to replace us or creating space lasers or that they created covid, or engaging in millenia-old anti-semitic tropes) and is instead trying to protect her people from violence (like the folks in the video are trying to protect their people from Hamas violence), and trying to silence her and trying to silence criticism of Israel and the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land. And I think we while the evidence seems to be mounting that Hamas lied about scale of death and damage and who fired the rocket, it's not completely crystal clear, and I think Tliab should be given more time to judge before being accused of blood libel and being an anti-semite who should be driven out of congress, eliminating one more voice that tries to bring balance to American policy to include Palestinian interests. Edit: Someone pointed out in a Majority Report clip that Israel and Biden initially claimed that Hamas beheaded babies and children. And they (I think it was a pro-Palestinian Israeli) called it blood libel too. I think it's the fog of war, and we need to stop calling both people blood libelists, and focus instead on the reality of the situation and see what the best options are for saving lives, getting the hostages back, achieving peace, and getting justice.
We can talk about offers after. But that's not what the post was about. It's about creating clarifying statements that clearly define peace and what peace will be while avoiding obfuscating value statements. Not only does it make discussion easier, but it also separates people who hate the history of what Zionism has created from the true anti-semites who want to wipe Israel and Israelis off the map.
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Holy cow, that was a loaded question after all! Very interesting reading, though. I agree. As to what the post was about, it was my understanding at the time of the offer(s) that the Arab League was not declaring that the creation of the State of Israel was legitimate, but instead recognizing that it does exist now, and has the right to continue to exist.
This question shows a fundamental misunderstanding. Before the establishment of the modern Israeli state, most of the Arabs living in the region were actually of Egyptian or Jordanian descent. There was no Palestinian people group until after that so as to identify the displaced Arabs as one group.
Jewish people, however, have lived in and been associated with the land for thousands of years. Palestinians are categorically not the same as native Americans.
There must be a separate, sovereign Palestinian state - because that would be most just and fair. There must also, however, be a sovereign Israeli state because of the historical ties to the land and the fact that for millennia the Jewish people have been persecuted wherever they go. I honestly don't know why, but they have.
There's definitely been admixing with other populations (including Ashkenazi Jews with Europeans), but Palestinians are Canaanite/Levantine (just like the Lebanese and Jews and Jordanians) and form a Levantine cluster. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#Comparison_to_non-Jewish_populations Meanwhile, Judaism is certainly from Israel (if the history didn't already point to it, the archaeology of Israel does). But a large number of Jews/Israelites were expelled by the Romans in the first century CE, creating a Jewish diaspora that shows genetic evidence of admixing with local populations over 2000 years. And certainly before the modern state of Israel was created and Zionist Jewish folk started immigrating back into Israel-Palestine after 1800-1900 years, the Palestinians were there.
Jewish people were persecuted in Christian nations because Christians started blaming Jews for Christ's death. You can see evolution of this idea from being nearly non-existent in the earliest gospel, the Gospel of Mark, to the newest canonical Gospel the Gospel of John. And sentiment is argued to have risen from Christian anger at the failure of other Jews to accept Jesus as the messiah and convert. All these negative stereotypes started to develop. And with the Romans destroying Jerusalem (or at least the temple in Jerusalem) and scattering Jews, you had a group of people with a strong cultural group identity that was strongly monotheistic in a strange land, that was easily to cast as the other. It's all bullshit.
Anyways, Israel-Palestine is the home of Judaism, the descendants of Israelites, and Palestinians (who probably partially the descendants of Israelites or at least neighboring Canaanites, from whom Israelites became distinct by the development of their monidolatry and later monotheism).
Also see this 2020 paper that compares the genetics of modern people living in this region (including Jews, Palestinians, Lebanese) with Bronze Age DNA from the region: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/ (got this from an earlier section in the above Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#2017–present
So yeah, at least some of the ancestors of modern Palestinians were in Israel-Palestine in the Bronze Age (ie before the Babylonian Captivity).
The good old "we were first, so we're the only ones who belong here", which always brings up the question, how far we want to go back in time to determine who really was first. There is no answer to this question, hence it's the reason for so many conflicts across the globe and through history.
Eh, I don't think many societies besides America are as open as America to migration and immigrants (and we have strong anti immigrant streaks sometimes, but I think we're more tolerant than most). Like Japan is an old society that's just not used migration/immigration. Hell, the shogunate shut out people coming in or leaving for 200 or so years before 1850. And even old Western societies that have a colonial past and immigrants resulting from that are not as open to immigrants as the US (I mean that's what Brexit's about, right? And you saw how destabilizing Syrian and Libyan refugees have been to the EU, and how incompletely integrated Algerian immigrants are in France).
Both Jews and Palestinians were first. At least some of their ancestors were chilling in the land as far back as the bronze age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/
But Jews were expelled a long time ago from their home, and only started coming back with the Zionist movement. But with respect to the creation of modern Israel, obviously the Palestinians were there before the Zionist movement and the creation of modern Israel, and I think they might feel the same way about the creation of Israel as maybe Native Americans might feel about European colonization and the creation of the US.
Ran out of space, but there's obviously more I could have added there. Like Palestine should exist and needs to exist as an equal.
People have a right to exist , all of them. Terror, war and Apartheid should not exist.
Your title is very confusing, I get what you mean after reading the long comment you've created, but based on the title I wanted to downvote you as well.
I wanted to make it a little longer to make it clearer, but I hit a title limit and the rules say the shower thought has to be in the title.