The last two thousand years? The Ottoman Empire was a refuge for Jewish people for a long time. It wasn’t just a neverending massacre or they wouldn’t have kept settling there from other places. It gave then some restrictions, but it did the same to Christians. And comparatively, they lived pretty good lives and thrived, especially compared to the oppression and massacred they faced elsewhere in Europe. It had the largest Jewish population by the end of the 16th century. They came from Russia, Prussia, ran from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Portugal, etc. It was way better than living under Christians for a long time. They would encourage each other to move there. It wasn’t until the 19th century that antisemitism started to ramp up there. And most scholars agree the attitude was imported from Christian Arabs, so it’s not just a Muslim thing. It sucks that it started to rise again then, but nationalism does that. It made it worse on both sides, since around that time Zionism started picking up steam, too, and they were buying land and kicking off the native tenants to make a country. Not to excuse the antisemitism, because obviously that is horrible, and there’s a long history of it happening all over the world. But the point is, so many immigrated there because of things like the Holocaust in Germany or the Russian pogroms, then started fighting completely unrelated people and kicking them off their land, like was done to them somewhere else. Same reason that even though I respect the struggle of slaves, I don’t approve of the colonial way Liberia was founded and the way the colonists treated the indigenous people.
Israel is barely a democracy. There are millions of people under their control who don’t get a vote. Their leader is stoking a war and nationalistic fervor to avoid corruption trials. They jail people for criticism, require military service, and have killed more journalists than any recent conflict. They’re an apartheid, settler colonial ethnostate that only exists because of racist and antisemitic Western interests. Gaza is not a failed state, because every attempt to become a state is stymied by Israel, the country that actually controls all their infrastructure, food, travel, sea, and air. Israel as a nation state could easily disappear and be replaced by an actual state with equal rights and equality for everyone in the area, without a single person being killed in the process, if the US and the Israeli people or government wished it. And that would be a good thing for both the Palestinians who could live free, and the Israelis who don’t want to have to worry about being threatened by actual attacks from rightfully pissed people all the time.
The last two thousand years? The Ottoman Empire was a refuge for Jewish people for a long time. It wasn’t just a neverending massacre or they wouldn’t have kept settling there from other places. It gave then some restrictions, but it did the same to Christians. And comparatively, they lived pretty good lives and thrived, especially compared to the oppression and massacred they faced elsewhere in Europe. It had the largest Jewish population by the end of the 16th century. They came from Russia, Prussia, ran from Spain because of the Spanish Inquisition, or Portugal, etc. It was way better than living under Christians for a long time. They would encourage each other to move there. It wasn’t until the 19th century that antisemitism started to ramp up there. And most scholars agree the attitude was imported from Christian Arabs, so it’s not just a Muslim thing. It sucks that it started to rise again then, but nationalism does that. It made it worse on both sides, since around that time Zionism started picking up steam, too, and they were buying land and kicking off the native tenants to make a country. Not to excuse the antisemitism, because obviously that is horrible, and there’s a long history of it happening all over the world. But the point is, so many immigrated there because of things like the Holocaust in Germany or the Russian pogroms, then started fighting completely unrelated people and kicking them off their land, like was done to them somewhere else. Same reason that even though I respect the struggle of slaves, I don’t approve of the colonial way Liberia was founded and the way the colonists treated the indigenous people.
Israel is barely a democracy. There are millions of people under their control who don’t get a vote. Their leader is stoking a war and nationalistic fervor to avoid corruption trials. They jail people for criticism, require military service, and have killed more journalists than any recent conflict. They’re an apartheid, settler colonial ethnostate that only exists because of racist and antisemitic Western interests. Gaza is not a failed state, because every attempt to become a state is stymied by Israel, the country that actually controls all their infrastructure, food, travel, sea, and air. Israel as a nation state could easily disappear and be replaced by an actual state with equal rights and equality for everyone in the area, without a single person being killed in the process, if the US and the Israeli people or government wished it. And that would be a good thing for both the Palestinians who could live free, and the Israelis who don’t want to have to worry about being threatened by actual attacks from rightfully pissed people all the time.