• ???@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Should one be allowed to have a national state if that national state is an ethnostate, practices apartheid, and commits genocide? I’m seriously asking because that is a standard I would hold any country to. And I don’t see how it means that “Jewish people can’t have a homeland”, just that it’s unacceptable to build a homeland on the mass graves of the natives.

      and it must restrain itself impeccably when fighting against terrorists with human shields.

      Ridiculous. How does that single out Israel? No other nation shoots through 30 members of a single family to kill a “terrorist”. How are Israel held to a different standard?

      Sounds to me like a genocidal excuse fantasy.

      • MsPenguinette@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Thank you for asking this. I’m against ethnostates regardless of the ethnicity and am genuinely curious to hear OP’s response

      • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
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        11 months ago

        No other nation shoots through 30 members of a single family to kill a “terrorist”.

        I agree with your argument in general, but hasn’t the US shot drone missiles (accidentally, for certain values of that word) at plenty of civilians as part of its was on terror?

        • ???@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Eh, it isn’t on the same level as erasing an entire bloodline on a genocidal crusade, but yes. Does that make it okay? Did the US not get shit for that and continue to get shit for that? During this whole war on Gaza, I’ve seen the history of America being used as a tell-tale example of how not to do this or any war ever in the future… And it doesn’t make Israel look any more “stellar”, especially not when it hides behind others’ atrocities to dilute its own in the eyes of the world. No different than Putin who makes similar remarks on a regular basis.

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      and it must restrain itself impeccably when fighting against terrorists with human shields.

      A base level of restraint would be fucking fantastic. Israel has killed more journalists in the past 10 weeks than ANYONE has EVER killed in a whole year. They dropped more bombs in a single week than America dropped in an entire year fighting ISIS, and in an area the size of a city. Calling it self defense is whitewashing intentional genocide.

      • ???@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The whole ‘why is Israel singled out?’ is just Israel’s main PR and main excuse for genocide. I find it hard to take anyone seriously when they make such a claim. You can tell them all these facts and they’ll pull out of their ass some other country with a shitty history and say, “OMG why are you holding us Israelis at a different standard?” as if we all forgot how it was after 9/11, how people protested the Iraq War, how no one justifies what Americans did to the natives… These people live in their own reality where everything is skewed and malformed to allow them to live in peace knowing too well they are committing ethnic cleansing and genocide.

        I really applaud all the Israelis who refuse to serve in the IDF and who see it for what it is.

    • ImTryingLemmy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Zionism has had a long and troubled history by this point, and I don’t even know much below the surface. I’ll tell you right up front I view Israel as an apartheid state and I’m not even a leftist. It’s just right out there in the open, for anyone to see.

      Here in the US, we have a Christian Nationalism movement that would love to set up exactly what Israel has in “The American Redoubt”, also known as “Greater Idaho”.

      Fucking terrifies me and my property isn’t even in their sights for conquest. Building a nation state along ethnic or religious boundaries is wrong in my opinion. I hold that opinion because I’m an American who believes in immigration, mixing of races, and freedom for all. Just the phrase “Jewish nation” makes my skin crawl.

      quick edit: of course, all the ethnostates surrounding Israel are immoral in my view also.

        • Orbituary@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          “They get more freedoms and a better quality of life than anywhere else in the middle east. In the written law at the very least, they have equal rights.”

          This is a hell of a statement to make.

          For an interesting point of view, I recommend a book called “The Hundred Years War on Palestine.” It starts in 1917 and discusses the origins of the state before 1948. It then continues until 2017. I’d honestly like to hear your thoughts if you read it.

          https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Hundred-Years-War-on-Palestine-by-Rashid-Khalidi-author/9781781259344

          • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            11 months ago

            “What do you mean black slaves don’t have it as good as the whites? It says right in our founding documents all men are created equal!”

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 months ago

          Maybe USA is an apartheid state too?

          Ya nailed it. See, the thing is here, both of you are citizens of nations where you don’t have a lot of actual personal choice in what your government does to “represent” you, despite both ostensibly being “representative government.”

          They’re both apartheid states. I live in one, I didn’t choose to. You live in one, you didn’t choose to.

          However, in the case of the US, we don’t keep them all in one single, open-air prison with a giant fence between us and them, and bomb the living shit out of all of them if one of them does something fucked up. Usually, we prosecute that individual.

          I’m not saying the US is better, it’s not. Just look at Guantanamo Bay.

          But I am saying the situation with Israel and Palestine is way more fucked up, based on the close proximity, how long this has been going on, and things like Netanyahu probably funding Hamas. Netanyahu is just like US conservatives, he’s willing to fund his enemies just so he can keep using them as scapegoats. Netanyahu has been a fucking piece of shit for over twenty fucking years in Israeli politics, and just like the US, we seem to be unable or unwilling to deal with criminal fucking scumbags like him.

        • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          there were no “No Irish Allowed” signs during The Troubles either. This conflict, as with all other competing ethnic quarrels, is complex. But it isn’t any more complex than those conflicts. In fact, I’d say that the ongoing conflict in Malaysia is more complex than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also to address the whataboutism, yes, I’d argue that the US is an apartheid state against the natives. Palestinians are living in a genocidal apartheid state. The treatment of Palestinians by the settlers in the West Bank are a clear sign of this. What recourse do the Palestinians have when an Israeli squats on their house while running out for groceries?

        • MisterScruffy@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          USA is a fascist state and always has been, that does not justify what Israeli settlers and the IDF are doing currently

        • smooth_jazz_warlady@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          11 months ago

          I’m not religious in the slightest and I barely see myself as part of the Jewish nation - but I do, just barely. It is unfortunately true that anti-semitism is alive and well, and will be for the foreseeable future. Even if I don’t view myself as Jewish, some anti-semites will, and we all know where that could lead. So Israel is the only country in the world where we can know for a fact that the government (police) will protect us from anti-semitism, not to mention won’t take part in it.

          Which is the chicken-and-egg problem of ethno/theostates, isn’t it? If most/all of a group are isolated to one geographical location, and largely absent from the rest of the world, it becomes easier for hate to spread in that rest of the world, because nobody there has lived experience, can have that moment of “but I know Elsa/Ahmed/Luna/whoever, and they’re decent person” to challenge propaganda when they hear it (and anyone who’s a minority where they live has at least one story of being the cause of such a realisation). But if you’re a group that lives in those little geographical pockets, it becomes that much harder to move out, because you give up your support network and move into an area of potentially hostile people.

          And of course, bigots know about this and weaponise it. Speaking as a trans person and noticing the current wave of vile legislation against us in the shit parts of the US, it sure as hell feels like the objective there is to force anyone who can leave to do so, and punish those who can’t, specifically to prevent a sufficient mass of trans people building up that those same deradicalising experiences can happen (hence why the use of a stereotypical trans name in above example). But in a way it’s both better and worse for us, because we aren’t just born into certain bloodlines or cultures, we emerge almost everywhere, so and have to fight to make the whole world queer-friendly, rather than just being able to set up somewhere in a small pocket and let the whole world slowly become most hostile to us in response.

    • MisterScruffy@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Israel has no right to exist where it does right now. No group of people has a right to force others out of their homes to establish a nation for themselves. By your logic if all peoples have a right to establish a nation wherever they see fit then the Roma people can justifiably show up in tel aviv tomorrow and start conquering the place since they have no nation of their own

      • highenergyphysics@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Seriously what a fucking unhinged Zionist rant, and people here are just upvoting that garbage?

        Really shows how deep the propaganda goes. No, Israel does NOT have a right to annex Palestinian land. Genocidal fucks.

      • ALQ@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        This is a theoretical moral quandary I’ve tried to determine for myself and have yet to figure out:

        How long is “long enough” between when one group forces another group out of its land and when the invading group should/can be accepted as the “rightful” group for that area?

        I often point out that some Palestinian people who were forced out of their homes in the creation of Israel are still alive as reasoning for why it’s not right to have Israel exist where it is, so I know that “within a lifetime” is too short. At the same time, I also know that thousands of years (i.e. Israelite homeland) is too long to reclaim land, so I’ve narrowed it down (if you can call it that) to “more than a lifetime, less than a few millennia.”

        What about a couple hundred years? Is it when everyone who originally lived on the land has grown old and died? When their children have? Grandchildren?

        So much of human history is violence resulting in displacement. I feel like the line has historically been drawn at “when the original group is either wiped out or too weak to say anything anymore,” which is not the moral line for which I’m looking.

        I’d be really interested to see what anyone else thinks on this.

        • Welt@lazysoci.al
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          11 months ago

          Take a look at the effects of colonisation. In 1788 the British First Fleet established a colony in Sydney, land of the Eora Nation, which is now functionally extinct. The following 245 years have led to the near-destruction of the some 200 nations and language groups across the Australian continent. Many are extinct, and genocides (particularly the “Black War” in Tasmania), intermarriage, forbidding indigenous language communication, and disease wiped out most of the rest of the cultural and linguistic heritage of Australia, dating back (in the northern parts east of Darwin at least) up to 65,000 years.

          Do the Wiradjuri deserve a state? It would occupy much of NSW and Victoria, if Australia ceded their traditional boundaries. Yet their continuous culture spans far longer than the Jews or Arab Muslims. So I think the answer to your question depends on the circumstances a people have been subjected to, and whether there are enough of them left, with enough resources, to fight the status quo. Ultimately, might makes right, and after the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany a mere 80-odd years ago, there were enough European Jews who had fled the genocides, and enough of a nation/diaspora to band together and influence the world after the dust settled. The same cannot be said for the Indigenous Tasmanians, unfortunately, whose culture was annihilated to the point that their languages only exist on early recordings by anthropologists.

      • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Roma people can justifiably show up in tel aviv tomorrow and start conquering the place since they have no nation of their own

        Please Roma, I would donate money for this to happen, unfortunately that would just end with genocide too though.

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Please explain to me what “existential threat” is being posed to you by the children being murdered in Palestine?

    • ebc@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      I think you’re conflating 2 other things: Religion and culture.

      Jews as a religion should absolutely not be allowed their own nation state, just as Islam shouldn’t and Christianity certainly shouldn’t either. In fact, there should be no religion-states at all. One of the fundamental values in democratic societies is freedom of religion; people should be allowed to believe whatever religion they want. Any state that interferes with that right is in violation of one of the basic human rights, and a religion-state is by definition violating that right.

      Jews as a culture should absolutely be allowed their own nation state, in fact, that’s what Israel is. Such a state is indeed allowed to have interests, but “exterminating all non-Jews in the country” isn’t a legitimate interest. In fact, you’ll recall that a world war was triggered because a country wanted to exterminate a specific ethnic / religious group not only within their borders but also in their neighbors’ country. Such a state is also allowed to defend itself, but I think it’s normal for a persecuted people to resort to terrorism when other avenues for ending their persecution failed. That doesn’t give the right to the persecuter to persecute even more. You’ll note that we also heavily criticize the US for their “war on terrorism”, and rightly so. Gaza is also not an existential threat to Israel the way Russia is to Ukraine either. There’s a world of difference between the 2 conflicts.

      So yeah, I guess I agree with you in part (there’s a difference between Jews in general and the Israeli government), but I really disagree with you on the “Jewish nation” part.

      That said, I’m just a random dude from the other side of the world, and I don’t know anything about the specifics of the situation in the country, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        In fact, you’ll recall that a world war was triggered because a country wanted to exterminate a specific ethnic / religious group not only within their borders but also in their neighbors’ country.

        WWII was triggered by Nazi Germany’s attempt to take over the world. Ending the Holocaust was just a fortunate side-effect of beating back the Germans and removing the Nazis from power. Nobody in power have a shit about Jews until people started seeing images from the death camps after they were liberated.

    • EndlessApollo@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Not all criticisms of Israel are antisemitic, just criticisms of Israel stealing land and murdering civilians. From the river to the sea friend :3

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      When I hear Israel has a right to exist because Jewish people need a home, I immediately wonder whether the person saying so would agree that Nazi Germany had a right to exist because German people needed a home. Nazi Germany is gone now and ethnic Germans seem better off for it.

        • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          11 months ago

          Are the fascists running Israel an ethnic group? No, they’re a bunch of war criminals who should be hanged for their actions so Israel can have some hope of transforming into a decent country whose people acknowledge its crimes.

          • S_204@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

            I’m not going to argue that some of them, Bibi in particular need to be jailed but comparing them to Nazis is blatantly bullshit and if you don’t understand that, please take a trip to aushwitz or the memorial in DC for an education.

            • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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              11 months ago

              I’m educated, buddy. Just because you’re too emotionally invested in Israel being blameless to see the parallel doesn’t make it bullshit.

              • S_204@lemm.ee
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                11 months ago

                I just admitted that israelis have blame… there is no parallel here. Let me know when they start trucking Palestinians in from Jordan and Samaria to get burned up by the thousands.

                As savage as this is, from a demographic perspective you’re talking 2% of a population. A population that’s growing faster than any other on the planet. We’re not even talking about it being decimated. By contrast, the Holocaust wiped out 50% of the global Jewish population and it still hasn’t recovered. There’s no comparison and attempting to make one demeans the Holocaust, holomodor and the actual genocides going on right now.

                • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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                  11 months ago

                  You fucking ghoul. You’re literally saying Palestinian lives are worth less than Jewish ones. You’re the worst kind of racist.