r/JewsOfConscience Free Discussion Thread

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[u/valonianfool]

I still feel harrowed from an event that happened months ago, when I made the mistake of trying to debate a zionist after seeing a post listing supposed examples of hypocrisy from the pro-Palestinian movement.

The OP attacked and insulted me, but what really caused me distress is because they were a hypocritical ass who while claiming to stand in solidarity with indigenous people, support the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians, and promote racist, colonialist narratives.

After I brought up how fellahin (Palestinian subsistence farmers) have cultivated the land for centuries they called me "gross" for implying that "indigenous status can be obtained through farming" and how European farmers are still colonists despite farming the land. They claim that the fellahin and all arabs in Israel are "colonizers".

They called me an "antisemite" because I pointed out that for most parts of history during muslim rule, jewish life was peaceful and how the one massacre against jews they brought up in the post-the Hebron massacre-was motivated in part by Palestinian farmers becoming disenfranchised because of land sales to the JNF, claiming I'm somehow "excusing anti-jewish oppression".

However, their stance is hypocritical: while acknowledging it was unfair for the palestinian farmers who became landless and impoverished, they excuse it with "it was normal practice at the time" for absentee landlords to rent out and sell land, and how the landlords who sold land to the settlers were landlords in neighboring countries.

So according to them, injustice towards jews can never be excused or viewed in context to give a more nuanced picture, but injustice towards Palestinians is excusable.

I'm just really angry to the point of seeing red that this person is claiming that the people who've been dispossessed and colonized are the "colonizers", and how they don't understand what "indigenous" means at all despite claiming to support indigenous rights, as well as the blatant double standard of justifying injustice towards Palestinians with "it was OK at the time" but jews being unequal under the law isn't acceptable.

[u/sudo_apt-get_intrnet → u/valonianfool]

Honestly its rarely worth debating longer-term Jewish/Palestine history with Zionists, and almost never if you yourself are a gentile.

Debating indigenousness is not worth it here. Once you start you end up asking questions that really have no place in the conversation. Things like: how many generations does it take for the Palestinian Diaspora to no longer be considered indigenous to Palestine? What percent "purity" does someone's blood need to be to be considered a true, native Palestinian, especially when the UN definition applies unconditionally from patrilineal descent? How long until a white American whose family came to North America during the 1500s and has been farming continuously since then as "indigenous"? All of these questions are important when discussing who is and isn't indigenous to the region and also completely irrelevant to the ongoing atrocities in the region.

Debating the morality of the events in the region's history is also irrelevant. Did Jews have it better under Muslim rule than European rule? On average, sure. Were they equal to the Muslims? Definitely not. Was the idea of equality even really a thing in the Ottoman Empire pre-Zionism? Not really. Were there massacres and instances of antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks pre-Zionism in the Ottoman Empire? Yes; see the Damascus Affair or the multiple sackings of Safed/Tzfat.

The Ottoman Empire was quasi-feudal, with lard scale pseudo-lords ruling over large amounts of land farmed by tenants living there for generations. Does that generational tenancy give them extra moral rights over that land, even if they don't have many legal rights? Debatable. Was it legal for land was purchased from a lord to be suddenly converted into an owner-operated/Jewish-operated farm, evicting the previous tenants who were there for hundreds of years? Yup. Was it right? Depends on your point of view.

What was the point of the last 2 paragraphs? Specifically, that one can start debating the legality and morality of pre-48 Palestine/Jewish history all you want and still have it be completely irrelevant to the question of Israel/Palestine. Zionists aren't evil because they took advantage of the historical legal system, and the Palestinians/Ottomans aren't evil because they didn't fully invest in equality amongst people significantly before Europe and the US. Israel is evil because it is currently, actively committing genocide against the Palestinians, and currently, actively denying them their rights to self-determination.