Someone on Reddit made the mistake of saying, "Teach me how this conflict came about" where I could see it.
Let me teach you too.
The common perception is that Jews came out of nowhere, stole Palestinian homes and kicked Palestinians out of them, and then bombed them for 75 years, until they finally rebelled in the form of Hamas invading Israel and massacring 22 towns in one day.
The historical reality is that Jews have lived there continuously for at least 3500 years.
There are areas, like Meggido iirc, with archeological evidence of continuous habitation for 7,000 years, but Jewish culture as we recognize it today didn't develop until probably halfway through that.
Ethnic Jews are the indigenous people of this area.
Indigeneity means a group was originally there, before any colonization happened, and that it has retained a cultural connection to the land. History plus culture.
That's what Jews have: even when the diaspora became larger than the number of Jews in Israel, the yearning to return to that homeland was a daily part of Jewish prayer and ritual.
The Jewish community in Israel was crushed pretty violently by the Roman Empire in 135 CE, but it was still substantial, sometimes even the majority population there, for almost a thousand years.
The 600s CE brought the advent of Islam and the Arab Empire, expanding out from Saudi Arabia into Israel and beyond. It was largely a region where Jews were second-class citizens. But it was still WAY better than the way Christian Europe treated Jews.
From the 700s-900s, the area saw repeated civil wars, plagues, and earthquakes.
Then the Crusades came, with waves of Christians making "pilgrimages to the Holy Land" and trying to conquer it from Muslims and Jews, who they slaughtered and enslaved.
Israel became pretty well depopulated after all that. It was a very rough time to live there. (And for the curious, I'm calling it Israel because that's what it had been for centuries, until the Romans erased the name and the country.)
By the 1800s, the TOTAL population of what's now Israel and Palestine had varied from 150,000 - 275,000 for centuries. It was very rural, very sparsely populated, on top of being mostly desert.
In the 1880s, Jews started buying land and moving back to their indigenous homeland. As tends to happen, immigration brought new projects and opportunities, which led to more immigration - not only from Jews, but from the Arab world as well.
Unfortunately, there was an antisemitic minority spearheaded by Amin al-Husseini. Who was very well-connected, rich, and from a politically powerful family.
Al-Husseini had enthusiastically participated in the Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire. Then the Empire fell in World War One, and the League of Nations had to figure out what to do with its land.
Mostly, if an area was essentially operating as a country (e.g. Turkey), the League of Nations let it be one. In areas that weren't ready for self-rule, it appointed France or Britain to help them get there.
In recognition of the increased Jewish population in their traditional, indigenous homeland, it declared that that homeland would again become Israel.
As in, the region was casually called Palestine because that was the lay term for "the Holy Land." It had not been a country since Israel was stamped out; only a region of a series of different empires. And the Mandate For Palestine said it was establishing "a national home of the Jewish people" there, in recognition of "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country."
Britain was appointed to help the Arab and Jewish communities there develop systems of self-government, and then to work together to govern the region overall.
At least, that was the plan.
Al-Husseini, who was deeply antisemitic, did not like this plan.
And, extra-unfortunately, the British response to al-Husseini inciting violent anti-Jewish riots was to put him in a leadership role over Arab Palestine.
They thought it would calm him down and perhaps satisfy him.
They were very wrong.
The second week of November 1942 has much to tell us about the region’s geopolitical centrality, its enduring political currents, and its ro
He went on to become a huge Hitler fanboy, and then a Nazi war criminal. He co-created the Muslim Brotherhood - which Hamas is part of - with fellow fascist fanboy Hassan al-Banna.
After years of causing disruption on the streets of Egypt, on 30 June 2012, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leader Mohammed Morsi was sworn i
He got Nazi Party funding for armed Muslim Brotherhood militias to attack Jews and the Brits in the late 30s, convincing Britain to agree to limit Jewish immigration at the time when it was most desperately needed.
He started using the militias again in 1947, when the United Nations voted to divide the mandated land into a Jewish homeland and a Palestinian one.
Al-Husseini wouldn't stand for a two-state solution. He was determined to tolerate no more than the subdued, small Jewish minority of second-class citizens that he remembered from his childhood.
As armed militias increasingly ran riot, the Arab middle and upper classes increasingly left. About 100,000 left the country before May 1948, when Britain was to pull out, leaving Israel and Palestine to declare their independence.
The surrounding nations didn't want war. They largely accepted the two-state solution.
But al-Husseini lobbied HARD. And by mobilizing the Muslim Brotherhood to provide "destabilizing mass demonstrations and a murderous campaign of intimidation," he got the Arab League nations to agree to invade, en masse, as soon as Britain left.
This article deals with the after-effects of Nazi anti-Zionist propaganda in the Arab world and the antisemitic campaign of the Mufti of Jer
ACTS OF AGGRESSION PROVOKED, COMMITTED AND PREPARED BY ARAB STATES IN CONCERT WITH THE PALESTINE ARAB HIGHER COMMITTEE AGAINST T
About 600,000 Arabs fled to those countries during the ensuing war.
Jews couldn't seek refuge there; in fact, most of those countries either exiled their Jews directly, confiscating their property first, or else made Jewish life unlivable and exploited them for underpaid or slave labor for years first.
The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, one of the biggest humanitarian crises of the 20th century, is all the more tragic for how little
By the time the smoke cleared and a peace treaty was signed, most of the Arab Palestinian community had fled; there was no Arab Palestinian leadership; many of the refugees' homes and businesses had left had been destroyed in the war; and Israel had been flooded with nearly a million refugees from the Arab League countries and the Holocaust - even more people than had fled the war.
That was the Nakba. The one that gets portrayed as "750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled!" in the hope that you'll assume they were expelled en masse, their beautiful intact homes all stolen.
Egypt had taken what's now the Gaza Strip in that war, and Jordan took what's now the West Bank - expelling or killing all the Jews in it first.
(Ironically, Jordan was originally supposed to be part of Israel. Britain, inexplicably, cut off what would have been 75% of its land to create Jordan.
Even more inexplicably, nobody ever talks about it. I've never seen anyone complain that Jordan was stolen from Palestinians. Possibly because Jordan is also the only country that gave Palestinian refugees full citizenship, and it's about half Palestinian now.
Israel is nearly 25% Arab Palestinians with full citizenship and equal rights, so it's not all that different -- but the fundamental difference of living in a country where the majority is Jewish, not Muslim, probably runs pretty deep.)
Anyway: that's why Palestine is Gaza and the West Bank, rather than being some contiguous chunk of land. Or being the land set aside by the U.N. in 1947.
Because Arab countries took that land in 1948, and treated them as essentially separate for 20 years.
Israel got them back, along with the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula, in the next war: 1967, when Egypt committed an act of war by taking control of the waterways and barring Israel from them. It gave the Sinai back to Egypt as part of the 1979 peace accords between Egypt and Israel.
Israel tried to give back the Gaza Strip at the same time. Egypt refused.
Palestine finally declared independence in 1988.
But Hamas formed at about the same time. Probably in response, in fact. Hamas is fundamentally opposed to peace negotiations with Israel.
Again: Hamas is part of a group founded by Nazis.
Hamas has its own charter. It explains that Jews are "the enemy," because they control the drug trade, have been behind every major war, control the media, control the United Nations, etc. Basic Nazi rhetoric.
It has gotten adept at masking that rhetoric for the West. But to friendlier audiences, its leaders have consistently said things like, "People of Jerusalem, we want you to cut off the heads of the Jews with knives. With your hand, cut their artery from here. A knife costs five shekels. Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off [their heads]. It costs just five shekels."
Hamas Political Bureau Member and former Minister of the Interior Fathi Hammad urged the people of Jerusalem to "cut off...
(Palestinians were outraged by this speech. Palestinians, by and large, absolutely loathe Hamas.
I thought I'd left Gaza behind, yet all this time, Hamas was planning to expand its extremism and intimidation.
It's just that it's not the same to say that to locals, as it is to say it where major global powers who oppose this crap can hear you.)
Hamas has stated from the beginning that its mission is to violently destroy Israel and take over the land.
It has received $100M in military funding annually, from Iran, for several years. Because Iran has been building a network of fascist, antisemitic groups across the Middle East, in a blatant attempt to control more and more of it: Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen.
Iran has been run by a very far-right, deeply antisemitic dictatorship for decades now, which pretty openly wants to take down both Israel and the U.S.
Last year, Iran increased Hamas's funding to $350M.
The "proof of concept" invasion of Israel that Hamas pulled off on October 7th more than justifies a much bigger investment.
Hamas has publicly stated its intention to attack "again and again and again," until Israel has been violently destroyed.
That is how this conflict came about.
A Nazi group seized power in Gaza in 2007 by violently kicking the Palestinian government out, and began running it as a dictatorship, using it to build money and power in preparations for exactly this.
And people find it shockingly easy to believe its own hype about being "the Palestinian resistance."
As well as its propaganda that Israel is not actually targeting Hamas: it's just using a literal Nazi invasion and massacre as an excuse to randomly commit genocide of the fraction of Palestine it physically left 20 years ago.
Despite the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been protesting HAMAS throughout the war.
This is such a good summary! I didn't know why it was called British Mandate Palestine (I just thought the British had mandated it, not that it was supposed to be returned).
Thank you for this!
@the-nerdy-autist reblogged to add,
"It’s not a good summary.
It blatantly denies Palestinian indignity to the land, denies and distorts the Nakba, and denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism."
(but blocked me, so I'm doing this by hand for anyone else who wants to know)
Blatantly denies Palestinian indigeneity to the land:
Palestinians are not indigenous to the land.
Palestinians are Arabs, and are indigenous to the Saudi Arabian peninsula southeast of Israel.
You don't need to be indigenous to have human rights.
I encourage people to think about why they think Palestinians are indigenous to the land. I.e., does this come from your knowledge of Palestinian history? Is this the Palestinians-are-the-original-Canaanites myth that arose in the 1960s? Is it because they're called Palestinians?
If anyone finds themselves recoiling from this statement because they've been going on the premise that Oct 7 was indigenous resistance against colonialism -- that being indigenous justifies the horrors perpetrated on civilians that day -- and they think I'm therefore saying Israel can do whatever violence it wants, then... I encourage you to not.
As indigenous people who reclaimed our ancestral homeland, we must be sensitive to others undergoing that same process.
If we're going with the "indigeneity has a time limit, if you've been there for a thousand years you're indigenous now" argument that's used only for Israel/Palestine, then it also has to apply to the Jews who were still there through those thousand years.
(Also, I don't think Westerners should be making that argument in the first place. Because it lays the groundwork for white people to just drag out the battle over indigenous land rights for a few hundred years until it becomes commonly accepted that oops, now white people are indigenous to the Americas too?)
If we're going with the additional "people who immigrated back from your diaspora can't be indigenous" argument, then we need to look at the fact that the population increase consisted of massive amount of Arab immigration alongside Jewish immigration.
During the mandate period, Arabs from many lands flowed freely into Palestine while Jewish immigration was severely limited. The truth remai
In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspectiv
Denies and distorts the colonialism of Zionism:
I've seen dozens of people claim that Zionism-is-a-settler-colonialist-movement, especially over the past ten months.
The basic argument is that (1) early Zionist writers used the word colonialism, and (2) Britain was a colonial power and was in charge of the Mandate.
The first part is a common but very bad-faith argument. We're talking about writings from 100-150 years ago, decades before it became common to think of the words "colony" and "colonialism" -- and "settlement" and "settlers" -- as meaning, "tools for subjugating indigenous people and stealing their land and resources."
This 1828 dictionary, for example, is just like, "A colony is when a bunch of people live in one country, but are citizens of a different one." That usage still lives on on the concept of art/artist colonies. Because they became A Thing in 1860-1900, when the word "colony" was still being used to mean "a bunch of ex-pats."
More importantly: You cannot DIY settler-colonialism.
In settler-colonialism, a country sends settlers "to completely destroy and replace indigenous people and their cultures in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants. Therefore, settlers do not only exploit indigenous people’s lands and resources, but they displace them, modify the names of the cities and places they colonize in order to completely erase the indigenous’ tracks."
A lot of you have probably seen memes like this one, that aim to show exactly that. The original Palestinian names of Palestinian cities, before Israel colonized them.
Let's just fact-check these real quick, because it's a really good illustration of what's going on here.
The first two, Jerusalem/Al-Quds and Israel/Palestine, really say it all. The rest, you can skip unless you really want to know.
Jerusalem Al-Quds Jerusalem: 4,000 years it's been Jerusalem. "The modern Arabic name of Jerusalem is اَلْـقُـدْس al-Quds, and its first recorded use can be traced to the 9th century CE, two hundred years after the Muslim conquest of the city."
Israel Palestine Israel: The first written reference to "Israel" appears on the 3,300-year-old Memphis Stele. Israel and Judea were either adjoining Jewish kingdoms, or two parts of the United Kingdom of Israel, depending on which historian you ask. Judea is where the term "Jew" originated, but Israel is the umbrella term for the Jewish people. (Which is why you might hear people saying "am Yisrael chai," "the people of Israel live." It means all Jews, not the country.)
The region was renamed Palestine by the Romans about 1,900 years ago, after the SECOND Jewish Revolt against colonialist Roman occupation. This time, they revolted because Emperor Hadrian banned circumcision and "decided to build a Roman colony, Aelia Capitolina, on the site of Jerusalem."
(Fun fact: During the revolt they minted their own coins, many of which said, "For the freedom of Jerusalem" in paleo-Hebrew. This paralleled coins from the first revolt, which said, "For the freedom/redemption of Zion.")
The Romans brutally crushed the revolt, destroying almost 1,000 Jewish villages and killing more than half a million Jews over the course of a few years.
THEN they exiled all remaining Jews around Jerusalem, and banned any Jews from visiting it.
And THEN they downgraded Judea from basically a state to just a district, and renamed it "Syria Palaestina," after the now-gone Philistines, to really rub it in that Jews had no self-determination.
That's why it's named Palestine today. That's where the name came from. The region has been named Palestine for almost two thousand years because of Roman colonialism.
The Arab-Islamic Empire that conquered so many of the Holy Roman Empire's lands, and the Crusaders who conquered the area for a while in the middle of that, just had no reason to change the name again.
This post is way too long. Continuing in a reblog!
Acre Akko Akka: Acre is jut the English name for it. The Crusaders named it St. Jean d'Acre a thousand years ago, when they were invading and ethnically cleansing the Holy Land by murdering and enslaving the Jews and Muslims. This city has been called Akka for 5,000 years, all the way back to when it was Phoenician. Akko is just Arabic for Akka.
Kiryat Shmona Al-Khalisa Al-Khalisa: This one is tough because it doesn't look like there's been any archaeology done there yet. There were lots of Jewish towns in that region 3,000 years ago, but I don't know if one became itty-bitty Al-Khalisa 1,500 years later, or what. The oldest historical record I have is that it was a Bedouin village starting in the 1500s. Bedouins are indigenous to the Negev Desert (#NotAllBedouins, but I'm assuming these Bedouins) and still live there today, so, like, ok, I guess?
Netanya/Umm Khalid: These aren't the same town. Netanya was founded in 1928. Umm Khalid was one of four villages founded in the 18th century, during the Ottoman Empire.
Ahilud Al-Birwa Beri and then Ahilud: The Arabic name Al-Birwa was first recorded in 1047, in the book Sifr Nameh by the famous Persian author Naser Khasro. It may be the later Arabic version of Beri, which was burnt to the ground during the Roman occupation.
Tel Aviv Yaffa Tel Aviv-Yafo: That's the city's official name. Yafo is the original Hebrew name going way the hell back. Yafa is just the Arabic for Yafo. (It's Jaffa or Joppa in English.) Tel Aviv was founded in 1909 by 60 Jewish families who raised the money for the land so they could get out of crowded Jaffa. It got big and the cities merged together.
Beer-Sheba/Beer-Sabe: This is just the Arabic name for a 4,000-year-old city that at one point marked the southern boundary of Israel.
Lod/Al-Lydd: Lod was the center of Jewish scholarship and trade 2,500 years ago, although it's much older than that. Al-Lydd is just Lod in Arabic.
Ashkelon/Ashkalan, Zekharia/Zakaria, Ashdod/Isdud: these are so fucking obviously the same name in two different languages I'm not even doing them
Hebron al-Khalīl Hebron: Archaeologists have found a 2,700-year-old Jewish home in Hebron, and seals that say "LeMelech Hebron" ("the king of Hebron") in paleo-Hebrew. The name was changed under Arab colonization: "The Arabic name for Hebron, al-Khalīl, emerged as the city's actual name in the 13th century. Earlier Muslim sources refer to the city as Ḥabra or Ḥabrūn."
The entire thing is just pure DARVO.
