So my uncle just called me and we began talking about Palestine. He was claiming all the usual “anti-violence” points and such. Condemning both sides yadayada. Perpetuating the war propaganda about eating babies and shit. But then he began saying that the conflict is super complex and saying it’s gone back millenia and that it’s about religious land and stuff. I personally don’t know much other than 1947 to now, and that seems to be a problem because I can’t refute or agree with anything he was saying.
It’s making me feel like I’m uneducated and shouldn’t be supporting Palestine. He was saying that they both have legitimate claims to the land and many other things I can’t quite remember.
He said that my argument that the Palestinians were being oppressed worse because they are dying at such a greater rate is the same as saying the South in the American Civil War were the oppressed because most people who died were in the south.
He’s a very staunch catholic liberal but he delivers things pretty well and is older than me so I feel stupid around him lol. Basically I’m just kind of unsure about my position now? Do I not know enough? Can anyone validate or invalidate what he was saying or give an explanation and sources for what the history is?
I thought I knew enough but clearly not.
https://youtu.be/m19F4IHTVGc?si=tPm9RN5YhfWyoNJZ
He linked this video. Haven’t watched it but he says it’s unbiased. I don’t necessarily believe that.
Help
The claim that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict goes back hundreds or thousands of years is a lie. It is a lie designed to obfuscate the clear and simple fact that it started in 1947 and is NOT about religion but about settler colonial land theft, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The millennia thing is reminiscent of the nazi myth of the Aryan race because it assumes that an ancient civilization remains into the genome of people forever which is total race science bullshit. Also it’s being used to justify territorial takeover with the idea that this ancient civilization had this and that territory
What I haven’t seen mentioned yet in the other comments is how a lot of orthodox Jews are against zionism because it goes against their religion, which says that the promised land can only be achieved after the Messias has returned to earth. Creating a promised land in the name of Judaism before this has happened is blasphemy even. Saying it’s about religious land is zionist propaganda because, even to Jewish people, it isn’t.
I don’t have answers as I’m still learning the history myself. But I’m currently reading The Hundred Years War on Palestine, which covers 1917-2017, so it gets you a detailed look earlier than 1947.
More crucially for this discussion with your uncle, perhaps, it describes the emergence of Zionism and Israeli identity as a modern phenomenon, as something distinct from just ‘ancient land disputes’.
It’s available as an audiobook if you find that helpful, and you can find the ebook in Library Genesis if you otherwise have trouble getting a copy.
GRAZIANI: ‘Italy has as much right here as anybody else… England has a right to Egypt, France to Tunisia, Algeria, Spain to Morocco… but none of them have our pedigree. We have hundreds of years of right here.’
OMAR: ‘Hm. Soon you will take everything from me, and you want me to justify your thefts? No nation has the right to occupy another.’
GRAZIANI: ‘…we’re back here, that’s all. No‐one can deny us… read the date on this coin. It’s a coin of the Caesars. Dated, minted, in Libya.’
OMAR: ‘You will also find Greek, Turkish, Phoenician coins—all over Libya you’ll find them. Buried in our sand.’
(Source.)
This applies to Palestine in a similar way. Palestine was once the property of empires like the Neo‐Assyrian Empire, the Neo‐Babylonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhat, but nobody would seriously argue that Syria, Iraq, Italy, Greece, Turkey, or any other nation should kick out all of the inhabitants and replace them with colonists of their choosing. Likewise, Philistia (which included Gaza) was actually separate from the Kingdom of Israel and remained separate until the Neo‐Babylonian conquest of 604 B.C.E.
The only Jewish people who have a deep connexion to Palestine are the small precolonial minority, and even they had no interest in establishing a ‘Jewish state’. Zionism is a fundamentally European concept, and European Jews have a much slimmer connexion to the land by comparison.
He said that my argument that the Palestinians were being oppressed worse because they are dying at such a greater rate is the same as saying the South in the American Civil War were the oppressed because most people who died were in the south.
False equivalence, and it was needlessly insolent of him to make that comparison. The Palestinians have no interest in protecting chattel slavery or otherwise subjugating people. They just want to be left alone, without a neocolony inhibiting or ruining their lives. Honestly, I think that at this point reclaiming all of their land is a much lower priority for them than surviving.
