> There was never a country called Israel until 1948. It was always Palestine.
Palestine was never a country before 1948, immediately prior to 1948 there was a British Mandate[0] with the name Palestine, but this mandate included land that would eventually turn into countries like Jordan(which just so happens to be a country with a Palestinian majority population). After 1948 and before 1967 the West Bank was annexed by Jordan and Gaza was occupied and administered by Egypt.
The idea of a nation called Palestine is arguably a more recent invention than the nation of Israel.
Jewish immigration to Palestine was initially accomplished by buying land from Arab landowners during the time when it was ruled by the Ottoman Empire.
> Is that why millions of Palestinians are refugees in other countries?
Palestinian refugees are defined differently by the UN vs essentially all other refugees.
Palestinian refugees fall under the UNRWA while normal refugees(i.e. refugees from essentially all other countries) fall under the UNHCR. The UNRWA definition is hereditary while the UNHCR definition is not. This hereditary definition is largely why the Palestinian refugee populations can increase over time in other countries so easily vs normal refugees.
> those people had to run away from Palestine because of Israeli murderers
There were multiple reason they(or their ancestors) left, there was plenty of violence when Israel was created but it wasn't like it was just one side attacking either. Regardless it's quite strange that someone is still considered a refugee despite potentially having never even been to the country they are supposedly a refugee from, especially since that doesn't happen for refugees from other countries(at least with how the UN defines refugee).
There was a war, people fled and were expelled from their homes for various reasons, Jews lost their homes as well due to the war. Sometimes fleeing a conflict is the least bad option. I have grandparents that had to flee their homes due to living in a country that was on the losing side of a war, they never got their homes/land back. I would probably even be considered a refugee by the UNRWA definition of refugee used for Palestinians. After Israels independence most Jews living in Arab countries were also forced out of their homes/land, I don't see Jews trying to get their original homes back in those Arab countries either. We can't go back in time and fix all the historical wrongs in the world, we have to move forwards.
It's the same people, on the same land, practicing the same religion, speaking the same language, with the same alphabet, with the same capital, with the same place names, with the same cities, with the same core texts, with the same national holidays.
But that's somehow nothing? At this point you'd have to actually work hard to figure out what's not the same.
Israel is an example of anti-colonialism, where the original inhabitants of the land were able to take it back from invaders.
It's amazing how everything you say above is proveably false.
They are not the same people. Modern day Palestinians share more ethnic heritage with the land's original inhabitants than European Zionist settlers.
The religion of the region has been different throughout time. Judaism is one religion of that region, and not the only nor even the first.
The language is not the same. Modern Hebrew that is spoken in Israel diverges significantly from the original Hebrew, which is more closely spoke by Yemeni Jews, for example.
Everything else is in your list is done by fiat, as even the the UN and the vast, vast majority of the world do not recognize Jerusalem as the capital.
Israel is the last major European colony and it's an anachronism that will go down in history as the final failed attempt at Western Imperialism.
Israel was not formed by displacement. That's a common misconception. Jews bought lands all across Palestine in early 1900's, with bodies such as the JNF. The displacement ("Nakba") came in 1948, during the Israeli War of Independence (started by the Arabs in Palestine and abroad), and even that mostly concerned areas which participated in the war. Areas that remained peaceful integrated into Israel (today's Israeli Arabs, 23% of the population).
It wasn't started by the Palestinians. Israelis conduced ethnic cleansing operations against civilians to displace them, including biowarfare and well poisoning. It continues today, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
The article you linked refers to events during the war of 1948, when Israel was already formalized. It's establishment up to that point was primarily based on lawful acquisition, not expulsion. When it turned to an all out war, then yes, expulsion took place.
You say "the Jews" but you're leaving out that there are Arab Jews and European ones. Arab Jews have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years alongside other Arabs peacefully in coexistence.
The arrival of Zionist European Jews was a phenomonen of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Zionist Jews that came from Europe brought with them a supremecist ideology that, in their eyes, justified all forms of violence committed against the Muslim, Christian, and yes, Jewish Palestians that opposed their colonization.
I don't know what you're making or misrepresenting in your statememt about Jordan and Jerusalem, but Jews have always lived in Jerusalem since the Muslims first took control of it 1400 years ago when Umar ibn El-Khattab brought back in Jews who had been expelled by the Christian rulers prior to that.
Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
"The Jordanians immediately expelled all the Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.[54] Mark Tessler cites John Oesterreicher as writing that during Jordanian rule, "34 out of the Old City's 35 synagogues were dynamited. Some were turned into stables, others into chicken coops.""
Which is why Palestinians should never get East Jerusalem as their capital, it's simply not theirs, not even in the nebulous way that the West Bank is.
This:
> Jews have always prospered under actual religious Muslim rule, whether in Palestine, Spain, Morocco, Iran, or otherwise. Zionism is what drove a rift between Muslims and Jews in past two centuries, as prior to this there never was one.
Is not true, as even a cursory view of the history will reveal endless massacres of Jews by Muslims.
This is completely in the context of the formation of Israel in 1948.
Also, you are lying about "endless massacres of Jews by Muslims". This is not, has never been, and continues to not be, true whatsoever.
Arabs and Muslims didn't even have antisemitism before Zionism existed. You can only look to times after Zionism with its supremeist ideology to find hostility from Arabs and Muslims specifically targeting Jews for being Jewish. It simply did not exist and they have coexisted for nearly the entirety of the history of Islam. Only when Europeans came down into the Middle East and they segmented and separated the society did this occur.
Avi Shlaim [0], an Israeli and also Arab Jew, talks extensively about the peaceful coexistence Muslims and Jews had for hundreds of years in the Middle East prior to Zionism.
Zionism tried to force a wedge between Arab Jews and Muslims that simply wasn't there beforehand.
I'm as against the genocide as you can be, but what you are saying is historically completely inaccurate. Discrimination against Jews is old, older than Israel or Zionism. The arguments against the land theft and genocide are strong enough without the hyperbole.
They have been deliberately displaced by Israeli's apartheid government giving Jewish people around the world a "right to return" to Israel. Except unlike the Palestinians, they were never from Israel in the first place so the term "right to return" as used by Israel is nothing but colonialist propaganda.
So you think the Jews imported by the One Million Plan and the tens of others like it were "displaced"? There's a reason that the multiplicity of Jews in Israel today are American and European immigrants with no connection to the land whatsoever.
It’s all just the ‘hopes and prayers’ of the left anyway. When someone doesn’t give a damn (like Israel right now), all the public shaming is just another version of the UN’s strongly worded letter.
Yes, the shameless and evil generally aren't to be reasoned with, in which case things will come to a head and there are other ways to stop genocides. See for example, the Nazis.
> No. You're just factually wrong. This is a made-up statement with no truth to it.
Arab colonisation of the middle east and north africa is documented history.
> Arab Jews were living peacefully side by side in Palestine before the European Zionist colonizers started coming in the 19th and 20th centuries.
You can look up historical incidences of Arab violence against Jews at any time you like. Palestine was partitioned into Jordan/Arab state/Jewish state for this reason, much like India and Pakistan was.
It's interesting how you have to go back about 1,000 years in order to try to make your false equivalency.
At no point in the plan for the partitioning of the Arab world was the safety or peace of peoples living there a consideration whatsoever. It was a convenient way to get the Jews out of Europe for the antisemites that lived there and to give the West a vassal colony to continue to serve its imperial purposes in the Middle East for destabilizing lest the Arabs otherwise unify.
Every other government in the Middle East with few exceptions are now, at this point, similarly vassalized and serve the same purpose, and any chance at deviation from that plan has been met with violence of an unsurpassed level with Israel serving as the foothold for that. The minor tribal violence you are alluding to, which was not targeted specifically at Jews, but part of general tribal spats that include Muslim on Muslim violence as well, pales in comparison to the technologized and politicized mass genocial violence in the Middle East that Israel has enabled and actively campaigned for (Iraq, Syria, Iran) for decades.
Don't tell me anything about the actions of the West or Israel in the Middle East aim for peace or reduction of violence. Jews were not spared from violence in Israel during its formation as well, with documented attacks against them in Iraq and Egypt to spur them to flee from the Arab countries to the "safety" of Israel. The Middle East was a much safer place for everyone, including Jews, before Israel was formed.
Arab colonisation being many years ago doesn’t mean it didn’t happen and doesn’t make arabs native. Here’s the Hamas leader talking about how they’re Arabs: https://x.com/eyakoby/status/1971056308939092028
> any chance at deviation from that plan has been met with violence of an unsurpassed level
Really? I thought it was because Arab leaders keep trying to destroy Israel. I think I got that impression from Arab leaders continuously saying they were going to destroy Israel, and 'the Jews' in the time between the writing of the Koran and the creation of the modern state (also still 'the jews' if you listen to Arab media).
Syria used to be Christian. Lebanon had a significant Christian population. Egypt was Egyptian and Iran was Zoroastrian. All fell after arab colonisation.
Judea became Palestine after the war in 115. Most of the population remained, stayed jewish, converted to christianism (which was just another jewish branch back then), or to one of the many other cults in the region. Their descendants are today's Palestinians. The fact that Samaritans, who are mentioned in the Bible, are still there is a good proof of this.
People didn’t refer to themselves as Palestinians until the 1960s. You can confirm this for yourself very easily.
The Arabs that lived in what is now Palestine simply called themselves Arabs, the same way that Arabs in Israel call themselves Arabs. British Palestine and Ottoman Palestine were multi ethnic states.
It's not their land to 'return to' - after all, people already live there and they have no moral right to displace them.