Too much emphasis on ancestral not enough on homeland. Despite what may have taken place 200 2000 or 20000 years ago to lead to the settled population being what it was when israel got Wished into existence, there was a population settled there. israel doesnt get to say it has a right to defend itself/right to exist when its defense now and existence in the first place is a function of the displacement of that population.

By the logic israel uses, the native Americans had no claim to the land because manifest destiny. They werent using it correctly either, the land is in much better hands now, gestures broadly. Also, those pesky indians were fighting among themselves so often the land changed hands countless times over the centuries and millennia; who’s to say who the rightful owners of the lands really were when the white savior came along and fixed it all up proper? They were wrong to try to defend the land their forefathers had hunted buffalo across, to launch failed wars to retake those lands, to form war councils to lead their people who recommended to commit acts designed to strike terror into the hearts of their oppressors like torture, kidnapping, raping settlers, and sending murderous raiding parties into border towns… Anyway, they couldnt defend it, so what claim can they be said to have had at all?

Now replace native american with palestinian, manifest destiny with zionism, hunted buffalo with farmed dates, war council with hamas, murderous raiding party with O7, and white savior with the 1947 U.N. Palestine Plan. Its just ethnic cleansing by way of genocide in order to take land and increase material wealth. There is no piece of paper that makes the harm done tit for tat for tit for tat going on nigh a century now any the less evil, and no matter how you slice this pie, israel comes out with a greater share of that evil, both for the initial wrong, and for the continued encroachment, coming full circle to the point I was making in my top level comment: Israel was founded by the foreign seizure of already settled lands. Observe in the “1947 U.N. Palestine Plan” UN is the subject and Palestine is quite literally objectified.

I didn’t say it was justified, I said this is why people are doing what they’re doing. I believe my exact words were, without looking them up, “This is what they will take when their right to exist is denied.” That isn’t justification- though I understand to them it would be. I’m saying I understand, sympathize, even empathize with other people. You are saying you don’t. You are saying that 77 years is “ancient history” (there are people alive today who can remember back to 1947, you betray the immaturity of your age, and your perfect ignorance of history with that belittling quip) as a way to misrepresent recent history. You are using the words “ancient grudges” to hand-wave the existence of people who are very much alive and suffering today as a footnote to history. The ancient history here, if you want to do that goes back through and past the ottoman empire. The collapse/dissolution of that empire balkanized the region- fuck me You know what, I don’t feel like teaching you history, it’s goddamned exhausting, and anyway you’ll ignore and twist and misunderstand and take out of context and put words in my mouth that I never said, whatever is convenient to your argument, based on the rest of our “conversation” anyway (I’m quite certain I detect the effect of skimming my work in your words, certain marks of a person who has not taken the trouble to understand a person’s position before replying to it). My advice: go read wikipedia on palestine/israel instead of the nothing you got in public school and the less-than-nothing you’re getting from the news.

From your initial comment it seems like the main misunderstanding is that nation states unilaterally declared by European powers in Africa and Western Asia from the nineteenth century until around the middle of the 20th century have been utterly disastrous to those places rather than being the only source of order in those places. Although these nation states are seen as legitimate by the powers which established them, in the opinion of many of the victims of these European powers whose population is much larger and much more relevant since they are physically present for the consequences of this establishment, tend not to consider them as legitimate and more of an encroachment. Colonization is not a neutral or natural process but an act of aggression by parties with superior military might on parties vulnerable to that might. If your view is that might makes right, then the issue here isn’t in historical misunderstanding but more of a moral dissonance. If that isn’t your view I’d be willing to entertain a more detailed conversation.