As I write these words, I am sitting at home in Tel Aviv, trying to figure out how to protect my family in a house with no shelter or safe room, following with growing panic the reports and rumors of horrible events taking place in the Israeli towns near Gaza which are under attack. I see people, some of them my friends, calling on social media to attack Gaza more fiercely than ever before. Some Israelis are saying that now is the time to eradicate Gaza entirely — essentially calling for genocide. Through all the explosions, the dread and the bloodshed, speaking about peaceful solutions seems like madness to them.
Yet I remember that everything that I am feeling now, which every Israeli must be sharing, has been the life experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.
That ain’t it, chief. Israel is a violent colonizer. Individual Jews are often persecuted for being Jewish. Those are separate and unrelated statements.
Israel isn’t a colonizer. This bullshit narrative is literally only believed by Marxists who get all their information through propaganda. About 70% of Israelis were already there, they’re native to the region. This idea that the majority of Israelis are European Jews is false, and so is the idea that Palestine before 1948 being a homogenous islamist Arab state. This region was always populated by Jews, Christians, and other groups. Jews, specifically, were oppressed and colonized by the various islamic empires because islam is deeply antisemtic, but they were still there despite all of their hardships. Israel didn’t pop out of thin air, and the European Jews who did migrate didn’t start from scratch. There were already large Jewish communities all over the region. When the Ottoman Empire fell, these Jewish communities finally had a chance to do something and so they started organizing, and with the help of the Brits they formed the modern state of Israel. When the Arabs saw this, they felt that their power was threatened and so they tried to genocide the Jews and destroy the state of Israel entirely… multiple times, and they failed each time. That’s how we got to where we are. It’s an oversimplification obviously, but it is an accurate portrayal of the situation. Trying to portray the origins of the modern state of Israel as the same as the colonization of the Americas is inaccurate in every way.
I’m talking about settlers.
There are no Israeli settlers in Gaza
Correct, why would they want to live there? The West Bank and golan heights are much nicer.
Israel did have Israeli settlements in Gaza, but it unilaterally gave them up to Gaza in 2005. The Israelis who were living were mad and didn’t want to leave voluntarily so Israel forcefully evicted them and took down the settlements. The hope was that by disengaging with Gaza, there would be an alternative path for peace with the Palestinians as they refused any peace offer or a two state solution.
Gaza in 2005 was a much easier place to live than it is now.