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Origins of Israel
Can somebody explain to me, in a nutshell:
- How was Israel created?
- Why do Western governments support Israel?
- Why does the left oppose Israel?
Plain statements of fact please, no 'because they are bourgeois imperialist scum'. Cheers.
the modern state of israel was created by one of the most evil empires ever to exist the
british empire and now it is supported and protected bythe new evil empire on the block the U.S.A they stole somebody else country and created their the own state
Right, well that is exactly the kind of response I didn't want, thank you.
Israel was officially founded by Britain in the British Mandate of Palestine. That set up the borders and all that for the state of Israel and all that.
Western governments support Israel, mainly I think, because it's a friendly face in the Middle East, which is incredibly valuable to them. Also, in the U.S., there are a few ultra-wealthy fundamentalist Christians with some strong political pull that see Israel as instrumental in their religious end-times apocalyptic fantasies. I'm not joking about that.
The Left opposes Israel for a lot of reasons. The racist policies of the Israeli government, for one, which make Palestinians second-class citizens. Things like their penchant for bulldozing Palestinian towns and building Israeli settlements over them, and using this strategy to take the vast majority of arable land in Palestine.
I'm on some sickle-hammer shit
Collective Bruce Banner shit
FKA: #FF0000, AKA Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Britain controlled Palestine after the end of World War 1, and a number of elite Brits...including a number of serious anti-semites like Balfour...supported this as a way to move European Jews out of Europe, to become a bulwark for Western imperialism in the middle east. They were able to prevail upon the newly created UN in 1947 to divide Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian pieces, even tho Jews were only a minority at that time, and the UN had no plan at all for how to protect the Palestinians. The Brits had largely disarmed the local Palestinian militias in the mid '30s, but had trained many Zionist Jews in the British Army during WW2. at the end of the war the Brits also ignored the massive arming by the Jewish paramlitaries, Haganah and Irgun. at the time of the 1947 partition, the Jewish section had only a smal Jewish majority. this was unacceptable to Zionist Jewish leaders like Ben Gurion who therefore opted for doing as much ethnic-cleansing of the Palestiniians as they could get away with. this is all documented extensively in "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" by Jewish Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.
in 1947 under Ben Gurion's command, the Jewish paramilitaries used armed violence to drive a half million Palestinians out of the country...a country where their ancestors had lived for centuries. Before 1947 Jews only owned 11 percent of the land, but after the cleansing Jewish entities ended up owning most of the land. moreover, the evicted Palestinians and set up policies to allow only Jews on the land these entities owned.
Altho there remains a Palestinian minority in Israel, it does not have equal rights with the Jews. Any Jew in the world has the right to move to Israel but the Palestinians who were driven out from what is now Israel have no such right. Zionism was founded on an exclusivist ideal of a purely Jewish society that denies equal rights to the Palestinians. in this sense Zionism is a racist ideology and practice.
The various proposals by Israel over the years for a socalled Palestinian state would create separate bantustans of Palestinians, broken up so as to better control them...like the bantustans created for blacks under apartheid in South Africa.
Israel has been able to get away with these practices, which continue (such as ongoing creeping takeover of the west Bank), despite much world opposition, because of backing by Western imperialism, first UK and now USA, which supports Israel as a pro-imperialist watchdog in the oil rich middle east.
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.
OK, prior to the 1948 founding of Israel, are there any historical facts and evidence to support claims for Jewish ownership or an Israeli state in or around the current surrounding controversial areas other than biblical or religious beliefs and texts ?
Well, the Diaspora did happen, so.
I'm on some sickle-hammer shit
Collective Bruce Banner shit
FKA: #FF0000, AKA Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Yeah, of course they are or should be welcome, but apart from the bible or religious references, is there a legitimate reason for 'Israel' ? Was the Israeli state only mentioned in the bible ?
The only foundation for legitimacy is the UN Resolution creating Israel in 1947.
But ultimately, no country is legitimate. All states which have existed and all state which are existing are ultimately owing their existence to weaponry, their own or someone else's. Originally, all modern states were formed in a process of organised thievery, murder, defensive and offensive warfare, genocide and I don't know what.
well, in the '30s Jews owned about a tenth of the land, and were a minority of the population. Zionism was created in the 19th century on the model of western imperialist/colonialist ideology. the rationale was that anit-semitism in Europe made the situation of Jews hopeless, so a Jewish homeland was needed, and a European colonialist mentality was adopted for re-settlement into what was a part of the 3rd world.
in regard to the Biblical justifications, problem there is that many of the Palestinians are very likely descendants of the ancient Judeans.
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.
Not really, not in the sense that it is popularly understood to have happened. I mean, there are Christians all over the world, does anyone suggest they are all the blood descendants of Christ and his buddies, long expelled from the Kingdom of Wherever? Of course not, this would seem absurd. Incidentally, Judaism is not so different. Actually, there is a wealth of evidence which indicates that there never was any mass exodus from Judea in the first place - that in reality, like the other Abrahamic faiths, Judaism was a proselytizing religion. This would mean, in actual fact, that "The Diaspora (TM)" is actually a bullshit myth, sort of like a lot of the things in the Bible.
Christianity is not an ethnicity you moron, Jews are an ethnicity and an ethnic religion. Christians were prostelatizers, Jews were not.
Whats the evidence? BTW you do know that Jews Holy Book is the Torah and the Old Testiment in the bible right? Which means the law of the Torah was the law of the jews.
You also know that the Babelonians displaced the jews in the 6th century BC, and when the persians let them go many of them traveled around (which is why christianity spread so fast, because origionally it was a sect of Judalism thus jews around the Roman empire took it up, and they were around because of what happened back in the 6th century).
But still, I'd like to see your evidence.
I said ethnicity, not race. There are a lot of Jews from Eastern Africa because of the dispora and the mixing with the local peoples.
I'm not 100% on this history, but to my knowledge, Judaism was not based on conversion for the most part and it's social usefulness in ancient times and the middle ages was as a community that existed across various cultures. So if you were traveling in these times before phones and Motel 6s, you could go to a temple and there was a network there already of trusted people who spoke your language and could put you up and so on. Christianity was similar, but because you didn't need to be born into that community to become part of it, it spread more and became very useful for elites wanting to create their own networks so that a ruler in a remote region was tied to the elites in Rome or Paris or wherever. This is why in Northern Europe it was the rulers who converted while the rest of the population kept the old traditions initially.
But again, I'm not sure how much of the above description is accurate history. I read Kautsky's "Foundations of Christianity" a long time ago and I'm not sure if I am getting his materialist explanation of these religions correct and I also wonder how much of his information still holds up historically because he took much of ancient history on face value and there has been a lot of new archeological discoveries and advances in both the Mediterranean and middle east.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/christ/
But the bottom line is that it doesn't matter for today. If people were displaced, they were no more displaced than other groups in the past. In fact leaving aside the ancient world, all of European peasants and yeomen were displaced, countless people from Africa were displaced, Native Americans in the northern and southern continents were displaced, hundreds of thousands of people in British India were displaced by patrician just this century... and of course people in Palestine were forced to abandon their land and still can not return.
There is no magical force that ties any group of individuals to land, if Israelis have some magical right to that land, then Native Americans have equal right to bulldoze your house if you live in the US. So the Zionist claim to that land is more like manifest destiny and the US's claim to the all of the Americas - a myth to justify opression, genocide, and a land-grab. In fact Palestine was one of a few places early Zionists argued for, it became that particular area because it was useful to the British... and now to the US.
Have an infraction for being an aggressive douche bag from the get go.
I'm on some sickle-hammer shit
Collective Bruce Banner shit
FKA: #FF0000, AKA Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
If you can get an infraction for being an aggressive douche bag, then almost everyone on revleft should have infractions.
Cry harder.
I'm on some sickle-hammer shit
Collective Bruce Banner shit
FKA: #FF0000, AKA Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath
Except me, but then I am an angel.
Nobody asks for such evidence with respect to Iraq or other countries, for instance. Bible mentions many nations like Syria, Persia etc. aside from Israel, so surely it couldn't have been false.
