A Leo R said to my friend Maya :
“I can accept that Israel in one form or the other did exist 3,000 years ago but it is not realistic to accept that people all over the world can just turn up today and dispossess the indigenous people who live in Palestine today. Remember Jews, Muslims and Christians have successfully lived side by side in Palestine for thousands of years. It is only after WW2 and the Holocaust and the issue of resettling the European Jews after the war that brought Zionism to the fore and then the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, farms and businesses thereafter.”
Now, I don’t know how many have had this kind of claim thrown at them against Israel but I have seen variants of this many times.
For one, the guy made too many wrong assumptions and claims that need to be straightened before sorting him out.
Number one is that the Palestinians are not and has never been “indigenous people” of the land in that territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They are rather colonizers and occupiers. This is informed by the fact that they are of the Arab ethnic identity. The Arabs indigenous lands is in the Arabian Peninsula and not Eretz Israel or North Africa. They conquered and colonized those territories and the claim that they are indigenous to Eretz Israel sounds same as the British saying that they are indigenous to Gibraltar or northern Ireland. Again, half of these guys he claimed are indigenous actually had their parents and grandparents flooding that territory from the 1920s to the 1940s from the surrounding Arab nations as migrant workers and Mujahideen when the Jews started developing it so how can they be indigenous tohe place? The other half as noted by Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 were made up of foreign communities of Circassians, Bosnians, Turks, Kurds, Yemenis, Saudis, Egyptians, Persians, Afghanis, descendants of crusaders, Arab Bedouins, Gypsies, Armenians, Greeks, Algerians, Sudanese, Turkoman and then Samaritans of Shechem who with the Jews are the only native people of the land showing that these people now calling themselves a Palestinians which they started answering since 1964 have no indigenous roots to the land and are colonizers used by foreign empires to.milk the land .
Number two is that they were not dispossessed of anything. You dispossess someone of what he owned and not what he has no claim of ownership over. These Palestinians have zero claim of ownership over the land of Eretz Israel. They have zero indigenous, national or legal claim of ownership. The Jews are the ones with indigenous and national claims of ownership over the land as he noted (which actually did not end 3,000 years ago but around 2,000 years ago when the Romans took the land from the Hasmoneans) that the Jewish nation had existed there and the Jews originated from the place as it’s indigenous people. The different occupying empires who ran the land after dispossessing it of the Jews were the ones who exercised empire and legal right of ownership during their times of reign. The last empire to exercise ownership over the land were the Ottomans. The Ottomans by virtue of article 95 of the treaty of sevres gave up the land for the Jews to reconstitute their nation state on it. They did not and never gave it to these Arabs now calling themselves a Palestinians. They knew then that these Arabs have no national claim to the land and only agreed that their then prior to 1920 existing communities should only have their civil and religious rights not to be prejudiced…..not political and not national. So based on what claim can he say that they were dispossessed? The Arabs are the ones who actually were trying to steal Jewish lands the Ottomans handed back to them via the British when they illegally started flooding the land from the 1920s to steal it from the Jews.
Thirdly, people all over the world are not turning up today in Palestine. Jews all over the world are turning up today in their own indigenous homeland and nation state after the occupying empires have left. If he has issues with that, then he should also have issues with diaspora Greeks who fought for and came back to their nation after it gained independence from the Ottomans. He should have issues with Poles, Vietnamese, Algerians, Irish, and other people who were exiled or escaped from their country when it was under occupation, colonization or oppression by foreign powers and later came back on their achieving independence. He will be applying double standards if he does not condemn them too.
And actually yes, it is right for people to expel colonizers brought in by foreign empires to colonize and milk their lands no matter how long it lasted. This is usually seen in situations where the colonizers were hostile to the indigenous owners. It is the right thing to do and has been done by different nations on numerous occasions.
He should also know that it never mattered to those nations how long their nation was under colonization for them to still come back and reclaim it then expel those used by foreign empires to colonize their lands as these Palestinians were used on Jewish lands. For example, the Greeks ran off the Turks that were used to colonize their lands for about 400 years. This is after the Greeks have been colonized by Rome, Byzantium and Ottomans for about 2,000 years. The Vietnamese ran off the Colon French and Chinese who were used by France and China to colonize their lands. This was after a thousand years of Chinese colonization and 80 years from France. The Poles ran off the Germans used by Prussia and Germany to colonize their land. This was after about 150 years of colonization. The same thing also happened with the Pied Noir of Algeria after more than a hundred years of France occupation. What of even the Indians of Uganda that Idi Amin expelled even though they were no threat to the nation? So if he has issues with people taking back their lands after a long time of colonization and running out the people used for such colonial enterprise, he should extend it to all the world and not just for the Jews.
Fourthly, the Jews did not live peacefully with the Christians and Muslims for thousands of years prior to WW2. The Jews were living as dhimmis under the Muslims and suffered pogroms in Safed, Hebron and Tiberias in the 1840s. They also got slaughtered during the Nebi Musa riots of 1920, then the pogroms against them in 1929 in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, etc. They also got slaughtered by the Arab mobs in 1936 and the slaughter and pogroms stopped only when the Irgun said enough is enough and started hitting back.
Fifthly, he shows so much ignorance about Zionism. Zionism which is the Jewish nationalism or movement for self determination and lndependence on their own Eretz Israel has been ongoing for millenia. From Babylon to the Seleucids then Rome, Byzantium up till when Dona Gracias Mendez moved to purchase Tiberias from the Ottomans, Zionism had held sway. From Yehuda Alkalai to Herzl, Zionism has been there. In fact, he ought to have known of the first Aliyah which happened in 1881, the Second Aliyah of 1905, the third Aliyah of 1917 and the German Aliyah of the 1930s. All of these happened prior to WW2. Also the re-establishment of the Jewish state based on Zionism movement happened in 1922 and it got independent from the foreign tutelage of Britain based on international law provisions in 1948 and then renamed itself back to Israel rather than continue to answer the colonial “Palestine” that the colonizers and occupiers called it. How apt that the Arabs in 1964 picked up that colonial name the Jews dropped in 1948 and plastered upon themselves to show that they are actually colonizers and occupiers. Unfortunately, many ignorants like him do not see that.