Asklemmy
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
Israel are absolutely and undeniably the bad guys. To use an analogy, imagine a school bully who is stronger and gets the support of the teachers and principal of the school, and the bully beats up the smaller kid every day until they hit a breaking point and throws a punch back. A reasonable school would support the bullied kid, but in this case, the principal just gives the bully a gun and looks away.
Israel has been dehumanizing and oppressing the Palestinian people since it's inception and things have been getting worse. When October 7th happen, it was indeed horrible and many civilians got hurt, but Israel's response was so completely disproportionately mad that they are actively committing genocide, treating the list of warcrimes like a to-do list.
The working class in both nations. The people, divided and conquered.
If Israel has a working class, it is one of settlers, IDF soldiers, etc. Those are not the "good guys".
There is a longstanding and incorrect view of Western leftists in the capacity of the Israeli working class to build their power and address the injustices. That class has no capacity to do so whatsoever. They are fully bought-off by the ethnocentric project, both materially and psychologically. This is not very different from how other settler colonist "working classes" did the same. If anything, it is an important lesson that the working class is not a moral quantity, it is a group defined by its relation to production, and only through political education can it gain agency for positive change.
They do have a working class, but your second point is all too true, which is why it has made no impact.
The humanitarian aide workers.
Have you watched the Mandalorian? Palestinians are Grogu and the Mandalorian, Israel / US and Zionists are the Empire.
The volunteers that risk going to do stuff in either side. Itβs crazy out there
on a scale from 1 to 10 how serious are you in asking this, I ask because I am genuinly unsure if you are confused and unaware of what is happening, or if you are trying to start some shit
I've answered this in the post to another commenter, but I am 100% serious.
Well for Decades the Irealies have both been genociding the Palistinians, and have been on a long push to try to conflait zionism, an origionaly anti-symetic idea in eurpope, that was even embraced by the Nazis, and quinticentialy jewish, so they could use anti-semitism to shield themselvs.
The good guys are the palistinians who where there before anyone else got there, and have been being genocided agian for decades on end, and are being genocided now.
The palestinian people. Sure, they have done some horrible things but it's been mostly out of desperation for decades of abuse from Israel, who are actively invading their country.
Yeah the conflict started way before october the 7th.
The fact that somebody would be asking this question after a year of genocide is phenomenal.
Reminder that at the outbreak of WWII, TONS of people in the US supported the Nazi regime right up until they started invading Western Europe AKA "the countries that matter"
Also worth noting that the US continued to do business with the nazis well into the war, and IBM famously facilitated the holocaust.
This is what Israel defending itself actually means
Well obviously it's the Western powers that gave a bunch of displaced Jews land after WWII, despite no legitimate claim to the area, and then proceeded to keep meddling in Middle Eastern affairs so they could get cheap oil. And the biggest of those Western powers directly gives taxpayer money to war profiteers so there's a direct financial incentive to keep the genocide going.
Those are the goodest guys.
The Zionist project was going full steam ahead prior to WWII. Zionists collaborated with Nazis to get Jewish people to emigrate or get deported to Palestine. And Holocaust survivors were often looked down on there are Jews that had not done the "right" thing of abandoning their homes to steal someone else's in Palestine. Zionists spread some of the most antisemitix things you have ever heard when it comes to this topic.
The backer of Zionism simply switched hands after WWII. Before it was the British, then it was the US.
It's important to separate out the government from the people, especially as it pertains to governments that don't listen to their population and don't have overwhelming support. Neither government is good. Most of the civilians from both sides are perfectly decent, though a number of them are misguided.
It's really impossible to simplify it, but I'll give it a shot with a quick timeline:
- ~1200 BCE: Several unrelated tribes of people group together to become what we now call Jews or Hebrews or ancient Israelites. How this happened and exactly when is disputed, and is significantly muddied by their own mythology.
- ~600 BCE: The first major expulsion of Jews from areas variously known through time as Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and many others.
- ~538 BCE: Jews are allowed to return (until next time).
- ~538 BCE through 1896 CE: For the sake of brevity, let's just say Jewish people rarely had real control over this land and were consistently persecuted and/or expelled from wherever they were.
- 1896 CE: Theodor Herzl writes "The Jewish State" and births the modern Zionist movement, claiming Jews have a right to Israel primarily on religious basis. He approaches world leaders saying as such and finds little traction.
- 1920: Britain takes control of the area now called Mandatory Palestine.
- 1941-1945: The Holocaust. I assume no additional information needed.
- 1945-1948: The Holocaust gives significant weight to Zionists' arguments that Jewish people need their own country. As many Jews have already been emigrating there (known as "Aliyah" or Jewish emigration to the promised land) since Zionism took hold, the powers that be (UK and US primarily) already have control of the area (still Mandatory Palestine), and a desire to maintain control of the area, they decide to give most of that land to the Jews and call it Israel.
- 1948: Israel is officially recognized by the United States, its primary backer today. As part of this recognition, Israel and its allies committed what is commonly known as "The Nakba." A huge number of Palestinians were killed, injured, jailed, or forcibly removed from the area.
- 1948: Arab-Israeli War. The Arab countries unite to fight the new state of Israel. This, as with most wars, is primarily because of power. The don't want the West to be controlling the region. The Arabs lose, but nobody loses more than Palestine.
- 1948: Palestinian attacks on Israel start. I don't have anywhere else to put this, but know that the end of the Arab-Israeli War didn't end Palestinians fighting for their land and independence. They will continue to do so by any means available to them.
- 1956: Suez Crisis. Israel and its backers invade and militarily occupy part of Egypt and take control of the Suez canal because Egypt decided to nationalize it. This war is transparent in its goal for power.
- 1967: Six Day War. Israel invades a variety of areas that it borders, including land owned by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. Palestine would be listed as well if it were recognized as a state. They're successful in only six days. Notable areas you may have heard of that were militarily acquired by Israel at this time are the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights. Israel still retains control over these conquered areas.
- 1973: Yom Kippur War. Arab states attack to try to get back the land lost in the Six Day War. Israeli victory.
- 1978: Camp David Accords. Israel agrees to give some land back in return for being recognized by Egypt as a state. Sedat, the Egyptian leader, would be assassinated in part because of this action.
- 1987β1993: First Intifada. More organized and wide-scale Palestinian insurgency than we've seen before. Palestinians are fighting for their independence and their land. The insurgency is suppressed.
- 2000β2005: Second Intifada. Same reasons and result as the first.
- 2006-current: Much like the intifadas, there's a lot to say here, but for the sake of brevity (lol too late) the Palestinian attacks that started in 1948 continue to this day. Israel intermittently declares various wars with the claim that they're rooting out terrorists, Hamas, Hezbollah, and more.
This leaves out a lot. It's just not possible to condense it. But (mostly) off the top of my head, that's what I'd consider most of the most important bits.
The way I see it, whether or not you think Israel is "the good guys" largely hinges on whether or not you think Jews have a right to the land of Israel, and whether or not you think that claim was executed in a humane way.
I would compare it to the Native Americans - were the Americans of that time period the "good guys"? In my opinion, absolutely not. Were the Native Americans wrong for defending their land? Again, absolutely not. Were they wrong for attacking innocent civilians in retribution (for their land being taken, their own innocent civilians being killed, a genocide in progress)? Maybe, but it's also understandable that when you're working from a position of basically zero power against a behemoth, you can't fight the way the behemoth fights, or you're going to lose.
The way I see it, the Palestinian people just want a place to live and develop, and nobody's giving them a way out, so they're trying anything and everything they can.
One minor, but important detail: The First Aliyah began in the 1880s, a decade before Herzl's work. Land was purchased for settlements, and a few tens of thousands came, mostly from Eastern Europe. Within a couple decades the kibbutz system was established, small socialist communities where it was decided, unfortunately, to try to rely exclusively on Jewish labor and economy. This led to the first significant frictions between the settlers and the Palestinians, setting the stage for our situation today.
Very true! It's hard to imagine Israel would be the same today without the particular cultural choices those first immigrants made. Thanks for the addition.