Where is this video incorrect about the history of Israel and the Middle East?

Might want to check your link. It took me to a video about losing weight and getting ripped. I’d say that is totally incorrect about the history of the middle east.

^^Was that an advertisement?

Not an ad. Pretty sure the link is wrong.

But a really nice distraction!

@JLeslie

“Was that an advertisement?”

The entire video is an ad for a metabolic accelerant.

Lol. Something I would never watch! I’ll flag this Q.

very nice abs!

Fixed! Try the video link again.

That dude is an extremist. He doesn’t believe that Palestinians have a right to exist on the land partitioned for them under the UN plan. He wants them to be ethnically cleansed from the land so Israel is one big state that’s for Jewish people. And just to be clear, ethnic cleansing isn’t a factor of population, but of removing people from territory. The number of kids they have after that is irrelevant if they’re in a different place. There are more Jewish people alive today than before the holocaust, such a fact is not evidence that Jews weren’t ethnically cleansed from Europe. (obviously).

I found an interesting counterpoint breakdown in the comments:

”

You’re so accurate about everything you say. The problem is: you don’t say everything :)
Few things you didn’t mention (references at the end):

- When talks of partition started in 1937, Ben-Gurion (the founder of the state of Israel) said in statement “we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine”. The expansive intentions were very explicit and it didn’t take much of research to know that the partition was only the start and was accordingly refused.

- You are very good at quoting arab leaders trash-talk Israel, but you didn’t mention that Egypt is in peace treaty with Israel since 1978 and the leader of the PLO Yasser Arafaat has recognized (Oslo accords 1993) Israel as a state and agreed to have 2 states solutions according to 1967 borders, which is way more than the original partition plan by the UN in 1947.

- Why this is not working? because Israel keeps expanding and grappling more land while kicking Palestinians (or call them whatever they want) from their houses. Dunno if you’re check but every settlement that is built outside 1967 border of Israel is considered illegal by the UN and international law. For some reason you deliberately decided to jump this issue of occupation, simply because it’s easier to believe that everyone wants to kill Jewish people, which is far from the truth.
– I find it really disgusting to take extremist examples from any religion or group and use it as a way to convenience people that they’re not worthy anyways.

- Currently in the world, gay marriage is legal in only 34 countries, that means there is around 162 countries where it’s still illegal. But you choose to, again, try to show arabs as less of humans or less civilized by highlighting that problem in there, implicitly saying “Those are not as liberal and cool as Israel so why do you listen to them crying about occupation”. Again, not cool man.

- You never talked about how arab citizens of Israel are being treated. Let’s talk about how the nation-state law is clearly setting non-Jewish citizens of Israel in a lower place in the Jewish-first country. Let’s talk about human rights, not only for women or gay people, but for 500 children that Israel arrests on average every year and puts them to military courts.

- You don’t like the word “Ethnic-cleansing” because there are more “Palestinians” now than 1948. But now there are more Jews than there were in Nazi times, does this mean the Jewish people didn’t face ethnic cleansing? It’s absurd. “Ethnic cleansing is rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group, which is contrary to international law.” This is exactly what Israel is doing.

I can go on and on. But I just want to say, if what you said is what average Israelis know, then that explains why Israel continues to oppress and “ethnically cleanse” Palestinians, or whatever you want to call the people who are being kicked out of their houses.

”

^^I have to ingest everything you wrote. I will say that by all estimates that I have ever read, there are not more Jews today than before the Holocaust. Even if we are close to the same numbers it took us 80 years just to get back close to the number.

@JLeslie You may be right. I saw 20 million Jewish people, but other stats are saying it is closer to 16 million. I apologize for the error. I imagine this number is somewhat fuzzy. My cousins are half-jewish and don’t attend temple, are they sufficiently “Jewish” to count? I’m sure Hitler would have murdered them with joy.

Either way, the point is that as soon as the global (or even the European Jewish population) exceeds the pre-holocaust number, that will not negate the fact that there was ethnic cleansing. We don’t measure ethnic cleansing based on the population count of the refugees who have been removed from their land, we measure it by the population in the geography where the ethnic cleansing took place.

I think the video makes some very good points. “Palestine” was never a country until relatively recently. “Palestinians” were never a people. There were Palestinian Arabs which is the closest thing you could say. But “Palestine” was the name give to a general area of the world. It had no borders, no government, no nothing until around the 1960’s. And this was due to colonialism as he said.

I’ve said before that there will be no peace in this part of the country until the bitter end. There isn’t war over space, there is war over ideology.

@seawulf575 But the same authority that created “Palestine” is the one that created the modern state of Israel. The guy is using semantic labels to essentially pretend people didn’t exist or to somehow delegitimize them as a people based on what their occupiers labeled them.

@gorillapaws Of course people existed. He never said that. But they weren’t Palestinians. They were Arabs. Just like the people living in Israel before it was acknowledged were Jews. This highlights even more my statement that all the violence is not about space but ideology.

But you are a huge Palestinian fan. Let me ask: do you approve of the recent attack by Hamas on Israel where they targeted civilians especially? Even women and children?

@seawulf575 “But you are a huge Palestinian fan.”

I’m also a huge fan of the Israeli people.

“Let me ask: do you approve of the recent attack by Hamas on Israel where they targeted civilians especially? Even women and children?”

Of course not. Terrorism is wrong. Murdering/raping/kidnapping civilians is wrong.

The Jewish people would likely now be at 35–50 million, maybe more, if they had not killed ⅓ of us during the Holocaust. Population growth is exponential. There are almost 2 billion Muslims in the world. There are 350 million in the Middle East. Israel is the size of NJ in the middle of HUGE Arab and Muslim lands, and Israel has 2 million Arabs within its borders, or the 9 million people who live there.

Jews were also Palestinians in the sense that the Jews that lived in the territory of Palestine could accurately be called Palestinians, but I actually have no problem with the Palestinian Arabs today wanting to use the name. Labels change over time.

Here is a recent video following the attack, the ending is the most interesting. I assume the person being interviewed is an Arab Israeli. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flyBrOdHj2U&t=7s Look slike it is on Middle East BBC.

@gorillapaws What does that mean the amount of the population where the ethnic cleansing took place. Jews are always a small number! We don’t try to convert people, most of us don’t make ten babies. We have been spread out across the globe because we are always trying to save our lives. Israel was supposed to be the place we can always go to when people are trying to kill us. Jews continued to come from Europe and other parts of West Asia to Israel when Israel was created.

It just goes back to they (there are so many theys) want us all dead.

Just pause for a moment and set aside the Palestinian Israeli conflict and that Palestinians have a crappy existence in Gaza. Put yourself in the place of the Jewish people.

Where should the Jewish Israelis go? I asked tinyfaery this and didn’t receive an answer. Should they go to Europe? The Americas? Other countries in the Middle East. What about my husband? Can he go to TelAviv since his grandparents were driven out of there in the 1930’s? Does he have a right to be there?

The Kibbutz that Hamas just attacked was there since 1946. They owned the land before the UN decision.

@JLeslie “The Jewish people would likely now be at 35–50 million, maybe more, if they had not killed ⅓ of us during the Holocaust. Population growth is exponential. There are almost 2 billion Muslims in the world. There are 350 million in the Middle East. Israel is the size of NJ in the middle of HUGE Arab and Muslim lands, and Israel has 2 million Arabs within its borders, or the 9 million people who live there.”

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make? That the holocaust was horrible? That it fundamentally impacted the population trajectory of the Jewish people? I don’t think you’ll find anyone disagreeing with that. My point was “ethnic cleansing” has a specific definition. The dude in the video is trying to alter the definition of ethnic cleansing to pretend like the state of Israel isn’t trying to do that in the West Bank.

@JLeslie “Where should the Jewish Israelis go?”

To Israel (as defined by the UN)!

The guy in this video wants Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza and remove the Arabs from it. He’s an extremist.

I haven’t had a chance to watch your other video link. I’ve got to run, but I’ll return tonight.

@gorillapaws Just curious. If Israel does what you say regarding the borders, and Iran and its agents like Hamas and Hezbollah continue to throw rockets and rape and pillage then what?

Do you actually believe the Middle East will actually calm down and accept Israel? I’m fine with going back to the UN borders, but I do not believe it will cure the problem.

I didn’t get what you did regarding the video, I just saw it as a history lesson. I didn’t see him promoting take all that land back for Israel, but I’ll watch it again. I felt he was explaining Jewish people are not occupiers of the land they have been there for centuries.

One other Q, how do you square promoting a group that generally is anti-LGBT, anti-women’s rights, I am not talking about Hamas, I mean all governments across the ME and many of the people. You want to promote a culture that is horrible on the civil rights scale?

@gorillapaws you claim to be a big fan of the Israeli people, yet every comment you pulled out was a slam on Israel. The video did not go out to slam everyone that wasn’t Israeli, it just gave facts. So if you are just as big a fan of Israel, why focus only on comments that slammed the video? And you treated them as an example of what you believe. You even attributed beliefs to the video presenter as facts that were specifically NOT what he said. But you did it so you could call him an extremist. In other words, if someone gives the view of the Israeli people he is an extremist? That puts a pin in your statement that support the Israeli people.

@gorillapaws I read through your answers. I am not anti-Arab at all. This is about the situation in the Middle East, the leadership there, and the laws there. The US is imperfect too, but it is much more extreme and dangerous in the ME countries regarding civil rights. I bet I interact with more Arabs, Persians, and more Muslims than you over my lifetime and even now. People always dismiss the “I have Muslim friends” or Black friends, pick a group, but I really don’t understand why. I could care less where someone is from or their ethnicity or religion, I meet each person as an individual.

The Yiddish facebook group I’m in just posted a picture of a Jew and Arab holding hands and there are so many responses of people saying they hope for it. Jewish people all over the world.

I’ve already said I agree with going back to the 67 borders. I’ve already said I care about the Palestinian people’s well being who, but just like the brainwashed Jan 6 QAnons, I don’t trust the extremists to be good citizens, and at least part of the population in Gaza is still going to want to throw rockets at Israel, are antisemitic, and don’t think Israel should exist. They are raised that way. I don’t know what percentage of the population that is.

When I talk about people wanting to kill Jews my first thought is not Arabs, Persians, or Muslims, it is White Supremacists and generally extremists. The extremists in almost all groups come after the Jews with at minimum negative stereotypes and at max want to kill us.

You don’t look at both POV’s from where I sit, you seem very one sided. The history is complicated. Both groups have lived on the land. I guess you are saying the long history doesn’t matter, just the UN decision, ok, I can go with that, but then I don’t want to hear complaints about Arabs being removed from Israel after the UN decision. I don’t even know that part of the history well. It sounds like Arabs came after Jews when the UN decision was made and the Jews won that war. I don’t know that history well. Maybe it was a little of both. That was a long time ago.

As far as Arabs in Israel, many are fighting with the Israeli army today against Hamas. You can see in the latest link I provided above that an Arab in Tel Aviv is lock step with Israel regarding the recent attacks.

If there were two states would all Arabs in Israel want to be under a Palestinian government or choose to stay in Israel? I wonder how many stay, certainly some of them would.

Being an American it’s said to me that any country is a specific religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Call me brainwashed, but I think the best way is multiculturalism and a secular government. But, then we have that nagging thing of people constantly wanting to kill Jews throughout history. You think that’s overblown or doesn’t apply today, but you’re not Jewish.

@seawulf575 ”you claim to be a big fan of the Israeli people, yet every comment you pulled out was a slam on Israel”

Yes. There is a difference between the Israeli people and the nation of Israel. Just like there’s a difference between the nation of Russia, or North Korea, or China and the people of those countries. I have a major problem with the State of Israel’s policies pretty much since the death of Rabin at the hands of an Israeli extremist who didn’t want a 2-state peace. Supporting a state doing evil things is not doing its people any favors by the way. Is being critical of a kid that’s ruining their life with a drug addiction “slamming” them? I think it’s done out of concern and love for a better outcome.

@seawulf575 ”you even attributed beliefs to the video presenter as facts that were specifically NOT what he said”

He has other videos on his channel that talk about the things I attributed to him for example one titled (“Free Palestine? No thanks! “). If there’s something I said that you don’t think he believes, name it and I can provide a source.

@JLeslie ”If Israel does what you say regarding the borders, and Iran and its agents like Hamas and Hezbollah continue to throw rockets and rape and pillage then what?”

Several things here. 1. I fully support expanding the Iron Dome to the point that Israel will forever be shielded from air attacks. 2. If there are 2 separate states how are Hamas crossing the giant boarder walls? Passing through the UN patrolled demilitarized zone and then managing to rape and pillage? Let’s say somehow they invent teleporter machines or something for argument’s sake.

In such a circumstance, the IDF would reach out to the government of Palestine and demand them to extradite the culprits. I have every reason to believe they would assist in apprehension and extradition.

But let’s say they refused. In such a circumstance, I think the IDF would be well-within their rights to conduct a raid with their special forces (similar to the one that attempted to capture Bin Laden) and arrest the suspect(s) to stand trial.

@JLeslie ”Do you actually believe the Middle East will actually calm down and accept Israel”

This is involved, so forgive my long response. There are multiple axes at play. You have the Jewish <——> Arab axis, the Judaism <——> Islam axis, and then you have the Colonizer <——> Colonized axis (aka the Occupier <——> Occupied axis). The position I’m advocating for really only resolving the last one. It won’t fix the other two, and there will be Imams and Rabbis on both sides denouncing the other side for many years to come—without question.

Furthermore there has been a lot of trauma that’s occurring right now. As we discuss this from the comfort of our homes, there are terrified captive hostages fearing a gruesome murder by terrorists and children on ventilators that have been switched off because Israel is preventing fuel to power the hospitals. If that’s your child (either one), forgiveness of the other side is a long ways off. I believe there are still Jewish people who refuse to buy German products (which I completely understand). These things will take decades to fully heal.

So, what’s to be done? There are 3 real options:

1. A 2-state solution. A Jewish Israeli state and a Palestinian one.
2. Declaring an end to Zionism and creating one greater Israel/Palestine secular state where everyone is equal and there are no special privileges based on one’s ethnicity. This would mean an end to the right of return (or at least expanding it to Arabs as well).
3. Pursuing a “Greater Israel” ethnostate that incudes Gaza and the West Bank. This solution has 2 versions:
3-A. Israel allows Arabs to remain as second-class citizens with fewer rights than Jews (aka apartheid)
3-B. Israel purges the Arabs from its territory via ethnic cleansing.

I would argue the State of Israel is currently pursuing 3B and has been for many decades. As evidence, I would refer you to this powerful quote:

“As the person who initiated the military fire zones in 1967, they were all intended for one purpose: to provide an opportunity for Jewish settlement in the area. As soon as the Six-Day War ended, I was still sitting with my division in Sinai. I was in Sinai when I drew up these zones. The firing zones were created for one purpose: land reserves for settlements.” — Ariel Sharon, 1979

Stealing the Palestinian land was the plan all along.

Returning to my earlier point about the various axes, the Occupier <——> Occupied axis is really the only one that can be controlled politically unless we are willing to accept the total ethnic cleansing of the Arab/Muslim people. Being an occupier and having the opportunity and temptation to settle other people’s land is unhealthy to the State of Israel—it incentivizes the state to behave grotesquely. Occupation necessitates violence and the dehumanization of the other people. There are no historical examples of the occupier and occupied getting along. It is a recipe for millennia of violence, suffering, terrorism, collective punishment, war crimes and desperation/destitution.

With that said, I would argue that eliminating the Occupier <——> Occupied relationship is necessary but not sufficient for peace. It’s going to take time and people from both sides putting in the work to oppose those who want peace to fail.

@JLeslie ”I read through your answers. I am not anti-Arab at all…”

I think there’s been confusion about my post. I was quoting a comment written by one of the people in the comments section and directed to the video’s author. Fluther doesn’t have block quotes so I put a “ on one line and then a final one on the last line to denote the quote (as well as explicitly saying that I was quoting a commenter). To be clear, I don’t think you’re anti-Arab. The “you” referenced in the quote was directed at the author of the video and the words weren’t mine.

@JLeslie ”You think that’s overblown or doesn’t apply today, but you’re not Jewish.”

I think antisemitism was on the decline for decades and that the extremist behavior by Netanyahu—especially the weaponization of “antisemitism” to be used as a smoke-screen to prevent criticism of his policies has sadly increased antisemitism from where it was, say, twenty years ago. Most people are anti colonialism and when Israel engages in colonial practices “in the name of the Jewish people” I think some people wrongly begin to associate Jews with colonialism. Netanyahu has done a lot of damage to the Jewish people. I do agree that it’s on the rise and I am very concerned for the Israeli people and Jews in general. It’s one of the major reasons I’m so critical of the State of Israel. I have many friends who are Jewish and family too.

@gorillapaws You claim he wants ethnic cleansing yet in the video provided he specifically talks about how Arabs are allowed to live in Israel whereas Israelis are killed in Arabic countries. At no time in the video did he call for eradicating anyone.

But you continue to claim that you support Palestinian and Israeli people. Hamas is made up of Palestinian people but you say you don’t support them. Other civilian Palestinians accept Hamas (much as they accepted the PLO, another terrorist organization. So if the people of Palestine are supporting the terrorists and the terrorists are killing civilians, do you still support that? Yes, I know that not everyone that lives in an area feels the same as everyone else. Yet it seems they do support terrorist organizations that are willing to attack Israel.

Everyone seems to want to blame Israel for the attacks. Yet looking back at the history it seems most of the Israeli military activities were in response to attacks from those that oppose Israel and/or the Jews. Very few times did Israel initiate an attack without obvious provocation. One example would be the raids into the Gaza Strip to hit what was effectively a Hamas command center.

The problem continues to be one of ideology. Arabs hate Jews and Jews aren’t overly fond of Arabs. Neither side is willing to give up their ideological or religious beliefs. And that comes down to the people. So again, you can say you support the “people” but you obviously don’t support their beliefs.

@seawulf575 “You claim he wants ethnic cleansing yet in the video provided”

Correct. The guy made many videos I watched some of them. He wants Israel to colonize the West Bank in violation of international law. That necessitates ethnically cleansing the existing Arabs to make way for Israeli Settlers. That is an extremist position.

@seawulf575 “So if the people of Palestine are supporting the terrorists and the terrorists are killing civilians, do you still support that?”

That’s literally the same reasoning Bin Laden used to justify killing civilians in 9/11. Can we expect Israel to be better than terrorists? I would fucking hope so.

@gorillapaws Colonizing does not equal ethnic cleansing. In fact it was the Israeli government that pulled back from the Gaza strip to avoid trouble. And you still have not shown the video where he calls for ethnic cleansing.

Yes, we can expect Israel to be better than terrorists. And we get it. Can we expect Palestinians to denounce terrorists? I would fucking hope so…but it never happens. In fact they vote in terrorists to lead them. And people like you bring out support for them.

@gorillapaws BTW, I watched the video you named earlier. At no point does this guy say a word about ethnic cleansing, he doesn’t hint at it, he doesn’t even suggest that Israeli’s need to colonize the West Bank as you claimed. Again, you are making shit up to try painting in a bad light the guy that says things about Palestine that you don’t like to hear. I believe that makes YOU the extremist, not him.

@seawulf575 Removing the Arabs from the West Bank is ethnic cleansing. That’s what this guy supports. He claims it’s not because the Arabs can have babies in other places, but that’s not what ethnic cleansing means.

@gorillapaws You keep claiming that, yet you have not shown me once where he said that. You gave the name of a video where he supposedly said it. I found that video and watched it. He didn’t say it. So, again, you are making stuff up which makes you the extremist.