Hamas, Israel, and Palestine: What History Will Tell

Sorry, but I only read books by authors that do not support or endorse genocide on the basis of religious supremacy for the sake of real estate.

They had a choice to accept an invasion of settlers and being forced off their land under threat of death and the loss of all of their autonomy and human rights? Doesn't sound like much of a choice to me. Does it sound like a choice to you?

Israel never accepted limiting how many Jews could settle. That's why so many Palestinians are still being forced out of their homes by settlers. And you think that's a choice. You'd be okay if a bunch of people came to your house, told you to get out or be killed, because so and so has a religious priority over your house? No, you would not.

You'd choose war too. To suggest they simply move out because white people in Europe and the US wanted their land is absolutely colonialism and the mass slaughter that went with it, shows just how it follows the exact same path as it has in history.

And yet, the world supports the European settlers who did behave like Nazis and continue to do so. Funny that, huh?

I'm sorry, what?

How many Palestinians have died since the creation of Israel as opposed to Jewish settlers?

Let's consider since the October 7 attacks. Do you think the response is proportionate? Do you think killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the majority of whom are women and children, is an acceptable response?

There is no alleging a genocide in Gaza. It is genocide.

All the markers are there.

You should say the same thing about Israel bombing hospitals, people's homes, schools, and refugee camps, no? But you don't. You seem to be justifying and defending it.

At no time have I justified the October 7 attacks. What I did note is that there is a certain irony in the way in which Hamas' acts were almost identical to what the Zionists forces did to numerous Palestinian villages in 1947 and 1948. Even down to parading the people they had captured and driving them through towns. The Zionists took women and children they had kidnapped and drove them through towns for the settlers to spit on, throw rocks at and abuse in the exact same fashion. A symbolism you cannot seem to grasp. It is a response to what was done to their parents and grandparents. Do you not see this? How can you not see this? I'm not saying it is acceptable. I am pointing out that understanding it and why is important.

Think back and consider why and how Hamas came to exist.

If you lock up millions of people and deny them their fundamental human rights after forcing them from their homes and lands and then locking them up for decades, they will rise up against their occupiers and captors. You think the Nakba was "alleged"? It is well documented. In the same way other genocides and holocausts are documented. You expect a people who had little arms, who had no rights, to pick "military targets" when they couldn't even fight back against the settlers who were taking everything they owned and denied them citizenship and their fundamental human rights? Surely you jest! You're blaming the victims of genocide for what was and continues to be done to them to the point of going down the ridiculous path of denial of history?

Why would they pick military targets? Israel rarely picked military targets in the past and it certainly is not now. It didn't when they committed massacres in villages across Palestinine and it certainly did not when they contravened the Geneva Convention and set up settlements on Palestinian lands.

Hamas are outgunned by a country that has one of the best armed forces and weaponry in the world. They will pick easy targets to make a point.

Israel has never upheld the Geneva Convention and you expect Hamas to? What double standards are you smoking? The very existence of the settlements is against the Geneva Convention. Where those villages were that were attacked? Their very existence were against the Geneva Convention. Gaza and the horrors Palestinians have had to survive for decades, goes against the Geneva Convention.

How can you not understand this? If you wish to bring up the Geneva Convention, then it would behove you to understand what that means for Israel and the millions of settlers who reside there, and certainly what it means for the land they continue to steal. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/c...3-israeli-settlements-and-international-law/]

 

They settled on Palestine because most of the land wasn't being cultivated? Seriously? You're going with the terra nullius doctrine?

Good lord, man!

Did you bother to read the link? Clearly you did not.

And "the return of the Jewish diaspora"? They weren't from there. They were Europeans. And if you really want to argue the right of return, then perhaps you should consider the right of return for the "Arabs" who were driven from their land and are now being killed for their land.

As I said earlier, the issue with Israel is one of religious superiority and the genocide they have been conducting and are currently in the process of speeding up, will not stop until there is a giant shift in the mindset of said religious superiority.

Oh, so now you're going with racial superiority. Okay!

https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/05/000509003653.htm
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30487-6

Many governments and countries in the past have tried to excuse genocide on the basis of the 'other' not being 'one of us' or being the outsider to justify their acts. You're pulling the same utter tripe here. Try harder and do better.

Frankly, you should be ashamed and embarrassed for having come out with this.

I see. How nice of you!

If they were to receive the equivalent of whatever they cultivated prior to the Nakba, Israel would no longer exist.

Still pulling the white colonist mentality that the British used when they colonised Australia and committed genocide?

Well I'm from slave stock. And there was a facture and forced exile for one ancestor who decided to father children with his slaves and I believe, married one, thus beginning my line. There's even a region in France named after that family. Quite lovely area, actually. I don't even have to go back 400+ years on my dad's side. I can go back to my maternal grandmother who was half French and half Dutch who was exiled by her family for marrying a coloured man! So you want to try that again? Because if this is what you think is acceptable, then really, your moral compass is so skewed, it's twisted itself into a pretzel.

Also, the settlers in Israel were not forcefully exiled from Israel (Palestinians, on the other hand, have been and continue to be). If you want to go with the 'forcefully exiled' route, then those settlers should be heading back to Europe to claim what was theirs and was taken from them by the Nazis when they were forced into exile and then into the death camps.

Didn't you just excuse and justify Israel forcing Palestinians into exile because the land wasn't cultivated? Because that's the same shit the British used against Australia's First Nations Peoples.

You are claiming religious and racial superiority in a land grab and genocide. You do understand that what you are arguing is morally repugnant, yes? You do get that, don't you?

Then you clearly do not know or understand Australian history.

Not to mention "aboriginals" is offensive and racist.

The First Nations Peoples fought. What then occurred was genocide and one that has reverberations to the population today.

Of course. Wouldn't want to offend or confront the people who are a major component of genocide. Heaven forbid we offend their delicate sensibilities!

 

So just kill them all instead!

Case in point:

Israel has the most sophisticated armed forces in the world. Their intelligence is one of the best in the world, if not the best. And yet, to kill one or two Hamas members, they elect to flatten a refugee camp?

Israel has always controlled Gaza. They have always controlled what goes into Gaza, to the point of even allowing just enough food after calculating the calorie intake required to prevent starvation.

As for Hamas. The chickens came home to roost.

But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronymOpens in a new tab for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later toldOpens in a new tab a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referredOpens in a new tab to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, toldOpens in a new tab the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.​

There are embedded links in that article, if you wish to delve further.

And how would Palestinians living elsewhere buy up real estate and build anything nice in Gaza?

Israel has controlled what building materials enter Gaza.

And how would they do that?

Blaming victims for essentially being victims is something.

As I noted above.. The chickens came home to roost:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

 

You're Canadian and you don't know that Australia is independent from Britain?

 

Are you actually trying to argue that the Nakba was legal and acceptable?

Except the Palestinians were also from there. Their genetic make-up proves this. And they had continued occupation, whereas the Jewish diaspora who spread through Europe left quite a long time ago and became natives of the Europe.

Given the original plan was to look at other countries before they settled on what is now Israel, says that it doesn't really have much to do with returning from the exile of their ancestors from hundreds of years ago and more to do with what they could easily access that would not anger the countries they wished to appropriate for their new homeland.

Not to mention the 'right of return' also applies to those who convert to Judaism.. In other words, someone with absolutely no connection to Israel or the "Levant", could convert to Judaism and be accepted and have the 'right to return' to Israel. Which kind of blows the whole ancestral home thing about Israel out of the water.

It's a religious state. Nothing more, nothing less. They practice apartheid and discriminate against any who do not share their religious ideology. It is as simple as that. And the rules against Palestinian residents is even harsher than it would be for a non-Palestinian. It is literally an apartheid state. We saw South Africa practice the same exact crap for decades.

The issue is that it is not just their ancestral homeland.

You're Canadian, right?

Pot meet kettle.

I'll put it this way, my ancestors were forced off their land, forced to migrate to another country and then mistreated for a few hundred years as slaves and then as 'free people'. I live in Australia, but I am also exceptionally mindful of the history of this country and how it came to be and what occurred and continues to occur. I recognise who the traditional owners are. I respect them. I don't tell them 'oops, sorry, it's mine now'. I support native title claims and I support reparations and giving them their land back and their self-determination. Can you say the same?

Can Israel say the same for Palestinians who were forced out and not allowed to return, despite being able to prove a connection to said land that goes back a thousand years or more. No, it cannot. I'll give you an example of what Israel did to claim the land as theirs. The Indigenous Peoples of Australia migrated here about 50,000+ years ago. Before doing so, they settled in parts of Asia and what is now known as Papua New Guinea, and then migrated down into the Australian continent and that occurred about 50k or so years ago. Now imagine if they now went into PNG and claimed that it's their land, because their ancestors lived there several millennia ago. Or if they went to Africa and claimed a right to that land or a right of return there, due to that ancient connection. It wouldn't happen because it would be ridiculous. The reason Indigenous and First Nations Peoples have a right to their land, is because it is their land. Palestinians, along with several Jewish tribes on what is now Israel, have a traditional ownership of that land, because that is where their ancestors settled several millennia ago. They are the First Nations Peoples of that region. And yet, you believe that the descendants of Jews who migrated to Europe in say, 67BCE, have a right to return to Israel today and Palestinians whose ancestors never left, are right to be forced out for no other reason than they are not Jewish? Then I'm sorry, but that simply does not wash.

And now Israel is doing to the Palestinians.

Does that seem right to you?

Or are you still going to clutch to that one drop rule when it comes to Judaism?

Pity the Palestinians who have been forced to deal with genocidal Zionists with apparently no right to defend themselves, their homes or their cultivated and uncultivated lands.

Again, you're going with the Terra nullius argument, which history has shown to be bogus and absolute bullshit. Ask any First Nations People's of Australia.

Just because land is uncultivated, does not mean it's yours to take as you wish.

They prefer to be referred to as Indigenous Peoples. The term "Aboriginal" is a white man's word that was forced upon First Peoples around the world.

I would have absolutely no right to return to my "rightful homelands", which would include parts of Africa, France and the Netherlands. Why? Because despite my ancestors being from those countries, it's not mine. Even though one part of France literally has my name on it and it's directly named after my French ancestors whose name I still carry and use, it's not my land or ancestral land for me to claim. What part of that don't you quite understand?

My African ancestors had no choice. They were slaves. What part of this do you not understand, exactly? By your reckoning, I should have the right to return to wherever in Africa my ancestors were forced from and claim it as mine, due to it being my ancestral homeland. Do you understand that this would be wrong as it's not my land? Claiming a right of return based solely and only on religion is even worse and excluding and forcing the native population from their lands to give it to others based solely on religious ideology, is the exact same crap colonisers did in Australia, the US, Canada and elsewhere over the last few hundred years. Every other country, aside from the die hard white supremacists, understand that this is wrong. Why can't you understand that? Why can't you understand that they very concept of terra nullius is inherently wrong? Why can't you understand that discriminating based on race and religion, is inherently and abhorrently wrong?

Israel is an apartheid state that directly discriminates against anyone who is Palestinian. That is all it is. And you seem to think that is acceptable. Why?

I don't want to hazard a guess at your level of education, but for a Canadian to be spouting this, is interesting..

 

Except, you are saying that very thing about the Palestinians.

Israel was created and to create the state, the native population was expelled by force, many driven into what we now know as the Gaza strip. They were stripped of their human rights, and literally imprisoned. Why? Because they are Palestinians.

Now, they are being bombed and murdered, because of a horrific attack months ago. The irony of that attack is that the terrorists, did the exact same thing, committed the same horrific crimes that Jews committed against them during the formation of Israel.

So, let's consider the response. So far, over 30,000 dead. Do you think this is an acceptable response? Is it a proportionate response?

I honestly don't even understand how you could come up with that based on what I have said.

If you come in and remove people from their homes, take their land, take their belongings, deny them any human rights and claim ownership based off religious ideology and 'oh, our ancestors lived here a few thousand years ago', and in doing so, commit horrific human rights abuses, then I'm sorry, what you are doing is wrong. It is legally and morally wrong and cannot be justified. Committing mass murder can never be justified. October 7 cannot be justified. Israel's response cannot be justified.

Except, that is not what happened. They didn't just take land that wasn't being used. They took all the land and did so by forcing and committing mass murder to do so. Do you understand that this is wrong?

Dude, there are literally studies which have already been linked, that show just how genetically close Palestinians and Jews are. They all come from the same region. They share the same ancestors.

More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.

The results match historical accounts that some Moslem Arabs are descended from Christians and Jews who lived in the southern Levant, a region that includes Israel and the Sinai. They were descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times. And in a recent study of 1371 men from around the world, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews.

Intrigued by the genetic similarities between the two populations, geneticist Ariella Oppenheim of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who collaborated on the earlier study, focused on Arab and Jewish men. Her team examined the Y chromosomes of 119 Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews and 143 Israeli and Palestinian Arabs. Many of the Jewish subjects were descended from ancestors who presumably originated in the Levant but dispersed throughout the world before returning to Israel in the past few generations; most of the Arab subjects could trace their ancestry to men who had lived in the region for centuries or longer. The Y chromosomes of many of the men had key segments of DNA that were so similar that they clustered into just three of many groups known as haplogroups. Other short segments of DNA called microsatellites were similar enough to reveal that the men must have had common ancestors within the past several thousand years. The study, reported here at a Human Origins and Disease conference, will appear in an upcoming issue of Human Genetics. [https://www.science.org/content/article/jews-and-arabs-share-recent-ancestry]​

This scientific fact is deemed so offensive, that studies and papers showing just how closely related both groups are were essentially ripped out and deemed offensive. The level of racism involved and that of superiority is the same level of complete BS that white supremacists used to pull in the past. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/25/medicalscience.genetics]

So, stop trying to rewrite history. Genetic studies have shown just how closely related the two groups are. They originated from the same region. They share the same ancestors. Their only differences is cultural and religious.

 

Israel isn't protecting "its own families".

Israel is attempting to annihilate Palestinians living in Gaza.

It's interesting that you bring up the Geneva Conventions. You do realise that under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Palestinians are classified as 'protected person's' and Israel is recognised as the occupying force, yes? You do realise that as a result, and under international law, Israel is committing illegal acts, not to mention human rights violations, yes?

As for Hamas. You should ask Netanyahu why and how Hamas were supported by Israel for years. [https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/]

Israel is bombing hospitals, refugee camps, people's houses and apartment buildings and now with the latest massacre, opening fire on a starving population attempting to get food. And you are saying that Hamas is choosing to place these civilians on the front line? When Israeli soldiers shoot children, you're going to blame Hamas? Or the soldiers who committed the crime? Or do you not consider it a crime, because the children are Palestinian? [https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/202...s-media/00000188-96e8-df21-a1b8-b7edb3ce0000]

How is Israel protecting "its own families" by killing Palestinian children? Consider that the majority of the population in Gaza are children.

Hamas learned from Israel. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/nov/21/israeli-soldiers-human-shield-avoid-jail]

You are literally justifying the massacre of Palestinians, most of whom are children, under the guise of religious superiority.

And if I ever need help on justifying mass murder and genocide, I'll come to you for help!

And here I thought you couldn't actually get any worse!

I've also cited Jewish news sites, scientific sites.

Let me guess, they are all in on the conspiracy as well? Not pro genocide enough for you?

How about Human Rights Watch? https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/26/israel-not-complying-world-court-order-genocide-case

Or B'Tselem? https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip/20240108_israel_is_starving_gaza

I mean, I could go on. But you've shown your true colours.