Stolperstein

> My understanding is that the Israelis had to remove some people to make way for their state - doesn't this apply to the Palestinians too, if they want their land back? Or am I missing something, did they leave voluntarily because of dissatisfaction with the government etc?

Your understanding isn't exactly in line with the history, at least from my Jewish-Israeli perspective. In general, It's a complicated question, over which literal wars have been fought.

I'll try to give a version of events as I understand them. This came out fairly long, sorry.

There were Jews living in Israel originally, who were displaced and moved to other countries about 2000 years ago. There was a Jewish presence in that land from then on, but it was relatively small, though Jews worldwide theoretically yearned to return to Israel.

Beginning in the 1800s and up to the founding of Israel, there was a large movement of Jews to return back to their original land, and Jews started migrating into Palestine. This was afaik completely legal - the land was first ruled by the Ottomans, then the British, and the Jews who moved there bought the land and developed it (it was not a very developed land before then). The British at some point promised the Jews that they would give them that land to build a country on, kind of - it was a vague promise. Then the British decided to hand the land over to the UN.

After the Holocaust, there was a lot of pressure for the Jews to get their own country. The UN came up with a plan to divide Israel up into two countries, one part for the Arabs (Palestinians) and one part for the Jews, with Jerusalem split. The Jews accepted this - the Palestinians rejected it. Then, various Arab countries launched a war on the newly-formed Israel, which had to defend itself.

Most of the Arab population fled from Israel - I think it was partly because leaders of the various Arab countries told them to flee the fighting and let them conquer Israel back, and partly because of fear and of actual Israeli actions against them. How much each part of this is part of the reason the Arabs fled is kind of contested, I believe.

Israel (somewhat surprisingly) managed to win the war, and ended up with most of the land that was promised to both sides, which it kept. The Arabs that had remained in Israel instead of fleeing became Israeli citizens. The Arabs that fled became refugees of various countries. This was the situation until about the 1960s.

In 1960, there was another war between the Arab countries and Israel (Israelis generally consider this a war against Israel, cause Israel realized it would be attacked imminently and struck first. I think this is disputed though.) As part of that war, Israel managed to capture territories from other countries, including what is today the land of Palestine (the Gaza strip and the West Bank.) This land had all those refugees still living on it from the war in 1948. This is today's Palestinian population.

Israel gave back part of the land it captured (The Sinai), as part of a peace agreement with Egypt. The Palestinian population continues to live on in the lands Israel captured. Since they were never granted citizenship in any country (not the original countries that owned the territories, and not Israel,) they are still refugees.

That is kind of where the situation is today.

Priviledged victims. I dont think any other ethnic cleansing can ever come close to this amount of "remembering"

>Nazi revivalist group Azov Battalion

Russian propaganda loves pointing to the same few cases of Nazism in Ukraine. Ok, lets see that Russian propaganda misses at home - that for example is the Roskosmos CEO Rogozin, one of the most prominent voices around Putin and the Putin's favorite giving a Nazi salute and the end of his Nazi speech at the Russian Nazi march in Moscow. The specific phrase they all give Nazi salute to is "Glory to Russia!".

https://youtu.be/xkXVVcPWSU8?t=87

And for that antique Nazist paraphernalia that some Azov members supposedly had... Well, this is the Main Cathedral of Russian forces built in 2020 where they store various Hitler's "relics" (yep, exactly that term - "relikviya" - was used here by the Russian top military leadership!) including his uniform, medals, etc. and where walls and floor is made out of German's tank metal - basically they made a Hitler shrine (and can make a good money organizing pilgrimage here for the neo-Nazis across the world :).

https://images.theconversation.com/files/449001/original/fil...

Anyway, Russia is a full blown nazist state today like Germany was in 1939 and whatever Russia says, in particular about nazims, is worthless at best, and usually is just outright propaganda lie.

>the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine and Crimea would ever agree

Definitely nobody is asking that population today. The Russian puppet regimes on those territories are terrorist states just like ISIS - the only difference is that ISIS preferred public beheadings while in those Donbass "republics" they kidnap and torture with fate of many unknown, though few mutilated bodies found so far of such disappeared people suggest that there is no good fate to expect.

>It's important to note that elements in Ukraine si nce 2014 pushed a series of oppressive legal restrictions on the Russian-speaking segment of the population that were designed to push that entire group into second-class citizen state.

That wasn't push against Russian speaking population. That was push against various symbols of the totalitarian regime of USSR. In particular removing names from public places of the USSR leaders who ordered/led mass killings of millions of people, ie. Lenin, Stalin, and their close associates in that, etc.

The requirement for Ukrainian usage in Ukraine is the same for Russian-speaking as for say Hungarian- or Romanian-speaking minorities.

[dead]

Ah, thanks for the explanation. But isn't this more or less what I describe still, other than people leaving on their own rather than being forced out?

Like, without going into too tricky political discussions, it seems like being physically present on the land gives you some form of title to it. And if the Palestinians/Arabs hadn't left, it would be much more difficult to run the Israeli state. They would have the right to vote, and so they might've voted e.g. against the Hebrew language or for autonomy.

Likewise, if Israel ended up collapsing somehow and Palestine taking over, then they would presumably realize that, well, the sooner these people are not here anymore, the less of a claim to an Israeli state can there possibly be.

If so, I don't see what it has to do with corruption, because it's just a basic fact of countries - one guy has to win and the other one thus loses, and it's a zero-sum game.

The way I see it, even if all of these countries were run like Switzerland, everyone involved would still quickly understand it's very definitively in their material interests to manage the other guys as quick as possible.

What's the way out of this conundrum?