Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No. There are surviving people with a clear right to return they were removed from. There’s very few Palestinians in Gaza alive from that time. Even then, while they may have a desire to return home it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten. Just as the equivalent numbers of Sephardic Jews who had their properties and homes stolen in Arab nations aren’t going to get them back or get a rig…
>Homes can be rebuilt. Homes can be rebuilt, they can be rebuilt where settlers destroyed them. >it’s not something any other people in similar conflicts have gotten. If your perspective is "Might makes right" that's a worse position for a people with the history that the jewish people have, than a position that seeks justice. Justice, and Israel being seen to be doing justice, would make Jews much much much more sec…
It’s not right, it just is. Ignoring realities of the situation has just made the lives of Gazans worse.
Accepting that the Jewish and an Arab populations separated and were exchanged after decades of fighting and massacres on both sides is just embracing reality.
The lives of the Palestinians would be better if as a culture and society, they accepted what happened and built new lives. The Israelis did.
Instead Gazan leaders with near unanimous popular support have continually tried to use violence and force to reconquer the lands they lost rather than protect their people. They use the lives of their children as human shields and their deaths as propaganda as they know militarily they’re weaker. They openly admit this.
Personally I find it cruel that parents in Gaza subject their children to indoctrination that being a jihadist and retaking Jerusalem is their noblest goal in life in order fuel a never ending conflict.
Again it’s tragic that two people groups with long established roots in the region were separated and displaced with both sides losing lands and properties during those decades.
However there’s no justice in saying only one of the two groups (the Palestinians) should be given their grand parents lands and properties back. That’s what the right of return of Palestinians would be as the Arab Muslim nations aren’t going to reciprocate for the displaced Jews.
Forcing relocation to “traditional” pre state of Israel regions would require even more horrible violence and force with people of both ethnicities loosing what they’ve built up in their lives. That’s not justice either.
That’s just wishful western liberal thinking. There’s usually a dash of racism of “poor brown people” too, despite the majority of Israeli Jews not being “white” or even from Europe.
> I mean it’s so easily sourced why bother denying it lmao.
I’m not denying it. Just saying that in my experience having met dozens or hundreds from both sides that one group was much more open on average to finding peace and even coexistence. That’s just my anecdotal data.
> I know quite a lot about the history of this region, and everything I learn makes me even more angry with the state of Israel, and the extremists who built it.
Then perhaps do you know enough of the history to be aware that Palestinians are largely descendants of the extremist Islamic colonizers who conquered the lands starting a thousand years back? The indigenous peoples there weren’t Arabs after all.
Those Muslim conquerors have for centuries persecuted not just Jewish, but also Christian, Druze, and many other minorities in not just Greater Syrian (what Israel and Palestine was called under the Ottoman Empire) but also the rest of the Middle East?
Again, I’ll point out that Arabs in Israel have equal rights as citizens and better lives than those in most of the surrounding Arab countries. There’s certainly some racism against them but they can and do build prosperous lives.
Trying to recast the history of the region into a white-colonial issue of the past 120 years is being ignorant of the history of the peoples and ethnicities in the area over the past 1000 years and more.