No. of Recommendations: 2
Your statements about Jews living in Palestine prior to WWll is completely accurate, but it is not right to conflate immigrant Jews from Europe in the 1940's with the prior group. Religious ties are not the same thing as physical tenancy in my view.
Again, though, that comes really close to "othering" Jews. It's just wrong to say Jews can't be a people or an ethnos entitled to self-determination (even though we've been a discrete and distinctive group for millennia). And generally, we never say that people who were driven out of their homeland by invaders or colonizers (like, say, Native Americans) are no longer indigenous to that area because they were conquered and exiled....except maybe the Jews? Because we were mostly driven out by the Muslims (but still living there in a remnant), we no longer get to be indigenous to our homeland in the same way that Indian nations that were driven off their lands centuries ago still are?
And again, it's flattening the history of Jews in the region to talk about them as being "immigrant Jews from Europe in the 1940's." Repatriation of the area by Jews began in earnest under Sultan Abdul Hamid II of the Ottoman empire in the late 1800's - he welcomed Jewish emigres, and they were lawful immigrants to the area. By the time the Empire fell, there were about 60,000 Jews in the Mandate area - roughly 10% of the population. Large enough that Partition would probably have been required/appropriate, just as it was in India (where a Muslim population of 20% was enough to require partition of the country).
That is the definition of colonization. Move in and move the other out.
No, it's not. People can't colonize the lands they're indigenous to. If Native Americans started all moving back en masse to historically tribal lands that they were driven off of, we would not refer to that as colonization.
However, despite the multitude of actors who derailed the two state solution, in my view, it is morally incumbent upon Israel to make it happen, as the state of Israel set everything in motion that led to today. Israel is not the victim here.
Again, to coin a phrase, history did not begin in 1948. Israel did not set everything in motion that led to today, because the events that led to today go back far, far longer than Israel has existed (using "Israel" to refer to the modern Westphalian system nation-state, not the "nation" of Israel that dates back to the 9th century BC).
