zazen

So how were all these Palestinian refugees created?

Yes, they may have started that way but don’t stay that way - as occupations - especially not in the modern world where standards have changed. So how long will it remain so and how does it end? With ethnic cleaning so there’s no one left to occupy or equal rights on one land or giving Palestinians a viable sovereign state that meets the international standards of one which every previous offer hasn’t and for that reason they are rejected. We are on the same page as in we both want peace and Israel to exist - the difference is in how you think you get to peace and the current strategy you think brings peace maybe doesn’t. Israel’s trying to answer a political problem with a military solution. As you refer to Hamas as a virus - it seems the current vaccine of disproportionate warfare being used against this 'virus' will not be effective. People oppose the remains of historical oppressive systems, discriminatory practices, and a security apparatus established during the founding of Israel or any nation with messy foundations as these remains are viewed as lingering traces of that initial colonialism or birth of that nation. The remains of past colonialism that are unjust can't exist in a post colonial world just as the unjust parts of religion and tradition can't exist in a post religious and post traditional world.

@Vrubel @Nivsch @hundreth @Lila9 and anyone else who enthusiastically supports Israel. A love letter to Israel (with humour, hope and good faith) - Osama Bin Shapiro Speaking on being strategic and whats in Israel's best interest. It's probably in Israel's best interest to not take their cue from America in how to deal with the war on terror through bombardments. A chihuahua can't learn from and act like the Pitbull that claims to have its back. America has a geography blessed with vast seas on its sides, a ally to its North and a weak neutral nation to its South that geopolitically insulates it from its foreign adventures. It can go around bombarding regions and barely have any repercussion - Europe bears the brunt of the cost via the refugee crises caused by these wars. I would offer my cousin Aladdin's flying carpet for escape but your state carpet bombed it. First, make sure not to deny the facts corroborated by international state bodies and human rights organisations on Israel's situation. Move the sideburn curls away from the ears and listen to the world. What you deem labels such as occupation, apartheid lite and discriminatory security structures are realities for millions of Palestinians. Occupation doesn't mean the most literal definition of the word like when you go to the toilet it says occupied by someone sitting on it - Israeli's don't have to be sitting on Palestinians laps in Gaza eating Baklava to claim occupation or defecating on their land - they can be occupied externally by controls of their border, sea and airspace depriving, dehumanising and un-dignifying them. Israel should avoid being duped by neo con evangelical interests who portray themselves to be on Israel's side but fill their pockets from war profits at the cost of Israeli/Palestinians filling their graveyards with bodies and who's pockets are filled with nothing, but instead get eviscerated by the burns from bomb blasts and the white phosphorus that US provides Israel. Deep down they wish to see their demented prophecies of Armageddon and the return of Jesus manifest - like wise for the fundamentalists of Judaism and Islam of which the former wants to hasten the Messiah and the latter their Mahdi for the 'great battle' after which Islam prevails. Israel acting the way America does in response to 'terror' endangers it in a way America acting that way doesn't. Israel sits by itself in a angered region. Israel's actions have enraged the Global South and domestic Westerners which are its own allies. Even Western media outlets critique Israel's actions as they are unable to keep up with propaganda that gets shred by the advent of social media and alternative media. Their are limits to Americas interests - they can't just bankroll the expulsion of 2.3million people and destruction of their homes with the current technology that allows the world to see it and feel it. It's not just the scale of destruction (more than 50% of homes destroyed) and civilian death (children and women) but the timescale of it (in the span of 2 months) that puts this conflict in a terrible light and moral standing for Israel. Israel are losing the sympathy of the world in real time - it may think it can win the battle but definitely not the War. Footprints disappear but good luck dealing with the digital footprint of massacre that don't as easily for decades to come and the constant hostility that brings with it globally - but we're meant to think this onslaught makes the Jewish diaspora feel safer. ''Western public has lost all its appetite for war. All the careful sanitising, video-gamifying and propagandizing that has been put in place since Vietnam in order to build a platform of consent for “humanitarian” wars has cratered into nothing. You can’t have a up close screening of the reality of bombs and all the things they do to human flesh and then go back to the way you were ever again. Millions of western eyes have been changed forever.'' Those to whole evil is done, do evil in return. Israel not only defends itself but has the strategy to establish deterrence capacity - deterrence by definition is supposed to be disproportionate to scare off / terrorise hostility (de facto terrorism in policy) but only causes further hostility and terrorism. Deterrence through strength means being strong, not necessarily flexing that strength on your neighbours like a narcissistic school bully which radicalises them towards you. If Israel or any countries safety requires the occupation, imprisonment and oppression of a people, you don't have safety and never will. Resistance movements are built on the blood of martyrs which Israel ensures a continual supply of. Their called grassroots movements for a reason - you can't get rid of them unless you poison the soil ie genocide, expulsion or brutal subjugation. Ironically a used phrase to describe Israeli operations is 'mowing the grass' which is periodic to keep resistance checked. But this resistance will never stop unless the soil is destroyed because its the soil (people) that keeps the grass (resistance) growing. Everything Israel obtains through oppression is inherently violent and must be upheld through violence - that violence will be justified through ideas of superiority and the idea that those you oppress must be more violent and oppressive than you. And when that oppression is resisted as it always has been, that resistance will firstly be gaslighted as barbaric terrorism from savages and secondly will be used to feed the fear of safety needed to maintain that cycle, a cycle set in motion by the aggressor who attempts to reverse the role of victim and victimizer, aggressor and defender in a bid to clean its global image and standing and not lose support from its main benefactor being the US. But The US can't be stained with the sticker of ethnic cleansing and more blood than it already has and that the world has become sick of. They most likely won't continue to bankroll this or else the current party risk political suicide- and if you lose US support domestically, politically and economically you become very lonely in a neighbourhood you can't afford to be lonely in. This is where Israel's arrogance and entitlement is its downfall - a level of arrogance and entitlement shared by your habibi - Bibi Satanyahu. Ultra-Zionist aspirations are limited by the ceiling that is the Palestinians suffering that the world will not stand by. If lobby interests, the state and the military industrial complex go ahead and get involved despite domestic disapproval anyway - this will suck Hezbollah and other actors into the war - world war 3 is here and we'll probably be too busy to rendezvous on forums like this. You reap what you sow - you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind - and in the Middle East if you sow the wind you reap the sandstorm that blinds you from humanity and chokes the throats from which their should be uttered words of peace and a breaking of bread eaten at the table together alongside local Judean olive oil and hummus. Peace for all though for real, inshallah.

Nice worded rebuttal 100%

No wonder he was sacked

@BlueOak Well written. Those to whole evil is done, do evil in return. “Israel may be able to hunt down and kill Hamas’s second-in-command leader Yahya Sinwar, but if they do, he will become the Middle East’s version of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Resistance movements are built on the blood of martyrs. Israel ensures a continual supply.“

Kinda disrespectful and lacking in social awareness to insult someone who created the very forum you use to insult them on lol @StarStruck True. None of us have probably achieved a fraction of what Elon has achieved - combined. Dismissing people of having nothing worthy of saying or learning from because your views don’t align on certain things seems foolish at best and ideaologically captured and egotistical at worst.

The baby in the oven comes from the Deir Yassin massacre before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, and the pregnant woman story is something which actually happened in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon in 1982. Zionists mine their own history for things they've done which they can then accuse the Palestinians of, otherwise known as confession through projection. They then flood the media with these stories so that their own history of committing what they accuse the 'evil' side of committing is drowned out. When you go to google searching for baby in the oven now you only get shown the accused Hamas stories of it rather than the old story of Israel doing such atrocities. Baseless allegations of 40 beheaded babies and the like, and connecting Hamas with Nazi's and ISIS indicates that they themselves don't believe Hamas to be as evil as they wish them to be which is why they always feel the need to lie and associate them with more evil groups such as ISIS and Nazi's who don't hold any moral ground for their actions as they weren't defensive resistant groups but expansionist ones.

I have skimmed through a bit of the above so forgive me for not fully understanding - I may come back later to read the reasoning more thoroughly. But I'd like to say first that for outsiders looking in who aren't aware of Spiral dynamics jargon or into non-duality its thread titles like this that put people off from stage green and above values, discussions or the more spiritual community as they view it as completely unhinged from reality. We are chained down by our biology though we have a spirit that is beyond the flesh. As long as we exist in this dimension we can't deny form just because we have access to the formless. Isn't it in our biology to be repulsed by incest? The enlightened types like to be detached from the disputes and dichotomies of the common man, looking down at it all from a lofty place of transcendence. As Ram Dass said, part of awakening can be playing the role of form we are in - that is human. To be human, we've got to get down in the muck where the humanness is happening and accept our humanness. Moral relativity is about understanding different sides but moral legitimacy is about determining and discerning the rightness of a side. Pluralism doesn't always mean neutralism. It's possible to see both sides of every issue - that's a sign of intellectual maturity. But just because we can see both sides doesn’t mean we should live our life as though they both have equal merit. If we don’t further grapple with the rightness of a perspective we neglect a whole dimension of understanding by simply leaving it at “well I can understand this concept (incest) so it must mean its right and okay”. It’s good to understand that all concepts are relative and that none contain absolute truth, but this necessarily means that some concepts are more relatively truthful than others and by extension some actions are more relatively right than others. None of us live our lives as though all things are the same and all concepts are equally true - men can't have babies and I can't identify as something I'm not. We don’t drink bleach to wake us up, we order a coffee. When we want to go to somewhere we take a specific route, we don’t walk in a random direction and hope for manifestation to do its magic. Our daily choices reflect our reliance on relative truths as a fundamental aspect of our everyday life. We create a great many theories and get lost in a subjective echo chamber of them. We rationalize around truth rather than be rational about the truth. We twist narratives to fit our sentiments and subjective feelings. Which is what we have currently in the West. We can call it a ignorant intellect - one which fears truth and uses the intellect and cognitive horsepower to avoid it - the truth that though we are boundless in spirit we are still bound to the limitations of flesh and instinct. A rational society (stage orange and above) is more developed than a less rational one (stage red, blue) but where the rational society malfunctions and starts to appear less developed or more clown worldish to other societies is when they use rationality in this way. Rationality helps us understand different perspectives - moral relativity. The West has indulged this and experimented with it but hasn't progressed to a mature rationality which not only understands but can then discern which perspectives are more valuable than others and which don't deny base aspect of reality or try to disassociate from them but integrate them into a healthy framework. It gets stuck at moral relativity and subjective games of being able to identify however we wish. Moral relativity is like a windmill going in all directions rather than a compass in a single one. If we get stuck going round and round on the moral relativity windmill we will become dizzy, dazed and disillusioned unable to make sense of the world without directionality. A post modernism that leads people to indulging the subjective world unhinges people from the biological reality they exist in. We can't debase ourselves from reality, the human body is a form through which the formless lives, the mould of our meatsuits is what allows spirit to unfold, our skeletal structure allows states of being to be. We won't be able to experience the formless without form or states of being without structure. Sure, these things have their flaws. Moulds become moldy, structures become rickety, forms become frigid, and base reality becomes a basement of dark ignorance when not used for what it is - a base to jump from to the heights of spirit. But without them we wouldn't be able to unfold spirit in the first place.

@Karmadhi @Lila9 Very sad on both sides what happened. It’s almost like a tit for tat in terms of the almost equal number displaced. Zionist memes trying to “debunk” this historical fact of the Nakba often begin their population tables after 1948. The term Nakba is even legislatively banned from Israeli school textbooks. And no this wasn’t sourced from ‘untrustworthy’ Al Jazeera but from Jewish virtual library. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present?utm_content=cmp-true

It seems you as well as many others think that just because you or Israeli society are higher up on spiral dynamics or 'developed' this means you are better and immune to becoming a dark version of your stages and that allows Israel or developed societies the right to do as they please akin to a colonial mindset. It is flawed to frame it as 'children of light vs darkness' or 'Western democratic angels' vs 'Middle Eastern authoritarian devils' . You can still be violent and tribal - you just tribalize around and be violent in the name of and for a different set of ‘higher’ values. Developed groups still have the ancient instincts we finger point less developed groups for acting upon, and the more developed groups can just pull at those instincts in different unassuming ways. You can be a stage green eco terrorist denying the sanctity of human life viewing it as a virus or plague on gaia / mother earth or a stage orange capitalist that though doesn't conquer lands (like stage red) on the geopolitical chess board but now conquers consumers through commerce from within the board room of corporations. A greedy stage red conquerer rapes and pillages land whilst a greedy stage orange capitalist conquers the wallets of consumers and pillages the soul for materialist gain. Similar dynamic unfolding in different ways. Is a broken orange/green society still better than a healthy red/blue society? Possibly, but a more developed society also has more powerful tools with more leverage and potential for destruction which could make them more of a threat to world peace. A stage red primitive tribe might be sick and dangerous but their destruction will only be localised/limited to their village surroundings whilst a stage orange techno-capitalist superpower though having more inclusive and broader values including democracy and science can inflict a larger negative global impact if this stage becomes sick, pathological or unhealthily manifest. A highly developed society generally has more powerful instruments / tools, but if the individuals of that society become unhealthy their potential for chaos is greater. The individual and wielder of the tool needs to be just as developed - a parallel match between the individuals development and the tools his developed society bestows him - because the stakes are higher. A sick red society may only cause ripples on the world stage due to their limited tools of power but a developed orange society with more powerful tools will cause a tsunami of damage which is what we’ve seen in the 21st century. We can use spiral dynamics to make sense of the world or make our sense of self more righteous in relationship to others lower on the spiral.

You're still spewing your hate. You're either trolling, deluded, or a recruit from the Israeli propaganda department known as Hasbara who volunteer to go on social media platforms to disseminate pro Israeli talking points and participate on forums and blogs. Theirs quite a difference noticed between people who tend to lean towards Israel or Palestine - it seems Israeli propaganda has gone so far up your butt hole in dehumanising the other side. Israel apologists throw up every distraction and red herring they can think of to try and drag opposition to Israel’s mass atrocities off course. 'Most moral army of the world', 'fight of light vs darkness', 'stop criticizing Israel’s actions. look over there, not over here at our massacring.'

Hasbara - a slang term for ‘explaining’ and Israel’s propaganda tool used even on its own citizens. https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/the-art-of-deception-how-israel-uses-hasbara-to-whitewash-its-crimes-46775

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0iAML0uBnx/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D Not sure what they did but pretty heave handed response by the IDF on Israeli Jews. Muzzle critics and if not obstruct information then obfuscate or spin it.

@_Archangel_ Your comment was good. @Leo Gura Only giga-zionist and giga-aladdin can solve this. Giga-Aladdin seduces Giga-Zionist with his magic carpet instead of carpet bombs, and giga-zionist speaks romantic verbal jew-jitsu into Aladdin's sweet ears. Humour has its ways. Peace and love.

@Lila9 @Nivsch @hundreth @Danioover9000 and others seem to be exhausted from the circles and biased talking points. I must admit it has been a class in how we humans are more rationalising creatures than we are rational. If Israel or any countries safety requires the occupation, imprisonment and oppression of a people, you don't have safety and never will. History has shown us this by the dismantling of the colonial powers and any remaining colonial powers that remain do so by the utter subjugation, expulsion or massacre of the natives. Their called grassroots movements for a reason - you can't get rid of them unless you poison the soil ie genocide, expulsion or brutal subjugation. Ironically a used phrase to describe Israeli operations is 'mowing the grass' which is periodic to keep resistance checked. But this resistance will never stop unless the soil is destroyed because its the soil (people) that keeps the grass (resistance) growing. Everything that colonial power will have will be inherently violent and must be upheld through violence - that violence will be justified through ideas of superiority and the idea that those you oppress must be more violent and oppressive than you. And when that oppression is resisted as it always has been, that violence will be used to feed the fear of safety needed to maintain that cycle, a cycle set in motion by the colonizers first and which frames the colonized as the undeveloped violent ones that need be tamed in a modern world. As for referring to Hamas as a virus - it seems the current vaccine of disproportionate warfare being used against this 'virus' will not be effective in the age of social media for the world to see and when you have a more multipolar world with rising powers. The biggest supporter of Israel which they can't do without is the US, and the US can't be stained with the sticker of ethnic cleansing and more blood than it already has and that the world has become sick of. They won't continue to bankroll this - and if you lose US support domestically, politically and economically you become very lonely in a neighbourhood you can't afford to be lonely in - this is where Israel's arrogance and entitlement is its downfall.

Thanks for sharing, thats a treat. Its like avengers assembling to talk about the world - probably better than the Elon, Tate and Alex Jones avengers assembly haha.

I provided a link indexed with up to 65 laws that discriminate. So unofficial organisations can't sway and influence government bodies such as AIPAC in USA for example? Half the members of the government agency Israeli Land Authority (ILA) that manages and allocates state lands belong to JNF. From Wiki: In 1953, the JNF was dissolved and re-organized as an Israeli company under the name Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (JNF-KKL). In 1960, administration of the land held by the JNF-KKL, apart from forested areas, was transferred to a newly formed government agency, the Israel Land Administration (ILA). The ILA was then responsible for managing some 93% of the land of Israel. All the land managed by the ILA was defined as Israel lands; it included both land owned by the government (about 80%) and land owned by the JNF-KKL (about 13%). The JNF-KKL received the right to nominate 10 of the 22 directors of the ILA, lending it significant leverage within that state body. Sure, its a Jewish state like you say - but then people can't claim with moral superiority its a democracy when it's really a ethnocracy. Like I said, I'm not against Israel's existence or its right to defend itself, its just in how it currently exists and goes about its defence. The fact remains that Israel can't have the remains of an oppressive discriminatory system and security apparatus and expect to be loved by the world. That makes the Jewish diaspora feel probably more unsafe and disillusions the majority of the Jewish youth away from Israel as the polls show in the US. If the Jews want so bad to live as a Jewish state then at least give the Palestinians a viable state as a solution so they can go live there in peace. Rabin who wanted peace was assassinated instead, and any offers haven't met the international criteria of being a sovereign state - thats why they are rejected by the Arab side. The land on which the Palestinians would have their state (West Bank) has been encroached by settler expansion almost nullifying or making the solution even harder.

@hundreth ''The fact remains, Israel receives an incredibly disproportionate amount of contempt and hate given what many consider it's biggest crime: existing. There's nothing Israel can do to satisfy you except for committing suicide and ceasing to be.'' Past colonial foundations exist but don't discredit present existing states (Israel) that came from it. Thats not the issue. The issue is when an oppressive and discriminatory system and security apparatus still exists as a residue of that root colonialism that needs to be rid of in the 21st century. Relics of past colonialism that are unjust can't exist in a post colonial world as most are opposed to it. Just as relics of religion and tradition that are unjust can't exist in a post religious and traditional world - although we shouldn't just throw the baby out with the bath water. Most sensible people aren't calling for the end of Israel, but the end of how it currently exists. I even commented two pages back that I'm all for defending their existence and right to defend itself.

@hundreth What you deem the label of occupation is a reality for 5 million Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza. In Israel proper they aren't legally occupied but are discriminated against. Occupation doesn't mean like when you go to the toilet it says occupied by someone sitting on it - Israeli's don't have to be sitting on Palestinians laps in Gaza eating Baklava to claim occupation or defecating on their land - they can be occupied externally by controls of their border, sea and airspace depriving, dehumanising and un-dignifying them. But if you want to see the discrimination about Israel proper itself and exclude the occupied territories. Heres a link to a list of laws within Israel that discriminate: https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index One example is land purchase: ''A large percentage of land in Israel is under the control of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has a: “specific mandate to develop land for and lease land only to Jews. Thus the 13 percent of land in Israel owned by the JNF is by definition off-limits to Palestinian Arab citizens, and when the ILA tenders leases for land owned by the JNF, it does so only to Jews—either Israeli citizens or Jews from the Diaspora. This arrangement makes the state directly complicit in overt discrimination against Arab citizens in land allocation and use..”. The JNF is not the only entity blocking Palestinian citizens of Israel from purchasing, leasing or renting land and property, but also by so-called regional and local councils, which account for the vast majority of land. These councils have the authority to block anyone from settling in these areas that do not seem like a “good fit”. In a Statement submitted by Habitat International Coalition and Adalah to the United Nations, it was estimated that almost 80% of the entire country is off limits to lease for Palestinian citizens of Israel.'' The same channel you shared has a video asking the question if Israeli Arabs feel occupied (not Palestinians of West Bank or Gaza) - most said yes, though legally speaking what they describe is more discrimination than occupation. As for the guy you shared - of course he/they wouldn't want to live elsewhere as thats their home and by the backing of the West it is a safe and more prosperous country. That doesn't mean the existence of injustices and oppression still don't exist.

@hundreth Whataboutism but since we're gonna play that game - I agree they should move to secular states and have human rights issues. A difference between them and Israel however is that they aren't occupiers, have a 'security' structure akin to apartheid as confirmed by Amnesty and Israeli human rights group B'tselem or systemic discrimination (some of them sure ie Emiraties in UAE). Neither do they attempt to elevate themselves and claim themselves 'to be the only democracy in the Middle East'. In the minds of those who often say this they think it confers an automatic moral superiority to Israel which further distinguishes it from its “backwards” neighbours. The assumption is that just because they are a democracy that is for the people and by the people that this translates to listening to the needs and wants of its citizens, who generally tend to reject war, misery and repression - but what is advertised isn't what is often practiced by the state as we can see from many war mongering democracies in modern times. Jim Crow United States was classified as a democracy at the time. If a state practicing untold injustice and repression against its own citizens let alone people abroad could maintain the moniker of democracy, then how can anyone claim that being a democracy automatically makes a state good or just? A system is no more moral or corrupt except by the agents within that system making it so. As you reference the official United States government I will reference them also to confirm that they also refer to Israel/Palestine as occupied territories: https://www.state.gov/reports/2016-report-on-international-religious-freedom/israel-and-the-occupied-territories/israel-and-the-occupied-territories-the-occupied-territories/ And a article about rising tensions along religious lines : https://www.uscirf.gov/release-statements/uscirf-expresses-concern-integrity-religious-sites-jerusalem-area “Recent attacks at sites of religious significance in and around Jerusalem restrict religious freedom for people of many different faiths. We hope that as Ramadan, Passover, and Easter approach, all houses of worship will be respected,” said USCIRF Commissioner Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum. Words such as occupation, apartheid, or systemic discrimination incite a allergic reaction to the ideologically captured Israel apologists because any discussion going forward from accepting these as realities favour the ones being occupied or discriminated against to be more legally right and morally legitimate in their defence, even armed defence. That is why they are so blatantly omitted in any discussion and often denied.

Israel doesn't allow their own population in their national registry to identify as Israeli - only Arab, Jew, Druse etc because doing so could have far-reaching consequences for the country’s Jewish character the Israeli Supreme Court said. Israel considers itself both Jewish and democratic yet has struggled to balance both. The country has not officially recognized an Israeli nationality. In a Supreme Court case, 21 petitioners argued that Israel is not democratic because it is Jewish. They say that the country’s Arab minority faces discrimination because certain policies favor Jews and that a shared Israeli nationality could bring an end to such prejudice and unite all of Israel’s citizens. “The Jewish identity is anti-democratic,” said Uzzi Ornan, the main petitioner who runs “I am Israeli,” a small organization devoted to having the Israeli nationality officially recognized. Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/supreme-court-rejects-israeli-nationality-status/amp/ It says quite a lot about Israel that a unifying egalitarian identity not based around ethnicity would “pose a danger to Israel’s founding principle: to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people“, as the court ruled. The fact that such discrimination is seen as a cornerstone of Israeli society only reinforces its colonial ethnocratic nature, and undermines any claims to equality among citizens.

The 1947 UNGA resolution wasn't the first partition scheme to be presented. In 1919 the World Zionist Organization put forward a ‘partition’ plan, which included all of historical Palestine, parts of Lebanon, Syria and Transjordan. At the time, the Jewish population of this proposed state didn't even reach 2-3% of the total population. Obviously this proposal was too unrealistic but it shows the entitlement of the Zionist movement in wanting to establish an ethnic state in an area where they were so utterly outnumbered. Even after waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, and a much smaller area allocated to the Jewish state in the 1947 partition plan, the proposed Jewish state wouldn't have a Jewish majority without more immigration and settlements. Even on the eve of the Nakba, the Jewish population in mandatory Palestine was less than a third. If we consider that most of this population arrived during the 4th and 5th Aliyot (Between 1924-1939), then majority of those demanding partition of the land had barely been living there for 20 years at most. The UN partition plan allotted approximately 56% of the land of mandatory Palestine to the Jewish state. Why, then, were Palestinians expected to agree to give away most of their land to a minority of recently arrived settlers? Why is the rejection of such a ridiculously unjust proposal framed as irrational or hateful? Any public acceptance of the partition plan by the Zionists was tactical in order for the newly created Jewish state to gather its strength before expanding. This can be referenced by many meetings taking place at the time and comments by the Zionist leadership: Partition: “after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine “ — Ben Gurion, p.22 “The Birth of Israel, 1987” Simha Flapan.

@Nabd Agreed and thanks for also pointing out that the Palestinians among them also abuse their cause. They may withstand the genocide/massacre but the point I think Lina also made is that what events set in motion for them (Hamas) to exist in the first place and which party has more power to affect change - Palestinian people disempowered and beholden to Hamas or a state body such as Israel with one of the most advanced militaries in the world and a superpower behind it. Most people don't see this as complicated - that the Palestinian treatment over decades is unjust. What is complicated is the solution or how we get to the solution with such vested interests on both sides who benefit from the status quo staying as it is. There exists a whole category of Palestinian leadership who profit from the suffering of the Palestinian cause as do Western interests in having a excuse in the Middle East as Biden once said (if there were no Israel we need to create one) to pursue geopolitical goals in a resource rich region. Who caused that cause (Palestinians) to exist in the first place that could be exploited on both ends - a cause that most with a moral conscience support though it doesn't mean we support those who hijack that cause for personal gain such as Hamas. Legally and morally I think the Palestinians are more in the right - they are the more aggrieved party in this situation. So I will side with their cause, but that doesn't mean I will always side in how they go about achieving their cause. Just as I support Israel's right to exist and defend itself but not the way in which they exist currently at the expense of the natives of that land or how they go about defending themselves killing innocents. The Palestinians emancipation is also the Israeli's emancipation - Israel will free itself from the stained negative reputation it has worldwide that it needs to waste resources on propaganda for in order to rid itself of. People on this forum are a minority and a lot of the world are unconscious and ignorant and easily associate people with their governments - Israeli's won't need to tackle indirect hostility or cold shoulders from people in the world due to this. That could all end with the Palestinians being given their rights and dignity. The burden of being a constant warden of a captive population and fearing for resistant retaliation which keep them in a constant state of fear and that cunning leaders like Bibi exploit for political power can end so they can put their energy to more noble pursuits.

There are facts and then there are the moral judgment of those facts. The fact is both sides commit terrorist acts and are devils committing evil. The scale of a act doesn't absolve the agent of that act from being labelled a terrorist, there can be state terrorism too. If we say Palestinians are Hamas's first victims or any people who the terrorist claim to be fighting for - we have to ask what enables the existence of those terrorists in the first place, what enabled their cause they claim to fight for? As far as legalities, it's in the Palestinians right to resist occupation, even armed resistance - a legal grey area comes when they start using terrorist methods and attacking civilians yes. They are occupied and addressed as such by all the relevant bodies and nation states including the US and UK who are Israel's allies - so that isn't even disputed which is a common rebuttal. As far as who has the moral high ground and is the more evil side - a group that are expansionist in their aspirations at the expense of anything in the way including natives in the way of that expansion seem more evil than the group of natives who's aspiration is one of localised resistant defence. The difference is the native inhabitant views it as a territorial defensive dispute of their home land and the other a conquest legitimised by religious sentiment that claims it as their homeland 2'000 years ago. A groups rights and moral high ground stops the minute they start infringing upon another existing groups - which is what the case is here. I am not approving Hamas's tactics, just analysing the place from which it comes - understanding doesn't mean endorsement. People who were once deemed terrorists such as Mandela of South Africa or Mat Turner of the slave revolt are today deemed heroes of emancipation. The elites are not morally consistent in applying their definitions, labels and judgements but morally strategic in applying them to their allies and to their interests. Morality and values then are used more as political sticks to undermine adversarial and hostile people and states rather than as a matter of principle.