Topspin715

I don't know you think the Jews should consider going to Europe. Why don't the Palestinians just go to Europe or Egypt or other places in the Middle East? I don't think that they should leave either. I didn't say violence is OK to gain land. Morals evolve over time and the West has sought to preserve national boundaries after WW2. It is starting to grow weaker which is why we see chaos and war breaking out in the Middle East and Ukraine. Throughout all of human history, the vast majority of land was taken and settled by force. That pertains to the entirety of the Middle East, Europe, Ottoman Empire, nearly everywhere. The early Zionists didn't have the worst intentions. I don't think that they anticipated how much disruption there would be from settling in the Middle East, nor did they predict WW1 or WW2. You have to realize what limited information people with using to make decisions in the late 1800s. In the late 1890s, at the time of Theodore Herzl, they only had telegraph and snail mail. Radio and telephone were slowly beginning to emerge but were certainly not ubiquitous at that time. At this point, there's generational and cultural trauma going back over 100 years among both the Arabs and Jews that needs to be acknowledged and overcome. Continued war, fear, and conflict leads people to dehumanize and hate others. Obviously Palestinians and Arabs are humans. What is considered "stolen" versus legitimately settled or even "occupied" land is not clear, it is really controversial and has not yet been settled. The Palestinian national identity did mostly emerge in reaction to Zionism but it doesn't make them any less human of deserving of security and living in peace. Arab nationalism as a whole is a very new phenomenon when you look at the course of history.

You are saying that the Jews should go back to Europe, which isn't suggesting that you are interested in peace. How do you think humans throughout history have come to legitimately "own land"? The Zionists had the intention to buy land, which they started to do, but they were received with all different sorts of violence. During episodes of geopolitical violence, there is almost always displacement and repossession of land. My goal here isn't to "win arguments" by the way. I'm looking to forge a shared understanding based on historical and current truths, because that's a pre-requisite to finding a real solution.

I'm not an anti-semite. I do not hold hostility towards Jews, for whom the term was originally invented, or the Semitic peoples in the Middle East. Between the early 1900s and the outbreak of World War I, Zionists purchased around 150,000 acres of land in Palestine. This was a relatively small amount, and the land was primarily acquired from absentee landlords, many of whom were Ottoman subjects, rather than from Palestinian peasants. Post-World War I (1920-1930s): After World War I, during the British Mandate over Palestine (1920-1948), Zionist land acquisition accelerated. By the late 1930s, approximately 1.2 million acres of land had been purchased. These purchases included both agricultural land and areas for settlements. The early land purchases caused tensions and some displacement but the largest amount of displacement came from the 1948 war and defeat of Arab militaries. I understand why native Arabs would be uncomfortable and frustrated with a foreign culture coming in to settle near them. I'm not sure that responding with violence, which happened beginning in the 1920s, was a good way to deal with things. As is the case with any irreconcilable conflict that isn't resolved, it will continue to escalate until the stronger and more motivated party or parties win. I don't want to see continued bloodshed in the Middle East, or anywhere for that matter, but the Jews clearly aren't leaving, nor should they in my opinion, but to de-escalate and restore peace, there are a lot of really complicated cultural, historical, political, economic etc problems and conflicts to resolve.

The primary goal is any state is to maintain security for its residents. The founding purpose of the Zionist state was to escape perennial persecution by the West and it proved to be very prescient given what happened only a few decades in Europe after Herzl created his imperfect vision that lacked foresight in other critical and obvious ways. It is about ethnicity and culture but it is even more about national security. Christian Zionists had begun planning and laying foundations for Jews to return to the "Holy Land" for centuries before Herzl started to promote his plan. I don't think it's a meaningful statement to say that Israel creates more danger for Jews. Some risks are increased, others are decreased. We are seeing tensions escalate in the US and Europe. If Israel didn't exist, it would most definitely be something else that people would be screaming about. During periods and cycles of political instability, as you have pointed out in your video, the low consciousness mob turns to scapegoat Jews in someway, maybe without exception.

I personally see Netanyahu as a very large obstacle to peace, although there is a large issue with Israel's political base having grown increasingly religious and extreme in the past couple decades. I might watch the documentary out of curiosity, and this doesn't excuse potential corrupt behavior from any Israeli political, of which there supposedly is too much, but the Palestinian leadership, beyond just Hamas even, has stolen billions of dollars in foreign aid from their own people. Without holding both parties to the same standards, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a durable peace. https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-live-luxury-lives-in-qatar/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arafats-billions/

There is just so much animosity and prejudice behind your language. I can tell you aren't western. Maybe you are Muslim or Arab, I don't know. Throughout history, any time some kind of state would collapse or implode on itself, it creates a power vacuum and there's a power struggle internally or externally to fill that gap. In this case, the western powers filled the gap and voluntarily chose to withdraw after WW2. The Muslim world has struggle to find a model for a stable and functional governing system after the decline of the caliphate system with the Ottomans. That is an overdue and sorely needed political innovation in this world. The original Zionists were not there to conquer or steal land. They bought land in the Middle East in order to escape from European anti-semitism, the Second World War happened which screwed up, well the entire world, and the native Arabs (proto Palestinians) fought the Jews and revolted against the British. Israel is clearly the only designated safe haven for Jewish people in the world, but like I said that, that doesn't even matter. If you are Arab or Muslim, I might be interested in discussing with you further, but I don't have much interest in speaking with random anti-semites about this who have no personal connections to the Middle Eastern conflict.

If people want to discuss this more deeply, to think about actual solutions, I would be happy to do so. I've already been thinking about this very hard for many years. You really can't understand this conflict without doing a deep dive on the formation of national identities, the history of nation states, ethnogenesis, and the many conflicting fundamentalist views in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and maybe even some of the smaller Abrahamic sects. To summarize what's been going on in Israel, the peace process has basically failed since 2000 and Israelis have increasingly given up hope of achieving a peaceful solution. During times of chaotic conflict and struggle, the most extreme viewpoints tend to become energized and rise to the top, so the religious nationalists have become increasingly empowered. There are still many Israelis and Zionists that want a peaceful two-state solution, but they are growing weaker and are being drowned out by extremists. This is the case on both sides of the conflict as both populations are being radicalized. This video about religious psychology in Dune is pretty helpful in understanding the power of cohesion in extreme religious groups.

It's kind of like sex work. It grants people the freedom to do what they authentically feel like, which is a good thing by itself, and by secular standards it's not necessarily harmful when done in limited circumstances, but if you normalize such a thing it becomes dangerous and can be a slippery slope.

Safe is a subjective term but it's completely unnecessary to justify Israel's existence. To answer your question, no there is no other safe haven for Jews. The US is not a safe haven. The US closed its doors to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. Europe is not a safe haven. There were pogroms in Europe even after WW2 ended. Israel is a safe haven. Still not necessary to justify it though. When you present such extreme arguments from extremists as legitimate, you assume the role of extremist yourself. But like I said, I'm not here to dissuade you of your hatred. Your arguments are inconsistent. Humans are war-like and have been since before the dawn of civilization. The Ottomans ruled through conquest and when they collapsed and were conquered, you expect them to somehow continue ruling over their territory? We fortunately live in a relatively more peaceful world today but you can't ascribe the morality of 2025 to actions that took place more than a hundred years ago. Somehow, humans need to learn to overcome our violent past.

A lot of these videos that you are posting come from the most extreme fringe of the fringe elements of Jewish fundamentalism. There are only two sects of religious Judaism that are anti-Zionist, the Satmars and Neturei Karta, and in recent years the Satmar community has started to support Israel more. It has always been this way but when you are vastly outnumbered, your enemies can easily cherry pick isolated cases, in this case the opinion of a single person's opinion, and make it seem like many Jews think that way. I understand the desire to disillusion oneself of mainstream narratives, and seeking out opposite extreme propaganda might be a good way to do that, but it should be acknowledged that this is more extreme propaganda in its own right.

Your argument is that Israel should be held to a different standard because Jews started to settle in the Middle East 150 years ago instead of 250 years ago for other European settlements? Where do you draw the line? 160 years? It's just stupid. There are more than "two types of Jews" but nearly a million Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jews were pushed out of their countries after 1948 which is more than the estimated 700k Arabs. Why does anybody HAVE to live anywhere? You are clearly arguing for ethnic cleansing of Jewish people from Israel while I don't support the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. I don't know what your background is so I can't discern the reasons for your motivations, but you are clearly coming from a place of hatred against Jews.

Why don't all the white people living in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia just get on a plane and go back to Europe? It's just a stupid question. If you want to tell the Jews to GO BACK TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM, they literally originated from the Middle East. The Ashkenazis appear to be white, due to some genetic mixing over 2,000 years, but the majority of their DNA is still Levantine. This thread was created by Leo to red pill himself against mainstream US narratives. This really barely scratches the surface of things in my opinion, but I'll let the thread return to that objective.

It was not just the UN that established a Jewish state, but also the Western powers, and the League of Nations. International law is very complicated. I would personally like to see the establishment of a legitimate body that actually enforces international law in a fair and even handed way, not subject to extreme politicization, but unfortunately that doesn't exist right now. While the UN was at its maximum legitimacy at the end of WW2 and the establishment of the new world order, it was still very imperfect at the time and has since only waned in legitimacy. The world still has not recovered from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the nation states that were put in its place are still barely legitimate. Until those challenges are addressed, the state of nature will persist and the strong will rule over the weak. This is a problem that requires the development of religious and global institutional solutions. Unless you want to dismantle the nation state of Israel and let massive chaos and bloodshed ensue.

You didn't destroy my arguments, but you don't seem to have much of an interest in either truth or justice, so you're not worth responding to. It's pretty self evident from the style of your "arguments", responding to my logical post by calling me "victim", and comparing Israel to the Nazis because they use fear, that you are obviously anti-semitic. I'm not here to win over anti-semites. I'm here to encourage the actually open minded people to think more deeply and critically and see if I can learn something myself. I'm not here to "destroy" or even win any arguments. Your opinion just doesn't matter that much. If you want to engage in actual discussion fine, but be warned that I'm not going to respond to additional trolling and provocation.

It was a threat of not just total war, but genocide, from an Arab leader in the wake of the holocaust. The Arabs had already rejected the UN plan in 1947 that granted land to both the Arabs and Jews. There had been violent exchanges in the past and it was very clear by that point that the conflict was not going to be resolved peacefully. People twist their arguments against Israel and Jews to hold them to standards that they never hold any other groups to. Their complaint is essentially that the Jews won the war and Arabs lost and fled, this was an inevitability of any serious conflict that couldn't be resolved peacefully. Did you care so much when Assad used chemical weapons against Syrians? Did you expect the Jews to simply lay down and be massacred after such a threat? I'm not defending Deir Yassin, it was clearly an atrocity, but to be considered even slightly objective, you have to strive to apply the same standards to all humans.

I watched the video but I'm not sure what specifically you are trying to highlight. There was an unprecedented amount of political resignations following October 7th but at the same time the State Department remained very divided. With the American empire declining in its power, influence, and legitimacy, the Pax America is beginning to unravel. There is a legitimate debate as to whether providing weapons to Israel would prolong and intensify the military conflict or make things worse in the region. I honestly don't have the military judgment to have a worthy opinion on that. If I were the head of state for US or Israel, I don't know what should be done to de-escalate the long standing conflict.

It was not just the British. It was the Western powers and also the League of Nations and United Nations. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after WW1 but it was foreseeable 50 years before then. What right did the Ottoman Empire have to that land and who had the right to take the land after an empire collapsed? This exact issue was called the Eastern Question and was debated for nearly 100 years while the European powers figured out what to do with a declining Ottoman Empire. Up until that point in history, when an empire collapsed, its neighbors very often took control over it to fill the power vacuum. WW2 was the turning point in world history where the West decided to decolonize.

"The Arab League Secretary General, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, declaring in 1947 that, were a war to take place with the proposed establishment of a Jewish state, it would lead to 'a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.'" You absolutely have to go back in time to understand the root causes of the conflict. Anybody who says otherwise, is not speaking in good faith and speaking from a place of prejudice. In some sense, the Arab Israeli conflict is almost like a peripheral theater of WW1 and WW2 that has not yet been resolved. Who or what do you blame for the start of WW1 or the 30 Years War? It is somewhat like that.

Thanks for those thoughtful responses

No it's not, but if that's the kind of response you would like to give then is then it's pretty clear you aren't actually interested in truth sadly.

The conflict precedes Israeli settlement in the West Bank by over 50 years. While the settlements are easily a source of friction, they are very very very far from the root cause. A simple Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would accomplish very little and may even make matters worse. Look to the 2005 unilateral disengagement from Gaza to gain more perspective.

The Israeli War of Independence, what the Arabs call the Nakhba, escalated when the Jewish state was invaded by seven Arab armies in the aftermath of the Arab League Secretary General, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, declaring in 1947 that, were a war to take place with the proposed establishment of a Jewish state, it would lead to "a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades." To ascribe cause and effect to this conflict literally requires going back over 1,000 years to see where many seeds of the conflict have been planted. The real obstacles to peace are much less Zionist vs. Palestinian but religious fundamentalism and extremism versus everybody else. The first fatality of the Arab-Jewish conflict dates back to 1920 in the Battle of Tel Hai and was literally a mistake that has continued to escalate for the last 100 years. From a secular perspective, to understand the current conflict, you have to look at the aftermath of WW1 where Western colonial powers had carved up the remains of the Ottoman Turk Empire and decided to take it for themselves. Nation states had not organically emerged in the Middle East by that point in time and their imposition post WW2 remains very unnatural and chaotic. People are quick to criticize Israel yet have completely ignored the atrocities committed by the Assad regime in Syria, which has just recently come to an end. The book A Peace to End all Peace describes some of the root causes of the current conflict pretty well, but the real roots are still much deeper than that. I'm not assigning credit or blame here, it is way too complicated to do that, but I am saying that simply digging up today's counter narratives are way too simplistic and superficial to understand what's going on there today. This is the latest volcanic flare up in a region that has been a powder keg for over 100 years and I'm not a war ethicist to say where the lines should be drawn. There is no functional international government to sort this out and enforce international law and order. With the decline of the US as a world power, heading into an era of multipolarity, the need to involve China in a resolution is increasingly necessary. This is something that I think about a lot, how to adequately resolve this, but I have yet to find anybody with much depth or insight on the conflict.

I can't prove it but I really don't think the shadow of unconsciousness is infinite It's just a hunch I guess

I guess the shadow is the ego or dark or unconscious side of us that we are not fully aware of that can lead us to do harm to ourselves or others. By mindfully studying it within ourselves, we can learn to transcend it. But can it ever fully go away? Is full enlightenment just the full transcendence of our unconscious side? I've definitely seen people who are more pure in intention and action than others but I have yet to find anybody that seems to have fully transcended their shadow. What do you guys think?

Maybe you are arguing a really aggressive epistemic point that we can't definitively prove anything, but if you do research into the subject, you'll see that there is extremely strong evidence and a lot of credible personal testimony showing that they did some really awful and illegal things This is my opinion though because how you decide to weigh evidence is subjective and how you morally judge something is subjective too