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Anyone in the Middle Eastern region is considered native to historical Palestine because of Ottoman citizenship.

That's not quite what I said. Palestine was a British colony on a fractured sliver of a former empire that existed for less than 30 years. Unless you consider native status to be determined by where you lived for a 30 year period, there's no "historical Palestine" for someone to be native to: Palestine was not a region in the empire that preceded the brief British rule, and people's identity was not distinguished on the basis of Palestinian borders. They would have been considered Jewish or Muslim or Christian, and lived in one city or another in nearby areas, but wouldn't consider someone to be an "immigrant" if they moved cities, as you've previously described Jews in Israel: some of whom are in fact literal natives and have lived within those borders for hundreds or thousands of years, and some of whom lived in nearby cities but not technically within the boundaries of Palestine (which again, at the time, didn't exist as a meaningful concept).

What would you say if a bunch of bedouins from the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula decided in 1948 that they were sick of the desert and went to conquer Palestine

Um, first of all, the British mandate of Palestine was in large part a desert. So, bad move on their part if they were "sick of the desert." Second of all, the Bedouins do currently live in the deserts of Israel, as they also have for thousands of years; they are not confined to the Arabian Peninsula as it seems you're claiming (they do in some sense come from the Arabian Peninsula, just as the Palestinians do — although in fact the Bedouins arrived thousands of years before the Palestinians did). So I'm not sure where you're going with this; they were also inhabitants and would not be some non-native interlopers, as you're claiming they would be? And as you're claiming Jews are?

Jews, like Bedouins, have been native to the region for thousands of years. They were also native to the region you call Palestine — there are synagogues hundreds of years old in Safed, Jerusalem, and other Israeli cities — but the boundaries of that region were not historically meaningful, and they were spread out throughout the surrounding area as well, as a small but meaningful minority. After WWI they faced massive repression in the new Muslim countries and consolidated in the boundaries of what is now Israel, but previously was also not meaningfully separated from the surrounding countries. Referring to them as "immigrants" is disingenuous: there was no country they were "immigrating" from or to that existed for more than a handful of years, and the previous longstanding country was one they were already citizens of and had been for its entire existence; they were native to it, and to the region it occupied. They predated almost anyone in the region by millennia.




Also, I just want to say that if a Mizrahu finds himself Palestine/Israel today born or after decades of immigration to simply go back to Morocco. Practically speaking that is ridiculous. Israel/Palestine is now his home.


Thank you for that clarification — I was beginning to get a little bit worried :)


Okay now it just seems like you are arguing for the sake of argument. I know you know that the land of milk and honey has copious areas rich in greenery and water. Yet you act like it’s equivalent to the deserts of Saudi Arabia?

And also, while I’m here, we don’t define “historical Palestine” by some maps. We can define it very clearly by a

Jews were native to the Middle East! Nobody is disputing that. What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco to parents born and raised in Morocco has the right to displace some Palestinian villagers just because he thinks his ancient homeland is from the time of after Joseph and Moses because of his ancestors.

By the way, for your information, my friends tell me that in their neighborhood they had a “harat al sumarah” which is translated neighborhood of the simarians. These people never accepted Israel and refused to move. My friends also tell me the IDF hate them because they both resist the occupation and are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them. That is just what I hear from them, but I bring it up so you know that there are some people of ancient Jewish lineage who are still living in Palestine alongside Palestinians.


I know you know the land of milk and honey has copious areas rich in greenery and water

Ok, I think you are very misinformed by Biblical quotes from thousands of years ago, when the climate of Mesopotamia was very different. Israel is considerably more than 50% desert or "arid steppe." The rest is either dry, temperate, and hot, or dry, temperate, and warm (with a tiny mountain peak defined as dry, temperate, and cold). [1] Rain does not fall at all for over half of the year. There is only a single major source of above-ground freshwater, the Kineret lake (also called the "Sea of Galilee"), which wasn't even fully in Israel until 1967, is at "dangerously low levels at times," and which continues to exist in part thanks to Israel pumping freshwater from its seawater desalination plants into the lake to refill it since 2018. [2][3]

The Negev desert [4] covers over half of the state of Israel. The Negev Bedouins live in the Negev. [5]

I am not joking, and hopefully these Wikipedia links can convince you that you have been misinformed.

What people are disputing is your claim that a Morrocan, born and raised in Morocco

Not all Mizrahi Jews are from Morocco, and you have chosen the farthest point in the Ottoman Empire to make your point. Morocco is not even in the Middle East, which is the region we're talking about. While perhaps one could view Moroccan Jews migrating to Israel as immigration, I think it is much more nuanced in the parts of the former Ottoman Empire that were actually in the Middle East. The Jewish communities of Cairo, for example, were about as far from the modern state of Israel as Boston is to New York. The distance from Damascus, the home of another large Mizrahi Jewish community, to the modern state of Israel is half that. They were part of the same country, and were in cities that were extremely close to each other, in the same region. I don't dispute that the Israelis had no right to kick out Palestinian villagers, but I do dispute your definition of Jews as non-natives due to borders that existed for less than 30 years and were imposed by the British (and which some Jews fell inside anyway, e.g. in Jerusalem.)

[The Samaritans] are considered anciently Jewish so the IDF is not allowed to kill them.

There are no laws in Israel that I know of that determine whether or not the IDF can kill someone based on their religion. It would be helpful if you could cite some sources here.

(I think your friends mean that they hold Israeli citizenship? Which probably means they can more easily pass border checkpoints traveling to and from the Palestinian territories and Israel. There are a group of Samaritans that hold dual Israeli/Palestinian citizenship that live in Qiryat Luza. For reference, there are also millions of Muslim Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship and live inside Israel; what is unique about that group of Samaritans is they hold both Israeli and Palestinian citizenship, whereas the Israeli Arabs are simply Israeli and not Palestinian. The situation in Palestine is super messed up either way and I don't condone the Israeli government's actions towards the Palestinians, though.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Israel#/media/Fil...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_of_Galilee

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev_Bedouin


This is all fine and accurate but it seems like you are not addressing my point. First, for the purposes of my analogy the relevant detail is that Israel/Palestine has substantially more fresh water then Saudi Arabia. So now, applying your logic from above it would be justified for the Saudis to come and displace Israelis/Palestinians. Why? Because they used to be under Ottoman rule. See why your remark justifying colonization of Palestinian is absurd?

You know, I wish that a reality can be realized where everyone coexists happily. But when a people have been harmed so directly and for so long acknowledging these points is the only way towards that reality. If we keep arguing then things will never change.

The fundamental fact is hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were wronged. Today millions are victims. We can’t just ignore that or marginalize it via debate.




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