this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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That's what makes the whole thing complicated, isn't it?
Israel shouldn't have existed to begin with and when it did, it shouldn't have acted the way it has since its inception.
Yes, Israel is to blame for Hamas having power in Gaza today as well.
I'm not arguing that Israel isn't a bad guy here.
What I'm arguing is I don't see an alternative that doesn't just kick the can down the road.
what of the poor Germans who moved into the homes seized from Jews where would they go if we gave those homes back
Besides the vast majority of Israelis didn’t come from Germany anyways, so there shouldn’t be as much of a displacement.
I was actually just comparing what Israel is doing now to a policy of nazi Germany regarding racial redistribution of property
The vast majority of Israeli's were born there at this point.
It's not a stolen home to them. It's the only home they've ever known.
Israeli settlers have, for years now, been slowly encroaching into territory officially recognized as Palestinian lands. These people absolutely have the choice to move back out of those areas and into lands officially recognized as belonging to Israelis. On the other hand, very few people can "just move, lol" and I wouldn't be surprised if Israel specifically chose settlers that would be burdened economically if they attempted to leave.
To be clear, Israel has continuously acted in bad faith against Palestinians and, along with its allies, destroyed the peaceful (or, at least, less militant) groups that sought to unite the Palestinians. This is absolutely a problem of their own making and I would be surprised if there was a peaceful path forward with the current political climate in the region.
If I steal 2 million dollars from you and hang on to it until I have children and give it to them, is that their money or is it still stolen?
This is where it gets tricky and a lot of nuance is lost, I think. There reaches a certain point where it stops being zero-sum because two or more parties can each have an entirely independent and valid claim.
In your example, if you pass the money to your children, they reach 40 years old, spending the money they believe is theirs, and then suddenly they're told they owe $2M they don't have for something they didn't do, that's not fair on them. Have they benefitted from the $2M? Absolutely. Is it fair that they benefitted while the person/people you stole it from suffered? Absolutely not. But your children didn't do anything to deserve punishment.
Now I'm generally fairly anti-Israel, and have been for years, so don't take this as me being an apologist for colonisers. But for someone who has lived all their life in Israel - whose great-grandparents were colonisers - Israel is home and they feel they have just as much right to it as the people it was stolen from 80 years ago. The longer these conflicts go on, the more difficult it is to come up with a fair solution on a human level.
Israel is definitely in the wrong, though. It's very clearly not fair from a Palestinian perspective. But no matter how you try to divide up the land now, there will be innocent people who suffer for it. There's no easy solution to it, unfortunately. It's more complex than just "give it back".