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How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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The settlers that currently take land from Palestinians on the west bank, those specific people, not some group centuries ago that those people might share some part of their identity with, were not there before the specific currently living people that they are taking that land from. People living now matter more than some vague historical claims. If the area had been invaded by Islam and the land taken from Isreal within living memory, then sure, it would be just that it be returned to those it was taken from, but taking the land from people who have been there generations to give to people that have not been there for that time and had established lives elsewhere, results in people being uprooted and forced from their homes needlessly. Any history along the lines of what religion was where first is irrelevant to that fact.
I'd be careful with the "living memory" argument. Lots of pretty recent colonialism and atrocity occurred outside of "living memory"
It was quite deliberate on my part. You can partly undo things done to or by living people, not even close to all the way obviously, but you can return things taken, from those that have stolen them, and reasonably minimize collateral effects from that, because any uninvolved descendants of the guilty party either don't yet exist, or can reasonably be assumed to have available whatever resources the perpetrating group had beforehand. When the original victims and perpetrators are dead, though, things become more ethically murky, because you can end up in a situation where it isn't clear who specifically to return stolen properties to, those properties may no longer exist or no longer be useful in the way they once were, the people in possession of them now may both not be involved in the original atrocity and be dependent on them/have nowhere else to go, and the two groups may have had time for mixing to occur or new identities unique to the region to form. That isn't to say that there's nothing to be done about addressing historical atrocities of course, one can still try to offset the impact on the victims descendants, but that doesn't really undo any of the impact on the victims themselves or punish anyone involved, because you can't at that point, justice is time sensitive, it just helps a whole new set of people with negative circumstances that they were born into as a result of the atrocity.
My point was gating significant or actionable injustices to only those occurring recently means all sorts of past injustices are de facto tabled by that position. For example, should slavery from the civil war era, or the colonialism of North America still be discussed and addressed? No one alive witnessed that
I wasn't so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we'd want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we'd still need to do something about it. What you can't do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that's still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that's just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
Alright, if you want to get more modern, how do you think Gaza got to be 99% Sunni Muslim? What happened to their minorities? Was it a nice thing?
It's rhetorical, but the fact of the matter is that Hamas is evil, and needs to not exist, just like nazis need to not exist.
Hamas is a different matter though, the post was talking about Zionism and the actions of Isreal more broadly. Hamas is a terrorist organization, sure, and a pretty intolerant one, but it exists largely as a response to those actions. The Palestinians were having their land taken before Hamas and are even in areas not controlled by Hamas, so Hamas isn't the main problem so much as an excuse for Isreal to do what they have been doing for a long time to a faster or slower degree. Now, if Palestinian statehood and sovereignty were achieved, then sure, Hamas is not the kind of organization that one would want ruling the place, any more than the Taliban for example have been good for Afghanistan. But, one would have to deal with the situation that is pressing people in Gaza to join that kind organization first to truly solve that, because just blowing them up indiscriminately will just drive desperate and angry people into the same kind of group again. And at the moment, the thing pressuring people to join up with Hamas, is the conditions that Isreal has placed them under. Treat any group badly enough, and some of them will do horrible things in the name of resisting you.
Israeli ethno state should also not exist like nazis need to not exist.
Share your receipts
And it doesn’t matter how many kids we have to kill to achieve that!
See, that’s how stupid and evil you sound.