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The Palestinians were in Mandatory Palestine peacefully living their lives and doing their thing when hundreds of thousands of Jews invaded their country, formed a fifth column, and declared independence at gunpoint.
I frankly don't care any more about the Palestinian people than I do the Indonesians or the Angolese (which is to say, not at all). But it's a constant source of amusement to me that there are seemingly about half a dozen people on the face of the planet earth who are able to vocalize the sentiment "What's happening to the Palestinians is what happened to the Indians, that's how the world works"
It was their land. We wanted it. So we took it. And put them all in reservations. So it goes
Really? Nothing happened in 1936-39?
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One of the most interesting thing abouts this conflict that I've had the pleasure of learning since I too like @Folamh3 have taken to catching up on the history is how much you can tell about someone by how they read the tea leaves on this conflict and decide to characterize events. There is enough back and forth over many years that one can justify just about any framing and find facts to fit the pattern. The story to you starts with as some sudden wave of hundreds of thousands of Jews all at once showing up, in a place where there was some kind of coherent community to even betray.
You're just wrong. Throwing ones hands up and saying 'there is enough back and forth over many years' is a cop out to actually understanding the history.
When the British took over Mandatory Palestine, the Ottoman Empire had been governing it for like half a millennia since anything interesting had happened there
I can highly recommend Darryl Cooper's Martyrmade podcast about the topic, it's about 30 hours long but it's worth it, goes through the whole story from the inception of modern zionism with Theodore Herzl
Hmm. Let's do some rough napkin math.
Mandatory Palestine started in 1920, half a millennium back is 1420. Did anything much happen then? Well, let's start.
The Mamluks of Egypt were ruling the area, and had since they kicked the Crusaders out in the previous century.
In the sixteenth century the Turks invaded, and the levant came under Ottoman rule.
In the seventeenth there was the great Druze revolt, which destroyed several major cities.
In the eighteenth, around the time of the French and Indian War in America, local elites revolted against the Ottomans, drove them from the Levant and formed an independent Emirate under Sheikh Zahir al-Umar. This lasted some decades, from around 1730 to 1774, before the Ottomans were able to regain control of the area.
Twenty years later, Napoleon invaded, won, then lost at Acre.
In 1831, Egypt re-conquered the levant from the Ottomans, but withdrew nine years later. The Ottomans regained nominal control in 1840.
So, when Zionism kicked up in the late 19th century, the Ottoman grip on the area had been slipping for centuries, living people remembered independence, French control, Egyptian control and the Ottoman was the most recent. The actual ability of the empire to govern the area was almost completely sub-contracted to local sheiks and mullahs, which is why the British-sponsored Arab Revolt of the first world war actually worked.
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And during the ottoman empire land ownership was created, given to Arabs, some of which became absentee landlords(often by tricking the people who lived there into thinking the land rights were a scam) and later sold some of that land to the jews who moved in and kicked the Arab tenants off the land they bought. Hundreds of thousands of jews didn't show up out of no where, that's not an accurate paraphrasing of what hat happened and the details matter. The ottomans were in no way the same people as the Arabs in the land that they ruled over.
I'm not even fully on the side of the zionists but your description is cartoonishly one sided.
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