naraburns nihil supernum
2yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Something that modern analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fails to understand is the insane length of the timeline of the conflict and how it changes and shifts the perspectives of these two cultures. It's easy to look at this as an eighty year-old conflict as the state of Israel was established and recognized by the UN in 1948, but the truth is that this is a conflict of literal biblical proportions. Even with Israel becoming increasingly secular over the years (currently around 40%), 60% of the population is still practicing Judaism on some level of observant. This conflict and intermingling of peoples comes to a head in the book of Joshua when God commands the Jews to genocide out the nation of Canaanites as entry into the promised land. Israel's failure to do so has perpetuated this conflict for the past 2000 years.
The importance of this not only as a denote of how long the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted, but also defines their relationship, one of violence and antagonism. Our much more recent historical conflicts shows how much chaos happens when one people subjugates another. In the US' failed occupation of Afghanistan and Iran, there has been little to no success of actually changing the populations political or social alignment at all - as soon as we left the old regime quickly took control the power vacuum and ultimately are as or more cruel as it ever was. England's conquest across the globe has also failed to significantly change the political and social rules of the old societies once England absconded from their (former) territories. Total obliteration and oppression seems to be the most effective method of instilling new values in a society.
I think this perspective creates a better 'screen' in which to view this most recent upheaval, this is not something new, but rather something incredibly old involving religious and historical contrivances as old as the Talmud and the torah.
Not really though. The Jewish population of Palestine/Israel prior to Zionist immigration starting in the 1880s is irrelevantly small. Jews basically don't exist as a people in the area before then - at least in contrast. If you want a solid number, 15,000 is a census of Jews from the Ottoman period before Zionism. Compare with the 7 million Jews there today.
Wiki (which I wouldn't completely trust) has a line apparently that nicely sums it up:
In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world's Jews lived outside the region, with Jews representing 2–5% of the population of the Palestine region.
Israeli Jews are fundamentally an immigrant people. Good luck finding a single one that has ancestry in Israel before 1880. The conflict is a colonial conflict of an outside people ethnically displacing the local natives. If you don't understand that you are not really understanding major keys to the whole thing.
Just because no Jews can trace their personal history to caanan doesn't mean that they don't consider it the cradle of their culture and their birthright. This is why understanding religious idealism is so important that everyone here is conveniently ignoring which is why I wrote this post, it's not about "I was here first" or "I can trace my family here for 1000 generations". It's about those many generations of Jews having a shared religion and belief structures that through the literal millenia as a nation without a home, that they are united through the Talmud and religious texts that they have a birthright destined by God. 60% of Israels population is Jewish in some degree, do you think that they don't know the history of their people and that it doesn't necessarily require a direct physical lineage?
I thought the small population of Jews who never left Palestine were fairly well tolerated by the Muslim majority
There is limited continuity of Jewish settlement in historic Judea over the last 2000 years. Which is to say that there were certainly always Jews there (though at times the numbers may have fallen to only a few thousand or even a few hundred), but they were regularly forced out, resettled, exiled, left because of high local taxes on Jews, political instability and violence, pogroms and so on, then replaced maybe a few decades later by settlers from other levantine Jewish communities from elsewhere in the region. The Crusades were obviously a low point, but there was regular persecution by Muslim rulers too that was no worse than what was seen in Europe, if sometimes less frequent.
but they were regularly forced out, resettled, exiled
Got a historical source? Because to me this sounds like the popular myth that Jews were exiled by the Romans which caused The Diaspora. No such thing actually happened, as far as I know. Hadrian did declare Jerusalem, what was left of it, a "pagan city" (whatever that means. I've not been able to figure out) in vengeance after the Bar Kokhba revolt/war. But that's not a mass exodus from everywhere in the Levant.
Probably the majority of locals converted to Christianity then Islam successively over the centuries, but I don't know that for sure. It does lead to the question why "diaspora" Jews were so much more vibrant in resisting conversion and building a unique Jewish identity, but that's an edgy taboo question for another time.
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Notes -
Something that modern analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fails to understand is the insane length of the timeline of the conflict and how it changes and shifts the perspectives of these two cultures. It's easy to look at this as an eighty year-old conflict as the state of Israel was established and recognized by the UN in 1948, but the truth is that this is a conflict of literal biblical proportions. Even with Israel becoming increasingly secular over the years (currently around 40%), 60% of the population is still practicing Judaism on some level of observant. This conflict and intermingling of peoples comes to a head in the book of Joshua when God commands the Jews to genocide out the nation of Canaanites as entry into the promised land. Israel's failure to do so has perpetuated this conflict for the past 2000 years.
The importance of this not only as a denote of how long the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted, but also defines their relationship, one of violence and antagonism. Our much more recent historical conflicts shows how much chaos happens when one people subjugates another. In the US' failed occupation of Afghanistan and Iran, there has been little to no success of actually changing the populations political or social alignment at all - as soon as we left the old regime quickly took control the power vacuum and ultimately are as or more cruel as it ever was. England's conquest across the globe has also failed to significantly change the political and social rules of the old societies once England absconded from their (former) territories. Total obliteration and oppression seems to be the most effective method of instilling new values in a society.
I think this perspective creates a better 'screen' in which to view this most recent upheaval, this is not something new, but rather something incredibly old involving religious and historical contrivances as old as the Talmud and the torah.
Not really though. The Jewish population of Palestine/Israel prior to Zionist immigration starting in the 1880s is irrelevantly small. Jews basically don't exist as a people in the area before then - at least in contrast. If you want a solid number, 15,000 is a census of Jews from the Ottoman period before Zionism. Compare with the 7 million Jews there today.
Wiki (which I wouldn't completely trust) has a line apparently that nicely sums it up:
Israeli Jews are fundamentally an immigrant people. Good luck finding a single one that has ancestry in Israel before 1880. The conflict is a colonial conflict of an outside people ethnically displacing the local natives. If you don't understand that you are not really understanding major keys to the whole thing.
Just because no Jews can trace their personal history to caanan doesn't mean that they don't consider it the cradle of their culture and their birthright. This is why understanding religious idealism is so important that everyone here is conveniently ignoring which is why I wrote this post, it's not about "I was here first" or "I can trace my family here for 1000 generations". It's about those many generations of Jews having a shared religion and belief structures that through the literal millenia as a nation without a home, that they are united through the Talmud and religious texts that they have a birthright destined by God. 60% of Israels population is Jewish in some degree, do you think that they don't know the history of their people and that it doesn't necessarily require a direct physical lineage?
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There is limited continuity of Jewish settlement in historic Judea over the last 2000 years. Which is to say that there were certainly always Jews there (though at times the numbers may have fallen to only a few thousand or even a few hundred), but they were regularly forced out, resettled, exiled, left because of high local taxes on Jews, political instability and violence, pogroms and so on, then replaced maybe a few decades later by settlers from other levantine Jewish communities from elsewhere in the region. The Crusades were obviously a low point, but there was regular persecution by Muslim rulers too that was no worse than what was seen in Europe, if sometimes less frequent.
Got a historical source? Because to me this sounds like the popular myth that Jews were exiled by the Romans which caused The Diaspora. No such thing actually happened, as far as I know. Hadrian did declare Jerusalem, what was left of it, a "pagan city" (whatever that means. I've not been able to figure out) in vengeance after the Bar Kokhba revolt/war. But that's not a mass exodus from everywhere in the Levant.
Probably the majority of locals converted to Christianity then Islam successively over the centuries, but I don't know that for sure. It does lead to the question why "diaspora" Jews were so much more vibrant in resisting conversion and building a unique Jewish identity, but that's an edgy taboo question for another time.
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