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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.

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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?