Not a big bible reader over here, but...
Nov. 14th, 2024 08:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI have really been enjoying the YouTube thing Satan's Guide to the Bible. I've talked about this before with a link, and since that was in February last, surely I would be done with it by now? Except no. It's very compelling and I am not done yet.
Look, I really like the guy who does the voice for Satan. It's very soothing and the right amount of amused sarcasm. Seriously, the whole thing is funny and sometimes I put it on because it's nice to listen to, with Annoyed Jesus and bible songs from my youth and yeah. Don't judge me.
So I was listening to that last night, familiar and comforting in many of the right ways, when I got to the part about the Israelites leaving Egypt (from the Exodus, in the Bible) and heading into The Promised Land.
If you are unfamiliar, the YouTube goes over how most "non-evangelical" biblical scholars freely admit that there isn't any actual evidence for the Israelites being enslaved in Egypt for like four hundred years, no pottery, no art, no language, nothing that they took or borrowed or adapted from their four hundred year stay in Egypt Land. Nothing in the archaeological record, either. No inexplicable feelings about cats, no walking sideways, no eyeliner. If they spent four hundred years in Egypt, the Israelites walked away afterward with absolutely nothing Egyptian to show for it.
Now, this is... either entirely unique among conquered peoples in the history of the world (because despite everyone's best efforts to be separate and unequal, cultural drift from the powerful to the powerless... happens) OR the Israelites were not in Egypt under Pharoah's rule, not at all, not for one year, not for four hundred and change. Most of the world's Biblical scholars fall on the side of the simpler explanation. Only folks super enthused by the notion of Biblical Inerrancy and swilling that kind of Flavr-Aid believe otherwise.
ANYWAY, the video asks (reasonably) if the Israelites didn't come out of Egypt, where DID they come from? As near as anyone can tell (archaelogical stuff, language, cultural artifacts of all sorts), they were from Canaan the whole time and the whole "out of Egypt" thing was like talking about your really hot girlfriend from Niagara Falls. Alternative facts is what I'm saying.
So if Canaan was the promised land and if the Israelites were already living there, what was the deal with the Canaanites? They were ALSO already living there, just with a different religion. And so I am listening to this YouTube and it brings up the story of Joshua.
The story of Joshua is y'know, God says that Joshua should/will kill off all the damn Canaanites so that the Israelites can have the Promised Land. See, the Promised Land is awesome and stuff but as previously mentioned, it's also already occupied by the fucking Canaanites. To solve this problem, Joshua is given a mandate by God to go forth and kill everybody, women and children too, burn the cities, cripple the livestock, etc. so that the Israelites can have unobstructed access to the Promised Land. It's kinda genocide-y stuff, the catchy Sunday school song notwithstanding.
Now, "It's OK to genocide people if you want their land." is not a great message. (I do need to point out the hypocrisy of saying this while at the same time being an of-European-descent American citizen living in a kinda-great and selectively-free nation that was formed by genociding people because we wanted their land.) Even as a NARRATIVE, as a teaching story, a holy book shouldn't say stuff like "Go kill all those people so that you can have their land." I feel like folks might get the wrong idea if their holy book went around saying shit like that.
But anyway. I was watching YouTube Felt Satan and suddenly I was reminded of the current (my entire life) shit in Israel/Palestine. How did that get to be such a fucking mess? It's been a fucking mess basicallyforever as long as I can remember.
Well, it's complicated. I have tried to get a grip on it. I Wikipedia'd and I YouTubed and I read some stuff. There was A LOT of stuff, tho, and I probably am missing some of it, but here's what I learned.
At the end of World War I, the territories held by the losers (Losers: Germany, Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria) got divvied up among the Winners (Winners: France, Russia, the British Empire, Italy, United States) to be administered under the mandate system for a time. This was intended to be a period of, like, training wheels prior to the territories being independent states.
One of those "belonged to the WWI losers" territories was Palestine (it had been part of the Ottoman Empire), which was handed to Great Britain following the war. See, during the war, Great Britain had made the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In that declaration, Great Britain promised to establish a "National Home for the Jewish People" in Palestine. In my reading on this topic, I got the impression that Great Britain didn't run their idea about a creating Jewish Homeland in Palestine past anybody who was actually living in Palestine.
Maybe they should have floated the idea, workshopped it a bit, etc. They did not.
Because it's important, I reiterate thusly: Great Britain did not consult with the Palestinians about its plan for the disposition of their land any more than God talked to the Canaanites about his Promised Land For The Israelites plan. Hunh.
I would like to point out that BOTH of these things are about taking land (occupied land, where people were already living) and handing it over to the Jewish people without giving a whole lot of thought to the people already living on that land. And worse yet, it's the same fucking land in both instances. Biblical Canaan is pretty much RIGHT WHERE PALESTINE AND ISRAEL CURRENTLY ARE.
Fuck me. We're still on that? Yes. Yes, we are. We're still doing that fucking thing, side order of genocide and all.
And that's how I got from Felt Satan On YouTube talking about Joshua and Canaanites to Why is Israel/Palestine such a fucking mess? I was happily watching the very reassuring Felt Satan on YouTube talking about Joshua and the slaughter of the Canaanites and I was "Hey, that sounds about like the Israel/Palestine thing nowadays."
Hunh. Maybe people did get the wrong idea from the story of Joshua and the Canaanites?
Before the Balfour thing, Jewish people were less than 10% of the population of Palestine and, as a group, they owned about 3% of the land in Palestine. After the Balfour thing, when Great Britain was mandating Palestine, the "facilitated" immigration of Jewish people to Palestine raised the Jewish population there from less than 10% to approximately 33% by 1947.
In 1948, the British mandate (from the end of WWI, thirty years prior) expired. So, the country of Palestine was now ready to function as an independent state, right? After all, the whole point of the mandate system was to guide and stabilize the losing-side territories from WWI so that they could eventually function as independent states. Remember? We just covered that a few paragraphs ago.
When the British Mandate expired, in 1948, Zionist (a Zionist is a person who supports the establishment of Israel/existence of a Jewish homeland) leaders announced they would be forming a Jewish homeland, the state of Israel, out of rather a lot of what used-to-be-Palestine, kthxbye. This started a war.
In the war, the Israelis captured about 78% of the land that had started off as Palestine and in the process they displaced about 750,000 Arabs from their properties. The parts of "historic Palestine" that remained uncaptured were in two non-connecting pieces: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. (The Gaza Strip is on the west of Israel, up against Egypt. The West Bank is on the east side of Israel, which seems confusing but it's called "The West Bank" because it's the West Bank of the Jordan River. The country Jordan is on the EAST bank of the Jordan River.)
In 1950, two years after the first Arab/Israeli war, the Israeli government enacted the "absentee property law", allowing them to confiscate the vacated property in Israeli-controlled areas. Now, this property was vacated because of the Israelis driving off the 3/4 of a million Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 war, but ... vacated is vacated, right? No sense wasting that land.
So, that's how we got Israel. The Zionists living in Palestine following WWII...
Wait, what? I thought we got the Great Britain mandate over Palestine following World War I.
********
Because I cannot trust the quality of public education, here I'm going to pause to point out that in between the end of WWI in 1918 and the expiration of the Great Britain mandate over Palestine in 1948, we had a whole 'nother world war in which like six million (at least) Jewish people (men, women, and children) got killed for the not-a-crime of being Jewish. Yeah. That thing. The Holocaust.
Now, all of the Good Countries of the Western World publicly felt very bad about that. And the most typical take was something along the lines of If the Jewish people had only had their own homeland where they were in charge of stuff, that homeland could have served as a safe haven for all the persecuted Jews to take refuge in so that they didn't have to go to places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. What a shame they had nowhere safe to go!
And yeah, that sort of bullshit plays pretty well, as long as nobody notices that The Good Countries of the Western World are sidestepping the inconvenient fact that despite knowing the Jews were being persecuted and exterminated (Hitler and the Nazis were not... subtle about their feelings regarding the Jews), those same Good Countries of the Western World did not open their doors to the Jews when there was still time to do that.
On the whole, The Good Countries of the Western World DID NOT expedite the immigration of Jews to save lives. Opening their own countries to an influx of persecuted Jews was not a popular idea, even though the Jews were being killed by the literal millions. But, talking about this out loud would make everybody in The Good Countries of the Western World look kinda complicit in those millions of dead Jews, right, so they generally just don't mention it.
Instead of being honest about their reluctance to try to do an actual humanitarian thing to save the Jews, the Good Countries of the Western World went around wringing their hands without actually... doing the thing that could help. But, after the war, when the newspapers and newsreels showed the camps and the starving prisoners and the piles of shoes and the brutal facts, dutifully recorded by methodical and efficient Nazis, The Good Countries of the Western World felt, y'know, kinda guilty (as they well and truly should have felt). So, they were inclined to look kindly on the notion of Jewish People Having Their Own Homeland.
And now back to where we left off...
********
So, that's how we got Israel. The Zionists living in Palestine following WWII basically shoved the Arabs out of about 3/4 of the country, drove them off their land, and basically said, "Welp, we're Israel now. Deal with it." And the Good Countries of the Western World were all kind of relieved about this because now the Jews had their own homeland and the Nazi thing would Never Happen Again and none of them had to open THEIR doors to invite millions of Jews into their non-Jewish countries. It didn't hurt that the people who were losing the land were Muslim Arabs, so... meh.
(For a time, in history back, the Good Countries of the Western World thought that the Holy Land should belong to Christians. There were a series of Crusades from 1095 to 1291 that attempted to "liberate" the Holy Land from the Muslim Arabs. Blah, blah, lack of success, etc. And so they gave up on that. But nobody, back then, was at all worried about taking the land away from the Muslim Arabs who lived there. My point here is that The Good Countries of the Western World have a pretty long history of not giving two shits for the property rights of Muslim Arabs living in the Holy Land, so this thing with Zionists stealing 3/4 of Palestine after WWII fits right in with the general trendline.)
Since the birth, I guess, of Israel in 1948, Israel has occupied most of "historical" Palestine and they've subsequently made inroads on the West Bank and Gaza Strip parts that they didn't originally capture. They also snagged the Golan Heights (from Syria) and the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt). The Sinai Peninsula eventually got returned to Egypt in the 80's, but Israel still has the Golan Heights.
As things stand now, there are still two pieces to Palestine. They are Gaza (which is the smaller piece), ruled more-or-less by Hamas since 2007 and the West Bank, operated under the Palestinian Authority. Near as I can tell, both of these... territories are still considered to be part of "Palestine", the not-quite-a-country entity, despite their differences in leadership. According to some international law, both Gaza and the West Bank are "occupied" by Israel and have been pretty much so since the 1967 war. (FWIW, Israel disagrees with this characterization.) Currently, Israel is actively at war with the Hamas-led Gaza territory and kinda-at-war with the West Bank territory in a back burner sort of way.
In broad strokes, Israel is against the existence of a Palestinian state. Like, they don't want it to be a country. That's kind of at the root of all of this "Israel keeps stealing Palestine's land" thing. The official position of Israel is that Palestine shouldn't be a country, isn't a country, and therefore doesn't get to have land. Also, since Palestine isn't a country, Israel isn't "occupying" it.
Well, is Palestine a country? Wait, how does a country even get to be a country, anyway?
To become a country, the proto-country has to get all the other countries to agree that it's a country. It's basically an acknowledgment of their peers situation.
Okay, makes sense. So, again... IS Palestine a country?
Er. Maybe no? Here's the map.
I will quote for your reading pleasure the following bit, which I did not know: This limited status (of Palestine) is largely due to the fact that the United States, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, has consistently used its veto or threatened to do so to block Palestine's full UN membership.
Apparently the USA also does not want Palestine to be a country. I did not know this before my not-deep dive into "Why is there an Israel/Palestine mess?" which was spurred into being by Felt Satan in a YouTube talking about Joshua going all genocidal on the Canaanites. What a world we live in, right?
It turns out that part of the reason Palestinians are being ... genocided and squeezed off their land and shit is because we, the United States, refuse to recognize that they exist as a country. If they were a country, they'd have some rights to their borders and stuff. They'd reasonably expect to not have the Israelis overrunning them for no other reason than We wants it, my precioussss. And they'd be able to plead their case to the UN and maybe get some backing and support.
But the US supports Israel, both by denying Palestine full country status in the UN and by giving Israel military aid and stuff. I get that. Israel is our ally. We are supporting our friend Israel.
But it's pretty clear that our friend Israel is being a dick. Our friend Israel is being a genocidal dick. A land-grabbing dick, aggressing against its neighbors (not just Palestine, but also Syria and Egypt). Israel is a dick committing what would be war crimes if Palestine were a real country in the eyes of the UN... but since Palestine isn't a real country in the eyes of the UN, Israel gets a bit of a pass on that.
But all of that is diplomacy, right? And it's really complicated.
Let's try a simpler example.
If your friend is doing dick things and you ACTIVELY SUPPORT YOUR FRIEND in his dick activities, that makes you a dick, too. Your friend wants to wait outside the gay bar and beat up queers. You go along to help him because that sounds like a good Friday night to you, too. You both pick a small, drunk guy, cut him from the herd, and you pin the guy's arms behind his back while your friend punches him in the gut repeatedly. You're just as much a dick as your friend. You are both dicks.
If your friend is doing dick things and you PASSIVELY SUPPORT YOUR FRIEND in his dick activities, you're a dick, too. You don't go out with him when he's date raping, you don't date rape beside him, but you are his supplier of roofies and you know he's doing it because you laugh with him when he tells you how fucking clueless the bitch was, didn't even know what was happening, started crying, it was *insane*, man. Bitches, amirite? Yeah, you're a dick and so is your friend. Both dicks.
If your friend is doing dick things and you just... stand there looking on while he does dick things, does that make you a dick too? I mean, you didn't rape the girl, you didn't even touch her. You just videoed it with your cellphone. It's not wrong to take a cellphone video, is it? Well, you're no rapist, but... you are not a good guy. You should have done something to stop it. Your friend is a dick. And you? Also a dick.
The only moral things you can do when you are aware that your friend is doing dick things are to (a) quit being friends with them and (b) work to stop their dickish behavior in whatever ways you have to impart consequences. If you don't... you're complicit in the dickery and also something of a dick yourself.
In your response to dick behavior, the issue of relative power is important to consider. If the dick is more powerful (bigger, wealthier, stronger, whatever) than you -- if the dick can and will pound you into the dirt for crossing them -- your options for doing the right thing are more limited... and most people will understand that when they regard your efforts to disapprove of and/or curtail the dickishness. But if you are more powerful than the dick, people will also take that under consideration when regarding your behavior towards stopping the dickery and/or the dick.
My question for the US, then, is... are we bigger, stronger, wealthier than Israel? I kinda think we are. I kinda think we're in a position of power, here, over our dick friend Israel. And we're... definitely aware of Israel's dickish behavior. It's all over the news, if you care to look.
And we're supporting it, for sure, at least at the passive level, with funding and military goodies and stuff. We're enabling it by withholding the status of "country" from Palestine in the UN. Israel's activities against the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, we are pretty much endorsing that stuff.
And so yeah, we're dicks too. We are.
So, what should we do? I already done told you. The only right things you can do when your friend is doing dick things are to (a) quit being friends with the dick and (b) work to stop the dick in whatever ways you have to impart consequences.
Have we done those things? No. No, we have not.
And what does that make us?
But What About Hamas?
I knew you were gonna ask that.
Look. The fact that Israel is being a dick does not preclude Hamas from being a dick too. They can both be dicks. But the US is not encouraging and supporting Hamas. The US is not throwing its diplomatic and international heft behind Hamas. The US doesn't have complicity or leverage with Hamas like it has with Israel.
Perhaps there is some sort of...useful diplomacy thing that could happen with other Arab/Muslim nations and Hamas to kind of get them to behave better?
Maybe if the US and other Israel allies were willing to have an intervention with Israel along the lines of Look, bro, this ain't cool. Stop it. You have your homeland and it is there. Give up the ground you took since the 1948 war and behave yourselves. Yes, that's a reduction of what you have now but you took it unfairly and you've been quite... bad for quite a long time and there are gonna be some consequences for your behavior. Suck it up, buttercup., then meanwhile, to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the other Arab/Muslim neighbors could be We hear your very valid grievances and we recognize your dead. Your country is in ruins. Israel has treated you badly for a long time, but we need to end this before all ya'll are dead, both gingham dog and calico cat, so... we're giving you full UN recognition, making Israel give up the territory it's taken since 1948, ending their occupation and "authority" over you, and having them plus the international community who stood by and watched this attempted genocide do some reparations. It's imperfect, but it's an ending. For your part, you need to settle down and accept the 1948 boundaries as firm while trying to be a real country under your own governance. In particular, the terrorist stuff against the Jews has to stop because every damn time you do that, Israel acts like it has a mandate to slaughter you.
I dunno. I am not a diplomat. Probably they could do better than this back-of-the-envelope effort.
Look, I really like the guy who does the voice for Satan. It's very soothing and the right amount of amused sarcasm. Seriously, the whole thing is funny and sometimes I put it on because it's nice to listen to, with Annoyed Jesus and bible songs from my youth and yeah. Don't judge me.
So I was listening to that last night, familiar and comforting in many of the right ways, when I got to the part about the Israelites leaving Egypt (from the Exodus, in the Bible) and heading into The Promised Land.
If you are unfamiliar, the YouTube goes over how most "non-evangelical" biblical scholars freely admit that there isn't any actual evidence for the Israelites being enslaved in Egypt for like four hundred years, no pottery, no art, no language, nothing that they took or borrowed or adapted from their four hundred year stay in Egypt Land. Nothing in the archaeological record, either. No inexplicable feelings about cats, no walking sideways, no eyeliner. If they spent four hundred years in Egypt, the Israelites walked away afterward with absolutely nothing Egyptian to show for it.
Now, this is... either entirely unique among conquered peoples in the history of the world (because despite everyone's best efforts to be separate and unequal, cultural drift from the powerful to the powerless... happens) OR the Israelites were not in Egypt under Pharoah's rule, not at all, not for one year, not for four hundred and change. Most of the world's Biblical scholars fall on the side of the simpler explanation. Only folks super enthused by the notion of Biblical Inerrancy and swilling that kind of Flavr-Aid believe otherwise.
ANYWAY, the video asks (reasonably) if the Israelites didn't come out of Egypt, where DID they come from? As near as anyone can tell (archaelogical stuff, language, cultural artifacts of all sorts), they were from Canaan the whole time and the whole "out of Egypt" thing was like talking about your really hot girlfriend from Niagara Falls. Alternative facts is what I'm saying.
So if Canaan was the promised land and if the Israelites were already living there, what was the deal with the Canaanites? They were ALSO already living there, just with a different religion. And so I am listening to this YouTube and it brings up the story of Joshua.
The story of Joshua is y'know, God says that Joshua should/will kill off all the damn Canaanites so that the Israelites can have the Promised Land. See, the Promised Land is awesome and stuff but as previously mentioned, it's also already occupied by the fucking Canaanites. To solve this problem, Joshua is given a mandate by God to go forth and kill everybody, women and children too, burn the cities, cripple the livestock, etc. so that the Israelites can have unobstructed access to the Promised Land. It's kinda genocide-y stuff, the catchy Sunday school song notwithstanding.
Now, "It's OK to genocide people if you want their land." is not a great message. (I do need to point out the hypocrisy of saying this while at the same time being an of-European-descent American citizen living in a kinda-great and selectively-free nation that was formed by genociding people because we wanted their land.) Even as a NARRATIVE, as a teaching story, a holy book shouldn't say stuff like "Go kill all those people so that you can have their land." I feel like folks might get the wrong idea if their holy book went around saying shit like that.
But anyway. I was watching YouTube Felt Satan and suddenly I was reminded of the current (my entire life) shit in Israel/Palestine. How did that get to be such a fucking mess? It's been a fucking mess basically
Well, it's complicated. I have tried to get a grip on it. I Wikipedia'd and I YouTubed and I read some stuff. There was A LOT of stuff, tho, and I probably am missing some of it, but here's what I learned.
At the end of World War I, the territories held by the losers (Losers: Germany, Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria) got divvied up among the Winners (Winners: France, Russia, the British Empire, Italy, United States) to be administered under the mandate system for a time. This was intended to be a period of, like, training wheels prior to the territories being independent states.
One of those "belonged to the WWI losers" territories was Palestine (it had been part of the Ottoman Empire), which was handed to Great Britain following the war. See, during the war, Great Britain had made the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In that declaration, Great Britain promised to establish a "National Home for the Jewish People" in Palestine. In my reading on this topic, I got the impression that Great Britain didn't run their idea about a creating Jewish Homeland in Palestine past anybody who was actually living in Palestine.
Maybe they should have floated the idea, workshopped it a bit, etc. They did not.
Because it's important, I reiterate thusly: Great Britain did not consult with the Palestinians about its plan for the disposition of their land any more than God talked to the Canaanites about his Promised Land For The Israelites plan. Hunh.
I would like to point out that BOTH of these things are about taking land (occupied land, where people were already living) and handing it over to the Jewish people without giving a whole lot of thought to the people already living on that land. And worse yet, it's the same fucking land in both instances. Biblical Canaan is pretty much RIGHT WHERE PALESTINE AND ISRAEL CURRENTLY ARE.
Fuck me. We're still on that? Yes. Yes, we are. We're still doing that fucking thing, side order of genocide and all.
And that's how I got from Felt Satan On YouTube talking about Joshua and Canaanites to Why is Israel/Palestine such a fucking mess? I was happily watching the very reassuring Felt Satan on YouTube talking about Joshua and the slaughter of the Canaanites and I was "Hey, that sounds about like the Israel/Palestine thing nowadays."
Hunh. Maybe people did get the wrong idea from the story of Joshua and the Canaanites?
Before the Balfour thing, Jewish people were less than 10% of the population of Palestine and, as a group, they owned about 3% of the land in Palestine. After the Balfour thing, when Great Britain was mandating Palestine, the "facilitated" immigration of Jewish people to Palestine raised the Jewish population there from less than 10% to approximately 33% by 1947.
In 1948, the British mandate (from the end of WWI, thirty years prior) expired. So, the country of Palestine was now ready to function as an independent state, right? After all, the whole point of the mandate system was to guide and stabilize the losing-side territories from WWI so that they could eventually function as independent states. Remember? We just covered that a few paragraphs ago.
When the British Mandate expired, in 1948, Zionist (a Zionist is a person who supports the establishment of Israel/existence of a Jewish homeland) leaders announced they would be forming a Jewish homeland, the state of Israel, out of rather a lot of what used-to-be-Palestine, kthxbye. This started a war.
In the war, the Israelis captured about 78% of the land that had started off as Palestine and in the process they displaced about 750,000 Arabs from their properties. The parts of "historic Palestine" that remained uncaptured were in two non-connecting pieces: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. (The Gaza Strip is on the west of Israel, up against Egypt. The West Bank is on the east side of Israel, which seems confusing but it's called "The West Bank" because it's the West Bank of the Jordan River. The country Jordan is on the EAST bank of the Jordan River.)
In 1950, two years after the first Arab/Israeli war, the Israeli government enacted the "absentee property law", allowing them to confiscate the vacated property in Israeli-controlled areas. Now, this property was vacated because of the Israelis driving off the 3/4 of a million Palestinian Arabs in the 1948 war, but ... vacated is vacated, right? No sense wasting that land.
So, that's how we got Israel. The Zionists living in Palestine following WWII...
Wait, what? I thought we got the Great Britain mandate over Palestine following World War I.
********
Because I cannot trust the quality of public education, here I'm going to pause to point out that in between the end of WWI in 1918 and the expiration of the Great Britain mandate over Palestine in 1948, we had a whole 'nother world war in which like six million (at least) Jewish people (men, women, and children) got killed for the not-a-crime of being Jewish. Yeah. That thing. The Holocaust.
Now, all of the Good Countries of the Western World publicly felt very bad about that. And the most typical take was something along the lines of If the Jewish people had only had their own homeland where they were in charge of stuff, that homeland could have served as a safe haven for all the persecuted Jews to take refuge in so that they didn't have to go to places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. What a shame they had nowhere safe to go!
And yeah, that sort of bullshit plays pretty well, as long as nobody notices that The Good Countries of the Western World are sidestepping the inconvenient fact that despite knowing the Jews were being persecuted and exterminated (Hitler and the Nazis were not... subtle about their feelings regarding the Jews), those same Good Countries of the Western World did not open their doors to the Jews when there was still time to do that.
On the whole, The Good Countries of the Western World DID NOT expedite the immigration of Jews to save lives. Opening their own countries to an influx of persecuted Jews was not a popular idea, even though the Jews were being killed by the literal millions. But, talking about this out loud would make everybody in The Good Countries of the Western World look kinda complicit in those millions of dead Jews, right, so they generally just don't mention it.
Instead of being honest about their reluctance to try to do an actual humanitarian thing to save the Jews, the Good Countries of the Western World went around wringing their hands without actually... doing the thing that could help. But, after the war, when the newspapers and newsreels showed the camps and the starving prisoners and the piles of shoes and the brutal facts, dutifully recorded by methodical and efficient Nazis, The Good Countries of the Western World felt, y'know, kinda guilty (as they well and truly should have felt). So, they were inclined to look kindly on the notion of Jewish People Having Their Own Homeland.
And now back to where we left off...
********
So, that's how we got Israel. The Zionists living in Palestine following WWII basically shoved the Arabs out of about 3/4 of the country, drove them off their land, and basically said, "Welp, we're Israel now. Deal with it." And the Good Countries of the Western World were all kind of relieved about this because now the Jews had their own homeland and the Nazi thing would Never Happen Again and none of them had to open THEIR doors to invite millions of Jews into their non-Jewish countries. It didn't hurt that the people who were losing the land were Muslim Arabs, so... meh.
(For a time, in history back, the Good Countries of the Western World thought that the Holy Land should belong to Christians. There were a series of Crusades from 1095 to 1291 that attempted to "liberate" the Holy Land from the Muslim Arabs. Blah, blah, lack of success, etc. And so they gave up on that. But nobody, back then, was at all worried about taking the land away from the Muslim Arabs who lived there. My point here is that The Good Countries of the Western World have a pretty long history of not giving two shits for the property rights of Muslim Arabs living in the Holy Land, so this thing with Zionists stealing 3/4 of Palestine after WWII fits right in with the general trendline.)
Since the birth, I guess, of Israel in 1948, Israel has occupied most of "historical" Palestine and they've subsequently made inroads on the West Bank and Gaza Strip parts that they didn't originally capture. They also snagged the Golan Heights (from Syria) and the Sinai Peninsula (from Egypt). The Sinai Peninsula eventually got returned to Egypt in the 80's, but Israel still has the Golan Heights.
As things stand now, there are still two pieces to Palestine. They are Gaza (which is the smaller piece), ruled more-or-less by Hamas since 2007 and the West Bank, operated under the Palestinian Authority. Near as I can tell, both of these... territories are still considered to be part of "Palestine", the not-quite-a-country entity, despite their differences in leadership. According to some international law, both Gaza and the West Bank are "occupied" by Israel and have been pretty much so since the 1967 war. (FWIW, Israel disagrees with this characterization.) Currently, Israel is actively at war with the Hamas-led Gaza territory and kinda-at-war with the West Bank territory in a back burner sort of way.
In broad strokes, Israel is against the existence of a Palestinian state. Like, they don't want it to be a country. That's kind of at the root of all of this "Israel keeps stealing Palestine's land" thing. The official position of Israel is that Palestine shouldn't be a country, isn't a country, and therefore doesn't get to have land. Also, since Palestine isn't a country, Israel isn't "occupying" it.
Well, is Palestine a country? Wait, how does a country even get to be a country, anyway?
To become a country, the proto-country has to get all the other countries to agree that it's a country. It's basically an acknowledgment of their peers situation.
Okay, makes sense. So, again... IS Palestine a country?
Er. Maybe no? Here's the map.
I will quote for your reading pleasure the following bit, which I did not know: This limited status (of Palestine) is largely due to the fact that the United States, a permanent member of the UN Security Council with veto power, has consistently used its veto or threatened to do so to block Palestine's full UN membership.
Apparently the USA also does not want Palestine to be a country. I did not know this before my not-deep dive into "Why is there an Israel/Palestine mess?" which was spurred into being by Felt Satan in a YouTube talking about Joshua going all genocidal on the Canaanites. What a world we live in, right?
It turns out that part of the reason Palestinians are being ... genocided and squeezed off their land and shit is because we, the United States, refuse to recognize that they exist as a country. If they were a country, they'd have some rights to their borders and stuff. They'd reasonably expect to not have the Israelis overrunning them for no other reason than We wants it, my precioussss. And they'd be able to plead their case to the UN and maybe get some backing and support.
But the US supports Israel, both by denying Palestine full country status in the UN and by giving Israel military aid and stuff. I get that. Israel is our ally. We are supporting our friend Israel.
But it's pretty clear that our friend Israel is being a dick. Our friend Israel is being a genocidal dick. A land-grabbing dick, aggressing against its neighbors (not just Palestine, but also Syria and Egypt). Israel is a dick committing what would be war crimes if Palestine were a real country in the eyes of the UN... but since Palestine isn't a real country in the eyes of the UN, Israel gets a bit of a pass on that.
But all of that is diplomacy, right? And it's really complicated.
Let's try a simpler example.
If your friend is doing dick things and you ACTIVELY SUPPORT YOUR FRIEND in his dick activities, that makes you a dick, too. Your friend wants to wait outside the gay bar and beat up queers. You go along to help him because that sounds like a good Friday night to you, too. You both pick a small, drunk guy, cut him from the herd, and you pin the guy's arms behind his back while your friend punches him in the gut repeatedly. You're just as much a dick as your friend. You are both dicks.
If your friend is doing dick things and you PASSIVELY SUPPORT YOUR FRIEND in his dick activities, you're a dick, too. You don't go out with him when he's date raping, you don't date rape beside him, but you are his supplier of roofies and you know he's doing it because you laugh with him when he tells you how fucking clueless the bitch was, didn't even know what was happening, started crying, it was *insane*, man. Bitches, amirite? Yeah, you're a dick and so is your friend. Both dicks.
If your friend is doing dick things and you just... stand there looking on while he does dick things, does that make you a dick too? I mean, you didn't rape the girl, you didn't even touch her. You just videoed it with your cellphone. It's not wrong to take a cellphone video, is it? Well, you're no rapist, but... you are not a good guy. You should have done something to stop it. Your friend is a dick. And you? Also a dick.
The only moral things you can do when you are aware that your friend is doing dick things are to (a) quit being friends with them and (b) work to stop their dickish behavior in whatever ways you have to impart consequences. If you don't... you're complicit in the dickery and also something of a dick yourself.
In your response to dick behavior, the issue of relative power is important to consider. If the dick is more powerful (bigger, wealthier, stronger, whatever) than you -- if the dick can and will pound you into the dirt for crossing them -- your options for doing the right thing are more limited... and most people will understand that when they regard your efforts to disapprove of and/or curtail the dickishness. But if you are more powerful than the dick, people will also take that under consideration when regarding your behavior towards stopping the dickery and/or the dick.
My question for the US, then, is... are we bigger, stronger, wealthier than Israel? I kinda think we are. I kinda think we're in a position of power, here, over our dick friend Israel. And we're... definitely aware of Israel's dickish behavior. It's all over the news, if you care to look.
And we're supporting it, for sure, at least at the passive level, with funding and military goodies and stuff. We're enabling it by withholding the status of "country" from Palestine in the UN. Israel's activities against the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, we are pretty much endorsing that stuff.
And so yeah, we're dicks too. We are.
So, what should we do? I already done told you. The only right things you can do when your friend is doing dick things are to (a) quit being friends with the dick and (b) work to stop the dick in whatever ways you have to impart consequences.
Have we done those things? No. No, we have not.
And what does that make us?
But What About Hamas?
I knew you were gonna ask that.
Look. The fact that Israel is being a dick does not preclude Hamas from being a dick too. They can both be dicks. But the US is not encouraging and supporting Hamas. The US is not throwing its diplomatic and international heft behind Hamas. The US doesn't have complicity or leverage with Hamas like it has with Israel.
Perhaps there is some sort of...useful diplomacy thing that could happen with other Arab/Muslim nations and Hamas to kind of get them to behave better?
Maybe if the US and other Israel allies were willing to have an intervention with Israel along the lines of Look, bro, this ain't cool. Stop it. You have your homeland and it is there. Give up the ground you took since the 1948 war and behave yourselves. Yes, that's a reduction of what you have now but you took it unfairly and you've been quite... bad for quite a long time and there are gonna be some consequences for your behavior. Suck it up, buttercup., then meanwhile, to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, the other Arab/Muslim neighbors could be We hear your very valid grievances and we recognize your dead. Your country is in ruins. Israel has treated you badly for a long time, but we need to end this before all ya'll are dead, both gingham dog and calico cat, so... we're giving you full UN recognition, making Israel give up the territory it's taken since 1948, ending their occupation and "authority" over you, and having them plus the international community who stood by and watched this attempted genocide do some reparations. It's imperfect, but it's an ending. For your part, you need to settle down and accept the 1948 boundaries as firm while trying to be a real country under your own governance. In particular, the terrorist stuff against the Jews has to stop because every damn time you do that, Israel acts like it has a mandate to slaughter you.
I dunno. I am not a diplomat. Probably they could do better than this back-of-the-envelope effort.
