eid mubarak to all those who are celebrating this beautiful holiday. may Allah bless you with sincere happiness and inner peace, bring an end to your struggles and heartache, reward you for all of the sacrifices that you have had to make in order to stay afloat, and grant you the glad tidings and relief that you have been waiting so patiently for.
Please do your research! There is so much misinformation out there and a lot of lies.
Everyone should know the truth so please try to know as much as you can so you can spread awareness and help!
Free Palestine🇵🇸✌️
Oh hey look, one of those bits of misinformation! So let’s go over some of the lies here and straighten them out, shall we?
1) Saying religion has no part in the conflict is false. While it is far from the main source of conflict, it does play a significant role in it.
2) “Peacefully” is a simplification, and the land was under Ottoman rule, which none of the mentioned groups were happy about. Hence why they were all very willing to help Britain oust the Ottomans, so long as the British promised them rule over the newly independent land. The issue was the British promised both the Jews and Palestinians the land, and they weren’t happy to share.
3) Samaritans consider themselves neither Palestinians nor Jews (I don’t know which label they’d take greater issue with, though). They are their own ethnoreligious group, having split off from what would become Judaism thousands of years ago (before the Torah was even written down! As an example, they don’t celebrate Hannukah or Purim, both relatively young Jewish holidays less than three thousand years old).
4) Alright, first of all, let’s unpack the term “settlers” here, because settler generally implies having a homeland elsewhere. Which the Jews do not have. The Jews are a diasporic group, who were kicked out of their ancestral homeland (again, but we’re talking about the most recent Jewish Diaspora, not the ones before that) by the Romans just short of two thousand years ago. As the Romans slaughtered roughly half the Jewish population and took the remainder as slaves, they renamed the province from “Judea” to “Palestine” as a final insult to the Jews.
a. I would not call what’s happening in Israel “Ethnic Cleansing”. Oppression, apartheid and military occupation, yes, but not ethnic cleansing. Despite what some extremists want, Israel is not trying to wipe out the Palestinians.
5) Palestine was never an independent country. It was a province of an Empire (Back and forth between Rome and Persia, then the Arabian Caliphates, then the Ottomans, briefly the British, and now Israel, which while not an empire does rule over Palestine at the moment). In 1917, the British took the land from the Ottomans, and occupied it under a Mandate for the next 30 years, ostensibly to make sure the locals formed a coherent and fair government, but mostly because the British Empire liked having territories. In 1947, under UN mandate, the British left. The UN had proposed a two-state solution. When the British left, the Jews officially declared Israel as an independent country. The Palestinians didn’t. They instead called upon their Arab and Muslim allies (Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iran) to declare war on Israel to retake the land given to it by the British. When the war was over, Israel remained, its borders shifted, and Palestine was no more, its territory eaten up by Israel, Jordan and Egypt.
a. Plus, about half the Jewish population of Israel is descended from native Jews who lived there prior to the British. So they are included in the “native population”.
b. Again, calling Israel a “Settler Colony” suggests the Jews have a home they could go back to. Which they do not. If your fantasies of dismantling Israel come to pass, where would they go? No country wants the Jews back! That’s why most of the Jews who moved to Israel moved there- the countries they were living in expelled them!
6) That’s accurate, for the most part. Although, again, where the fuck would the Jews go?! The majority of the “coloniser states” you mentioned expelled/massacred their Jewish population multiple times over the course of history. As did every single Arab state.
7) Israel isn’t the one to spread that misinformation. It’s mostly Europeans and Americans conflating religion and ethnicity because Jewish is both (it is an ethnoreligion).
8) That’s pure lies right there.
9) Again, the “White Settler State” narrative. False and a misdirection.
A lot of people online with no understanding of Israel or Palestine have a whole shitload of opinions about Israel and Palestine and refuse to come to terms with the fact that a shitload of them comes from a context of antisemitic beliefs that have gone on for millennia.Â
The same people complaining about Israeli “hasbara” will post Instagram memes full of misinformation, like the above, and it becomes taken as fact, especially when the Jews are involved. The Nazis “Great Lie” revolved around the simple truth that if you repeat something about Jews enough times and loudly enough, people will believe it.
The idea that Israelis revel in the death of non-Jewish children comes from the medieval blood libel that Jews love the blood of Gentile children. Are there Jewish extremists in Israel who cheer on the death of Palestinian children? Yeah. They’re a disgusting group that doesn’t indicate that all Israelis are bloodthirsty murderers who love dead children, just like Hamas is a disgusting group that doesn’t indicate that all Palestinians are bloodthirsty murderers who love dead children. The fact that people know that the extremists of most groups don’t represent the whole yet immediately point to only Israeli Jews as inhuman monsters who need to be eliminated should send up some fucking red flags.
The idea that the dirty Jews are trying to defile al-Aqsa mosque has been going on for at least two centuries, long before the current state of Israel was created. It’s a propaganda point that people use whenever they want to stir up anger at Jews, because it works. The fire set at al-Aqsa the other day that people claimed was Jewish Israelis? It was actually caused by people trying to shoot fireworks at the Jews’ holy site while a large group of Jews were there. There’s video of the fireworks being set off from al-Aqsa and hitting the tree that was set on fire. Videos of the fire were then circulated with thousands talking about the vile inhuman Jews of Israel. What kind of monster would set a fire to a religious site and during such a holy time of year for Muslims? Spoiler alert: it wasn’t the Israelis
Here’s some facts: Thousands of people on both sides of the conflict have died. Both sides’ populations have also multiplied at pretty much same rate and at pretty much the same numbers. When people claim that Jews learned nothing from their own genocides and are now doing it to Palestinians, please remember that antisemites love to claim that Jews are committing genocide. It’s kind of their thing. White supremacists do it through their claims that jews are committing white genocide (which…lol). Those who aren’t white supremacists found a way to claim it by pretending if you use the term Zionists instead of Jews when you pretend the Jews are wiping out hundreds of thousands or millions of people, you’re not being antisemitic.
Israel and Palestine, and before it the British Mandate of Palestine, and before that the Ottoman-owned Palestine was never the paradise for Jews that people claim it was before the Zionists showed up. Anyone telling you the people of the British Mandate of Palestine were all living peacefully together before the Zionists showed up is trying to sell you a bridge. Yes, things were better for Jews in Palestine than in Europe, but Europe was also turning their Jews into soap and lampshades so that’s not saying much. There were pogroms against Jews in Palestine long before the current state of Israel. Towns that used to be Palestinian are now Jewish, yes, but towns that used to be Jewish are now Palestinian.
Palestine was a settler colony state of Rome, then the Ottomans, then the British. There were Palestinians there that would be considered indigenous, there for centuries and milennia. There were Jews there that would be considered indigenous, there for centuries and milennia. But here’s the thing no one really wants to talk about: Jews weren’t the only ones immigrating en masse to Palestine before the modern state of Israel’s creation. There are plenty of Palestinians who haven’t been living in what is now Israel and Palestine any longer than the dirty Zionists have.Â
Israel and Palestine isn’t really a conflict based on religion, true- there are Christian and Muslim Palestinians, just as there are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Israelis (along with other religions on either side). Israel and Palestine is a conflict based on ethnonationalism. And the Palestinian cause is just as ethnonationalistic as the Israeli one. Palestinians are the one true original people of the land, not like those outsider Jews- despite the fact that Jews originated in those very lands. That last fact makes people very uncomfortable: it’s why people love to claim that Ashkenazi Jews are actually secretly European converts from Christianity, and why people still call Israel’s majority-Mizrahi population who never left the MENA region “white European colonizers.” But that brings up another uncomfortable idea that no one wants to reckon with. The idea of the Jewish outsider isn’t new either. It’s just the age-old trope of the Wandering Jew- he has no real origin, he has no real homeland, he is destined to wander the Earth for all days with no place to put down roots. And no one wants to reckon with the fact that , in this case, most of the same people calling for the dismantling of Israel are the same people- the non-Jews of the Middle Eastern, European, and African nations- that made the Jews “wander” to Israel in the first place. And, let’s be real, you’re never going to be ready to have that conversation because to do that you’d have to see Jews as human beings who you’ve wronged, rather than just the misfortunes who you think are replacing you (and, yes, this means all of you in the tags and reblogs who woke up this morning, saw these pics with no actual sources on Instagram and said “wow, I didn’t know all of this, these are facts so make sure to spread them and don’t believe misinformation going around,” and now think you know about the conflict).
A lot of the women who have stepped forward - and I stand in solidarity with them - what they’re getting paid, which is half of what a man is getting paid, well we get probably a tenth of what a Caucasian woman gets. And I’m number one on the call sheet. And then I have to go in and I have to hustle for my worth.
