Seeing the number of flagged comments, and going from past discussions where any discussion seen as pushback was flagged, this discussion really doesn't belong on hacker news.
replies(5):
But don't let that stop you. Feel free to make a nuanced and well-researched counterargument why the UN report is wrong.
Accusations of "one-sidedness" for everything that doesn't follow the Israeli narrative of the conflict has been a standard defense for decades, last employed against the two-states UN resolution.
That's why I find (naive) insistence on seeing "both sides" problematic in this conflict. By all means, do see both sides, but see them with their respective amounts of power and historical context.
It was so obvious that you were trying to carefully push Zionist propaganda from the very start, but here you went from 0 to 100% hasbara real quick. This isn't 1990, you won't get away with this kind of blatant Zionist revisionism; there are about 10000+ academic articles and videos now that teach the history in painful detail. So give it a rest with your lazy propaganda.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231029055310/ojp.gov/ncjrs/vir...
>How can you try to swat away historical facts
The cognitive dissonance of Zionists needs to be studied in Universities across the world. You are straight up lying into people's faces and in the same breath projecting your own behavior on others "trying to 'swat away historical facts'". It's truly astonishing.
I have no issue discussing this situation, in fact that was the whole point of my original statement. Which is that most people seem too emotionally attached to this situation to the point where they can't even have a proper discussion without trying to talk down to me about a position I don't even hold.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101003080945/http://unispal.un...
I already quoted that exact part and even referenced the academic work which elaborated on it in detail. It was also not a "random" master thesis, it is academic work that is cited by the United States Government.
>Correct me if I'm wrong
"Entertain my Zionist revisionism". I've heard variations of your hasbara for 2 decades. It's insane that you still think that you can just lie in people's faces when everybody can just fact check you in a jiffy. You obviously don't care about the facts, that's why you persist in trying to deceive people with Zionist revisionism, but for others who happen to stumble upon this convo here some elaboration that concisely debunks these Zionist talking points:
- "The Conflict Based on a Lie" https://youtu.be/dy56Q1a0Flc - "The Masterplan for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" https://youtu.be/C3cnRcfp_us
For anyone who is more interested in a comprehensive study of the history, Zachary Foster is a jewish historian whose research can be found at palestinenexus.com of which he is the founder of.
But if you insist on starting with the Palestinian civil war then you will soon find that a lot of Palestinians were expelled from their lands and never granted the right of return. It was not merely the partition, but the fact the international human rights granted the right of return for Palestinians illegally expelled, but this international human rights was promptly denied to Palestinians and has been till this day. There is no tit for tat here, as Zionists have not been illegally displaced and Zionists don’t have their rights of return denied to them.
>There is no tit for tat here, as Zionists have not been illegally displaced and Zionists don’t have their rights of return denied to them.
The claim Zionists make here is that the land was originally Jewish land to begin with. History does support this claim as the Roman Empire took over Judaea in the early first century and then subsequently exterminated and enslaved the Jews in the region renaming the area to Syria Palaestina about 100 years later.
Let's correct the record. First, you claim Zionism was just a reaction to antisemitism, not the cause of the conflict. This is a deliberate misrepresentation. Political Zionism was a confident and proactive colonial project, growing from the exact same soil of European nationalism and race theory as antisemitism itself. The early Zionist leadership were not "traumatized victims" at all. They were confident Europeans, operating in the same intellectual environment as the "Scramble for Africa" who saw themselves as a superior people with the right to colonize. This wasn't some abstract theory, but their explicit worldview. As one of their key leaders, Chaim Weizmann noted: "The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.
This colonial mindset is also why your second claim, that the focus on Palestine was just a pragmatic choice that only became central after Balfour, is historical nonsense. The proof is again the Zionist leadership's rejection of the Uganda offer. If the goal was simply to find a safe haven for worried Jews, a vast territory in Africa would have been the logical answer. They refused it because Zionism was never just about safety. It was a nationalist colonial project with a specific, predetermined target, and their argument was about claiming the right to do what other Europeans were doing i.e. conquering and colonizing a land inhabited by people they had already, in their own words, dismissed as having "no value."
Finally, and most cynically, you absurdly present the ancient and laughable claim to "Judea" as if it were a legitimate historical justification. You're framing a modern political maneuver as some kind of ancient "right". The secular, European, and atheist founders of Zionism did not even believe in the religious basis of this claim at all. They saw the biblical narrative noting more as useful myth-making tools to justify their colonialism. They weaponized these ancient stories, which they themselves viewed as superstition, for the very modern purpose of justifying the dispossession of the native population and legitimizing their colonial project. It was a calculated propaganda strategy, not a reclamation of faith. A faith in which they didn't even believe in, but which they were cynically weaponizing.
Starting before the colonization project started and finding reasons or justifications for the colonization is only ever gonna be an exercise in justifying oppression. The victims of colonization had nothing to do with that. Conflicts start when the indigenous population resists colonial oppression.