It would be only just if the Palestinians would get their own state after this.
replies(6):
Are you aware that most of the Arabs of the Holy Land came around the same time period as the Jews? There were Arabs living here previously, of course, as were there living here Jews. Half a century before the British mandate, Jerusalem was already Jewish majority.
> where they've lived for thousands of years.
Palestine is not in Arabia but in the Levant, which was conquered by Arabs from the Byzantine Empire in the 7th c. as part of the Arab-Byzantine wars, and came under the Rashidun Caliphate, the first incarnation of the Arab Empire (which also conquered parts of Europe, BTW, not to mention that people in Morocco or Tunisia speak Arabic for pretty much the same reason people in Peru or Mexico speak Spanish). Warfare in the Levant obviously preceded the crusades by centuries and millenia, and included not only European conquests such as Greek and Roman, but also Persian and Arab conquests.
While it is true that modern Zionism originated in Europe, most Jews living in Israel have no European ancestry whatsoever. Most Jews in Israel have a recent ancestry in the Middle East and North Africa.
Even Ashkenazi Jews of a recent European ancestry (who are a minority in Israel) have genetics pointing to Middle Eastern ancestry. While it is hard to tie any group to ancient Jews, it isn't unlikely that Jews of all origins as well as Palestinian Arabs have ancient Jewish ancestry.
Just as European nationalism excluded Jews as Europeans, Arab nationalism excluded Jews as Arabs, and if there's any group that identifies as Jewish-Arab today, it is vanishingly small.
What Zionism is has not only changed considerably over time, but now, as in the past, there's great disagreement among those considering themselves Zionist on what it means. For example, as recently as a decade ago you could find a small but not negligible group of Israelis who identified as Zionsists yet were in favour of a single multi-national (or non-national) Jewish/Arab state, i.e. the same position was regarded as both Zionist and anti-Zionist by different people simultaneously. Today, many (perhaps even most) of those identifying as Zionists favour a two-state solution.
Not really. The European colonization of Latin America (and North America in general) was extremely bloody, and rooted in eradication and subjugation and erasure of the local culture. The native languages in the Americas are all but gone and been replaced with Spanish/Portugese/etc. We also saw what they did in the Levant, India, Africa, etc.
On the other hand, the Islamic (not Arab) conquests preserved the local culture. This is why Berber is still spoken in North Africa for example. And this is also why an extremely significant number of famous and prominent Islamic scholars came from Persia and the surrounding region (like Abu Hanifa, Bukhari, Muslim, Tirmidhi, and many more to list here). Not to mention countries further east like India and Indonesia as Islam spread. As a matter of fact, there are more non-Arab Muslims than Arab Muslims.
I attended a lecture by a Chinese Muslim who talked about the history of Islam in China - one amusing point he mentioned was how a local martial art was influenced by Wudhu' (Ablution) in Islam. This points to how there was an assimilation and acceptance between Islam and the locals, and was not an eradication.
We are seeing the genocidal calls by the israelis government officials (and polls show a majority of their population agree with them).
Of course, Arab colonialism (Arabisation), European colonialism - of both the settler and non-settler type - and Zionist settler-colonialism are all distinct phenomena, with some important similarities and some important differences. Even the violent struggle between settler-colonial forces and colonial forces are very different between, say, America and Israel.
What is happening in occupied Palestine today—witnessed by the world and actively enabled by certain Western powers—is a tragic chapter in human history. History will judge it with the same moral clarity and horror as the atrocities committed by a certain German regime during and around the WWII era. Already, we are seeing a growing awareness among Western civilians, who are beginning to recognize and challenge what their governments are supporting.
The Arab Empire's conquests are called both Muslim conquests or Arab conquests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Muslim_conquests).
> It’s worth remembering that the longest-lasting Caliphate was the Ottoman Caliphate. As I’ve noted, Islam transcends race and ethnicity.
Yes, but I was talking specifically about the Arab conquests that preceded the Ottoman Empire by centuries. The Arab conquests were in the 7th and 8th centuries. The First Crusade was in the 11th century. The Ottoman conquests were in the 14th century.
> Scholars have acknowledged that mistakes were made by some during these conquests, but such actions were contrary to the core teachings of Islam and have been openly recognized as such.
I'm not talking about religion but about history in response to a statement about the crusades having introduced warfare to the Middle East. Not only is that obviously not even remotely true, but the Arab Empire conquered and colonised the Levant, Maghreb, and Europe's Iberian Peninsula centuries before the crusades. All of this happened a long time ago, no one who was there is alive today, and I'm not trying to sit in judgment. This is just something that happened.
> History will judge it with the same moral clarity and horror as the atrocities committed by a certain German regime during and around the WWII era.
Not everything needs to be compared to the holocaust, nor, for that matter, to the atrocities in Syria this past decade that killed over half a million people and displaced almost 7 million. The atrocities in Palestine are bad enough without being "the same horror" as the killing of 80-90% of Eastern Europe's Jewish population. Nothing justifies mass killings, and each of those atrocities stands on its own.
If you look at the citation for the latter designation, you will see that it is a non-Muslim/non-Arab source. Never have I heard the term (الفتوحات العربية) in any proper source.
As far as I know "Arab conquests" is a modern phrasing used in English (orientalist historiography). It reflects the ethnic origin of the initial armies (mostly Arab tribes) but is not how pre-modern Muslim sources described them.
> Yes, but I was talking specifically about the Arab conquests that preceded the Ottoman Empire by centuries
If you mean the Rashidun, Umayyad, or Abbasid Caliphates, then those were not simply "Arabian" empires - they were Islamic. Non-Arab peoples were deeply involved at every stage. The unifying goal wasn't to spread Arab nationalism but the spread of Islam.
> Not only is that obviously not even remotely true, but the Arab Empire conquered and colonised the Levant, Maghreb, and Europe's Iberian Peninsula centuries before the crusades
They certainly conquered territory, yes. But the term "colonization" (especially with the European background involved) is very loaded, if not misleading. Unlike European colonialism, which involved stealing natural resources, dispossession, and often depopulation - Islamic conquests generally integrated local populations as I previously pointed out. Andalus was ruled by a combination of Arabs, Berbers, and large numbers of local converts. Likewise, in the Levant and Maghreb, indigenous societies weren't replaced or erased. They remained, adapted, and in many cases thrived under Islamic rule.
> Nothing justifies mass killings, and each of those atrocities stands on its own.
Agreed. But my point was that the Western-backed Israeli regime and WWII Germany share a disturbing structural resemblance: both are rooted in ethno-supremacist, ethnic-cleansing ideologies, and both commit mass killings against civilian populations. At least the nazis tried to hide their crimes; the israeli regime doesn’t even bother, and they boast about it (there are countless video interviews and confessions of israeli soliders that affirm this - several recent ones of israeli soldiers confessing their PTSD symptoms in court because of their crimes are very telling and distrurbing). The so-called "allies" hardly had clean hands either, their own history of indiscriminate mass killings during WWII (firebombing cities, nuclear attacks, colonial massacres) shows the same willingness to treat civilian life as expendable.
On a side note, what happened in Syria was a direct result of French colonial policy when they and Britain colonized the Levant, and israel is trying to follow the exact same play book in post-liberation Syria today. I won't get started on Lebanon either.
Well, nationalism is a very modern concept, and things gets murky once we go further back. The very same could be said about applying the moniker "European" to the Roman Empire or even to the crusades. They were no more European than the Arab conquests were Arab.
> But the term "colonization" (especially with the European background involved) is very loaded, if not misleading.
That's true, but that would also apply to Israel and Zionism. There is no kind of European colonialism - of the settler or non-settler variety - that would cleanly apply. Even the Jews living in Europe who were the ancestors of a minority of Israeli Jews, created the Zionist movement because Jews were not considered European or Western by their environment.
The point is that in history, there are often important similarities and important differences, and we need to be careful when it comes to the extent of comparisons.
> both are rooted in ethno-supremacist, ethnic-cleansing ideologies, and both commit mass killings against civilian populations
Yes, and the same, of course, applies to Arab nationalism, which, at least in part, expressly allied itself with Nazi Germany.
There are many prisms of historical analysis. You can look at similarities or at differences; you can look in a specific era or across era. But if you apply different prisms to different groups and then compare them, it starts looking as less of an attempt of historical understanding and more as an attempt to use history carelessly to judge the politics of the present.
I'm not so sure about that. Are you referring to specific, minority individuals pushing what you are claiming, as opposed to a more systematic approach? And how much of what happened was a reaction to the zionist immigration from Europe?
The fact that by the time of WWII, most Arabs were Muslims - and such an ideology explicitly contradicts Islam. We also know that the movement was heavily in response to (the also misguided) Turkish national movement - Young Turks during the last days of the Ottoman Caliphate.
The Arab nationalist movements in Egypt and Syria were primarily anti-colonial and not really aligned with the Nazis. After WWII, Arab nationalism (e.g. Ba'thism) was shaped by opposition to western imperialism and zionism as opposed to any nazi connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_fascism
As to it being a reaction, be careful not to look at things from a perspective that sets out to pass a moral judgment on history. Virtually everything in history is a reaction to something else. Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism and part of a larger trend of national movements; even Nazism was, in a way, a reaction to Germany's defeat in WW1 and what ensued (and a minority ideology until they took control and then that didn't matter anymore) and so on and so on.
It's perfectly okay to say that certain actions in history were morally right, wrong, or complicated, but everyone involved in any of them felt their actions were justified by something they believed or had experienced. There are no good or bad nations. Virtually every society has done both good and terrible things at different points in time.