Fonz wrote:To say ‘the Jewish People’ are indigenous to the region isn’t really accurate though. The Jewish People are a mixed bag from all over the place.
But, I agree that some Jewish people have lived there for millennia. Does that entitle the mixed bag that shares their religion to come along, displace other people who have lived there in greater numbers, and treat them like shit?
Jews are an ethno-religious people, with their roots in the southern Levant. The Jewish disapora all over the world has always cleaved to the ancient land of Israel as its homeland, and in large part, longed to return there, for various reasons - not least that they've almost always been persecuted everywhere they've lived. Hence the Zionist movement which arose in late nineteenth century central and eastern Europe. A reasonable comparison is the Back to Africa movement which arose in the contemporaneous USA, also known as Black Zionism, displaced people wanting to return to their homeland.
Israel was created by UN agreement as a homeland for the Jewish people, in the wake of the Holocaust. It is a very small country in the Middle East region, greatly dwarfed by the Arab and Islamic countries that surround it, which repeatedly attacked it from the moment it began to exist.
One of the tragedies of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is, to paraphrase the Israeli writer Amos Oz, that you have two peoples who are
both right, and who have more or less equal claims to the same area of land. It's what the UN partition plan of 1947 for two states tried, and failed, to resolve.
It's a situation which defies simple explanations, and black and white condemnations. Which is why I get irked when people try to portray the Israelis as the sole aggressors, or to graft on to the situation inaccurate and unhelpful analogies of colonialism and apartheid.