At 3 I spoke Yiddish at home with my grandparents from Vinnitsya and Chmelnik. 13 years later I spoke in German with my grandma's cousins in Jerusalem. 8 years after that I spoke Spanish with my Argentine cousins. In 1985 in Montpellier I spoke French with Algerian Jews who invited me to dinner. We're all the same people with the same right to sovereignty as Ukrainians, Germans, Argentines and the French. To say no is the essence of anti-semitism: denying to Jews rights that other peoples assume without question.
If my European origins nullify Jewish sovereignty, then the origins of most so called Palestinians from the Ottoman province of Hauran, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Iraq invalidate their right to a state.
That said, I'd be happy to have the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza live in their own demilitarized sovereign state once they renounce "from the river to the sea" and explicitly recognize the Jewish state of Israel within the Clinton parameters Arafat rejected in December 2000.Jewish occupation of the land predates the Arabs by 1800+ years. Denial of Jewish sovereignty = anti-semitism. Jews have the same right to state sovereignty as all other peoples. This is the Jewish yes that Arabs have continually said no to in 1937, 1947-48, 2000-01 and 2008. It's what Hamas and Fatah still say no to. Even now, after the murder and kidnapping of 1600+ Israelis, Jews from 20 different countries and randomly rocketed Israeli Arab citizens, former PM Ehud Olmert said that the war against Hamas will fail if Israel doesn't give the Palestinians a political alternative. I agree with Olmert....even after the greatest mass murder of Jews since the Shoah, even after hearing "gas the Jews" in Sydney and death threats against Jewish students at multiple colleges by pro-Hamas genocidaire demonstrators.
In 1867 under the Ottomans the population of its Palestine province + the Hauran was under 100000, of whom only 7000 were Jews due to the ethnic cleansing pogroms of 1517 and 1834 + other depredations of Muslim dhimmitude.
Most of the so-called Palestinians immigrated to British mandatory Palestine to take jobs created by the booming port of Haifa, Jewish capital and the British rule of law and property rights.
"Palestine was never an empty country": Then why in 1867 did the Ottoman government change its law against non-Muslims buying land in order to attract settlers? The same year Mark Twain described how desolate the land was. Ten years before the British Consul painted the same picture.
Here's a sample of the dhimmitude treatment of Jews in the Ottoman empire:
"Prior to the creation of the Yemen Vilayet in 1872, the Zaydi Imam of Yemen had implemented more restrictions on Jews than had been present in the Ottoman Empire, such as the Orphans' Decree, which required orphans of Jewish parents to be raised as Muslims. Once Ottoman rule began, the Orphan's Decree was revoked, although a "Dung-Gatherers' Decree," which tasked Jews with cleaning sewers, remained in effect. Also, the Ottoman authorities raised the jizya tax burden on Jews....Starting around 1881, many Yemeni Jews began to move to Jerusalem."
in the 19th century that the position of Jews worsened in Muslim countries.[38] According to Mark Cohen in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, most scholars conclude that Arab anti-Semitism in the modern world arose in the nineteenth century, against the backdrop of conflicting Jewish and Arab nationalism, and was imported into the Arab world primarily by nationalistically minded Christian Arabs (and only subsequently was it "Islamized").
There was a massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1828....a massacre of Jews in Barfurush in 1867.
In 1865, when the equality of all subjects of the Ottoman Empire was proclaimed, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, a high-ranking official observed, "whereas in former times, in the Ottoman State, the communities were ranked, with the Muslims first, then the Greeks, then the Armenians, then the Jews, now all of them were put on the same level. Some Greeks objected to this, saying: 'The government has put us together with the Jews. We were content with the supremacy of Islam.'"
This missive clarifies how the Jews in the Muslim world of dhimmitude Jim Crow were its n****rs, subject to property looting, "tax" extortion, humiliation and terror by periodic pogrom. This is the system whose return Hamas has explicitly said jihad aims for and whose only cure is Jewish sovereignty.
"Throughout the 1860s, the Jews of Libya were subjected to what (Martin) Gilbert calls punitive taxation. In 1864, around 500 Jews were killed in Marrakech and Fezin Morocco. In 1869, 18 Jews were killed in Tunis, and an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores, and burned synagogues, on Jerba Island. In 1875, 20 Jews were killed by a mob in Demnat, Morocco; elsewhere in Morocco, Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight. In 1891, the leading Muslims in Jerusalem asked the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople to prohibit the entry of Jews arriving from Russia. In 1897, synagogues were ransacked and Jews were murdered in Tripolitania.
An important instance of anti-Semitism around this time was the Damascus affair, in which many Jews in Damascus (which was then under the leadership of Muhammad Ali of Egypt) were arrested after being accused of murdering the Christian Father Thomas and his servant in an instance of blood libel. While the authorities under Sharif Pasha, Egyptian governor of Damascus, tortured the accused until they confessed to the crime, and killed two Jews who refused to confess, prominent European Jews such as Adolphe Crémieux demanded the release of the condemned.[42]
Benny Morris writes that one symbol of Jewish degradation was the phenomenon of stone-throwing at Jews by Muslim children. Morris quotes a 19th-century traveler:
I have seen a little fellow of six years old, with a troop of fat toddlers of only three and four, teaching [them] to throw stones at a Jew, and one little urchin would, with the greatest coolness, waddle up to the man and literally spit upon his Jewish gaberdine. To all this the Jew is obliged to submit; it would be more than his life was worth to offer to strike a Mohammedan."
You can read my view of Native Americans in Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford and 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Givers:_How_the_Indians_of_the_Americas_Transformed_the_World
and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
Ben Franklin acknowledged that the US constitution was a plagiarized and modified copy of the Five Nations' Great Law of Peace.
The germs preceded the guns and steel. Rafael Lemkin's legal definition of genocide requires intentionality. The Trail of Tears was intentional and genocidal government policy. The American west's settlers were often openly genocidal, but against President Grant's policy of protecting Indians. The Pennsylvania Quakers could be pacifists only through William Penn negotiating the policing of their western frontier by friendly Indian tribes.
Every Mexican Indian people supported the Spaniards against the human sacrificing Aztecs. Did buyers' remorse follow the Spanish victory? Certainly.
The post-1492 Great Exchange is irreversible. Woulda, shoulda, coulda is ahistorical wishful thinking. Of course, by the legal standards of the post-1945 rules-based order created by WWII's western Allies, that dispossession is an horrendous crime. In that entire history of conquest and enslavement, you should include:
* the Arabs' enslavement of black Africans, which continues today,
* the Islamist and secular nationalist Arabs' and Persians' wars against the Kurds, Berbers and Yazidis,
* Russia's subjugation of its empire's 190+ non-Russian peoples under its Tsarist, Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.
* Its criminal colonial war against an independent Ukraine and
* China's imprisonment of 1m Uighurs in concentration camps.
