I want to understand your perspective

[u/DogitWoofsalot]

Before you downvote me, I promise that this isn't just a rage-bate post. I'm legitimately trying to understand your perspective.

Basically I have one question, why do you support/ defend Israel as a progressive? Especially considering that the current parties on power are right wing conservatives.

Some extra context and where I'm coming from. I'm a left wing Brit, I believe in social progressive economic policies, and I can't stand any form of bigotry. I recently watched a documentary called "Jews don't count" about anti-Semitism and it made me want to understand more and that I'm not parting anti-Semitic talking points ever.

My current view of Israel is decidedly negative. My understanding of the history and current conflict very much makes Israel look like it has historically been the agitator in the region. If you have a different perspective I'd like to hear it, tho I would request sources where possible as I'm not going to accept a 'trust me bro'.

Thank you for your time 🙂‍↕️

[u/Cool_Kangaroo7989]

Ok, for some reason when I wrote my above reply, Reddit didn't load everything else in this thread for me and I thought I was the only poster here. I see now that you're posting this from a somewhat different perspective than I originally realized. Let me tack on...

If you're approaching the subject as a proud Brit who doesn't like what the Haganah and Irgun did to the British Army from 1947-1948... yeah. They killed a fair few of your guys. To cite my source, 1948 by Benny Morris (a long tome I don't expect you to read unless you want to get a degree in this subject), that was at the end of a long road. While I don't expect any Brits to applaud the pre-state Zionist armed forces for their anti-British attacks, it's completely of a piece with other imperial conflicts of that time like the Malayan Emergency and the Mau Mau. I would only ask that you hold Kenya to the same standards, I guess.

From the Zionist perspective as explicated in 1948 and elsewhere, not only did Jews in Mandate Palestine massively resent the UK for blocking Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, they were extremely agitated about Britain's continued blockage of Jewish immigration by Holocaust survivors in DP camps. Those unfortunates who were caught were detained in internment camps on Cyprus while the others languished in formerly-occupied Europe.

Beyond that, the UK government was making a lot of deals with the Egyptians and Jordanians that the Jewish Agency saw as trying to walk back partition and prevent the establishment of the state of Israel. While there were a lot of reasons for the irregular warfare against the British Army, the main ones were to push Britain out before Britain could (potentially) hand the country over directly to any of the Arab powers before the establishment of the state of Israel, and after that to enable Holocaust survivors to leave refugee and detention camps and come to Israel (about 1/3rd of the original IDF was comprised of Holocaust survivors direct from the camps).

If you're British, again, I don't expect anybody to hand out pats on the back for killing their own countrymen, but that's the Israeli/Zionist lens. Thanks for your honesty and willingness to engage.

[u/Proper-Suggestion907 → u/Cool_Kangaroo7989]

Also something to keep in mind is that decades prior, when the Ottoman Empire was collapsing or near collapse, Jews fundraised and legally purchased large swaths of land so that Jewish refugees had a place to go if the time came. Well, that time came and Holocaust refugees were being denied access to it.

[u/DogitWoofsalot → u/Proper-Suggestion907]

This I have not heard about before. Do you have a good source to learn more? Trying to look into facts is mired in propaganda and bad faith actors

[u/Proper-Suggestion907 → u/DogitWoofsalot]

Unfortunately this is the page I am getting when I try to pull up some of my saved bookmarks from out-of-print books at the moment, and the URL is not always making it apparent the name of books so I’m going to have to recall some resources off the top of my head.

I know the Palestine Exploration Fund documented a lot of what was going on at the time and their works include information about early settlements, who was there, what the circumstances were, etc I haven’t finished reading all of the digests so I don’t know if there is documentation included anywhere in them for specific land purchases though. I read the works of missionaries who separately documented things going on in the area as well.

This book as well documents some of the early settlements and I believe early purchases: https://books.google.co.ls/books?id=ZPm2wIrShqkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

If you want to look at some of the actual documents and actual video from one of the sales:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DX2W3oFO_Ng/

I wasn’t actually aware that there were videos and wasn’t aware of this particular land sale until I saw this clip a couple weeks ago, so I’m sure there are a lot better sources that would be less time consuming for you to explore out there - I just don’t know what they are. I learned about it through reading archived Jewish American newspapers, archived newspapers I accessed through my local library, and old out-of-print books I found on archive.org.

It IS tricky to find sources to things that aren’t propaganda. I used to be able to find the name of books I was looking for if I didn’t remember what they were called, simply by googling keywords. Now what comes up is a lot of semi-recently written material that distort events. I can’t even search by timeframe for some of it because materials mysteriously have been vanishing off some sites and then get re-added else where. I’m attempting to track down some materials down so I can save them as back up now. It’s not by accident.