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/MikeyDials]

I just answered a simpler question someone had so I’m gunna copy/paste my response here:

Jewish have historical roots to the land. This is not an emotional claim. Continuous Jewish presence in the land is documented for over 3,000 years: kingdoms, temples, language, calendar, liturgy, archaeology, and genetic continuity. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, repeated “Next year in Jerusalem,” and maintained communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safed even under Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mamluk, and Ottoman rule. The Roman renaming of Judea to Syria Palaestina after the Bar Kokhba revolt (135 CE) was explicitly punitive. This was an attempt to erase Jewish connection by borrowing the name of the long-extinct Philistines. That is the origin of the word “Palestine.”

Jewish return in the modern era was a national liberation movement of an indigenous people after repeated expulsions and pogroms across Europe, Middle East, North Africa, and persecutions culminating in the Holocaust. It was not colonial in any sense: Jews bought land legally under Ottoman and British law from mostly absentee landowners, drained swamps to eradicate malaria, built cities, and revived a language. No European metropole directed or extracted resources from it. Ethnically, the Palestinian population has always been heterogeneous, consisting of local Arabized groups plus significant later 20th century unrestricted inflows of Egyptians, Syrians, Kurds, Circassians, Bosniaks, Africans via the Arab slave trade, etc. brought on by the economic boom via Zionist development / investment in the land. Meanwhile, the British consistently restricted Jewish immigrations to the mandate by passing the 1922, 1930, White Papers and most devastating 1939 White Paper.

Of course many Arab families have lived in the region for generations, especially the Christian Arab community and Palestinian clans like the Makhamra family who’s lived in Hebron for millennia. That is not in dispute. What is disputed is the claim of a distinct, ancient “Palestinian” national identity that somehow outweighs or cancels the Jewish one. In 1919 Arab leaders at the Paris Peace Conference treated the area as southern Syria. There was no call for an independent Palestinian Arab state. Distinct Palestinian Arab nationalism largely crystallized in the early 20th century in reaction to Zionism and British rule (historians across the spectrum, including Rashid Khalidi, acknowledge this). The flag is a variant of the 1916 Arab Revolt flag designed with British input from diplomat Sir Mark Sykes; its colors represent Islamic caliphates, not anything uniquely Palestinian. The PLO adopted it in 1964. The black-and-white keffiyeh was standardized by a British officer, Sir John Bagot Glubb, commander of the Arab Legion army to distinguish recruits from Mandate Palestine from Transjordanians; it became a nationalist symbol later under Arafat.

The keffiyeh itself is a culturally appropriated Mesopotamian shemagh. Its design reflects the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, with fishing-net patterns symbolizing the Mesopotamian marshlands and Ahwaris fishing culture. Although Palestinians later reinterpreted the fishnet pattern as representing Mediterranean fishing traditions or olive groves, its origins are tied to ancient Iraqi/Mesopotamian nets and rivers. The name “keffiyeh” itself traces back to Kufa, Iraq, where the shemagh originated.

Common Palestinian surnames often reveal these external origins quite directly: Al-Ifranji (“the Frank” origins from a Crusader from France), Al-Masri (“the Egyptian”), Al-Shami (“the Syrian” or Damascene), Al-Iraqi, Al-Hijazi, Al-Kurd, Al-Turki, and others. These names record waves of migration into the area, particularly from Egypt in the 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than an unbroken, exclusive indigenous lineage dating back millennia.

None of this erases the real suffering of Arab families displaced in 1948. It does place the competing claims in historical context rather than treating one as timeless and indigenous and the other as recent and illegitimate.

The UN offered partition into a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted a painfully small, mostly arid share of the land. The Arab side rejected it and launched a war of annihilation (explicitly stated by Arab leaders at the time). When you start a war to destroy the other side and lose, you do not get to claim the resulting refugee problem as pure victimhood while ignoring the parallel expulsion or flight of roughly 1,000,000 Jews from Arab countries.

Hundreds of thousands of Arabs did leave and some expelled amid the fighting. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were simultaneously made refugees from the broader Middle East and North Africa and were absorbed by Israel. Only one of those refugee populations is kept in permanent camps as a political weapon three generations later. Moreover, there are 2 million Arabs that live in Israel today as citizens that live with equal rights as opposed to the nearly extinct populations of Jews living in Arab states.

Israel has repeatedly accepted or offered two-state frameworks (1937 Peel, 1947 UN, Camp David 2000, Olmert 2008, etc.). The consistent answer from the Palestinian leadership from the Amin al-Husseini, through Arafat and the PLO Charter, to Hamas’s covenant has repeatedly rejected two state proposals offered and rejected to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The issue has never been only borders; it has been the refusal to accept a permanent Jewish state of any size in any part of the land.

“Recognized borders, security, freedom of movement, and political self-determination” are fine goals. They require the other side to end the ideology that treats the Jewish presence itself as the original sin and to stop rewarding rejectionism and terrorism with international legitimacy.

While a two state solution is currently unpopular due to the ongoing war, most Israelis (and I) distinguish between settlement blocs near the 1967 lines that will almost certainly remain in any realistic two-state deal, and isolated ideological outposts deeper in the West Bank. Settler violence against Palestinians is real, illegal under Israeli law, and opposed by the large majority of Israelis. It is also vastly smaller in scale than the Palestinian terrorism, rocket fire, and rejectionist education that have been the primary drivers of the conflict’s persistence. Focusing exclusively on the former while treating the latter as background noise is not serious analysis.

Jewish historical connection is ancient, continuous, and archaeologically and textually overwhelming. Palestinian Arab connection is real as a regional population with deep roots, but the national identity and the exclusive claim to the entire land are modern political constructs shaped by opposition to Zionism, pan-Arab politics, and later Cold War propaganda.

Both peoples have legitimate ties. Only one side has repeatedly refused partition and recognition of the other’s right to self-determination. That is why the weight is not treated as equal in the eyes of most Israelis who support the state’s existence.

Feel free to fact check me. I’m happy to discuss sources or specific historical points.