"I exist. I know I exist. But do I have a right to exist? Like someone else is giving me permission to exist?
Why is that said about Israel? Like we're giving you permission to exist.
Israel does exist. Like excuse me for living."
To which I reply...
It is not a question of Jews' "right to exist."
It is a question of where they will exist - and on what terms.
The land mass we now call Israel (about the size of Vancouver Island) belonged (almost entirely) to Palestinians from the time of the Diaspora in 70 A.D. until the return of European-scattered Jews nearly 19 centuries later.
Two millennia went by (the entire span from Antiquity to Modernity) and Israelis were still convinced they owned "The Golden Ticket" and that Palestinians had only been "doing them the favor" of looking after their belongings.
In the past, friend Fred has spoken of American Indians not having the right to re-appropriate their land even though Native American dispossession took place just 100 to 200 years ago.
General George Washington Orders "Complete Destruction" Of Iroquois Settlements
A key question...Why do Jews have an iron-clad right-of-return to their "once upon a time" homeland 2000 years after they left that homeland, and -- in the interim -- an entirely different people inhabited the land they vacated?
Currently, Palestinians, driven from their land within living memory, live in the world's largest (open air) prison camp.
What Is The Palestinian Naqba? If You Don't Know, You Have No Clue What's Going On In Israel
Indeed, Palestinian insistence on their right-to-return is represented as being as preposterous as allegations of sexual misconduct brought against Donald Trump by the following women:
I suspect Zionist Israelis know the substantive truth but are threatened by it: first they stole Israel from the Palestinians and now they cannot afford to open any chink in their terroritorial armor because modern Israel is built on ill-gotten land, a land-grab that stinks to high heaven.
If Zionist Israel had "played nice" with the Palestinians from the beginning, modern Israelis would not have called upon themselves the question of their right to exist.
***
Although it would require another essay, please note that the modern state of Israel would fit into Nevada 14 times. Why not cede/sell one fourteenth of Nevada to Israel... help Israelis re-settle in the American desert after one final diaspora... and then invest the new State of Israel with sovereign nation status.
Notably, the Jewish people have undergone diaspora at least three times in the past, making resettlement a demonstrably do-able endeavor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_diaspora
If the dispute between Israel and Palestine comes down to a question of "Israel's existence," how can that existence be better assured -- once and for all -- than re-constituting the Nation of Israel within the heartland of The United States?
Sadly, Israel's frequently trumpeted "right to exist" is a red herring: Israelis are not fundamentally concerned with their "guaranteed existence."
Rather, they are fully-prepared to sacrifice their own existence -- and the existence of the rest of the world -- in order to have their existence guaranteed in the place of their choice and on their own terms even it means the slow-motion genocide of Palestine.
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