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That’s where things get tricky. There clearly are people who claim Israel (and Jews in general) as a shared identity and cultural group have no right to exist. These people are traditionally called Nazis.
You’ll also run into trouble talking about historic Palestine, previously part of the Ottoman Empire, and long prior to that the Kingdom of Israel (around 1047-930 BCE). The Israelis aren’t simply a group of Ashkenazi Jews who moved to the Middle East during the Holocaust. They’re a people who have lived in the area for thousands of years and maintained a distinct culture throughout occupation by other empires.
No, these people are called Palestinians, not Israelis.
If you’re just going to lie then you’re not even worth talking to.
Where's the lie? Have Palestinians not lived in the area for thousands of years or maintained a distinct culture, even while being occupied by other empires?
Israelis and Palestinians have lived in the area for centuries and centuries. They’re ethnically the same, brothers and sisters. They differ by culture and the old problem (familiarity breeds contempt). I have maintained all along that both have a right to exist and to self-determination.
But there are people here that now deny these rights to Israelis simply because Israel has a lot of military and political power right now. It’s like for them it’s not enough for Palestine to be free, they must also see Israel destroyed. And in the process they overlook the atrocities committed by Hamas (not to mention what the PLO did in Jordan decades ago).
Again, where was the lie?
Not according to the state of Israel
The lie was that only Palestinians have lived there for thousands of years.
Correction: the government of Israel, with a ruling party (Likud, led by Bibi) which has 32/120 seats in the Knesset. That’s less than 27% of the seats. This is what you get with proportional representation and coalition government.
Israel (the state) has always given special rights to ethnic Jews. It was founded *as an explicitly Jewish state. Jews have always been given a unique right to freely immigrate and gain citizenship, while limiting Palestinian's right to even return to their homes in Israel after having to flee. It isn't just about the current government - Israel has always been predicated on an ethno-religious immigration campaign. No other nation on the planet is as singularly-focused on the ethnic makeup of its population, to the point that they have an actual program to retrieve the reproductive material of soldiers who die in combat. Zionists will waste no time calling you antisemitic if you were to suggest that Israel should provide equal rights regardless of ethnic or religious identity, or suggest that Palestinians and Jews might live together on their shared ancestral land. It's that idea that Palestinians are so violent that they'd just "destroy all the Jews" if they were to ever be given equal status that is the wildly bigoted and racist one.
This isn't some transient political movement unique to Netanyahu's government, it's been a principle feature of its mission since it's founding.
Yeah, if you look far enough back in history, nobody had autonomy or freedom, and amost everyone was subject to imperial tyranny of some kind. So what?
One thing that's very clear is that things said in the Bible don't entitle anyone to take someone else's home. It's a holy book, not a title document.
A small number did. Vastly more were part of the diaspora.
I'm part of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora. That doesn't mean I can go to Dresden and kick some family out of their house because my ancestors lived in that area over a millennium ago. Such a claim would be seen as manifestly idiotic. And if it were two millennia, such a claim would be even more absurd.
All our ancestors originated in Africa, shall we use that as an excuse to displace some modern African people?
That’s not true. Only 26% (and shrinking) of Israeli Jews have European ancestry. A plurality, 44% (and the fastest growing) have native Israeli ancestry. The remainder come from North Africa and Asian ancestry but all groups besides Israeli background are shrinking.
The study you're referencing is looking at paternal lineage of Israelis born in Israel, not the ancestral lineage of all Israelis.
A second-generation Israeli would be considered 'From Israel by paternal country of origin" in this census, because their paternal country of origin would be Israel.
The bulk of immigration happened in the 1950's-1970's. The number of Israeli's who's ancestors lived in Israel before the establishment of the Israeli state isn't ~~a known or studied figure~~ a definitively answered question, but it's reasonable to assume that it's a minority given the large migrations that happened during and after the Nakba.
The only real information we have regarding the make-up of Palestine before its partitioning are a couple of censuses done during the British occupation, but it was during a period of time when zionist jews were already beginning to migrate. Here's the topline:
Yup, and those Nazis largely supported the Zionist mission of a Jewish state, both because they wanted the Jews to emigrate out of Europe and because they hated Arabs almost as much as they hated Jews. Nazis and Zionists share a strictly defined understanding of cultural and ethnic boundaries, and a belief that geographical boundaries are a reflection of those boundaries (or ought to). It's only really tricky if your understanding of Zionism and Israel is limited to the specific group that is doing the cleansing.
The jewish diaspora is almost as defined by their shared cultural heritage with their middle eastern neighbors as it is by their origin. You can't draw a clean ethnic or cultural boundary around Israel that's separate from their arabic brothers and sisters. That's exactly the problem with zionism - it attempts to forcefully separate the cultural inheritance of its arabic history and expel it from both the geographical and cultural boundaries of Israel.
People who oppose Israel as a Jewish state do so because they see Zionism as a mission of ethnic and cultural purification, not because it's a symbolic representation of Jews as an entire people. That's what makes the conflation of anti-zionism and antisemitism so nefarious.
Nazis during the Holocaust might have wanted Jews deported to Israel but today’s Nazis want Israel wiped off the map and all Jews destroyed.
Not an ethnic boundary but definitely a cultural one. Judaism is very different from Islam. Palestinian culture is very different from Israeli culture.
The conflation happens on both sides of the argument. The two extremes need each other to justify themselves.
I believe both Israel and Palestine have a right to exist. The issue is that both claim the same land and neither tolerates the other at this point. It doesn’t help that none of Israel’s neighbours want Palestinian refugees so the crisis is exacerbated to such an extreme.
Good thing the ME isn't mono-religious
Insofar as they are both partially defined by being on either side of an apartheid state, sure. But Jews and arabs lived very peacefully in Palestine and throughout the ME long before Palestine was partitioned. The ME was full of arab-jewish communities living alongside Muslims before Israel began their immigration campaign and before pan-arab nationalism spread through the region. I highly recommend Avi Shlaim's "Three World's" book if you're curious how those cultures developed alongside each other, and how they've changed since Israel's establishment.
I believe both the people of Palestine and Israel have a right to exist, but neither have a right to exist as ethno-nationalist apartheid states.