by ithkuil | 2026-01-30 18:22:22+00:00
I used to think like you. There is some deeply human in seeking basic justice that even small children have strong reactions even for the minor perceived injustices, let alone for serious stuff.

However when your survival is at stake (and the survival of your own kind and culture) people often stop giving a damn about who was right and who was wrong and they just try to defend themselves.

Many people understand this when the people defending themselves are Palestinians, and somehow are able to forgive senseless violence that they do, all because "they are in the right".

But somehow they cannot imagine that Israeli Jews are living for a long time in a genuine existential threat. Many people just think that all those Jews who live in Israel should just go back where they came from. That's obviously impossible since many fled countries where they didn't feel safe.

It's hard to understand the determination to fight for having just a normal life. We can't understand this because most people in the world have a "nation" a "fatherland" a place where they don't get butchered just because they belong to a given race or speak with an accent or have a long nose.

The situation is not symmetrical at all. Arabs can live in Israel. Arab citizens are not discriminated, there are Arab doctors, Arab justices, Arab members of the parlament. 20% of the Israeli citizens are Arab Muslims.

Israel is the multicultural democratic state that everybody claims to want Palestine to be. Jews need Israel to exist because they need a state that will protect them and not be at the whims of whatever populist government will turn their neighbors against (as it happened many times in many places, not only in Germany)

And yes, Israel did do many crimes directly and indirectly and has mistreated Palestinians in many cases.

But you have to put things in context. Arabs never accepted the Palestinian state and fought with several wars. Which they lost.

These kind of stuff happened many times in history, even recent history. Many borders were redrawen even in Europe and people were displaced. None of that is a good thing for people who suffered it

But Arabs did something that nobody else did for quite a long time: they engaged in a holy war, using suicide bombings and having an utter disregard for their own lives and the lives of their own children, all in the name of martyrdom. This ideology is very hard to fight. Japanese lost and surrendered, Germans lost and surrendered. Palestinian lost and kept blowing up people and making their own women and children dangerous. This increased the tension and created the condition for security checks and a kind of apartheid.

But this can be solved, if only Arabs stopped demanding the destruction of Israel. Of course, Israel cannot accept laying down their arms and letting them be butchered.

There is truth in the quote: if Palestinians laid down their arms there will be peace, if Israelis laid down their arms there would be genocide.

This seems like a crazy statement but this happens every single time Israel lowers their guard.

The only reason Israeli Jews are not dead is because they are efficient at defending themselves.

They are constantly bombed but they blow the rockets out of the air. They have shelters.

That's why there are so few dead Jews. Not for lack of trying on the Arab side.

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So what is the right thing to do in this case?

Saying "Israel shouldn't have been created in 48 so they are and they always been colonizers so now they just have to go away"?

How can this be reasonable solution? We're talking about millions of people who are born there for a few generations now.