What Is Israel? Why So Much Violence?

10 min readMar 25, 2024

The Accusation Israel Is An Ethnostate

The best way to understand Israel is to think of it as a kind of reservation for indigenous people returning to the land they came from, living on a relatively small part of their ancestral lands, surrounded by a large hostile population who themselves have been there a long time after conquering it. Zionists were immigrating to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th century to escape persecution in Europe, and after 1948 to escape similar persecution in Muslim countries. The immigrating Jews legally purchased land from the lawful owners of the land with donated money from people across the world and were trying to live on it.

The Cherokee nation limits tribal citizenship by strict rules. Other people can live on the tribal reservation with Cherokee permission but they have to abide by Cherokee law. Israel’s purpose as a refuge for self-determination of an indigenous people is similar to other reservations around the world, with the exception the surrounding population has never accepted the Jewish presence and so it has a vital need to still defend itself.

It is true: the immigrating Jews purchased the land they lived on, they did not “steal” it. Supporting Zionism absolutely is an issue of supporting immigrants and immigration. No form of imperial or racial colonialism is predicated on people fleeing persecution in the land where they lived, returning to their ancestral homeland, and once there legally buying land from its owners.

Go deeper: How the Zionists acquired land

Today, Tel Aviv is one of the most beautiful, progressive cities in the world. Below is a photo of what Tel Aviv looked like when the Zionists “stole it”. It was nothing, literally nothing, but sand dunes. Like all other land the Zionist refugees obtained, the truth is they bought the land, legally and fairly, with the help of donations from overseas Jews who cared they should have a safe place to go to get away from Czarist Russia.

This purchase happened during the time of the Ottoman Empire, when the Ottomans controlled the area. The Ottoman Empire was an old European Muslim empire run by the Turks, with a sophisticated legal system, understanding of currency and land rights. It was not the sort of place where stateless refugee Jews could just waltz in like colonizers and “steal” land from Muslims. Jewish people were barely allowed to look the wrong way at a Muslim in the Muslim empire of the Ottomans, much less steal land from them. This was not the British convicts landing on the shores of Australia taking land from aborigines who had no concept or system of money or land ownership.

One forgotten feature of many of these transactions is the Arab side was getting rich selling the land to them at inflated prices because the Arabs thought the desperate Jews had more money than brains, and were willing to overpay for worthless sand. Historical documents show there were even speculative bidding wars among the Arabs, in which they paid high prices to buy the land from one another in anticipation of being able to sell it at even higher prices to the Jews.

After the Jewish immigrants turned plots like Tel Aviv into something nice, with productive farms and bustling settlements, the Arabs began complaining to the British, who had taken over from the Turks, that it had been obtained unfairly. They said this unfairness should mean the Arabs should get it back ( of course, keeping the money ). When the British investigated, they found the Arabs were lying. The Arabs responded with riots and started killing both Jewish immigrants and the British.

The auction of first plots of land for Tel Aviv. On April 11, 1909, 66 Jewish families gathered there to parcel out the land by lottery using seashells.

Zionism was not about “replacement” and still isn’t, as can be seen from the evidence of two million non-Jewish Arabs living with full citizenship rights within Israel. This Arab population has full political rights, while still struggling against many of the same cultural prejudices minority populations face in most other countries. The difference between these Palestinians and those in the West Bank and Gaza is they chose to live in peace with the Jewish state. It is the choice about war, not Zionism, which has created the differences.

Go deeper: Jewish National Fund

Go deeper: Achievements and Obstacles of the Israeli Arab Population

The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens or residents of Israel, and are a completely different population from the Arabs of Israel. When Palestinian activists talk, and say things like Israel is an “apartheid” state, they tend to purposely conflate these two groups. The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza do not have rights in Israel because they are not part of Israel and are at war with it. We will get to this situation in detail in later chapters of this book, but first it is very important to understand the broad outlines of the situation.

Here’s a useful analogy for thinking about Jewish immigration to Israel in relation to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. I come from the state of Georgia. The area where I grew up was originally the home of Cherokee Indians, who European Americans forced to leave in what is termed the Trail of Tears. Originally, the Cherokees not only lived in parts of Georgia but also Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

It’s not hard at all to imagine sometime in the future that the oppressed descendants of those Cherokees, having become numerous in other states out west but experiencing discrimination and occasional violence, should decide to start moving back east to Georgia. As they do so, they are willing to give up their dream of being allowed to live in other parts of their ancestral lands ( they know the white people would never allow it ) but they may openly dream of making a portion of north Georgia once again a Cherokee homeland, a small portion of their original lands and a place where they can prosper and be safe.

As a result, they take up collections from across all the surviving Cherokees to provide aid to any Cherokee people who want to move back to Georgia and live in their ancestral homeland.

The Cherokee immigrants show up with the donations in hand and start peacefully buying houses and farms, setting up businesses, and getting involved in government. They hope if enough of them choose to emigrate back to Georgia, someday there might be enough of them to run the government in the northern parts of the state where they live. This is what it initially means to them to re-establish a homeland.

Go deeper: A deep dive into how early Zionists obtained land and the impact on the Arab population

In this situation, it’s also not hard to imagine the white MAGA population from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district and other areas of Georgia get themselves worked up about Cherokees buying land and taking positions in government. They start a movement to stop the “replacement” of white Georgians in what they call their own “ancestral land”. They get scared if enough Cherokees move to the area to make it a homeland, they will no longer have control.

Imagine this anti-Cherokee movement catches fire and gains widespread and passionate support among a loud and organized faction of the white people of north Georgia. Suppose it results in pogroms against Cherokee Indians: a campaign of harassment, intimidation and violence which eventually erupts into incidents of mass murder and property destruction committed by some of the white residents against the newly arriving Cherokees.

Go deeper: How the Arabs of Palestine Immediately Reacted to Jewish Return

In this hypothetical future world, the local and federal governments, afraid of arousing the white population further, either refuse or are indifferently incompetent in protecting the Cherokees. Instead of fleeing, The Cherokees organize themselves and fight back, with surprising success as ( against the odds ) they find allies in other states who are willing to sell them the means to defend themselves. After generations of this struggle, in which the federal and state authorities recuse themselves, the Cherokees succeed in pushing the white MAGA crowd to the outskirts of North Georgia, into areas on the borders of Tennessee and Alabama. Other white people who didn’t fight live peacefully with the Cherokees in the majority Cherokee parts of Georgia.

However the people of Alabama and Tennessee refuse to let much of the Georgia MAGA crowd into their states, even though they share similar culture and history, partly because the Georgia MAGA are bringing revolutionary violence into those states, including assassinations of their governors and politicians. The north Georgia MAGA eventually start claiming they are a different “people” who do not belong in Tennessee or Alabama or any other American state, and the MAGA crowd starts to take pride in being “native Georgians”, embracing a form of radicalized Christianity which refuses any non-Christians a right to live on North Georgian land except as a subjugated people, and they also refuse to give up the fight.

The Cherokees, Tennesseans and Alabamans have all erected hard borders around them to protect themselves from the eruptions of periodic violence emanating from MAGA-land.

Progressives, Marxists, global left liberals and anti-First Peoples activists from elsewhere visit the land at the end of this process, see a power imbalance, and listen mainly to the MAGA descendants in Appalachia ( who play up their victimhood and recite the violence of the Cherokees while backgrounding their own actions ), call the Cherokee Indians racists running an apartheid state, and start to claim the MAGA crowd is the victim in this situation.

Essentially, that is the state of Zionism vs. anti-Zionism today.

Do you know what Zionism is? It is the belief that Jewish people have a right to live in the land they came from, determining their own destiny and not subject to the mercy or protection of others.

This is exactly why Zionism is an essential belief to 90% of Jews. It is the Jewish people’s equivalent of the civil rights movement.

The story of the Cherokee Indians is a hypothetical, but the real world contains parallels too. The relationship between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is something like the relationship between South Korea and North Korea. In the 1950’s, North Korea invaded the south and tried to subjugate it but their attempt failed. Today, North Korea is blockaded. The people of North Korea are desperately poor. It is weaker than South Korea, and South Korea works with America to keep it that way. It has been that way ever since North Korea invaded the South in the 1950’s and was driven back.

Imagine you were a South Korean, knowing full well North Koreans have been brainwashed into thinking South Koreans were the most evil people in the world, a puppet of also evil America, deserving to be driven off or die miserable deaths to liberate the land from their influence.

Imagine you knew North Korea had been arming to the teeth and training for the opportunity since the 1950's.

This in fact is all true. That’s what North Korea is like.

Lastly, imagine you had to watch hundreds of thousands of young Americans organizing and shouting, “Free North Korea!” and “From Pyongyang to Seoul, Korea will be whole!”, trying to convince America to withdraw its support and allow North Korea to fulfill its dreams, as if your life and the existence of South Korea were worthless.

That is what it is to be a Jewish person right now, in the early summer of 2024.

The best way to understand how things have gone so badly is to read the chapters of this resource in order, from beginning to end, clicking on the Go deeper links as your time allows. It is an immersive experience and few people will get through unchanged, having learned the context of the conflict, including parts the United Nations does not want people to learn.

This essay is part of a larger resource for parents, teachers, students, concerned individuals, and anyone else who desires to contextualize the conflict and navigate the accusations against Israel and Palestinians.

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