mikedilger on Nostr: #politics Nothing terribly contentious below... just a clarification. Within the ...
#politics Nothing terribly contentious below... just a clarification.
Within the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups of people, sometimes I find that they are both wrong.
I hear from pro-Israel people that "there is no state of Palestine. There never was." to which I hear from pro-Palestine people that the state of Palestine existed for thousands of years and Israel stole it.
There is a region called Palestine that has existed for thousands of years and been called Palestine (Palestina) since at least the Roman times.
But the people of that region have either never, or almost never, been under self-administration. Rather, other larger powers controlled them: Currently Israel, before that Britain, before that the Ottoman empire (Turkey), before that the Mamluk Sultanate (of Egypt), and various empires before that (Ayyubit, Fatimid, Abbasid, Roman, etc). And so a case can be made that there never was a sovereign state of Palestine, but rather that Palestine is a region that was always under the control of some other sovereign state.
But it is also true that despite who controlled Palestine, the region was locally populated primarily by ethnic native Palestinians without much displacement or dilution, and the local regions (Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Nablus, and Beersheba) were controlled locally by these Palestinians, under the authority of a higher sovereign power.
But since 1988 Palestine has declared independence, and right now 147 out of 193 member states of the UN (over 75%) recognize the State of Palestine as the combined region of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as East Jerusalem. It is a NEW thing, recognized for the purpose of resolving the conflict. Israel and the US do not recognize it -- from their perspective Israel is an aparteid state. From the perspective of countries taht do recognize the State of Palestine there is a war between Israel and Palestine.
These very different perspectives confuse dialogue about the issue, even though none of these facts is really very contentious.
Within the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine groups of people, sometimes I find that they are both wrong.
I hear from pro-Israel people that "there is no state of Palestine. There never was." to which I hear from pro-Palestine people that the state of Palestine existed for thousands of years and Israel stole it.
There is a region called Palestine that has existed for thousands of years and been called Palestine (Palestina) since at least the Roman times.
But the people of that region have either never, or almost never, been under self-administration. Rather, other larger powers controlled them: Currently Israel, before that Britain, before that the Ottoman empire (Turkey), before that the Mamluk Sultanate (of Egypt), and various empires before that (Ayyubit, Fatimid, Abbasid, Roman, etc). And so a case can be made that there never was a sovereign state of Palestine, but rather that Palestine is a region that was always under the control of some other sovereign state.
But it is also true that despite who controlled Palestine, the region was locally populated primarily by ethnic native Palestinians without much displacement or dilution, and the local regions (Haifa, Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Nablus, and Beersheba) were controlled locally by these Palestinians, under the authority of a higher sovereign power.
But since 1988 Palestine has declared independence, and right now 147 out of 193 member states of the UN (over 75%) recognize the State of Palestine as the combined region of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, as well as East Jerusalem. It is a NEW thing, recognized for the purpose of resolving the conflict. Israel and the US do not recognize it -- from their perspective Israel is an aparteid state. From the perspective of countries taht do recognize the State of Palestine there is a war between Israel and Palestine.
These very different perspectives confuse dialogue about the issue, even though none of these facts is really very contentious.