Facing a soaring death toll from Israel's renewed offensive in southern Gaza, the Biden administration is trying to pressure its ally to minimize civilian deaths while stopping well short of the kind of measures that might force it to listen, such as threatening to restrict military aid.
And you’re referring to land seizures that happened even earlier, so I’m not really sure what your point is.
So I already know where this is going, so let me save some time and skip ahead:
I’m sorry, but the Bible (old testament, Torah, whatever you want to call it) isn’t an accurate historical record. And even if it was, it explains exactly how the Jews got their land, doesn’t it? How come Canaanites haven’t ever existed since then? Huh. But I guess that’s different somehow?
The Old Testament is chock full of genocide, whether it be through the Israelites (and the magic box they liked to carry) themselves commiting it in god’s name, someone claiming that god spoke to them and commanded them to commit genocide, or even just god zapping entire cities himself. But Sodom and Gomorrah “deserved it” right? But not Lot’s daughters that literally fuck their dad (shortly after their dad offered them up to be raped by the people of Sodom). That shit is A-OK.
Are these also accurate historical records then? If so, then it seems like, even by your own metric, Israel took that land from other people.
But regardless, again, the Bible (old testament, Torah, whatever you want to call it) is not history.
I genuinely have no idea why you’re talking about the Bible, and I’ve been a pretty stringent atheist for most of my life. I agree it’s a pretty poor moral guide and an unreliable source for history, but I’m not sure how that’s at all relevant.
So er, I’m just gonna bow out of whatever this conversation was meant to be, because I don’t know what you’re trying to say. Cheers I guess.
Because these conversations always go back to that. We can go back and forth about who lived where, and when, and it will always lead back to “the Bible says that land is theirs.” Because when you get down to it, that’s the only claim they really have. And even if you did want to go back that far, they still took that land from someone else.
If that’s not where it was going, then there’s no valid argument whatsoever that Israelis were there first. It’s just not true.
I don’t give a shit about the Bible, but I would say that a bunch of Jews legally bought a bunch of land in the late Ottoman period, a lot more legally immigrated during the British mandate after WW1 (which was wrong, I’d say; the land had been promised to the Hashemites before Sykes-Picot to create a unified Arab state in exchange for Arab support against the Ottomans, but the British and French reneged), then ethnic tensions exploded as everyone did a lot of violence to everyone. In 1947, a UN partition plan was proposed to create two states; the Jews accepted, the Arabs didn’t, and war broke out. Once fighting had ended and the first lines were drawn, we have a state of Israel and the mess has properly begun.
None of this involves the Bible.