Hi Azadehruh,

Thanks for responding. It is a myth that this land was A) a compensatory gift in light of the events of the Holocaust and B) that there is anything random about this land becoming what is now known as Israel. I'll begin with saying as I have many times that what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinian people is despicable, and I believe there should be a two-state solution; both Jewish and Palestinian people have valid claims to this land as their homeland, and I don't think either of those claims should be mutually exclusive (though certainly there must be compromise if both parties are to be able to live at least peacefully side-by-side one another, if not as a single integrated state. And I would by no means call what's happening right now where Israel "owns" the Palestinian territories any kind of "compromise"--it's abuse.).

First of all, this is indigenous Jewish homeland that dates back literally thousands of years--that is corroborated by archaeology, continuous culture even as we have separately adapted our Jewish cultures throughout the diaspora, and distinct Jewish DNA; no matter where we are in the world, we share unique DNA (DNA that's much closer related to our Palestinian siblings than say Western Europeans in whose countries some of us may have been forced to flee). There were several forced expulsions that happened during the first millennium, namely the Roman conquest and later the Arab conquest the culminated in the forced expulsion of the majority of Jews from our homeland -- except for, and this is very important, literally thousands of Jewish people who managed to remain in that land, often hiding and always being severely abused and marginalized by the majority people in the region (which, for most of that time was Arab people).

It is profoundly ignorant and cruel to suggest that all Jews belong to Europe; the places in Israel--places with graves of our ancestors and sacred sites that are recorded in our thousands of year old continuously practiced religion -- are our home. This doesn't mean they also haven't become home to Palestinian people who have continuously occupied it for a longer period of time, but continuous occupation is not the definition of indigeneity; displaced African Americans who were stolen from their lands and brought as slaves are still called *AFRICAN* Americans for a reason.

Just so you know, there are many different types of Jews throughout the diaspora; the Ashkenazi Jews who fled to Europe only constitute a fraction of Jewish peoples overall. Sephardi Jews, Yemeni Jews, Beta Israel, Indian Jews etc constitute the rest of us--who are very much tied and have continously been tied to land and living and culture of the Middle East. No one gets to whitewash Jews just because they don't think they "deserve" to be back in our homelands. And that does NOT excuse Israel's behavior or the actions that have happened to Palestinian peoples. But if you have any compassion for or understanding for the events of the pogroms, then you would understand that Jews have NEVER been accepted as "white" or "European" which is incidentally also why it's so unreasonable to suggest that we should set up camp somewhere in Europe after they tried to wipe us out altogether.

Jews have been expelled from, tortured and killed in almost every country in the Middle East. Look up the Farhud in Iraq. Look up what happened even very recently to the very last Yemenite Jew in Yemen. You cannot erase our history because it's inconvenient for the narrative that you have conceived about our presence there. We were banished from our homeland against our will, but that doesn't mean we don't have a right to come home, and it doesn't mean Palestinian people don't also have a right to a homeland.

And by the way, I'd be cognizant about suggesting they're incurring "the same sort of terror they had been subjected to" -- 6 million Jewish people, half of our population was genocided. The population of Palestinians has grown from ~700,000 to 4.17 million in the last 73 years. I'm not going to suggest in any way that there hasn't been horrible abuse and oppression and displacement, but let's not say it's the exact same when it's clearly not.