[throw310822]

Are the US currently illegally occupying large parts of Mexico and progressively colonising it, displacing and oppressing the Mexican population?

And if that were the case, would you say that Mexico had started attacking the US across the border? Or would you say that the US are waging war against Mexico and Mexico is fighting back?

[thomassmith65]

  Are the US currently illegally occupying large parts of Mexico

This comment would depress a highschool history teacher.

[throw310822]

The depressing thing is that you don't know that the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed 178 years ago, and that territory can be legally ceded by means of peace treaties. The part of Palestine that is considered illegally occupied is the part that lies beyond the 1949 armistice borders and has never been legally ceded to Israel by any treaty.

[tovej]

Yeah, the annexation of Texas. Which is similar to Israel / Palestine in many ways.

[naasking]

You have the timeline backwards. Palestinians attacked Jews first, then Jews occupied the invaders.

[throw310822]

I disagree with this timeline (the Jews got there in the first place with the precise, declared intent of colonising somebody else's land. That's the whole point of Zionism).

But more in general, there's no point in following a tit-for-tat that goes back 80 years or more with the intent of finding "who was the first". Each event further down the chain completely reverses the assessment, and you can't base any solid reasoning on such grounds. What you have to look at is the big picture: who is occupying someone else's territory? Who is oppressing the other with overwhelming force? Which side keeps taking and which keeps losing?