[moxifly7]

Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).

[0] https://www.btselem.org/topic/apartheid [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_Palestinians

[moxifly7]

>Like after creation of Israel

So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.

Doesn't defend what happened to Jewish people in Egypt and Lebanon, but certainly puts some context around it.

As for the depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves.

[tdeck]

Despite this varied ethnic makeup Israel's basic law says that

> The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.

Which is why there are plenty of racist laws like this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaization_of_the_Galilee

[moxifly7]

Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.

Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic (mixed with their local dialects) and adopting aspects of Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization and Hellenization from the Greeks and Romans.

TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants of ancient Jews and other peoples local to the region of Palestine who eventually converted to Christianity and/or Islam, some remained Jewish, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.

That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in (Ben-Gurion wrote a thesis on this subject), until it became inconvenient for Zionism to continue to do so.