The formation of Israel was a shitshow. The region has always been a shitshow, it’s the coast closest to the cradle of civilization. But it’s unfair to refer to the Nakba as peaceful. (Though it’s no less peaceful than the nutters calling for the destruction of Israel in response.)

I don't believe I referred to the Nakba or anything else as "peaceful" - of course the Zionists engaged in (non-peaceful) violence, before and during and after the war. But the point is that, contra the claims that ethnic cleansing is "at the core" of Zionism, violence wasn't the Zionist starting point and unlike the Palestinians they were content with a peaceful solution; neither of those things would've been the case if violence was fundamental to their project.

you’re denying ethnic cleansing occurred in the Nakba when we have primary source evidence that it was

No, I'm not. Really frustrating to have to explain this repeatedly.

While ethnic cleansing undoubtedly occurred, it wasn't the original intent "at the core" of the Zionist project. Rather, the intent at the core of the project was - precisely as always stated - desire for Jewish self-determination, and (once again) they initially set out to attain that through peaceful and legal means and were happy to accept an internationally supported solution that did not involve ethnic cleansing.

I'm really not sure how to make this clearer: there was an entirely workable plan that would have gotten the Zionists what they wanted without ethnic cleansing, they accepted it, no further violence needed to occur. The proof is in the pudding: if ethnic cleansing was core to the project, such a plan could not have existed and/or the Zionists would not have accepted it.

Instead, the Arabs refused this, had zero interest in trying to negotiate any kind of peaceful solution, began to ethnically cleanse Jews throughout the Arab world [0], and launched an international war effort to subjugate or oust the Jews from the region.

The Israeli defense and retaliation ultimately included ethnic cleansing of its own. That's undeniable. But even here it wasn't core to the project; it wasn't a war goal at the beginning. Per Wikipedia [1]:

    Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of
    the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply,
    genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which
    had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As
    the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN
    partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated
    Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and
    give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among
    the political and military leaders after four or five months was to
    "reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab
    minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency
    and expulsion".

It's tragic that they arrived at that "third and further aim"; I'm looking back on this with 80 years of both distance and hindsight, but I can at least conceive of a world in which they didn't.

I don't mean to whitewash what the Israelis did in the war - any more than Palestinian supporters want to whitewash what the Arabs did and intended to do, I suppose. But I was replying to someone asserting that the State of Israel simply could not exist without ethnic cleansing, that to be a Zionist fundamentally means to support ethnic cleansing. This is what I'm disputing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...

> Zionists purchased land in the region and immigrated legally

Colonial Britain famously sold a lot of land they didn't control, occupy or reasonably administrate. The Raj comes to mind.

The Balfour Declaration, in context, was like buying a car title from the impound lot. The slip of paper might say you own it, but nobody ever notarized it at the DMV. And now the person who put 50,000 miles on the odometer is going to see you in court for the rest of their life.

> thus ethnic cleansing is at the very core of Zionism

Ethnic cleansing is absolutely not at the core of the existence of a Jewish state. This rhetoric is particularly unhelpful since it seems to suggest that Palestine needs to be ethnically cleansed if Israel is to exist, which is absurd.

Ethnic cleansing is at the core of every ethnostate. You can't have, say, a racially German state, if you don't do something to all the non-Germans.

> Ethnic cleansing is at the core of every ethnostate

What makes Israel an ethnostate? (Versus a nation state.)

Demographically, and structurally, Israel doesn’t look dissimilar from e.g. China, India, Russia or most European countries. None of them require ethnic cleansing.

> You can't have, say, a racially German state

Race is a social construct. What constitutes a “true” German has been debated annd fought over among the tribes since before Cæsar.

And I’m not even sure how one would go about defining an Israeli “race” without being incoherent. (Which is fine. Plenty of races are defined in a way that is internally inconsistent. But none of that requires ethnic cleansing as a consequence. Just periodically redefining racial boundaries to broaden what being X means, the way American whiteness has evolved over the centuries.)

You just called it a Jewish state and now you're pretending that a Jewish state isn't an ethnostate by definition. A purposefully created white state is an ethnostate; a purposefully created German state is an ethnostate; a purposefully created Jewish state is an ethnostate. Ethnostates are very very bad. And it doesn't matter who's a "true" member of the group; it matters only that there is a group. There could be an ethnostate for people with brown hair and that would be bad regardless of whether or not people with black hair were counted as brown-haired.

> you're pretending that a Jewish state isn't an ethnostate by definition

It isn't. Certainly not in a way that requires ethnic cleansing.

What definition are you using? Are all Arab states ethnostates? What about monoethnic countries [1]?

> Ethnostates are very very bad

Because they arise from ethnic cleansing. Nobody has a problem with Egypt or Finland being monoethnic, and I think it would be incorrect to call them ethnostates.

If Egypt and Finland (and Iceland and Palestine) are ethnostates, then we've broadened the definition to where they seem to be fine.

> it doesn't matter who's a "true" member of the group; it matters only that there is a group

Of course it does. If you can expand the group, you don't have a problem. The very act of nationhood is an exercise in defining groups of people.

One can have a liberal, democratic, Jewish state that isn't an ethnostate. Nothing about Israel's existence requires ethnic cleansing. That's just a weird own goal that argues for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoethnicity

I suggest you look up the definition of an ethnostate before trying to argue about it

> suggest you look up the definition of an ethnostate before trying to argue about it

I’m literally asking for the definition you’re using. Because none of the ones I’m seeing match what you’re saying. And the way you seem to be defining it turns “ethnic cleansing is at the core of every ethnostate” into tautology.

This game—who hurt whom first—doesn’t work outside the new world. It particularly fails in parts of the world that were prehistorically settled.

I also dislike this game but I didn't start this game - barbazoo did and he happened to be wrong so I had to correct him.