I have remained consistent in all of my writings and pronouncements that I support Israel but oppose US intervention in the Middle East and foreign aid. This has earned me very few friends; people want you to pick a side and not say anything that steps out of line, but I can’t abide by that. When all you do is listen to likeminded individuals, that’s how a bubble gets formed. I make it a point to listen to people I deeply oppose and figure out areas of common agreement and more importantly flaws in their logic, even if it is a person I find unlikeable.
Today I listened to Candace Owens’ one-on-one interview with Briahna Joy Gray. One might come away from the interview thinking as I do that there is a convergence happening between people with few common beliefs and interests apart from their opposition to Israel. A common refrain on the part of both Owens’ and BJG was that Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” ethnostate, and Gray even remarked that Israel’s inherent contradiction is that it has a population that is ~20% Arab and its advocates brag about it, yet they somehow also claim that allowing the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and descendants from 1948 would be disastrous and that the Palestinians are too violent and hateful to allow into Israel.
Look, it sounds like a great point she’s making, but as we are seeing with mass migration in other nations like France and Ireland, too much of a new group at too fast of an influx rate is a recipe for disaster. Palestinian Arab advocates during the late 19th and 20th centuries said so about Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, even though they typically bought the lands they settled on legally from Arab landlords under the Ottoman law. Even Palestinian academics are often forced to admit that a real purchase took place, such as Dr. Mohsen Mohammed Saleh of the Al-Zaytouna Centre in Beirut which deals with issues relating to Palestinian land claims: “By the end of the Ottoman State in 1918, the Jews had acquired about 420 thousand dunams (or 1.5%) of the land of Palestine, which they bought mainly from Lebanese feudal landlords, most notably the families of Sursock, Tayyan, Tueni and Medawar, or from the Ottoman administration through public auction in which the lands of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes are sold, or from some Palestinian landlords who belong to feudal families like the Ruk and Kassar families.“
He goes on to talk about how non-Arab and Lebanese Arab feudal landlords betrayed the Palestinians, as did the British by selling or granting lands to the Jews. This is a man in 2020 bemoaning real estate transactions that happened often more than a century earlier. We learn from this that the Palestinian cause was not about oppression and occupation, at least not in the beginning, but rather about keeping foreigners out even if they purchased land legally. The complaints about the sellers being feudal landlords are not framed as a critique of Ottoman society as being unfair to the Arab inhabitants, but of the Jewish purchaser inserting himself where he doesn’t belong. That is the attitude that Briahna Joy Gray is supporting. She even called Palestine an “Arab land” that a Jewish state was forced upon, seeming to endorse that Palestine was and should have remained an ethnostate prior to Israel’s founding. Just to be clear, the Arabs were living in Palestine prior to the founding of the state, but the masters of the land were often foreigners like the Turks, or non-resident Arabs. Other Muslim immigrants were perfectly welcome there, such as the Bosniaks who resettled the Samarian village of Yanun in 1878 thanks to an Ottoman land grant. In Caesarea there remain the ruins of buildings settled by other Bosnian Muslims from the same period. Or how about the Turkish Cypriot brides that were sold by their parents to Palestinian Arab men in the early 20th century during times of economic hardship? The issue that many Israel opponents refuse to address is that Jews are designated as being foreign by the Palestinians because of their religion just as much as their national origin. Other foreign immigrants were welcomed due to their religious compatibility, not some affiliation with the Arab society in Palestine.
Greek Cypriot men detained by invading Turkish troops in 1974.
I will not justify every action taken by Israel or the Zionist groups that came before it to get to this point, but the fact is that today in 2024 the Arab population of the state numbers over 2 million. Allowing such a large group within one’s pool of citizens, whether in terms of raw numbers or proportion of the overall population, is not an ethno-state. The true examples of an ethno-state are less than an hour flight away in Cyprus. Here, there is an island split between the legitimate, internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus (ROC), which is 99% Greek Orthodox Christian and occupies the southern end of the island, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is 99% Turkish Muslim. This situation has persisted since 1973 when in the wake of a coup by Greek Cypriot ultranationalists Turkey’s military invaded the northern third of the island. Overnight all of the Turks, who constituted 18% of the population, fled to that area. In the other direction Greeks flowed into the reduced ROC bosltered by Greece’s military expeditionary force, fearing ethnic cleansing as had happened in the 1920s to Greek communities in Asia Minor. Some estimates have it that 200,000 Greeks were forced to abandon their homes in the North (I have no figures regarding the Turkish refugees). Both Turkey and Greece were NATO members, making this a rare occasions when two members of the alliance were at war with one another. To this day, Cyprus remains divided along ethnoreligious lines to a greater extent than Israel or the Palestinian territories, and there are missing persons from either side that have never turned up. To make matters more complicated two areas in the south are controlled by Britain’s Royal Air Force, another NATO partner, a holdover from its pre-1960 colonial status.
Despite all of these issues - the ethnic cleansing, religious seized lands, and NATO involvement on three sides, I doubt we will see campus protests, boycott efforts, or segments on the shows of either Owens or Gray demanding that the US do something to resolve the “injustice” on Cyprus. Why do you think that is?
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Not far from #Gaza: The real ethno-states are on Cyprus
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I have remained consistent in all of my writings and pronouncements that I support Israel but oppose US intervention in the Middle East and foreign aid. This has earned me very few friends; people want you to pick a side and not say anything that steps out of line, but I can’t abide by that. When all you do is listen to likeminded individuals, that’s how a bubble gets formed. I make it a point to listen to people I deeply oppose and figure out areas of common agreement and more importantly flaws in their logic, even if it is a person I find unlikeable.
Today I listened to Candace Owens’ one-on-one interview with Briahna Joy Gray. One might come away from the interview thinking as I do that there is a convergence happening between people with few common beliefs and interests apart from their opposition to Israel. A common refrain on the part of both Owens’ and BJG was that Israel is a “Jewish supremacist” ethnostate, and Gray even remarked that Israel’s inherent contradiction is that it has a population that is ~20% Arab and its advocates brag about it, yet they somehow also claim that allowing the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees and descendants from 1948 would be disastrous and that the Palestinians are too violent and hateful to allow into Israel.
Look, it sounds like a great point she’s making, but as we are seeing with mass migration in other nations like France and Ireland, too much of a new group at too fast of an influx rate is a recipe for disaster. Palestinian Arab advocates during the late 19th and 20th centuries said so about Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe, even though they typically bought the lands they settled on legally from Arab landlords under the Ottoman law. Even Palestinian academics are often forced to admit that a real purchase took place, such as Dr. Mohsen Mohammed Saleh of the Al-Zaytouna Centre in Beirut which deals with issues relating to Palestinian land claims: “By the end of the Ottoman State in 1918, the Jews had acquired about 420 thousand dunams (or 1.5%) of the land of Palestine, which they bought mainly from Lebanese feudal landlords, most notably the families of Sursock, Tayyan, Tueni and Medawar, or from the Ottoman administration through public auction in which the lands of Palestinian peasants who are unable to pay their taxes are sold, or from some Palestinian landlords who belong to feudal families like the Ruk and Kassar families.“
He goes on to talk about how non-Arab and Lebanese Arab feudal landlords betrayed the Palestinians, as did the British by selling or granting lands to the Jews. This is a man in 2020 bemoaning real estate transactions that happened often more than a century earlier. We learn from this that the Palestinian cause was not about oppression and occupation, at least not in the beginning, but rather about keeping foreigners out even if they purchased land legally. The complaints about the sellers being feudal landlords are not framed as a critique of Ottoman society as being unfair to the Arab inhabitants, but of the Jewish purchaser inserting himself where he doesn’t belong. That is the attitude that Briahna Joy Gray is supporting. She even called Palestine an “Arab land” that a Jewish state was forced upon, seeming to endorse that Palestine was and should have remained an ethnostate prior to Israel’s founding. Just to be clear, the Arabs were living in Palestine prior to the founding of the state, but the masters of the land were often foreigners like the Turks, or non-resident Arabs. Other Muslim immigrants were perfectly welcome there, such as the Bosniaks who resettled the Samarian village of Yanun in 1878 thanks to an Ottoman land grant. In Caesarea there remain the ruins of buildings settled by other Bosnian Muslims from the same period. Or how about the Turkish Cypriot brides that were sold by their parents to Palestinian Arab men in the early 20th century during times of economic hardship? The issue that many Israel opponents refuse to address is that Jews are designated as being foreign by the Palestinians because of their religion just as much as their national origin. Other foreign immigrants were welcomed due to their religious compatibility, not some affiliation with the Arab society in Palestine.
I will not justify every action taken by Israel or the Zionist groups that came before it to get to this point, but the fact is that today in 2024 the Arab population of the state numbers over 2 million. Allowing such a large group within one’s pool of citizens, whether in terms of raw numbers or proportion of the overall population, is not an ethno-state. The true examples of an ethno-state are less than an hour flight away in Cyprus. Here, there is an island split between the legitimate, internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus (ROC), which is 99% Greek Orthodox Christian and occupies the southern end of the island, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is 99% Turkish Muslim. This situation has persisted since 1973 when in the wake of a coup by Greek Cypriot ultranationalists Turkey’s military invaded the northern third of the island. Overnight all of the Turks, who constituted 18% of the population, fled to that area. In the other direction Greeks flowed into the reduced ROC bosltered by Greece’s military expeditionary force, fearing ethnic cleansing as had happened in the 1920s to Greek communities in Asia Minor. Some estimates have it that 200,000 Greeks were forced to abandon their homes in the North (I have no figures regarding the Turkish refugees). Both Turkey and Greece were NATO members, making this a rare occasions when two members of the alliance were at war with one another. To this day, Cyprus remains divided along ethnoreligious lines to a greater extent than Israel or the Palestinian territories, and there are missing persons from either side that have never turned up. To make matters more complicated two areas in the south are controlled by Britain’s Royal Air Force, another NATO partner, a holdover from its pre-1960 colonial status.
Despite all of these issues - the ethnic cleansing, religious seized lands, and NATO involvement on three sides, I doubt we will see campus protests, boycott efforts, or segments on the shows of either Owens or Gray demanding that the US do something to resolve the “injustice” on Cyprus. Why do you think that is?
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