The state of Israel currently controls an area of land comprising four distinct regions: the 1948 green line territory (what could be considered “Israel proper”), the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
In total, about 14.8 million people live in this combined area, with a plurality (but NOT a majority) of them - 7.2 million - being Israeli Jews. That means that the rest, the majority, are non-Jewish - they include Gazans, West Bank inhabitants, and non-Jewish Israeli citizens (aka ‘48 Arabs).
Are Americans aware of this? It doesn’t get brought up very much, but to me this seems like a pretty significant fact. We’re sending billions of dollars a year to Israel so that a minority of the people who live there can have a special set of rights over the majority.
I did not know this prior to October 7th. I was pro-Palestinian prior to that anyway, but I mistakenly thought that Israel was, at least, oppressing a numerical minority rather than a majority.
95% of Americans have no idea what you’re talking about. They mostly believe in some vague notion that there are Jewish people there and Muslim people there and they’ve been fighting for thousands of years and this is just an extension of that.
But the upside of such breathtaking ignorance is that, so long as I’m not dealing with a racist or some evangelical over 65, I’ve found it’s actually pretty easy to bring people over to a nominally pro-Palestine position. I simply frame it as “the UN created two countries in 1948. Eventually, Israel attacked Palestine and occupied it. And now for decades the Palestinians have no real rights or freedoms and Israel is slowly trying to take all their land. The Israelis refuse to let them have their own land but also refuse to let them be citizens in Israel”. That angle works surprisingly well on Americans.
Zionists saying pro-Palestinians need to learn history will never not be funny because even learning a broad strokes version of events will lead most people to sympathize with Palestine.
Right! When I talk to people I have to leave out so much (pretty much everything before 1948) because when you talk to an American about history you only have a couple minutes at best before you completely lose their attention. But none of that makes Israel look any better.
100%. I just heard people saying “we shouldn’t talk about the current situation it’s too controversial.”
The "land without a people" myth really did a number on the western imagination