i feel like the "It wasn't Palestine before 1948, it was a Br*tish colonial possession" argument is not the gotcha that person thinks it is

I mean this whole argument is just some bullshit technicality that aCkTuAlLy the land was British in 1947. Given that Palestine isn't in the fucking British Isles I did a little digging to see how they stole came to to govern the land.

Mandatory Palestine, from wikipedia:

During the First World War (1914–1918), an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule and the British Empire's Egyptian Expeditionary Force under General Edmund Allenby drove the Turks out of the Levant during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign.[2] The United Kingdom had agreed in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence that it would honour Arab independence if they revolted against the Ottomans, but the two sides had different interpretations of this agreement and in the end, the UK and France divided up the area under the Sykes–Picot Agreement – an act of betrayal in the eyes of the Arabs.

So classic colonizer shit - the Allies were fighting the Ottomans during WWI and promised an Arab state for those that revolted from the inside, but immediately reneged on the deal (of course Wikipedia pretends this was due to a "different interpretation" and not the fundamental greed of imperialists). The League of Nations rubber-stamped this so it was all cool and legal and no one could complain.

Well the Palestinians decided to complain about this, uh, "interpretation" of events and fought back with a general-strike-turned-revolt (based) which was violently crushed by the British (unbased). According to a Palestinian historian, "Over ten percent of the adult male Palestinian Arab population between 20 and 60 was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled" - official British figures record ten times fewer casualties.

Given that they had already violently opposed the colonization of their homeland by European powers, it's unsurprising that they would reject a partition plan further seeding more of their land to colonizers and escalate to a full blown war.

TL;DR: "THE TRUTH": Palestine was promised all of the land in green and white, but the West stole it instead and violently put down any opposition to their ever-increasing colonies.

all I see is a colonizer gradually taking more land from the Palestinians who lived there, it hardly needs debunking

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wow, what a shit argument, "the Palestinians didn't let us settle on their land so they actually deserve what they got".

Under British governance

:british-maw:

The Palestinians do not govern themselves, Israel controls virtually everything in the Palestinian territories; even the nominal Palestinian officials need Israeli permission just to move between parts of their alleged territory. Pretty much all the Palestinian "Authority" does is issue press releases.

"Other violent colonizers gave it to us fair and square so it's all ok."

1. Palestinians lived in the same lands they had for generations under the British Mandate, aside from where the Zionist colonizers who displaced them (white patches). Whether the land was subject to British vs. Ottoman doesn't change where people lived and developed ethnic identity, economy, communities.

2. The original partition plan gave Zionist colonizers everything they wanted (literally a European Jewish ethnostate), which is exactly what the Palestinians, the actual people of the area, did not want. A few years prior, Palestinians had been promised a form of sovereignty over the area. The British also fucked around leveraging Transjordan to decrease the lands available. "You should have accepted the deal because the ethnonationalists and their settler-colonial backers ended up doing a genocide" is not an argument in favor of Israel or against freeing Palestine.

3. Same as the first panel. None of this justifies settler-colonialism or invalidates ethnic identity or working their lands or living in their homes, which is what the Zionists attempted to strip, often successfully. All I really does is highlight why Palestinians need sovereignty and power.

4. None of those areas have sovereignty. Israel mostly dictates what goes in and out, prevents international recognition of Palestine (with the US - Israel acts as a proxy), prevents them from actually doing normal government things like procuring resources. Gaza is a ghetto with extreme controls on transportation in/out and regular Israeli violence. The West Bank is an apartheid situation undergoing very active settler-colonialism. And it, of course, is also constantly on the receiving end of Israeli violence. Israel destroys Palestine infrastructure, effectively creating pre-industrial living conditions on s regular basis. This relationship is extremely lopsided, with an incredibly well-funded nuclear power controlling all the most valuable land vs. a dispossessed refugee population.

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