You are basically saying: "Because X wronged us, we are now entitled to Y’s house."
https://x.com/nxt888/status/2012929921715413233
You’ve stacked so many half-truths and sleights of hand into one comment that it looks impressive at first glance.
But if we slow it down, your whole argument collapses.
1. "Ok, so reject historical and ancestral land claims. Focus on land title. By that measure, the vast majority of land owned by Israelis is…owned by Israelis."
You are doing a neat little trick here.
You take today’s land registry, which is the outcome of expulsion, military rule, emergency regulations, and discriminatory laws, and then you point at the result as if it were a neutral starting point.
If I kick you out of your house at gunpoint, declare you an "absentee," transfer your property to the state, and then the state sells it to me, guess what:
On paper, I "own" your house.
That is exactly how a huge share of "Israeli-owned" land was created:
1948 expulsions and flight under bombardment.
Absentee Property Law to seize refugee land.
"State land" reclassified away from Palestinian communities.
Military orders closing off areas, then handing them to settlements.
JNF and other bodies locking land for Jews only.
You are pointing to the ledger at the end of the heist and saying, "See? All legal."
The question is not whether the thief filed the paperwork correctly.
The question is how the paperwork was produced.
2. "Don’t forget that Jerusalem was 2/3 Jewish in 1850…"
Even if I grant you that statistic for a moment, it does nothing like what you think it does.
First, we are talking about the city of Jerusalem, not the whole country.
Second, those Jews in 1850 were overwhelmingly part of a long-standing, mostly non-Zionist religious community living inside an overwhelmingly Arab Muslim and Christian majority in the surrounding land.
They were not a European settler movement with a charter to build an exclusivist state.
They were not bulldozing villages in Lydda or Haifa.
They were not running an army, an air force, and a siege.
You cannot retroactively draft every Jewish community that ever lived in the region into your political project and call that "proof."
By your logic, any neighborhood where one group once formed a majority becomes eternal license for a modern ethnostate.
Cities change hands and demographics all the time.
What does not change is the simple rule that you do not get to expel people, lock them out, and then use their absence as proof they have no claims.
3. "…and that 'free Palestine' started as a Jewish rallying cry in the 1920s against occupation…"
Cool anecdote. Zero relevance.
Words and slogans travel.
That does not mean Zionists get copyright over the meaning of "Palestine" or "free."
"Free Palestine" today is not a nostalgic nod to some 1920s Jewish protest.
It is a demand to end a very present system of dispossession, siege, military rule, settlement, and apartheid that your side is enforcing.
Pointing to a century-old Jewish usage of the phrase is not the flex you think it is.
It just proves that once upon a time, even some Jews understood the word "occupation" differently than you do now.
4. "The majority of self-described Palestinians never set foot on nor owned land in Palestine/israel."
You are hoping nobody notices how ugly this logic actually is.
By your standard:
A refugee’s grandchildren have no claim to the home or land their family was driven out of.
A people whose villages were wiped off the map cease to be indigenous the moment they are forced into exile.
A child born in a camp in Lebanon or Jordan is suddenly less "real" than a recent immigrant from Brooklyn who landed at Ben-Gurion last week.
You say "never owned land," as if only private title deeds count.
What about communal lands, village lands, grazing lands, orchards, waqf properties, urban rentals, generational tenancy?
What about the fact that many of those records were literally seized, burned, or reclassified by the very state you are defending?
And even then, you are dodging the core point:
Palestinian identity is not a zoning register.
It is rooted in continuous presence, culture, language, memory, and a documented pattern of forced removal.
If you flood a country with settlers, expel the natives, and then say, "Look, most of them are now outside the borders so they do not count," you are not making an argument.
You are just describing the crime and calling it a demographic fact.
5. "And if you want to apply this standard, you must be demanding that Jews receive Baghdad, Syria, Yemen, Iran…all places they had land owned stolen ahead of massacre and ethnic cleansing…"
You just proved my point for me without realizing it.
Yes, Jews in Arab countries suffered expulsions, pogroms, dispossession.
Yes, they have legitimate claims for justice, restitution, and recognition.
What you do not get to do is this:
Take crimes committed against Jews in Baghdad, Damascus, Sana’a, or Tehran,
And use them as a voucher to dispossess Palestinians in Jaffa, Haifa, or Hebron.
Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, Iranians owe a historical debt to the Jews they expelled and robbed.
Palestinians did not sign that bill.
You are basically saying:
"Because X wronged us, we are now entitled to Y’s house."
Imagine if every traumatized, dispossessed group on earth claimed the right to go pick some third party’s land and build an ethnostate there as compensation.
You would call that madness in any other context.
Justice for Mizrahi Jews and justice for Palestinians are not mutually exclusive.
You could:
Pursue restitution and recognition in the countries that expelled Jews.
Build a shared, equal civic state in Palestine with full rights for all who live there and all who were expelled.
Zionism chose a different path:
Leverage Jewish suffering everywhere to justify Palestinian dispossession here.
That is not moral math.
That is laundering one injustice through another.
To sum it up:
You treat conquest-backed land titles as sacred when they favor you.
You cherry-pick 19th-century city demographics as if that licenses 21st-century apartheid.
You erase Palestinian refugees by blaming them for the fact they were expelled.
And you wave Jewish suffering in Arab lands as a free pass to keep Palestinians in cages.
If you really believed in land title, you would take seriously how much of that "owned by Israelis" land passed through the hands of a military governor first.
If you really believed in ancestral ties, you would not pretend that fresh arrivals have a deeper claim than people whose grandparents are buried under the soil your state is still digging up.
And if you really believed in justice for dispossessed Jews, you would not use their trauma as a shield for a project that is now doing to Palestinians exactly what you say was done to them.
posted by Satish Sharma at
01:30
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