Thank you. I appreciate the engagement in conversation.
100% agree that we cannot turn back time. It is wrong to cleanse that land of 6 million Palestinians, but it is also wrong to cleanse it of 7 million Jews or to take away the autonomy or self-determination of those Jews. And on the other side of that, the Palestinian people need self-determination too. I know the present situation is unsustainable. I think some people have a very bad and greedy or supremacist fantasy of undoing a state that has been there, in present form (as opposed to biblical and pre-Roman) since 1948, and not caring what happens to its millions of citizens. That is no better than the worst fantasy of the radical supremacist Zionists today such as Ben-Gvir or Smotrich.
I don't know who your "we" is. Are you Lebanese? Or when you say we, do you mean Muslim, or Arab generally? You don't have to tell me of course. I only ask so I can best try to understand your perspective.
Every people has a broad range. I'm sure most of your people are fair and just, and most of mine are fair and just. But for both of us, some are not. Some are greedy and want it all and unfortunately these are often the people who rise to power, across all of humanity. Crusaders kicked Jews out, and Salahuddin welcomed us back, but then others in history were not as benevolent. The gold star that my people wore to differentiate us during the holocaust was first invented centuries before by the Umayyad Caliphate. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem collaborated with the nazis in WW2. Many Jews whose descendants now live in Israel were kicked out of surrounding Muslim states and their property confiscated after or around the time of the Nakba. And Jews or Israel has done bad too, including recently, and including the way 1948 was done. I am not saying it is only one-sided. When a close relationship spans thousands of years, there are going to be a lot of changing dynamics.
Interestingly, did you know Salahuddin was Kurdish? Today the Kurds are another indigenous people some of the more militant Arab or Ummah pan-nationalists have occupied, marginalized, massacred, and genocided. This is what they did to Salahuddin's descendants. That may be metaphorical based on how some of the militants are trying to take over and control Islam, and appoint themselves as the arbiters of God's will, and also the ones who live most luxuriously - I'm not sure those two things are supposed to go together!
The word Zionist seems to be going through recent changes in definition. I think the people making it change are doing it intentionally and maliciously to demonize everyone who believes in a Jewish state and separate young impressionable diaspora Jews away from Israel, by making them think they can be accepted if they denounce their heritage and lineage. But there is also the extremist Zionists who enable it by doing and saying things that can easily be demonized. I will tell you what I believe and you can tell me, if you want, if you think it makes me a bad kind of Zionist.
I believe in a Jewish homeland and self-determination in the land of Israel, because it is our home too. That is the classic, original definition of Zionism. I do not believe in this idea of Greater Israel that some people talk about. But we are indigenous, too, as are Palestinians. We are not from any other homeland. You can talk about the passage of time, but also, there is no precedent, no other people in the world who has been exiled from their homeland for thousands of years and yet still remained a people, and prayed to that land during every day of the exile. It should have been done differently in 1948, but here we are today. The mistake of 1948 was that an injustice to Jews was attempted to be remedied by an injustice to Palestinians. We cannot remedy that injustice by putting Jews once again in the position of injustice. It has to be remedied for both.
These claims of or rights to homeland, to me, are not based on a promise made in the Torah or Quran, or which people observe God's covenant more closely or are more favored, or who has more Canaanite DNA or whose artifacts are deeper in the ground, it is simply that is our homeland, and it is also Palestinians' homeland. It is where we are all from and I think to refuse to share it goes against both of our faiths.
The definition of Zionism that bad actors are pushing today is that a home for Jews must be at the expense of, or to the exclusion of, a home for Palestinians, or on the blood and bones of Palestinians as some people like to say. Similarly a home for Palestinians should not be to the exclusion of, or at the expense of, a home for Jews, or on the blood and bones of Jews. I think it has to be two states instead of one, because, at least as things are today, in the one state there will be too many Palestinians who want to make it bad for the Jews and too many Jews who want to make it bad for the Palestinians. And also, if we are defining Palestinian as anyone with one Palestinian parent, then people who want to conquer demographically will flood in and marry Jordanian/Lebanese to Palestinian and outvote the Jews and make us dhimmi again. We do not want to be dhimmi.
When I say "we" I can only speak for myself, of course. The way I speak or identify with Israel, some people have mistakenly assumed I am from Israel. I am a US Ashkenazi Jew. I think 3 out of my 4 grandparents moved here as children prior to WW2, and one grandfather fought for US in WW2. Closest I've been to the Levant is Turkey. My nationality is US but my ethnicity is Jewish, the same way an Irish American might feel about Ireland or Italian American about Italy, except that I am more invested in it recently because of all the chaos and danger and risk of un-existence that is going on and also extending to those of us in the diaspora outside of Israel.