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.
Even Israelis being Jewish is of little consequence; European Israelis are apparently heavily racist to Arab Israelis (even Jewish Arab Israelis) and black Israelis (they were sterilizing Black Jews for so long that apparently the last Jewish black person they sterilized was in 2013). Arab Jews, while they were indeed expelled from several Arab countries, were also attacked by Mossad in others (under the guise of Arabs) to drive them into Israel, where they were then placed in territories bordering Arab nations in case of an invasion so as to be cannon fodder/buffer to slow Arab invaders/freedom fighters. There’s even places where Arab Jews aren’t even allowed to live and mix with European (Ashkenazi?) Jews.
They’re not really one unified nation, it’s a bunch of European colonizers and their mistreated second class citizens living in a glorified military base. Calling Israel a country feels like a joke; how many of their population moved there in this generation, their parents’ generation, or their grandparents’ generation? These same people (except for most Arab Jews I would imagine) have a dual citizenship and can leave at any time they wish and be citizens in a Western country, unlike Palestinians who have no home outside Palestine.
I recall a video I saw of newly arrived Israeli colonizers crying because they just found out that the local court had decided to rule in favor of the Palestinian family who were supposed to be evicted so they could live where the Palestinian family was living; utterly disgusting; Crying? Really? Because a family wasn’t evicted and turned into refugees?
Israel is a settler colonial occupation, it’s not a country.