That offer has been made multiple times in the form of the Arab Peace Initiative.
And was followed by the first intifada iirc. Its not only about the rights of Palestinian people but obviously about “chasing the Jews into the sea”.
I hate the current government of Israel for being right wing, religious and downright populist. The settlers policies are plain provocation. That doesn’t influence my conviction that the state Israel absolutely must keep existing and that the people are not the same as their government (also worth remembering this when you hear people speaking Russian omnthe streets right now).
This brings up the very important distinction between nation and state. We think of them now interchangeably, but as I understand it, the Peace of Westphalia created the modern system of nation-states that comprises the international order. It was very recent, historically speaking, such that even Germany didn’t unify into one until the early 20th century.
It’s important, because while various nations existed in Palestine, the region got integrated into the Westphalian system under outside, colonial powers, rather than as a nation-state. That allowed room for the Zionist slogan, “a land without a people for a people with a land.” That was a clever distortion—there was not “a people” in the sense of the new international order, but there certainly were people who lived there, and had lived there for generations.
The bottom line is that the Israeli state must absolutely be distinct and separate from the nation of Israel—and that the nation of Israel must be allowed to exist in peace in the region. The current state can go kick rocks, as far as I’m concerned.
The good old “we were first, so we’re the only ones who belong here”, which always brings up the question, how far we want to go back in time to determine who really was first. There is no answer to this question, hence it’s the reason for so many conflicts across the globe and through history.
Eh, I don’t think many societies besides America are as open as America to migration and immigrants (and we have strong anti immigrant streaks sometimes, but I think we’re more tolerant than most). Like Japan is an old society that’s just not used migration/immigration. Hell, the shogunate shut out people coming in or leaving for 200 or so years before 1850. And even old Western societies that have a colonial past and immigrants resulting from that are not as open to immigrants as the US (I mean that’s what Brexit’s about, right? And you saw how destabilizing Syrian and Libyan refugees have been to the EU, and how incompletely integrated Algerian immigrants are in France).
Both Jews and Palestinians were first. At least some of their ancestors were chilling in the land as far back as the bronze age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10212583/
But Jews were expelled a long time ago from their home, and only started coming back with the Zionist movement. But with respect to the creation of modern Israel, obviously the Palestinians were there before the Zionist movement and the creation of modern Israel, and I think they might feel the same way about the creation of Israel as maybe Native Americans might feel about European colonization and the creation of the US.
Your title is very confusing, I get what you mean after reading the long comment you’ve created, but based on the title I wanted to downvote you as well.
