First and foremost, I owe you an apology for all of my unfounded accusations. The mere fact that you are willing to hear me out is clear indication that I was mistaken. Upon reflection, it appears that your passion about the topic is entrenched by empathy for the Palestinians that lack any form of agency over their own suffering. That is, of course, the most important thing here. I would do better to remember that.

Note: In an attempt to cut down on the enormous amount of text on screen, I’ve added a lot of links to selected text. I’m not sure whether or not they’re going to work correctly in your browser of choice.

I don’t get your point about Yosef Weitz, he did play a major role with the unofficial Transfer Committee and the JNF. Which has dispossessed Palestinians to present day.

My point is that extremism had pervaded both parties perpetuating this conflict, not to mention there was a tidal wave of Nationalism surging through many countries of the time period. The presence of radical ideology is self-evident and gets us no closer to conclusively proving that the Jewish government had always been plotting to expel Palestinians by force. There needs to be a very clear distinction here. This controversy is embroiled in an abyss of disputed information.

The JNF is actually a prominent example of an organization that took measures not to expel Palestinians by force. There were plenty of Palestinians that were more than happy to sell their land in Palestine, presumably because they wanted to live elsewhere.

And that once Zionism chose Palestine as a location, it was deliberately a settler colonialist movement.

Yes, they made mention of this often. Presently the terms “settler” and “colonialist” are used to retroactively transpose modern narratives onto a period in history where conquest/colonialism had not yet been demonized. The Ottoman Empire had not even completely dissolved by the turn of the 20th century. Hell, Egypt, Jordan - Syria and Iraq all swooped in to occupy territory in Palestine, even though the only country that Britain had sanctioned in the territory was Israel. And sure, the ideologies of Zionism were certainly distorted by individual extremism, but I would argue that the underlying goal of an independent Jewish state is not inherently evil when considering they had long established territories in the region. As you brought up, the alternative was to submit themselves to the inhumane segregation of Christian fundamentalism or the inhumane segregation of Islamic fundamentalism.

However, looking into the history, it looks like many Jewish people experienced more rights as Dhimmi than they would’ve under Christian nations for example

I think we can agree that they’re both demeaning, and they’re both inhumane. Here are some examples of rights stripped away from you under the Ahl ad-Dhimma System:

required to pay additional taxes, required to wear certain forms of dress, required to join only a set list of occupations, had their ability to work in the government circumscribed, forbidden to possess weapons, judged in Islamic Courts for any crime involving a Muslim (even if the Muslim was the perpetrator), Jews and Christians confined to certain areas, etc.

https://medium.com/@Jaime.Morris/does-dhimmi-status-still-exist-in-some-islamic-countries-4389b485a134

Especially during the Ottoman empire, it looks like Jewish people had comparatively more rights and was generally considered a ‘safe haven.’

The Ottomans sometimes made concessions to appease Europe, but Islamic revivalists were still prevalent. Sharia law still being rampant in the middle-east to this very day should be more than sufficient evidence that it was not just paranoia.

Amin Husseini became antisemitic largely after his Exodus to Germany. I’m certain he fell for Nazi propaganda and even tried to promote it in Palestine. However his influence continued to dwindle after his Exodus and in Palestine his western antisemitism didn’t really catch on

I’m almost in complete agreement with you here, but I would still be very careful that we’re not conflating that contemporary Palestine and Arab League. I only ever claimed it had ties to the latter, and the former was not the only Jewish adversary. I’d just really rather not get into the minutia of this topic, its only relevance is the cooperation of some Arab leaders and the fear it would invoke in Jews. It’s not isolated to just Husseini:

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna29058048

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ba'athism

Ba’athism has been criticized by Western observers as similar in form to Nazism, specifically regarding its historic anti-semitism, authoritarian and nationalist tendencies.[287][288] The historian Stephen Wild in his 1985 paper National Socialism in the Arab near East between 1933 and 1939 briefly draws a direct line between these two ideologies. He cites the fact that Michel Aflaq, one of the founding fathers of Ba’athism, purchased a copy of Alfred Rosenburg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century. He also quotes Sami al-Jundi: Whoever has lived during this period in Damascus will appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.

We were racialists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation and H.S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which revolves on the race. We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf.[289]

Arsuzi formed the Arab Ba’ath Party in 1940

Hopefully I at least raised enough alarm about Al Jazeera to compel you to be more skeptical about them. The English branch does placate to public opinion, but has still been caught pushing the limits of antisemitism until the outrage starts to boil. I do strongly agree with you though, criticism of Israel is indeed not antisemitism. And extremism still present in Israel continues to disproportionately cause much more suffering than any extremism permeating the Palestinian population.

I don’t think Pappe ever insinuates ‘jews’ had ‘complete control.’

Pappe’s entire rhetoric about an overarching “master plan” is beyond silly to me. The Arab League’s biggest weakness was not having a united front, but for the overwhelming majority of this time period, even up to the very month the war of independence began, the Jewish military could not even begin to compete. If not for the exact set of events that lead up to this moment in time, such as the Holocaust and emancipation in North Africa both causing massive surges in Jewish emigration and conscription, conquest in Palestine would’ve never been feasible for them as they would’ve been easily obliterated as soon as they occupied territory in Palestine. However, I won’t discredit his assertions that there were radical individuals.

I don’t agree with the notion that the civil war was inevitable. For one, that argument depends on the notion that Palestinians had no desire for peace and wanted to genocide all the Jews

We have a complete misunderstanding here. I’m not suggesting that Palestinians, or Arabs in general, had no desire for peace. They had no desire to recognize Israel’s independence, under any circumstance. And Israel had no desire for anything but independence, under any circumstance. These two diametrically opposed beliefs were on a collision course from the very beginning.