age of aquarium

I'm gonna be honest: the fact that this is coming from a blank blog makes me far less likely to want to answer it, especially because I haven't been on tumblr as much lately and thus don't know if this is a copypasta ask.

Who are you? Have you read my pinned post? Have you read the many, many sources in it?

I am going to give you extremely truncated answers, but understand that you have a lot of reading to do that is not possible to summarize in an answer to a tumblr ask. (Edit: this got a lot longer than I expected, but I stand by my words that these are truncated, incomplete answers. You need to read several books to actually develop a reasonable understanding of this.)

At what point of conflict and violence do we say that being indigenous to a region does not actually confer land rights?

Never. What you are asking here conflates two separate concerns: (1) the rights of an indigenous group to the land they are indigenous to, and (2) the ethical responsibilities said indigenous group has towards other human beings, in particular those who also live on that land. People don't lose their indegeneity and thus their ties to the land by being bad people. "Indigenous" is not an indicator of moral purity or uprightness. It means that they have deep cultural, historical, and (often) religious roots in a particular land that cannot be severed without totally destroying the group as such.

Eretz Yisrael will always be the homeland of the Jewish people regardless of whether we have control over it or not, whether we have a sovereign nation there or not, whether we are permitted to live there or even visit there or not. All of our religious and cultural practices tie back to eretz Yisrael, even ones that have been adapted to the diaspora. Religiously observant Jews pray facing Jerusalem three times a day, our liturgy is infused with references to the land, the Temple in Jerusalem, the redemption (of the people to the land) and/or specific attributes of the land. Our sacred texts occur in and make constant reference to the land and our observance of the mitzvot and how that relates to the land. (A ton of the religious laws we are given are land-based because it developed as an agricultural religion, and a huge number of the rest are related to the Temple in Jerusalem.) We have three pilgrimage festivals that pre- forced diaspora, all Jews would make back to Jerusalem to make specific sacrifices. We still observe these festivals in ways adapted to the diaspora, but you need to understand that the essential condition of diasporic Jewry is one of constant longing to return to the land. We observe these things today to keep the knowledge alive so that someday, future generations of Jews can use that knowledge in eretz Yisrael. Jews are of that land and can never be severed from it without becoming something entirely different.

Now. Does that give us a right to act with total impunity? Absolutely not. We still have moral obligations to our fellow human beings that we have to observe no matter what. That is true of all peoples everywhere, indigenous or not.

But the idea that you can "punish" an indigenous group by severing their roots is to say that total cultural annihilation is a valid punishment ever, which is genocidal rhetoric.

I understand that having land stolen is a travesty and a part of genocide, and I don't mean to be dismissive.

You answered your own question here, don't you see? Reread what you wrote here, as many times as you need to, until you get it.

But at some level of conflict and violence, is it not healthier for individals to learn to love the place they are at, the people around them, and the new culture they can build together?

You need to read some Jewish history.

If you are asking this question about Israel, and in particular the Israel / Palestine conflict, you need to read more Jewish history.

"....to learn to love the place they are at" Jews in the diaspora tried this. Please read this list.

"...the people around them" Do you think that Jews were expelled, pogrommed, and genocided multiple times across numerous locations because we didn't "love the people around us" enough? For real? Read about the Kielce Pogrom and get back to me on that.

"...the new culture they can build together" Ah. I see. Yes this is the thing:

We don't fucking need a new culture. We have been fighting to practice the culture we already have in peace for thousands of years.

I think there are ways to do that which are not assimilationist.

Well. You're wrong. You are one in a long long long long long long long long long long long line of gentiles who think that "Jews can just..." and (1) you're wrong; read what the Nazis did to ethnic Jews who converted to Christianity, the history of "new Christians"/conversos/etc. but also even if that were guaranteed to work (2) why should we have to change our culture instead of other people not trying to kill us for it?

And I think the ongoing suffering in war cannot be justified by mere land claims.

This war is not about land claims though; not really. Hamas wants every Jew dead. That is why they started this war. They have promised a new October 7th every day until the whole land is entirely judenfrei. Of course there are reasonable Palestinians with legitimate policy objectives, but that's not who's driving this war, and the ones in Gaza who speak up about it tend to get abducted or have their families disappeared and are tortured until they escape, die, or are silenced.

Are there legitimate things to be discussed about Israel's approach in this war and/or in general? Sure. But this isn't "mere land claims." This is about the safety, lives, and self-determination of half the global Jewish population, the vast majority of whom are only there in the first place because they themselves or their parents/grandparents/great-grandparents fled (or were forcibly relocated) there as refugees of genocide. Israel is the only remaining place in the world for certain smaller Jewish sub-ethnicities. If Israel is destroyed, so much will be lost. And, we will be back to being subjects of the whims of hostile foreign powers who have proven again and again that they will just periodically expel or murder lots of us when it is politically useful for them to do so.

That is what is at stake for us.

The fact that you think that our connection to the land is "mere land claims" and not an existential part of our identity says volumes by itself, but the fact that you don't know what is actually at stake for us says even more. It tells me that you have a lot of reading to do.

What am I missing?

Empathy. History. Context.

That's so funny, because I felt like such a grouch answering this the way I did lol

I thought about not answering it at all tbh, but I ultimately decided to do so anyway because I think a lot of non-indigenous gentiles (especially culturally Christian folks) have this thought process because like. They didn't grow up with their identity and whole sense of self being tied to a particular land, and when that's your experience it's hard to fathom fighting for a specific parcel of land so intensely and at such a high human cost. I can't imagine fighting an actual war over, for example, the endless miles of cornfields I grew up with. If someone was willing to kill me and my friends and my whole family over us living there, I'd just fucking move. Nothing about living in my home state is worth dying or sacrificing other human lives for. To wit: I don't even live there anymore and have no plans to ever move back.

Similarly, when you don't grow up with a strong sense of culture and belonging to that group as an inherent fundamental aspect of who you are as a person, you just don't get why people would fight, kill, and die for it. There is nothing about my culture of origin worth risking my life for. I will simply just not if that's the alternative. As it is, I've already tried to leave as much of it behind as possible to become Jewish.

And now that I am a Jew and have been to Israel, I get it. I could never be bothered to care about my culture of origin except to vaguely joke about it and the idea of defending it with my life is laughable. But being a Jew? You'd have to beat the Judaism out of me until I was dead, and even then I know my community would still try to recover my body for a traditional Jewish burial and say Kaddish for me. That is indeed a choice that many Jews have been forced to make throughout our history, and so many have, despite the consequences.

I think it's hard to understand what the point of all this suffering is when it's not something you have, but is hard to stomach not fighting for if you do.

So I felt it was worth answering even if it maybe was a bait ask, because most people are too afraid to ask the question, but it's an important context to have when considering these issues.

Unfortunately, you are catching me at over 500 days of constant antisemitic harassment over these issues in particular (honestly way longer than that, but it has been truly relentless since October 7th, 2023.) Other people have asked similar questions in the rhetorical as a "gotcha!" to show that we don't care about the safety, lives, security, dignity, and self-determination of Palestinians, as though caring about our own is mutually exclusive rather than just complex. Answering these types of sealioning questions pretty much always results in targeted harassment, accusations that amount to blood libel, and people who show up to downplay, deny, or support the atrocities that have happened to our people.

And obviously I'm speaking for myself here, but I feel comfortable saying it's been like this for pretty much the whole Jewish community online. It has been exhausting, demeaning, and dehumanizing. I cannot explain in words whst it feels like to have to justify everything about one's own culture, people, right to life and a peaceful existence, and trauma to a world that then uses every answer it demands as a weapon to degrade you further.

So I read the ask, checked your blog, saw that there were two posts, and sighed deeply. But then I answered this because of the reasons I gave spank-the-villain. I'm sorry my original tone was so surly, but there is a context for that reaction.

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

This has been a common method for a long time in some states