Questions about Palestine from a neutral (please remove if inappropriate for this subreddit)

Sure, I'll bite.

First of all, if all your Muslim friends are really "deep antisemites" (and not just extremely anti-Israel/Zionism), that's on them and it adds nothing to the legitimacy of Israel.

The religion card is played constantly to paint Palestinians as rabid jihadists, and Israel as a beacon of enlightened secularism. This is bullshit. The situation is not a religious conflict, it is a nationalist one. The root of the conflict is wether Jewish migrants (mostly from elsewhere) have the right to invade, displace, and oppress native Palestinians who've at the very least been the majority of the population for centuries. Some of the foremost Palestinian nationalists were Christian, and the conflict was often secular in nature.

Israel is a highly successful country with a high standard of living, pretty much only for Jewish Israelis. Even the Israeli-Arabs that Zionists love to point to as an example of how tolerant they are, usually have lower standards of living and worse living conditions.

This is without even talking about the millions of Palestinians that Israel holds power over, yet have no rights as citizens. The claim is that these Palestinians aren't citizens, and so they're not Israel's problem. The issue here is that Israel occupies and polices them, despite being a foreign nation so obviously there has to be responsibility.

1) The Palestinian government is essentially split between the PA in the west bank who have no will or ability to stand against Israeli transgressions, and Hamas in Gaza who've been locked into their prison for years. Of course they're not in a position to hold 'democratic and free' elections when they have no meaningful sovereignty allowed to them by their occupier.

This is absolutely no indication of what Palestine would look like after its liberation.

2) I'm not Palestinian, but this would never be allowed by Israel. I didn't not understand how you people can act so uninformed and innocent when Israeli government figures have boldly and openly stated that Israel is only a Jewish state. They openly claim it's an ethnostate, this isn't some baseless accusation. A person anywhere in the world with provable Jewish ancestry can claim Israeli citizenship, but a Palestinian can't go to his grandfather's house in occupied land.

3) To most, free Palestine means an independent Palestinian state, with no Israeli transgressions limiting their sovereignty. At this point even Hamas has accepted a two state solution, the "they want to wipe us out" claim is baseless.

/r/arabs Thread