Europe was a pile of smoking rubble after World War 2 and they didn’t want to deal with all the Jewish refugees displaced by the war. So they used a Bronze Age fairy tale as an excuse to drop an entire country in the middle of somebody else’s country in the Middle East and steal a bunch of land from the people who had been living there for centuries, if not millennia.

Therefore, Israel has a right to exist. QED.

I’d say the basic position, without trying to start a big argument, is that regardless of historical grievances, Israel exists and is not going anywhere. That doesn’t mean that it’s oppression of Palestinians is justified or that settlements in the West Bank aren’t counterproductive to peace, or that they haven’t committed terrible atrocities.

Be that as it may, none of that can ever excuse what happened three weeks ago. No amount of legitimate grievances can ever justify slaughtering hundreds of innocent civilians, and given that those attacks were explicitly organized by Hamas, who has the violent destruction of Israel and murder of its citizens as an explicit goal, Israel is justified in eliminating Hamas from ever being a threat again.

That does not mean that they have the right to just flatten Gaza and murder all its residents, which, it needs to be said, it easily could do and is not doing. However, while they certainly could be doing much more to protect the lives of Gazan citizens and should be criticized for not doing so, their fundamental aim of eliminating Hamas and forcibly de-militarizing Gaza is legitimately justified.

Ultimately, a two-state solution is the only realistic path towards some kind of peaceful co-existence, and that is impossible when you have a party like Hamas that is expressly opposed to the existence of Israel and takes action to indiscriminately murder its citizens. Again, that doesn’t mean that Israel hasn’t also done objectionable things as well, but what it hasn’t ever done is drive the IDF into Palestinian villages and start shooting every man, women, and child they see.

Essentially, I support actions that make peace more possible and oppose those that don’t. There is no world in which Hamas is part of a productive path to peace. Similarly, I’m also extremely opposed to West Bank settlements and have next to no sympathy for the people that voluntarily move there. They only really began in earnest once Likud gained power, and Likud is also a party that has no real interest in moving towards peace (though thankfully, they’re absolutely toast once the fighting is over). However, the lands that were attacked three weeks ago have never been claimed by any Palestinian government and have been recognized as Israel’s since 1949.

That’s roughly the general liberal pro-Israel approach I see. Likud is bad and needs to go. Israel does a lot of bad things and needs new government (a sentiment shared by a good half of Israelis). Hamas are literal terrorists and absolutely have to go. If you have any genuine questions to ask that isn’t just accusing me of being a genocidal maniac, I’m all ears.

Because if you know the history you know that it is the pals who are belligerent and have instigated every conflict guided by islamic fascism, that their can be no non Muslim nation in the middle east (and later on for the world)

Obviously Jews have a reason for living in the land, Jews are the natives of the land , you can see in Jerusalem there is a mosque built on top of the Jewish temple, I don’t think it’s hard to figure out who the colonizer is.

Most of history is reaction to another thing… But if you look up the 1948nparririon plan you will see that Israel was willing to accept a tiny Jewish state on land which was largely uninhabited and the inhabited part Jewish. The arabs went to war against it under the premise there can be no Jewish state. Preceding the state of Israel there were laws against Jewish immigration and discriminatory laws against Jews in every Muslim country.

Palestine was not a nation in any sense, there were many groups of people and one side of the land had nothing to do with another. Jordan was part of Palestine as was given the the ‘heshimite’ family which is not from there and no one seems to mind.

So it is clear the opposition to a Jewish state on any form is based in bigoted Islamic fascism, I don’t know how this couldn’t be clear to someone when you see what the Muslims have done to Christians in Lebanon and syria, Hindus in India, and to each other in the Syrian cival war, iran-iraq war etc…

You can see over the years Israel has made many concessions for peace, offered Palestinian states many times, has RESTRAINED military responses. What steps have the pals ever taken towards peace? They receive millions in aid and use it to build rockets. How asinine can you be to claim to care about the ‘history of the land’ and seek to exclude Judaism? Jews are the natives of the land, arabs and islam are from arabia. It would be like being in genocidal hysterics over indian reservations.

The people supporting pals are Islamic fascists and slogan yelling clueless teenagers

I like saying something controversial then not responding

gottverdammt*

Given how often the term is being misused lately, it’s a fair question. The Israeli embassy started a campaing against the mayor of Barcelona trying to frame her as an antisemite because she took symbolic measures to denounce Israel’s crimes against Palestinians back in February. Plenty of European politicians just don’t want to speak with honesty because they don’t want the bad PR of being the target of this kind of attacks.

How would you derive that someone “dislikes jews because they are jews”? Do you listen to them talk and make a decision following your gut? Do you make an MRI image of their brain and measure their brain waves to read their mind?
You would have to work with their past actions. And then it becomes non trivial to define “anti-semite”.
So it is not really about “what does the word mean” but “how do you decide who fits the definition and who doesn’t”. People are concerned about this because it is very hard to make a law that 100% only fits to the people you want to target (leaving asside wether the principle is correct or not).