A Dutch commentator said something incredibly profound that stuck with me: Israel is a Middle Eastern country instead of an outpost of European civilization.
I wonder what makes Europeans think Israel is an outpost of European civilization - just the skin tone? Lol.
Israel has always been a country trying to coopt the culture of its Arab neighbors. They've tried to claim shawarmas, falafel and hummus, dishes that are quintessentially Arabic, as their own.
Skin tone? The aspiration to assign Western concepts of racism to Israeli society is so uninformed, if I am to be assuming good intentions, or very manipulative. More than half of Israeli Jews immigrated from Arab countries, and look Arab by all means. Including myself. It's literally impossible to tell if someone is an Israeli or a Palestinian based on their skin tone.
Israel is literally a European colony. Europe sent a bunch of people from Europe to an already populated land to settle there and displace the natives. What definition of "outpost" wouldn't include that?
> Europe sent a bunch of people from Europe to an already populated land to settle there and displace the natives
Are we talking about recent Jewish migrants? Or migration under the British, the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Romans, the Macedonians, the Babylonians or the Sea Peoples?
This American tendency to project black-white and colonist-colonised diametrics onto the world is insanely reductive. There are settler-colonial elements to Israel's creation. That one thread of commonality doesn't make it comparable to the New World.
> Israel has always been a country trying to coopt the culture of its Arab neighbors. They've tried to claim shawarmas, falafel and hummus, dishes that are quintessentially Arabic, as their own.
That argument is just as much BS as the squabbles in the Balkans over who can claim Nikola Tesla, cevapcici, burek/börek, döner/gyros, pljeskavica and a whole other host of foods. Everyone got their own takes on food and trying to act like shawarma/falafel/hummus are "exclusively" Arabic (or Israeli) is borderline moronic.
That's precisely my point. I didn't mean those dishes were Arabic by origin, but by prevalence. In fact, evidence points out to shawarma being an adaptation of the Turkish doner that was developed variously across the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire. But the fact of the matter is that these dishes ended up being the mainstay of Arabic cuisine long after the Ottoman Empire's end.
Then a bunch of white Ashkenazi/Sephardic/Mizrahi bois ship on over from Europe and Yemen and Morocco and try to claim themselves as the originators when they clearly aren't.
And when other Europeans stopped those Europeans from murdering all the Jews, they decided to expel them to the middle east instead, creating the situation we have today.
