#I'm not a politician and I won't pretend I can solve a millennia old conflict

[butwhypants]

I have a question and I’m not trying to be annoying. I just want to understand because I feel like I have been misunderstanding how Zionism should work.

Obviously, Zionism is the belief that a Jewish state should exist in Israel. The thing I’ve been misunderstanding is how this can be achieved while protecting the Muslim arabs.

What I mean is, there are a lot of Arabs in West Bank and Gaza, and if Israel gave full citizenship to these people, they would outnumber Israeli jews, and this it would no longer be a Jewish state.

How, realistically, would the Jewish state, protect the rights of the Arabs while remaining fundamentally Jewish?

The main solution I have seen is a two-state solution, but I feel like that would force Jews to leave their homes in the West Bank.

I understand if you aren’t comfortable answering this - I’d just like to try to understand both sides. It’s hard to get unbiased info from the news.

Thanks for the polite question.

The problem with the question I think here is twofold, first Zionism is a very specific word. Zion is the name for the hill that Jerusalem is built on, and was used by the Israeli people when we were taken as slaves to Babylon in the 5th century BC. Zionism isn't inherently about a Jewish state existing, but about the right of the Israelite people to return to Zion, now known as Jerusalem.

The second problem, and I don't mean this with any disrespect, is that you've fallen for the Great Replacement theory as espoused by Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk. It's a very common and very insidious idea, which is based on the idea that if "foreign" cultures were allowed to come in to a society that they would outnumber and overthrow the people currently there. That's not true, and in fact a majority of the Palestinian people ARE Israeli citizens, with full legal and voting rights. Israel is not a theocracy (significantly more religious diversity then the US has for example), and maintaining a religious majority should not and can not be our goal. Allowing the Jewish people self determination in our homeland does not have to correlate with oppression or discrimination against the Palestinian people who also live there.

This current war betrays the fact that there is a long history of cooperation and conflict between all these groups - Eretz Israel is the most contentiously fought over piece of land in the history of the world, and this current war isn't even in the top one hundred most deadly. On the other hand though, cooperation has happened before and it will happen again. Muslims and Jews are not automatically enemies - we've both been willing to make sacrifices on hardline religious interpretations for the sake of peace before, and I hope we can do so again.

Fundamentally, the Jewish people have a long history of living in Israel and we have the right to live there safe and free. However, the Palestinian people ALSO have a long history of living in Israel and have the right to live there safe and free. There is no solution here that will create a mono-state of any culture or religion, and especially not when it is the most important place to 4 billion disparate people.