And I’ll say it again, you’re not speaking history, you’re speaking narrative and ideology. You don’t seem to understand that it doesn’t matter what the founding ideology is, what matters is what actually happened. The fact that you think you can boil this conflict down to “good vs bad” shows that your ignorance on the subject. There are a lot of conflicts in history that could be that simple, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a good example, but this is not one of those conflicts.

History is meant to be something that’s factual, because you’re retelling what happened. You’re not supposed to be taking sides and digest information from the perspective of a side, that defeats the whole purpose of being objective.

I’ll give you an example, during the 20th century, around 1 million Jews in the muslim world were forced out from their countries for no other reason than being Jewish. These people didn’t do anything wrong, they had nothing to do with the creation of Israel but they found themselves stripped of their property, communities (some of which are thousands of years old) and were forced to go there as that was the only place that would accept them. These people are as much victims as the victims of the Nakba, except this was even larger in scale… yet people like you don’t even acknowledge it’s existence.

Here’s another example, before the creation of Israel and Palestine, the British Mandate had a population of around 750k in the 1920s, and around 10% of those were Jewish. Those Jews were very religious, as opposed to many zionist Jews that migrated there. These Jews were vocal against the creation of Israel, but they became citizens anyway when Israel was established. Those Jews also happen to be from sects that have consistently had the highest birthrates over the decades, and so their descendants today can trace their roots back for thousands of years having never left the region. These people clearly don’t fit the narrative you are trying to paint, but again, you don’t acknowledge their existence.

Here’s yet another example, the Palestinian national identity formed around in the 1920s and 1930s, around the same time the Israeli national identity formed, and both became official after the 1947 partition plan. Prior to the British Mandate, there was no such thing as a Palestinian nation. The term “Palestine” was a colloquial one that loosely referred to the region that made up the “holy land”. The borders and identity that we associate with Palestine today didn’t exist during the Ottoman period, these are literally British inventions. The region was divided differently and the people there saw themselves differently. The region was filled with Turks, Jews, Christians, Arabs, and bunch of other ethnic and religious groups. They all saw themselves as natives to the region and they primarily identified with their ethnic/religious group first and then as Ottoman second. The same applies to Mamluks before the Ottoman Empire. In this case, the Arabs in the region saw themselves as a part of al bilad al sham (the Levant or greater Syria) which was a part of al ummah al arrabiya (the Arab nation). This is because until the British and the French drew random borders, the Arab world saw itself as a single nation. When people talk about the native nation of Palestine, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. Like I said, it doesn’t matter how something was intended to happen, what matters was what actually happened. These are all events things that were not foreseen by Zionist philosophers living in god knows where. This is precisely why you can’t develop narratives based on narratives, what you will end up with is a distorted image of reality. I agree with you that what the Israeli government today is doing in Gaza and the West Bank is reprehensible and I agree with you that Zionist philosophers were pro-colonialism, but what I am saying is that only using these two points of the regions history or using a single perspective (especially a biased one) will blind to everything else that happened.

If you would like something to read, a good and free place to start would be this chapter of israeli historian Avi Shlaim’s book “Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine”, which is publicly available right here.

Some relevant excerpts about Jabotinsky specifically:

The Zionist mainstream settled on Palestine as the location of this state because of the territory’s resonance in Jewish history and culture. How large should the state be, what should be its character, how could it be realised – such questions provoked heated controversies within the Zionist movement. But almost the full spectrum of Zionist opinion cohered around the essential goal of establishing a state in Palestine populated by an overwhelming Jewish demographic majority.

This objective almost inevitably provoked conflict in Palestine between Zionist newcomers and the territory’s existing inhabitants, who were overwhelmingly not Jewish. Palestinian Arabs had no political stake in an endeavour that sought, as the leading Zionist diplomat Chaim Weizmann put it, to render Palestine “as Jewish as England is English”. On the contrary, Palestinians reasonably feared that Zionism could succeed only by dispossessing them of house and homeland. Palestinian opposition to Zionism was therefore as comprehensive as it was consistent. This fundamental clash of interests was spotlighted by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ever-candid leader of Revisionist Zionism. In his seminal 1923 article, “The Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky argued that Palestinians would never “voluntarily consent to the realisation of Zionism” because “every native population in the world resists colonists”. This meant “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population” behind “a power that is independent” of them. Zionism for many Jews was a movement for collective assertion as well as defence through national self-determination. Zionism for Palestinians was a violent colonial imposition.

and later

As Jabotinsky prophesied, expanding Jewish settlement frequently provoked Palestinian opposition as well as resistance. Such opposition was typically overruled by means of discriminatory administration while resistance was suppressed by force. In the Mandate period, the Zionist leadership rejected the democratic principle of majority rule in Palestine so long as Jews comprised a minority, on the correct assumption that an Arab electoral majority would vote to end Jewish immigration and settlement. Between 1936 and 1939, British armed forces along with Jewish paramilitaries viciously crushed a Palestinian national revolt. After the 1948 War, Israel subjected some 90 percent of its Arab citizens to military rule. This emergency regime facilitated the destruction of Arab property and expropriation of Arab land until it was lifted in 1966, by which time the state’s demographic objectives within the Green Line had been substantially accomplished. The pattern repeated in the OPT from the following year. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967: three-quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a state. The occupation has been enforced through harsh repression including deportation, arbitrary detention, collective punishment, and unlawful killings. By one estimate, Israel jailed more than 800,000 Palestinians from the OPT between 1967 and 2016; those detained were “routinely subjected to torture”.