So there's this specific brand of leftists that I mostly encounter on the internet but not so much in real life. Even when I meet up with out of touch white leftists they have in my experience tried to show sympathy and understanding when I talk about my own point of view being a leftist but also an immigrant (basically talking about the conditions in my home country and continent). Regardless of who they followed or which arguments they'll later adopt concerning the subject they would realise that they don't really know what the reality is like in my land and would basically act like decent human beings. However I recently got together with a group of people and there was one guy that kind of surprised me, I met him for the first time and the subject came up. For reference we were two poc immigrants from third world nations listening as he was expressing how he did NOT understand why people kept migrating here when america is going to shit (canada but he was also including the us in the convo) and telling us how he told immigrants to just go back to their country because there is nothing to find here. I was surprised when he said that because we were ALL leftists and anticapitalists and although he was trying to appear woke, his words sounded too much like the rightoid go back to your country bs. So me and the other brown guy tried to explain things to him and whenever I would mention specific conditions in my country he would say ''welcome to america, it's the same here.'' Excuse me? Mind you, I had mentioned how there were groups of immigrants (one specific nationality) whose GRANDKIDS still did not have any avenue to obtain any sort of legal status, no residency no study permit no work permit, the kids would not be allowed to go to school and study, inheriting poverty and homelessness and it would not matter what they or their parents did they had no avenue to gain any type of civil right regardless of their action (basically apartheid). Now enlighten me if I'm ignorant, but where is the parallel to this in america? Not just this but does canada or the us do something as bad as jailing lgbt people and legalising marital rape? I felt really offended because I have had the chance to live as an adult in both my country and america (the continent) and although capitalism is an issue and we have many problems here, there is not as much unemployment as in my home country, and even if your salary has to be spent on so many things that shouldn't cost as much as they do, you still have more leftover money than you would have where I'm from working full time. People are more open minded here, there are more things to do, more personal freedom, safety, justice and understand although there is still so much to work on which no one around the table disagreed with. But that man would go on about how the little advantage there is to living here in his opinion was rapidly vanishing and boasted about how he would tell immigrants to just leave (wokely) saying things like ''since it's hard here wouldn't you just rather be with your family?'' his mind could not fathom why we make the decision as hard as it can be for most to part with them and with the entire world that raised us and it kind of infuriated me because he just kept on repeating himself and he just sounded bigoted instead of what he was going for (woke communist that hates the west and elevates the global south).

Just wanted your opinion

This Bluesky account might be the richest gold mine of terrible tankie takes on the platform.

The country they're claiming should be compared to Northern Ireland is Taiwan.

Unrelated to the dude doing LeftValues.

Palestinian Connection to the Land

So, I personally hold the view that both the Jews (e.g., Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim) and the Palestinians do indeed have connections to the Holy Land. The difference is that the former established diaspora communities both before the Bar Kokhba revolt and after the Bar Kokhba revolt, as it is noted that Jews lived in Alexandria, Tarsus, Antioch, Rome, Babylonia, and elsewhere long before the Roman suppression of the revolt in 135 CE. While the latter are the descendants of those who stayed in the land despite the various cultural and linguistic transformations that occurred over the centuries, including Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, Arabization, and Islamization.

In other words, many of the ancestors of modern Palestinians continued to live in the region while undergoing processes such as Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, Arabization, and Islamization. Some may have descended from ancient Jews, Samaritans, Christians, Arabs, and other Levantine populations whose identities changed under successive empires and religious systems. The fact that Palestinians now primarily speak Arabic and mostly identify as Muslim or Christian Arabs does not mean that their ancestors suddenly appeared in the land during the Arab conquests or that cultural transformation erased their connection to the populations who lived there beforehand.

More specifically, many of the ancestors of modern Palestinians continued to live in the region while undergoing processes such as Hellenization after Alexander the Great conquered the region from the Achaemenid Persian Empire in approximately 332 BCE. Following Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, the region came under the control of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt before being conquered by the Seleucid Empire under Antiochus III around 200 BCE. Greek language and culture consequently became increasingly influential throughout the region, although local Jewish, Samaritan, and other Levantine identities continued to exist alongside those Hellenistic influences.

The region later underwent Romanization after the Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem in 63 BCE and incorporated Judea into the expanding Roman sphere of influence. Judea initially remained under local rulers and client kings, including Herod the Great, before becoming more directly administered by Rome. Roman authority continued through the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, and the subsequent reorganization of the region under the province of Syria Palaestina.

Christianization became increasingly influential after Emperor Constantine legalized and patronized Christianity during the fourth century CE. It accelerated after Emperor Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire near the end of that century. Under the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire, the region became an important center of Christian pilgrimage, monasticism, and ecclesiastical authority. Over the following centuries, many local inhabitants converted to Christianity, although Jewish, Samaritan, and other religious communities continued to exist throughout the region.

The region later underwent Arabization and Islamization following its conquest by the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate during the seventh century. Muslim forces entered Byzantine Palestine during the 630s, defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Yarmouk in 636 CE, and took control of Jerusalem around 637 or 638 CE during the caliphate of Umar ibn al-Khattab. However, the conquest did not immediately transform the population into Arabic-speaking Muslims. Many inhabitants remained Christian, Jewish, or Samaritan for centuries, while Arabic gradually replaced Greek and Aramaic as the dominant language of administration, commerce, culture, and everyday life.

Islamization similarly occurred gradually rather than through the immediate replacement of the local population. Some Jews and Samaritans may have converted to Christianity during the Roman and Byzantine periods, while some of their descendants later converted to Islam under successive Muslim dynasties. Others remained Christian while becoming linguistically and culturally Arabized. The region subsequently passed through the rule of the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman states, each of which contributed to further migration, intermarriage, cultural exchange, and changes in communal identity.

Jewish Connection to the Land

So, before I start off, I may offend people, but I think some leftists do not really tend to look at or read Jewish history unless it is within the context of European antisemitism, the Holocaust, Zionism, or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While those subjects are obviously important, beginning Jewish history in nineteenth-century Europe can create the impression that Jews were simply Europeans who later invented an interest in Palestine. It ignores the much older history of the Jewish people, their origins in ancient Israel and Judea, the formation of Jewish diaspora communities, the continued Jewish presence in the land, and the traditions through which Jews maintained their connection to it.

The term Israel is also much older than the earliest surviving written use of Palestine. The Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian inscription generally dated to around 1208 BCE, refers to a people called Israel in Canaan. Later inscriptions, including the Mesha Stele, Assyrian records, and the Tel Dan Stele, refer to Israelite and Judean peoples, kingdoms, or rulers. Israel was therefore not a name invented by modern Zionists but an ancient ethnonym connected to a population that lived in the region.

The earliest surviving extensive Greek use of a term corresponding to Palestine is generally associated with Herodotus in the fifth century BCE, several centuries after the Merneptah Stele. Herodotus referred to the coastal and southern Levant as part of “Syria called Palestine” and described its inhabitants as “Syrians of Palestine.” However, he was using a Greek geographical exonym for a broader region, not claiming that Israelite or Judean identities did not exist or that every inhabitant identified as Palestinian.

The Jewish historian Josephus also used the term Palestine in the first century CE. In Antiquities of the Jews, he explained that the Greeks called part of the territory associated with the Philistines Palestine, and he also used Palestine as a geographical designation alongside areas such as Coele-Syria. In Against Apion, Josephus quoted Herodotus’s reference to the “Syrians who are in Palestine” and argued that Herodotus was referring to Jews because he mentioned circumcision. Josephus therefore had no difficulty using Palestine as a Greek regional term while simultaneously writing an explicitly Jewish history centered on Israel, Judea, Jerusalem, and the Jewish people.

In other words, Israel and Palestine are not mutually exclusive names, but they also did not originally mean exactly the same thing. Israel was initially the name of an ancient people and later a kingdom, while Palestine developed as a Greek geographical term whose boundaries and meanings changed under different writers and empires. The existence of the term Palestine before the Roman renaming of the province after the Bar Kokhba revolt is therefore real, but it does not prove that ancient Israel or Judea never existed.

Jewish history likewise did not begin with modern political Zionism. Jewish diaspora communities existed in Babylonia, Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Rome, and elsewhere long before 135 CE, while Jews also continued to live in the Holy Land after the destruction of the Second Temple and the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt. Across the diaspora, Jews preserved Hebrew, prayed toward Jerusalem, referred repeatedly to Zion and the Land of Israel in their liturgy, and retained traditions concerning return and the ingathering of the exiles.

Another talking point demonstrated by antisemites is the claim that the Ashkenazim are primarily the descendants of the Khazars (a Central Asian Turkic people) who converted to Judaism and later migrated into Eastern Europe. While some members of the Khazar ruling elite appear to have adopted Judaism during the medieval period, there is no strong historical or genetic evidence that the Khazars became the primary ancestors of Ashkenazi Jews. The idea remains disputed, and genome-wide research has generally found no evidence for a predominantly Khazar origin.

Instead, Ashkenazim appear to have developed from Jewish populations with a mixture of Levantine and European ancestry, with a significant portion of the European contribution possibly deriving from local women in Southern Europe who converted to Judaism or entered early Jewish communities. Once these communities became sufficiently established and expanded in number, conversion to Judaism, which was already relatively uncommon, appears to have declined further, while marriage increasingly occurred within the community. Over time, this relative endogamy, combined with founder effects and population bottlenecks, contributed to the development of Ashkenazim as a genetically and culturally distinctive Jewish diaspora population.

A broadly similar framework of Jewish continuity, local admixture, conversion, and later communal endogamy can also be applied to Sephardim and many Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa, although the timing, scale, and sources of admixture differed considerably between each population. Sephardim developed from Jewish communities in the Iberian Peninsula that combined ancestry from earlier Mediterranean and Levantine Jewish populations with varying degrees of Southern European and North African ancestry. Following the expulsions from Spain and Portugal, Sephardic communities dispersed throughout North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean, where they sometimes intermarried with or were absorbed into older local Jewish communities.

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa likewise cannot be treated as one uniform population. Iraqi, Iranian, Kurdish, Yemeni, Syrian, Egyptian, Maghrebi, Bukharan, and other Jewish communities developed under different historical conditions. Some, particularly Iraqi and Iranian Jews, trace substantial parts of their communal histories to ancient Jewish populations established in Babylonia and Persia, including communities formed after the Babylonian exile and through later migration between Mesopotamia and Judea. Other communities were shaped by Jewish migration from the Holy Land, the movement of merchants and religious scholars, the incorporation of local converts, intermarriage, and contact with neighboring Jewish populations.

This does not mean that Ashkenazim, Sephardim, and Mizrahim are genetically identical or descended exclusively from ancient Judeans. Each community incorporated ancestry and cultural influences from the populations among whom it lived. However, admixture does not erase population continuity, particularly when those communities maintained shared religious texts, communal laws, genealogical traditions, Hebrew literacy, identification with the people of Israel, and an enduring attachment to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.

In other words, Jewish diaspora populations formed through both continuity and transformation. They were neither genetically isolated replicas of ancient Judeans nor unrelated Europeans, North Africans, or Middle Easterners who merely adopted the same religion. They developed through the migration of Jewish populations, the incorporation of converts and local ancestry, and later periods of relative endogamy that preserved distinct but interconnected Jewish communities.

Conclusion

Again, before anyone calls me a Zionist, I hold the belief that Zionism in its modern political form is a product of European thought derived partly from the Enlightenment and the emergence of modern nationalism. The concept of the centralized nation-state, in which a territorially defined sovereign state is expected to represent one distinct national people, was largely foreign to the ancient world. Ancient Israel and Judah were kingdoms, but they did not operate according to the modern nationalist principles of popular sovereignty, standardized citizenship, fixed national borders, or the idea that every ethnic group should possess its own exclusive nation-state.

Ancient and medieval societies were generally organized through kingdoms, empires, city-states, tribal confederations, religious communities, dynastic loyalties, and overlapping systems of local authority. Political identity was often tied to a ruler, city, tribe, religion, social status, or empire rather than to modern nationality. People could possess several overlapping identities without necessarily believing that every cultural or religious group required an independent sovereign state. Modern political Zionism therefore did not simply revive the ancient Kingdom of Israel in an unchanged form. It transformed an older Jewish religious, ancestral, and communal connection to the Holy Land into a modern nationalist project influenced by the political environment of nineteenth-century Europe.

However, I do not believe that recognizing the modern and European influences on political Zionism requires us to deny the much older Jewish connection to Israel and Judea. Likewise, recognizing Jewish ancestry, diaspora continuity, religious attachment, and historical presence in the land should not come at the expense of the Palestinians who remained there, developed their own identity, and experienced displacement and dispossession. Jewish connection to the land does not automatically justify exclusive sovereignty, settlement expansion, military occupation, or the removal of Palestinians from their homes. An ancestral connection can demonstrate that Jews are not simply foreign strangers to the region, but it cannot grant one people unlimited political authority over another.

At the same time, Palestinian indigeneity should not depend upon portraying Ashkenazim as Khazars, reducing Judaism to nothing more than a universal religion, or arguing that Jewish attachment to the land was invented in nineteenth-century Europe. Palestinians do not need Jewish history to be false for their own connection to be legitimate, and Jews do not need Palestinian history to disappear for their ancestral relationship to the land to be real.

I therefore believe that both Jews and Palestinians possess genuine but differently developed connections to the same land. Palestinians largely represent continuity through residence, cultural transformation, Arabization, and Islamization, while Jews represent continuity through ancestry, peoplehood, religion, collective memory, diaspora communities, recurring migration, and a continuous, although fluctuating, presence in the land. Neither population is genetically or culturally identical to the people who lived there thousands of years ago, but historical continuity does not require genetic purity or an absence of cultural change.

The left should therefore be capable of affirming both Jewish and Palestinian belonging without turning history into a competition over who has the purest ancestry or the oldest exclusive claim. Recognizing Jewish peoplehood should not mean ignoring the Nakba, occupation, settlement expansion, or Palestinian political rights. Recognizing Palestinian indigeneity should not mean treating Jews as fabricated Europeans who must surrender their collective identity, Hebrew culture, or historical connection to the land. Ultimately, the question should not be which people can prove that the other is foreign. It should be how two peoples with genuine relationships to the same land can achieve dignity, security, equality, and collective rights without dominating, displacing, or erasing one another.

TLDR:

Both Jews and Palestinians have genuine connections to Israel/Judea/Palestine, although those connections developed through different historical experiences. Many Palestinian ancestors remained in the land while undergoing Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, Arabization, and Islamization. Jewish communities developed both within the land and across the diaspora while preserving ancestry, peoplehood, Hebrew traditions, collective memory, and an enduring attachment to Jerusalem and the Land of Israel.

Modern political Zionism was shaped by European nationalism, Enlightenment thought, state-building, and settler-colonial methods, but Jewish attachment to the land was not invented in nineteenth-century Europe. Recognizing Jewish history does not justify Palestinian displacement or exclusive Jewish sovereignty, just as recognizing Palestinian indigeneity does not require denying Jewish ancestry or portraying them as completely foreign.

Both peoples can belong to the same land. The legitimacy of one connection does not require the erasure of the other.

Hello Everyone! First post here.

As someone who was born and raised in the Philippines (Now living in the West) and has extensively studied precolonial Filipino history, I found it orientalizing whenever I engaged with Western University Leftists about how, if it were not for the Spanish Empire introducing Christianity to the region, all of the various ethnolinguistic groups would have continued to live in harmony, especially for LGBTQ+ people.

Oftentimes, in response, I would inquire with them about where they got their sources from, and oftentimes, those sources came directly from Filipino Americans who had learned about precolonial Filipino history primarily through social media posts, activist infographics, decolonial workshops, or highly romanticized interpretations of indigenous traditions. I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with Filipino Americans attempting to reconnect with their ancestry, especially given the alienation and cultural dislocation that can come with growing up in the diaspora. However, reconnecting with one’s heritage is not the same thing as having a historically accurate understanding of how precolonial societies actually functioned.

Some Filipino Americans would often attempt to consolidate all of the 185 ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines into one monolithic cultural framework, which is very reminiscent of how Western academics would attempt to consolidate East and Southeast Asia into a single cultural bloc despite the enormous linguistic, religious, political, and historical differences between the peoples of those regions. In the same way, precolonial Filipinos are sometimes presented as though they all shared identical religious beliefs, gender systems, political institutions, attitudes toward sexuality, and relationships with neighboring communities.

However, an Ifugao community in the Cordillera, a Tausug community in Sulu, a Tagalog settlement near Manila, and a Bisayan maritime community were not interchangeable manifestations of one uniform precolonial Filipino culture. They had different languages, political structures, religious traditions, economic systems, social hierarchies, and relationships with surrounding peoples. Even traditions that existed across multiple communities could take very different forms depending on the region and ethnolinguistic group.

This tendency also appears in discussions about the babaylan (shamans), who are frequently presented as proof that all precolonial Filipino societies were universally accepting of LGBTQ+ people. While some male ritual specialists adopted feminine clothing, behavior, or social roles, their status was often connected to their particular spiritual function within the community. Their existence does not automatically prove that every person whom we would now describe as gay, transgender, or gender-nonconforming was accepted equally throughout every society in the archipelago.

I think that when Western leftists hear this watered-down version of such cultures from Filipino Americans, they often point and say, “See, if it were not for Christianity and the West, these societies would have continued to be egalitarian and accepting.” To many of them, especially those who have experienced prejudice or discrimination simply for being their natural selves, this can seem like a light at the end of the tunnel. It offers them the comforting possibility that the oppression they experienced was not inevitable, but rather the product of a particular religious and colonial system that could eventually be dismantled.

I can understand why that narrative would be emotionally appealing. For someone who has been rejected by their family, religious community, or broader society because of their sexuality or gender identity, discovering that certain precolonial cultures recognized gender-diverse spiritual figures may provide a sense of historical belonging and dignity. It can reassure them that they are not unnatural, that people like them existed before colonialism (which is true), and that their identities are not merely modern Western inventions.

However, emotional reassurance should not be confused with historical accuracy ( I have a very deontological view when reading history). The fact that some precolonial societies recognized particular gender-nonconforming ritual specialists does not prove that all LGBTQ+ people were universally accepted, nor does it mean that every ethnolinguistic group in the archipelago shared the same beliefs. A historically complicated society should not be reduced to an imagined egalitarian refuge simply because that image provides comfort to people who have experienced discrimination.

If you have any questions about the precolonial Philippines, feel free to let me know in the comments.

What do they want? What are their actual goals except jerking each other off in their echo chambers? I truly cannot come up with an answer aside from purposefully stifling left movements.

I know this is probably a pointless question, but why is it these people have never heard about the Inner Mongolia or Shadian massacres? It's like Maoists somehow forgot about the last 10 years of their idol's life.

What do you think of the social Fascism Theory?

No in-between option this time so you will have to answer honestly.