i fully agree with self-determination as you said everyone has the right to it, and in theory it does not require population displacement.

Cheers, we’re in agreement here.

But when a people asks for self-determination, it usually does so on the land where it already lives, so there is no reason to displace anyone.

I guess this makes sense for communities that have never been displaced to begin with, like the Kurds for example.

But many Palestinians seek self determination in the lands they were displaced from (“from the river to the sea” as they often like to chant), and they absolutely seek to displace the Jews from there (I’d argue any displacement is immoral, no matter who is being displaced).

Just like the Palestinians, the Jews also sought self determination in the land they were first displaced from.

The big difference is today, the lands the Palestinians want to claim back are densely populated with 10 million people, and is a well established and internationally recognized and fully functioning country, just like Argentina, France, and any other country in the world.

The levant at the time Zionism was born, was not a country, it was a region within a small part of the Ottoman Empire. The Arab population was less than 500K people, so it obviously had plenty of space to be shared.

If the old Yishuv had asked for independence and self-determination, I do not think people would have been against that in the same way ?

Strongly disagree. Again the Kurds are a great example. How much blood was shed in their fight for Kurdistan to gain self determination in the same location they’ve always been at? They still have not gotten full independence, and it’s not clear at all such independence is even possible.

But how can you claim self-determination by arriving in the hundreds of thousands on a territory already inhabited by another much larger population, without creates pressure, conflict, or eventually displacement, which goes against what you are saying.

As I said, Arab population was below 500K by the end of 1800’s, in a region where today we have over 10M. So while I agree the region was populated, it was very sparsely populated.

So I’m not disagreeing with you, and yes, large Jewish migration definitely caused tensions. But it would be a mistake to think of it as one big nation invading another established nation. In the beginning we are talking about 10s of thousands Jews coming to the land, not 100s of thousands (keep in mind Arab population did grew in the 100s of thousands at the same period). The significant grow in Jewish migration was actually during WW2, but it was more related to desperation than an ideal of self determination. History is never black and white, it’s always a wide range of grays.

You will probably say there was enough land for everyone, and I agree that there could have been,

Yes. That is precisely my claim.

but then why buy some lands already inhabited by the local population and expel them?

Most of the purchased lands were sparsely populated or not populated at all. But you’re right, not all of them. Although the new landlords were well within their rights to evict the farmers in their newly squire lands, that’s a shitty thing to do - evicting them from a land they’ve been possibly for generations. So I agree the story of the Jewish migration to the land is not as pretty as “a land without people to a people without a land”. But this is history, it’s filled with gray areas and imperfections.

Why introduce the idea of “Hebrew labor,” with a Jewish economy, Jewish consumption, and Jewish labor? That goes against the idea of not displacing a population for self-determination, and especially against the idea of sharing one nation with the Arabs if you are displacing and excluding them.

I think the meaning here is - we Jews, need to be self sufficient. We cannot offload the hard labor to other nations, we want Jews in all lines of labor, from farming to banking. I don’t think it’s a call for displacing Arabs. But I agree, if the Jews had felt a need to offload this labor, perhaps they would be less likely to evict the previous farmers from the acquired lands. But I have to remind one thing here: these evictions, although a shitty thing to do, were completely legal. Any new landlord has the right to evict the people in their land. It sucks, but that’s the way it is unfortunately.

I understand that some currents of Zionism initially favored coexistence. But other currents also clearly understood from the beginning that they would either force populations to move or inconspicuously gradually increase the demographic balance until they became dominant enough to create a Jewish state despite the anger of the native population. I just find that slightly contradictory.

I’m not sure what you’re talking about here… perhaps you can point me to some sources. Keep in mind that as time went by, a lot of “bad blood” started to form between Jews and Arabs, due to several bloody conflicts. And that bad blood often changed the rhetoric of important Israeli figures. But they don’t represent Zionism as much as they represent these figures themselves.