Hi. I am from Jordan, and all four of my grandparents were born in Mandatory Palestine … yet I am pro Israel.

Why?

Well here are my reasons, and they might be different from what you usually hear.

Who owns the land?

Property (including land) is rightfully owned by those who created it, discovered it, or peacefully traded for it.

However, rights are “forfeitable”. They are contingent on you respecting the rights of others. Let’s say you buy a gun: Now you have earned it; it’s yours. But if you use the gun to commit a crime, then you can lose the right to it. Is land any different? No it is not.

Palestinians do not even understand the concept of rights, let alone have the capacity to practice them, even imperfectly. Atheists, women, LGBTQ individuals, and even Muslims who are unorthodox are treated horribly by their Palestinian kin. This is not an exception but the rule, and any attempt at criticizing Palestinians (or Arabs in general) in this regard are met with hostility, making them hard if not impossible to reform.

Palestinians therefore cannot have a moral claim to the land, or a state on such land…

Which state has the right to exist?

A state that would have institutionalized such rights violations would be even worse. When the state you dream of is an institutionalization of oppression, you have no right to a state.

On the other hand, the Jews wanted to establish a modern, secular state, and actually did so, which protects human rights a million times better than any Palestinian state imaginable.

Israel has a right to exist simply because it knows how to protect human rights, even if imperfectly. Palestinians however, don’t have such a concept to practice to begin with.

Why the conflict is about core values, and why some of those values are better than others

The start of the Arab-Israeli conflict is not historical: What happened 5000 years ago, or even 50 years ago, does not have to influence what happens today.

Plus, why did what happened 50 years ago actually happen? You can’t keep pushing the start backwards, since you’ll get an infinite regress, or stop arbitrarily at a point in the past.

So where does the conflict start? What is the cause?

It starts from values. Both parties have a conflicting set of values. If jews today accepted Islamic values, there would be no conflict, and all the historical issues would dissolve.

Likewise, if Arabs were to become Zionists, the conflict would resolve in a day.

These two sets of values are incompatible, and also morally distinguishable.

While I am not a fan of Zionism, the other values in Israel like democracy, separation of powers, freedom of speech, science, technology, art (to name a few), are all rational and necessary values.

Meanwhile, Palestinians’ values are medieval in a modern world, and lead to terrorism and oppression.

Finally…

Finally, due to these differences, a rational person in Israel would have a much, much better chance at living a rational life, than he would in any Palestinian state. If politics/ethics have any use at all, I think it would have to be to allow for a rational way of life; to protect rational human beings.

This is my basic motivation for supporting Israel, and it’s different from any historical argument (the Jews were there first…), or a religious one, or one that is derived from details of who did what at some point in time: In principle, one way of life is better and has to be supported, and another is worse and has to be condemned and fought.