50 years…
…is as good an answer as any.
Somebody might have taken land from me six months ago or five years ago. But if somebody took land five hundred years ago, it obviously wasn’t taken from me.
If we’re arguing about whose ancestors were there first, I think it’s a historical fact that the Jews were around before the Muslims.
I don’t see how anyone can debate the legality of Israel’s existence; it was indisputably ratified by the UN and is recognized by most member nations around the world. There certainly are legitimate criticisms about the process toward becoming a nation-state (not really feeling like having that debate again, lol), but the legality of its existence itself is pretty clearly established.
The Chinese have bought property down the street from me. 5% is pretty good given that Jews weren’t even allowed to buy land before 1920 and there were restrictions.
I’ve read the debate in the UN about Israeli independence, and I don’t remember much discussion of the amount of land owned, though it was a long time ago.
And if independence had been peaceful, no doubt land ownership wouldn’t have changed as much as it did.
Jesus, listen to yourself. 5% is not pretty good as a justification for taking the other 95% (or if you include the West Bank, the other 130%).
True, but irrelevant. Muslims were not an ethnic group that moved into Palestine, any more than Catholics were an ethnic group that moved into France. The people in Palestine who converted to Islam were already living there.
If you believe the Bible stories, they were living there long before the Jews, or even the Israelites. However, scholarly consensus now seems to be that the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites never happened, they were just a subgroup of Canaanites who developed a distinct identity and religion. So at best, it’s a tie.
But all of this is moot. Might makes right, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it still is. The Israelis were strong enough to drive the Palestinians out of what is now Israel, and are strong enough to hold it, especially with the unwavering support of the US. That’s how they got it, that’s why they’ll keep it, that’s why it’s pointless to pretend that things that happened thousands of years ago matter, or that fairness matters. If the UN had wanted to be fair, they would have given the Jews some prime land in Germany.
Is there any historical reason to believe the modern day Palestinians are the descendants of the Canaanites who were living in the region 3500 years ago? They are more plausibly descendants of the Arabs who entered the region over a thousand years later.
NB that some of the Jews who suffered in Germany at the hands of bad guys were not only German, but hard-core German patriots and/or military veterans. They would have been dismayed at the suggestion of Germany being carved up.
I once saw an exhibition of machine tools, and there was one old (pre-War? There was no date) Israeli lathe that had a manufacturer’s plaque that said “Rishon Lezion, Palestine” in English, parallel to “Rishon Lezion, Israel” in Hebrew script. No Arabic.
The British also oversaw the Partition of India (legally? Illegally?), and we all know how well that worked out.
I don’t think the British should be blamed for the partition; they were opposed to it. It was something that the local Muslims insisted on.
So is that the standard: it must have been taken from someone living? If in 2065 there is one 118 year old person who was still alive when Israel was established, the case is still good? If the lawyer is in court and gets an email that the person died, is the case over?
I’m not trying to be a smartass, but there comes a point in time where even an illegal action becomes final, like a statute of limitations. This argument to me seems no different than sovereign citizens saying that the Constitution wasn’t ratified properly therefore we are still under the Articles of Confederation.
You might recall who attacked first. In 1948 and in 1967. Who kept the Palestinians in refugee camps before 1967, when the West Bank was in Jordanian hands.
As I said, if the Arabs had not tried to destroy Israel, there would likely be a much smaller problem.
You might also recall that Jews in Germany had finally gotten some rights after hundreds of years. And they found the true feelings of many Germans. The suggestion that the few remaining ones should be given land in Germany surrounded by former Nazis borders on the anti-Semitic.
We’re not talking about the current generation of Germans here, but the ones that supported Hitler.
BTW, I’m in favor of a two state solution, which would be a lot easier if the Palestinians acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. The current relationship of Israel and Egypt would have been considered a fantasy when I was a kid. So it is possible.
I may be losing track of the argument you’re having with Little Nemo, but that’s not how sovereignty works. It works when you have land you can defend and other nations recognize you and let you keep it. The Socratic question makes no sense in this case, because it’s a category error – if you have property and someone steals it from you, that’s one thing. A new nation being formed, defended, and recognized is a different thing entirely.
I’m not sure if this was intended as a gotcha, or cornering me into making questionable statements or somesuch ? Either way : any other nation ; but more realistically those nations that currently support and guarantee Israel’s sovereignty. If international opinion suddenly reversed itself and declared Israel’s government to be some sort of autocratic rogue actor on par with e.g. the Viet Cong then it would become much, much harder for Israel to argue for its legal existence, much less physically enforce it or find support for that.
Kind of like Palestinians find out every day ;).
The argument has as much weight as arguing that, since the US illegally left the UK, it has no right to exist.
All nations formed in any form of armed conflict will be a violation of the previous laws.
I don’t think there’s a bright line. But I think a claim based on “You evicted me from my land and I want it back” is stronger than “You evicted my grandfather from his land and I want it.”
And the balance does shift over time. There may be Palestinians who can say their grandfathers were born in a land. But there are now Israelis whose grandparents were born in that same land. These Israelis can make their own claim that the land in question is their ancestral homeland.
Or that since the USA illegally stole native land, it has no right to exist.
Human history is the history of Human migration. It isn’t going to stop happening just because we try to nail borders to the ground and insist that everyone stay where they are.
I’m not a historian, but I’m unaware of any mass migration of indigenous people out of that area in ancient times other than the Roman expulsion of Jews, so I would expect that the original Canaanite blood was no more diluted by Arabs than Ashkenazi Jews were diluted by Europeans. My guess would be that most Palestinians are descendants of (among others) the Israelites who did not become Jews, i.e. the so-called lost tribes. Contrary to popular belief, the Assyrians did not deport the bulk of the northern tribes, just the leaders who were most likely foment rebellion.
You would think that DNA testing would easily settle the matter, but googling yields so many tendentious articles that I’ve given up, because as I said in my previous post, it doesn’t matter. The Israelis have powerful, nuclear-equipped armed forces and US backing, and that pretty much settles it.
That borders on the idiotic.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but with your last line are you espousing some sort of theory that the only legitimate reason Jews were in the Levant is because of some Western “correction” for the Holocaust? So we could just as easily fix it via giving them land in Germany.
Like I said, maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but that is extremely false.
If we talk pre-Zionism, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in the Ottoman Empire. They just were not concentrated specifically in lands that make up the modern day State of Israel–however, Jerusalem for example still had a significant Jewish population in 1860. But there were large Jewish communities in Istanbul and several other smaller cities in Northern Anatolia–some of these communities traced their histories back to the 15th century when large numbers of Sephardi Jews had left Spain as conditions worsened for them in that country (as most casual students of history know, for most of world history before the 20th century, Muslim ruled countries had historically been far more tolerant of Jews than Christian ruled countries.) Aside from that, there were many ancient Jewish communities that had existed in the Levant region for centuries, and which had been mostly tolerated for centuries of Ottoman and even earlier Muslim rulership. Now, they were certainly a “small minority”, but they were a relatively widespread and meaningful one, smaller than for example, the Christian population (particularly the Arab Christian) population in the Ottoman Empire, but it was a significant minority group.
While not all of these Jews were concentrated in “Israel” that’s a meaningless discussion in any case. Prior to the 20th century there was essentially no form of “nationalism” that mapped to modern Middle Eastern countries. That is because historically the historical administrative/political/legal divisions of the land in this region didn’t map to nationalities or “historical countries” or anything like that. From about the 14th to the early 19th century the Ottoman Empire was divided into a number of Eyalets, ruled over by a number of Pashas. A large one that covers small portions of modern day southern Turkey, much of Syria, all of Lebanon, much of Jordan, and much of Israel was simply called “Syria” in Ottoman times, however this eyalet was sub-divided several times into different divisions.
When the eyalet system was replaced with the Vilayet system, three Vilayets covered area that today contains parts of Israel, the Vilayets of Jerusalem, Syria, and Beirut.
The people who lived in these regions did not view themselves as citizens or residents of specific “country”, so there is no organic history of Palestinian nationalism any more than there is Israeli nationalism. These concepts really did not exist. There were Arabs who lived in this region, some in villages, some were still Bedouin nomads. There were Jews who lived in this region, there were Arab Christians who lived in this region. And a large number of other small ethnic groups and religious groups, including a large variety of non-Catholic “Eastern Christian” groups (most of these Christians were ethnically Arab, although not all.)
The Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic, polyglot, and multi-religious, largely the only way it worked for so long is because most of the areas it ruled lacked any meaningful national identities. They had religious, ethnic, cultural, regional/village/tribal identities for sure. And they were allowed to largely adhere to those as they pleased, while being obedient to Ottoman suzerainship.
Now, starting the late 19th century obviously you have the Zionist movement. However almost all of the early migration here came from Russian Jews and Eastern European Jews. Conditions in these regions had deteriorated quite badly for Jews in the 30-40 years leading up to it. A large number of Russian Jews had emigrated to the United States, however U.S. immigration law started to tighten down on this in the 1920s, which accelerated the pace of Russian Jewish immigration to the Middle East in lines with Zionist motivations. In the 1920s, obviously the Ottoman Empire had ceased to exist, and the British had control of much of its former territory in the Middle East. While at first they were fine with immigration of what, in modern terms, would be seen as Jewish refugees fleeing oppression in Russia and Eastern Europe, you started to see the first early signs of Arab nationalism in the region. This made the further importation of Jews relatively controversial, and is when the British formally restricted it in the 1920s–after the British restricted Jewish immigration to the region you could still immigrate there as a Jew, but you had to meet certain financial obligations, which meant those who continued to come in trended towards more middle class families. It should be noted at this time around 100,000 Jews died in massacres in Ukraine and Russia, and around 40,000 immigrated to the region making up modern Israel.
By the time 1947 rolled around and the UN had decided it was basically going to oversee the carving up of the British Mandate into various countries, there was a significant, and more concentrated Jewish population in the area making up modern day Israel. However the majority of these Jews had arrived before the Nazis ever took power in Germany. Some had been fleeing earlier humanitarian crises in Russia and Eastern Europe, some were the early idealogical Zionists of the late 19th early 20th century, and again–significant numbers were historical Jewish communities that had existed in the Ottoman Empire for centuries. “Moving them all to Germany” was both unrealistic and largely ignorant of where these people had come from, and was not a very realistic solution.
The UN had recognized from recent history that nationalism was a real and serious force, and that countries mostly liked to have borders that mapped existing “national ideas.” But there were also practical problems with this. There were a lot of minority ethnic groups in the mandate, and a lot of religious groups. They didn’t live in solid contiguous blocks of land. They were all mixed in with each other. So just drawing lines around areas would be extremely difficult. There are no real natural or historical boundaries of importance here. You could use the old Ottoman provincial boundaries, but those changed all the time, and had subdivided the region a great number of times of hundreds of years. This was not an easy task. Some ethnic groups (like the Kurds for example) got screwed very badly in the situation, some got screwed but not as bad (the Arabs), and some probably came out “better than was fair” (the Jews.) That mostly is because of Western guilt over the Holocaust. The reason I use the term “more than was fair”, is largely because of the relative population sizes and the geography involved. I do not think, given their desire to at least try to build states that wouldn’t implode, and to at least try to protect the various differing ethnic/religious communities in the region, having a Jewish state was a bad idea. But it was given far more land and high quality land that likely was “fair”, given the population numbers involved.
At the end of the day however, going from the old system where you have a mish-mash of varied peoples, all in communities scattered around the region, to hard-defined states was never going to be easy. The only way to rectify all those mish-mashed settlements with the new borders would be for people to be moved out of their homes, either voluntarily or by force–this is a recipe for disaster, and it was a disaster. It should be noted it affected Jews, some in communities hundreds of years old, across the region, not just in the mandatory lands but even in the broader Arab world there was such a negative reaction that you saw new waves of Jewish immigration from places like North Africa and etc to get inside the borders of the new state of Israel, because these Jews suddenly were much less welcome in their old homes than they had been before.
There’s a common belief that the Middle East was somehow “ruined” by the British or the UN, but that’s really not true. It was ruined because a growth of ethnic nationalism and religious intolerance happened as the Ottoman Empire died. The Empire was able to stay “above the fray” of differences between its subject peoples, and mostly being allowed to live how they wished in their own communities, while dutifully paying taxes and fealty to the Ottomans, kept some degree of peace. Without this, the region was fucked regardless of anything the British or the UN were going to do. Transitioning this region of polyglot Ottoman administrative subdivisions into “modern states” simply was and is a non-trivial task that was almost guaranteed to cause extreme ethnic and religious strife no matter how it was managed. The British to their credit actually predicted the UN map was going to cause extreme strife for being overly favorable to the Jewish population, and that is what happened. The British never really signed off on the UN borders and were happy after the deadline passed to get the fuck out of there and wash their hands of the matter.
There are lots of bad people in the story of the modern Middle East, and the development of the modern states of Israel, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon etc; but there aren’t any easy “bad guy groups”, the Jews weren’t the bad guys and neither were the Arabs. They were largely victims of circumstance and petty bigotries that are fairly endemic to humans, especially humans of the time. But simply saying we could’ve just carved off part of Bavaria or something and moved all the Jews into it, is shockingly ignorant of how this region got the way it is and the actual rational mechanics of how such a proposition would have worked.
Just think about it for a second from the context of 1947. The proposal would be for a Jewish state surrounded by people who had just exterminated millions of them. To be protected by a bunch of nations who did shit to protect them before, and who were even then blocking the movement of refugees to Palestine.
From the perspective of today we know the Germans have (mostly) turned their back on evil, but from back then their defeat in 1918 hardly made them moral players in 1933 - 1945.
Not to mention Germans with 12 years of hatred burned into them and then expelled from their homes by Jews could well be the core of a Nazi revival.
I dare you to defend this offensive idea.