How convenient of you that you have come to terms with that, seeing as there are plenty of Native Americans left you could be returning land to.
We are the species that tells stories.
We build ourselves, and change the world, out of the stories that we tell ourselves.
Ursula Kroeber LeGuin said, some years ago, that we need to learn to tell some new stories. The old ones are destroying us.
– the Palestinians and the Israelis are both indigenous to the same land. In some cases to the same exact houses. That’s where the problem is. (Well, there and with those of their neighbors who are happier with them at each other’s throats.)
Erm, then you know that the vast majority of “Indigenous” groups aren’t Indigenous by that definition, right?
Not the Aztecs, not the Apache, not the Iroquois…
There were multiple waves of humans that reached Europe and were replaced by latter humans long before either the Basque or the Sami arose. The Sami, for example, are believed to have arrived in 1500 or 1600 BC, and the first traces of human habitation in Norway are from 9500 BC.
By your definition, the only Indigenous People are particularly remote Pacific Islanders.
The Jewish origin story in the Bible says that there were no Israelites until Jacob, whose name became Israel after he wrestled (Isra) with an angel of God (El), hence his children became Israelites.
The historical origin story that the Bible likely echoes is that of pastorial Nomads who settled and became an agricultural society while elevating the worship of specific deities from within the Canaanite pantheon.
In both cases, the Israelites arise in Israel.
Well, we didn’t sign treaties and steal land. We bought land, and later when the Ottoman Empire fell we got the British, who took it upon themselves to divy up Ottoman land, to guarantee that they’d give us some of the land we were on when they leave.
If you want to make an analogy to Americans breaking treaties with Native Americans and taking their land, how about the fact that we all agreed to Resolution 181 and then the Palestinians attacked us and tried to take all the land with aid from the neighboring Arab states; and when they failed, rather than accepting the treaty and creating an independent Palestine, those Arab states took the land?
Imagine if the US colonists (not that Israelis are analogous to US colonists, but let’s pretend for a moment) signed a treaty with a neighboring native tribe, and that tribe decided to try and wipe them out with aid from two bigger neighboring tribes, and when that attack failed, those two neighboring tribes gobbled up the original tribe’s lands…
No, it means that around 700 AD, after thousands of years without any indigenous humans on the planet, the people who arrived on Easter Island became the only Indigenous people on the planet. And a similar event occurred in 1100 with Hawaii.
Ooh, and don’t forget, the Brits who live on the Falkland Islands are indigenous too, because they are the first people to live there.
Not really, they were assimilated by the Latins, not wiped out. The Etruscan DNA is strong in Tuscany in fact.
As to that:
About 190 years ago the Americans got the leader of a band of Sauk drunk and agree to move permanently west of the Mississippi. On the strength of this, all Sauk and Meskwaki (my grandmother’s tribe) were permanently banned from the east side. When they tried to return, they were massacred by Americans and other native tribes.
However, there haven’t been any great porgroms against the Saulk/Fox; no swastitkas painted on doors or tombstones knocked over. It wasn’t a holocaust. If it was, I’m sure I’d probably be walling-off a corner of SW Wisconsin and being very careful who I let in.
But my grandmother’s tribe had the option of assimilation, and now I live nicely on land taken from the Cherokee, who themselves assimilate elsewhere. 28 miles from me, 125 years ago, the knuckles of a lynched Black man were on sale in a grocery store window. Like Theodore Herzl witnessing Alfred Dreyfus’ ordeal in Paris four years before this, W. E. B. Dubois saw those knuckles and wondered what to do. There would be a Back to Africa movement, and he himself would eventually fetch up in Ghana. But instead of that being the only solution, Atlanta is now home to a Black middle class, Black millionaires and is maintained by career politicians and civil servants who are predominantly Black. They had a hard road, but made the right choice to stick it out. And frankly, as bad as African Americans still have it, their prospects are brighter as assimilationist than are any ethno-statists
My point being, I see the Israeli POV, but like a lot of other people (including some Israelis and Jews), I don’t think meeting violence with violence, and otherwise saying “fuck ‘em!” in nonviolent interactions, offers anything but more of the same.
I have no idea. I do find it telling that you consider “landless” and “loser” to be synonymous. Guess in your mind I’m a loser because I’ve never owned a piece of real estate in my life. Oddly enough, I don’t feel oppressed by that state - probably because where I live I could own real estate if I chose to do so. And I wouldn’t have to use guns to get the rights to that real estate.
Ah, here you are twisting words again. Once more you are hammering to force me into a pigeonhole because apparently you need an adversary and not a discussion.
Throughout multiple threads on the fuck-fest that is the Modern Middle East I have advocated for a two-state solution which would give BOTH the Israelis and the Palestinians a state. Yes, that would also make both sides unhappy, because both sides want everything to the point they’d rather destroy the pie than settle for half each. But they’d be equally unhappy, for whatever that is worth.
But by all means, just shit on what I actually say and continue to misconstrue my words to whatever strawman you feel a need for in the moment. It just makes you look like an unreasonable ass.
WILL YOU FUCKING READ WHAT I ACTUALLY WRITE?
NOWHERE did I say WWI - that is YOU projecting on someone else, tilting yet again at windmills you have constructed rather than actually address what someone else is saying.
Right, because the people already living in Palestine were going to be so fucking happy that other people handed their territory over to newcomers. The only consistency in the Middle East is that no one likes UN resolutions.
And you’re right, Egypt and Jordan fucked things up, that’s on them. The whole place is, as I said a fuck-fest.
I’ve been an avid subscriber to his channel for a long while now. Funny, isn’t it - two people can look at the same thing and come to different conclusions.
Yes, it would be nice but humans are apparently too greedy and too bigoted to make that work.
Actually, the US Supreme Court decreed that it was not OK to take the Cherokee lands but Andrew Jackson decided to be a greedy, murderous asshole and do it anyway. So actually nine people DID argue that Georgia (and parts of other state) should be given back but they were ignored.
Actually, I can’t because I do not and never have owned land in my life. Nor would I have a problem with renting from a Native landlord.
Like I said, a lot of bad stuff can’t be fixed. Justice is actually pretty rare in this world. I don’t have good answers to a lot of the bad problems facing the world.
The neighbors continuing to stir up trouble has a LOT to do with the continuing fuck-fest. Iran doesn’t care about either Israeli or Palestinian lives but it very much serves their interest to keep those two parties killing each other and distracting the rest of the world from what they’re doing. As just one example.
I am happy to agree that is a hot, steaming bucket of bullshit and wrong in about a dozen different ways. I’ve never denied that the Israelis have a lot of grievances, too. It’s wrongs all the way down.
One reason I actively do not want to go to Israel is because I do not want to be embroiled in any way, shape or form with a collection of disputes I have no good answer for. The last thing anyone there needs is yet one more person joining the riot. About the “best” I could do there is piss everyone off equally, so best I stay away.
No, you moralizing fuckwad - loser as in, they lost their land to the winners of history. The ones who wrote it.
What the fuck are you wailing about?
You said:
And I asked, then why do the Palestinians have a claim for a homeland, when they didn’t lose it 1,800 years ago, they never had it?
No one is twisting your words, and in case you hadn’t noticed because you were too busy whining about how evil I am, I’ve never argued for anything but a two state solution.
You said “the war that created modern Israel”. That would be World War 1.
I was, of course, being facetious. I knew you meant the War of Independence. As I said, that just highlights your ignorance, because the War of Independence didn’t create Israel; Israel was created by UN Resolution 181, or more accurately, Resolution 181 recognized the right for Israel to declare itself a state, which it proceeded to do.
That was when (well, the first time that) the Arab world launched a massive war of annihilation against us, and lost.
I’m sure the Turks weren’t happy, but they lost the First World War and had to hand their territory over to England and France.
There was no Palestine at that point, there was Ottoman Syria which included Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. If the people living in one part of Ottoman Syria didn’t like the people living in another part of Ottoman Syria, and rather than two countries they wanted just one so they could kick those people out or kill them - that’s too fucking bad.
Yes, some of the people from Ottoman Syria were pissed off because they felt that land that should have been theirs went to someone else. Hussein bin Ali, for example, thought that all of Ottoman Syria should be a single kingdom under his rule. He didn’t get what he wanted, only Jordan; and his original kingdom of Hejaz was conquered by the Saudis, with British support.
Well, those humans who rejected the Two State Solution are. Fortunately, there are better humans than those, on both sides.
Where’s the old one trick pony pit thread? Because Babale would fit right in it.
Yes, I know that’s supposed to be the party line - that the Palestinians never owned that land they lived on. What next, you’ll join Smotrich in denying Palestinians even exist? You want sympathy for Jews who purchased land in the Levant, but refuse to acknowledge that there were Palestinians who owned land there, too.
I am certain they weren’t.
Absolutely every fucking person reading this - except, apparently, you - understand that “Palestinian” is a place holder for “people who were living in that area for generations before modern Israel was created”. Why are you denying them their identity? We need a collective term for those people, what would you recommend instead of Palestinian?
Look - another thing we agree on!
And another!
And on that note I am going elsewhere for awhile because I have stuff I gotta do.
Palestinians owned some of the land - about 8% was privately owned by Arabs and 5% was privately owned by Jews in 1947, IIRC.
But I wasn’t talking about individual Palestinians.
You said that Jews lost the claim 1800 years ago, so presumably, with the end of the sovereign Jewish state and latter Jewish client state to Rome. There were still individual Jews living in the borders of modern day Israel, Lebanon, and Syria since then until the modern day. There was a brief period when Jews were completely expelled from Jerusalem, but they never totally left Israel as a whole.
But you said that Jews lost the claim when the sovereign Jewish state ended.
So what year was there a sovereign Palestine?
The answer is that there never was, and so if Jews lost the claim to the land 1800 years ago along with their sovereign state, the Palestinians never had a sovereign state.
I’d thank you if you respond to what I actually post, not your Smotrich flavored fever dreams.
No, as I said earlier, Palestinians exist as a distinct culture because they consider themselves distinct, the other surrounding Arab and non Arab cultures consider them distinct, and the world as a whole recognizes them as distinct.
What is “that area”? There wasn’t a distinct culture in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Ottoman province of Syria encompassed what today is Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Territories. People within Ottoman Syria didn’t say to themselves “I’m Jordanians” or “I’m Lebanese” or “I’m Palestinian” or “I’m Israeli” because those concepts didn’t exist yet. In fact, of you read Zionist correspondence from the British Mandate era, they sometimes refer to the Jewish immigrants as “Palestinian”.
Because it’s anachronistic to come up with a collective term for the Arabic subjects of Ottoman Syria who live within what will one day become Palestine as distinct from those who live in what will one day become Jordan or Lebanon or Syria. These identities formed as a result of partition. If instead the whole region was united as one Kingdom of Greater Syria under King Hussein Bin Ali, and the kingdom’s subdivisions didn’t line up with the modern day borders, we’d have a different mix of cultures.
Hey asshole, maybe we can start questioning your right to self determination instead, and we can see how motivated to defend it you feel.
Genocide, conquest and the mass theft of land isn’t “self determination”. Nor is it “self defense”, before you bring that up.
The goal of Israel, and your goal is the extermination of the Palestinian population and the theft of the entirety of their land. All your rhetoric is in service to that; dehumanizing and demonizing them, pretending Israel is defending itself, declaring the Palestinians to not be “indigenous” to the region while Israelis somehow are, and on and on. This is all nothing but Israel reprising the genocide of the Native Americans by the US, even reusing the basic methodology of creating provocations and then committing massacres in “self defense”.
But hey, don’t worry. Just like us , when they’re all dead you can write them out of your history and make up stories about the glorious founding of Israel as a shining beacon of justice.
You’re the braindead Tankie moron fuck who thought that the war in Iraq was about the American colonization of the Middle East. The saddest part is that Putin doesn’t even write you a check; you just genuinely are that stupid.
That’s exactly how other people got those rights, so that the people who now have legal rights to sell land to you have them.
That wasn’t addressed to me, but I’ve got something to say about it:
Having the right to live comfortably somewhere and to expect to be able to continue to do so is actually orthogonal to holding legal ownership of that land. Cultures with nothing resembling our modern ideas of individual legal ownership exchangable for money nevertheless had and have homelands. Do you have a home? Do you feel at home there? Do you feel that others recognize that you’re properly at home there? Because if so then I don’t think you’re “landless” in the sense that I think @Babale meant it in.
And in many places, for many generations, Jews couldn’t.
Bullshit.
Yes, i agree with this. We aren’t talking about individuals legally owning land, we are talking about having a homeland and a nationality.
Despite the recent rise in bigotry in the US, i think Western hemisphere “birthright citizenship” is superior to European “nationalism citizenship”, and I’m not convinced that nation-states are a good for which we should be striving. But there’s not going to be a peaceful state encompassing both the Israelis and the Palestinians in the foreseeable future, and no one has extended citizenship to the bulk of the Palestinians, so forming one or two nations out of Gaza and the West Bank seems like the best outcome we can reasonably hope for. Because while I’m not convinced of the virtue of nation states, i am totally behind the virtue of every person having citizenship in a sovereign nation.
In a theoretical world with no bad actors, I might agree with you. In practice, the world is chock full of bad actors, and peoples without a nation-states of their own tend to get screwed over again, and again, and again.
The sort of citizenship you refer to isn’t unique to the Western hemisphere or to modern times. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially in Hungary, worked a lot like that. Until things got tough, that is.
Things in the US have quite literally never been as tough as they were in Europe during the World Wars. I’m not going to take the bet that America would hold up better than that.
I’m willing to concede your point on that, although me, I’d prefer capture by Hamas to the Comanche any day. And by the way, fifty years after they were dashing American babies’ brains out against their cabin wall, rather than exterminate them, the Americans put the Comanche on their own corner of Oklahoma. Not the greatest start, but we’re done killing each other and working together.
Maybe not applicable to the Middle East. You’ll be better equipped to explain why. But what I can’t get past, @Babale, since you deal in personalities here, is the obviousness that you’ve assumed you’ve found yourself in a message board full of naive middle class white Americans, whose worst day was the morning that they found their beloved parakeet lying in the bottom of its cage. We’ve never been hungry, beaten, stabbed or shot, we’re ignorant of what it’s like to be viscerally hated, we can’t understand how desperate life can become for people just trying to live peacefully.
Everywhere else I can concede you have some valid point of view, but on this conceit you are so very full of shit.
Why on Earth would you think it isn’t applicable? If you haven’t noticed, we aren’t trying to exterminate the Palestinians; we repeatedly offer them half the land instead.
For all your rhetoric, you can’t escape the simple fact that one side has repeatedly offered a two state solution and the other has repeatedly rejected that option in favor of continuing the violence in hopes that they can secure the whole pie.
One of the favorite stock phrases I see tossed around by ceasefire proponents is, “you don’t make peace with your friends”. I agree, you don’t. So let’s make peace. I think the two state solution is more than fair. Why aren’t any Palestinians in positions of power (other than the Israeli parliament, of course) working towards that goal?
Oh, I never said Americans had it that good. I just said you’ve never been through anything like what Europe has been through during the World Wars. And as a country, you haven’t been in real danger since 1865.