And this segue into the BNP relates to Israeli settlements in Gaza how exactly? Are Palestinians offering financial incentives for the settlers to quit?
I’d much prefer that you stopped misusing the term and repeating it. I mean I could read every use of yours of the word ‘the’ as ‘chocolate sprinkled snow cones’ as well. Your point doesn’t stand because you are horribly misusing the term.
Okay, if it’s nonsense you can of course provide cites that these Israeli settlers who only moved there after the 1967 war were there beforehand. Good luck with that, because it is not nonsense, it’s a fact. Your denial of it is nonsense.
While I’m here, care to make any comment on your claim that the removal of ethnic Germans colonists from lands they only went to live on as a result of force and genocide after WW2 was ethnic cleansing? Seriously, describing this as ethnic cleaning is putting the phrase completely on its head.
I have no idea what your point is. If you are trying to be sarcastic, please just spell out whatever you are trying to say.
I’m not sure if it’s relevant to your point, but you are wrong again. Plenty of Mexicans have acquired citizenship (or at least legal residency) as a result of having sneaked in to the United States. Plenty of people have acquired title to property by occupying it illegally. Anyway, I’m not sure how this applies in the West Bank, given that there is no recognized entity which claims and exercises sovereignty over the area. Does that mean the Palestinians who live there are illegals or illegitimate in some sense?
In the case of the West Bank, which state would that be?
I think you were probably weaseling right here:
I’m not sure I fully understand your principle, so let me ask you this:
(1) In the case of land which is not privately owned and over which no recognized entity claims sovereignty, can anyone make use of that land, consistent with your principle?
(2) Does the converse of your principle apply? i.e., if a Jewish settlement purchases land on the West Bank from somebody whose title can be traced back to, say, the days of the British Mandate, then is it consistent with your principle for the Jewish settlers to live on such land?
You were asked to produce a quote showing that I had “refuse[d] to even acknowledge that the settlements and the ‘immigrants’ were only placed there as a result of a war and through violence in the first place.”
Instead, you link to the very post where I point out that I’m being strawmanned.
The request I had made to another poster was to produce a quote showing that I had “refuse[d] to even acknowledge that the settlements and the ‘immigrants’ were only placed there as a result of a war and through violence in the first place.”
In response to that request, you link to the very post where I point out that I’m being strawmanned.
My point is that for me it is a virtue to be willing to engage people that “don’t play by my rules”, and a sign of an open mind.
That does not, however, mean I don’t get frustrated when you chose to reply to posts only after you’ve chopped them up with the QUOTE function. Specifically you chop them up so as to remove significant meaning with relevance to the statement you are replying to. (I bolded the part you chopped out in my post above).
Then they have indeed (eventually) been granted citizenship by the laws of sovereign state-entity united states of america (i.e. through amnesty). You are confusing your partisan outrage with actual matters of fact.
Any rule has exceptions. Denying the general principle with appeals to the inevitable exception is a practice for children.
Do you deny that property rights and the rule of law is the norm in present societies? Do you believe that disputes over territory and citizenship on the west bank should be resolved under the rule of law (i.e. in accordance with the established framework), or do you reject that framework?
If you accept the legitimacy of the rules as laid down then it is irrelevant to a discussion over how to apply the rules if there were cases where the rules were broken.
I agree that the situation is complicated by the history of the area, but I did suggest a way to define citizenship: as defined by the previous recognized entity (i.e. the british protectorate). It will not be sufficient, however, since that entity included present Israel. The state of Israel will never grant citizenship to all citizens (and their descendants) of arabic ethnicity that occupied that larger area, and a sovereign palestine will probably not grant citizenship to jews expelled by Jordan during the war and definately not to all citizens of Israel. That will have to be worked out in a peace agreement, and it will not always be clearcut.
Those circumstances, however, does not change the fact that an occupying power that does not exercise recognized sovereignity over territory should not allow settlers into the occupied area, and such settlers does not have any legimite claim for citizenship. Therefore the expulsion of such settlers - by the Israeli state or by a future Palestine state - does not constitue “ethnic cleansing” as you argued in you OP.
Well you’re confusing your established ability to make a tortured reading with me weaseling. This is what I wrote:
Your “rebutal” that my statement is false because some individual could somehow under certain circumstances circumvent the law, enter a country illegaly, and get away with it would have been apparently weak if you could be bothered to make it in a coherent fashion.
(1) Then the land will be the property of the next sovereign entity with a recognized right to the land.
(2) Well here it could get messy, but if not under undue interference from the occupying power, yes then those individuals should have legitimate claim to the property. (The typical messy example would be i.e. a WWII jew selling property to nazis at a bargain price because of the need to flee persecution.)
A legitimate claim to property does not necessitate a palestinian state granting them citizenship however. I think my personal opinion in that case is close to DSaids, that they should be granted citizenship for the reasons laid out by him, and duly protected by the palestinian state.
The key aspect for it to be “ethnic cleansing” is the why a particular group is being placed under “forced relocation”. This is something that tagos fails to comprehend: the who is carrying out the order is immaterial.
If Lemur is right - that the settlers need to leave and should leave because they would not be tolerated there under any circumstance, no matter what deal is offered to allow for it, because it will be an Arab country and that “Jews aren’t welcome to live in Arab countries and that most of them have been forced to leave” … well then at its heart this is ethnic cleansing, whether Israelis implement it or Arabs do, and whether a legal basis justifies their expulsion or not.
If Lemur is wrong, and that is not the heart of the matter then other phrases suffice.
Anyone who reads my proposal and dismisses it out of hand on the same basis as Lemur does is believing that the Jewish settlers should be ethnically cleansed. If my proposal is conceivable with the right deal thrown in (more land called Palestine and under PA control, water rights, money, whatever) and one can indeed imagine the Jewish settlers living in a new Palestine with full rights and obligations of citizenship, then even if one doesn’t believe that such a deal will be worth it to the parties involved and that the settlers will need to be removed because no legal way for them to stay will be created, then merely calling it “forced relocation” is more appropriate. My guess is that posters like SherwoodAnderson would fall into this group (please correct me if I am wrong).
I believe that a deal that allows Jewish settlers to remain as Palestinian citizens if they desire to is worth exploring and that the Palestinian government and populus would tolerate them as a minority group with full citizenship rights as part of the right deal. Therefore I do not believe that proposals to remove the settlers if no such deal transpires would be ethnic cleansing.
Using language precisely is not torturing it tagos. It merely encourages one to clarify one’s beliefs.
More or less. My position is that the majority of settlers do not have a legitimate claim on either property rights to the land they occupy or citizenship in a future palestinian state - unless they would be given such rights as part of a peace agreement. (I don’t, however, see a reason why they should).
Therefore, as you said, I believe they can be “forcefully relocated”, without it constituting “ethnic cleansing”.
Well i guess our disagreement is about what is “the right package deal” then.
My understanding (imperfect, i admit) is that the settlers to a large extent is made up of ultra-religious, true believers that see a divine jewish right to the whole of “palestine” as dictated by holy scripture. In addition they were fully aware of moving in on disputed land, on shaky legal ground.
I see no good coming from granting those people citizenship, or property rights in palestine, when they have no legal claim to either.
Well, DSeid, as SherwoodAnderson points out, Arab hostility towards Jews is only part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is that the sort of person who becomes a settler in the west bank is also the sort of person who wouldn’t be happy living under Palestinian rule. The whole point of the settlements is to claim the west bank as part of Israel. Now, not every settler believes this, many are just kids, some got financial incentives to move there, and so on. But the easy cases will leave. The ones who stay behind are going to be the hard cases.
Look, I can imagine a scenario like the one you outline…Israel puts up a big chunk of money to the Palestinian authority to settle land claims for the remaining settlers. And then with clear title to the land the settlers are allowed to remain in the new Palestinian state under Palestinian rule. It could happen.
But it is very unlikely to happen. The problem is that for lots of people in this area control over land isn’t driven rationally. They’ve got emotional, religious and nationalistic attachments to the land. And they’d sooner resort to violence than compromise. And all compromises are shadowed by the threat of violence.
So the problem is that the amount of money needed to settle these land claims is much greater than the land is actually worth, and even if the claims were settled between Israel and Palestine there would still be lots of people on either side who would not accept the settlement and would still feel justified in using violence. And then the settlement falls apart because it can’t be effectively implemented.
We can all see what a settlement would have to look like. And if this was and agreement between Czechs and Slovaks about the status of minorities after the partition then it wouldn’t even be worth discussing because such things could be worked out rationally. But it isn’t and so a rational settlement like you describe is pretty unlikely to occur.
Sorry that I can’t find more recent data, but this ten year old survey may help flesh this out.
Only 27% of the settlers came primarily “for ideological and religious reasons”. 46% came for economic reasons. Presumably many of those are among the 42% who would willingly evacuate. For the religiously motivated settler who would want to stay no matter what the issue is not having the land be part of Israel but having a Jewish presence on the land. These are often the people who are part of that 20% of settlers who would be willing to live under Palestinian sovereignty.
Survey says! No! A few would yes. Only 14% say they might consider physical resistance to evacuation and a mere 2% actively advocate it.
The emotional tie to the land for the ultra-Orthodox settler is just that - to the land, not to the state. They want to live there but have no need to be part of Israel. Give that minority of settlers that option and most of the others will relocate, especially for a nice big carrot. The ultra-Orthodox won’t integrate well into the rest of Palestinian society but then this group is insular wherever they are, including secular Israel proper.
The emotional tie for most Palestinians is, I think at this point, wanting a future more with some prospect for jobs and education and economic growth. Getting a state that has prospects for that is tantamount. Face-saving requires that it look pretty much close to 1967 borders and that they have a presence in what can be called Jerusalem (yes, I think outskirts might do for that). Will there be gangs of haters? Sure. Similar to the fact that the US still has skinheads, neo-Nazis and members of the KKK. But that should not force ethnic cleansing as the only option any more than it should have in America in years past.
Frankly, I know to little about the specific circumstances on the ground to have an opinion as to whether it could work practically. Maybe as part of a workable deal where arabs have sufficient access to their holy places in Jerusalem, etc?
Anyway, pragmatism, reconsiliation and constructiveness as you advocate will certainly be needed!
Sorry, but I’m not interested in reading insults (explicit or by innuendo) in this discussion. Kindly stop. Thank you.
That’s ridiculous, but I’m not interested in meta-debate, either.
That’s true, which is why you were wrong.
It depends on the significance of the exception. Since I don’t know what point you were trying to make with your original statement, it’s possible that your incorrectness was irrelevant.
Generally speaking, in developed societies such as the United States, no.
I don’t know what the “framework” is which you refer to, so I can’t answer that.
In that case, it’s hard to see the relevance of your earlier point about citizenship. If you insert the word “legally,” but you don’t really know whose laws you are applying, the statement doesn’t have much meaning.
Does that mean yes or no?
Are you saying that if Jews are removed from such property, it’s ethnic cleansing?
Ok, I’ll give the benefit of the doubt and guess there was a misunderstanding. I’d assumed that your reply of “that’s nonsense” was to the statement that the Israeli settlements in Gaza were only put there after conquest in 1967 instead of the nonsense being that you denied that this was the truth. My apologies if I misunderstood you. Just to be clear that this is the case, you do acknowledge that the settlements in question were only put in place after 1967 as a result of conquest? Again, my apologies if this is what you meant and I misread it.
Anyway, for the third time, any comment on:
While I’m here, care to make any comment on your claim that the removal of ethnic Germans colonists from lands they only went to live on as a result of force and genocide after WW2 was ethnic cleansing? Seriously, describing this as ethnic cleaning is putting the phrase completely on its head.
I mean honestly, a violent displacement of the indigenous population (which involved not just driving the natives off but murdering them) and their replacement with German colonist while the Germans were winning followed by a removal of these same said people after Germany lost is ethnic cleansing of the Germans? The Nazis somehow had a legitimate claim on lebensraum because they won for a bit and then (thankfully) lost?
What was “nonsense” was the claim that I “refuse to even acknowledge that the settlements and the ‘immigrants’ were only placed there as a result of a war and through violence in the first place”
In the sense that I’m well aware that the Jewish settlers started coming in as a result of the 1967 war and have never denied this.
It’s just a matter of semantics. You seem to be assuming that in my view, ethnic cleansing is necessarily wrong and evil. The truth is that I am not making that claim.
If the expulsion of the germans is ethnic cleansing, it does not necessarily follow that the Nazi occupation of the area must have been legitimate.
By the way, there is a fascinating wiki article about the expulsion of ethnic Germans from many areas after World War II. You might take a look at it.
You might want to spend a bit of time on the history of Central and Eastern Europe. The huge event of ethnic cleansing at the end of WWII had nothing to do with removing German “colonists” from conquered lands–particularly since the Germans did not particularly engage in “colonization.” Rather, the ethnic cleansing event was the depopulation of Eastern Prussia–the core kingdom from which Bismarck actually created the German nation–to allow the Soviets to move Poles whom they had displaced into that region, effectively moving all of Poland to the west by a few hundred kilometers.
True, the Germanic and Frankish peoples had expanded into that territory between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, but that was pretty much the history of Europe up until the Renaissance, as those peoples had already done to the Celts, as the Rus and Magyars had done in the East, as the Norse had done along the western coasts of Europe, and as the Slavs did, (with less success), among their own groups, and as we see in any history of Britain. If you need to go back seven hundred years to find examples of ethnic cleansing to which an act is responding, I submit that your claim is anachronistic.
You might want to spent a bit of time on the history of Central and Eastern Europe yourself. The huge event of ethnic cleansing in these places was the mass murder of ‘undesirables’ by the Nazis. That their full replacement by colonists didn’t occur because Germany lost the war is well - a good thing? While yes, a lot of Germanic peoples were displaced unrightfully after the war simply because they were of Germanic decent, masses of Jews, Slavs, etc were murdered in these lands with the intention of making room for German colonists. Colonization did occur, the simple fact is that the Nazis didn’t win the war and didn’t have time to complete it. See for example Generalplan Ost Pertinent quote:
Colonization was occurring and the act of massacring the indigenous inhabitant was well underway. I doubt I need to cite to you how many millions of Jews, Slavs, Communists, Gypsies, etc etc were removed from Central and Eastern European lands because they were murdered. Yes there was overreaction in removing anyone of Germanic decent since in all honesty they had nothing to do with the plan, but when millions were murdered in these same locations to make Lebensraum for the colonists to arrive, is it odd that no discrimination was made?
I’d submit that your anachronistic looking at the tenth to thirteenth century has absolutely zero relevance to anything I’ve posted , and your idea that I am looking back 700-1000 years to make a point is a straw man to the utmost extreme. Find me one cite where I even referred to the tenth century, or Magyars, or Celts, or Vandals, or Mongols or where I relied on
Really, find me **once **that I looked back to the seventh or tenth century, or admit that you are making up my position in your head, not on anything I’ve actually written.
Again, my apologies to you on this matter, I was misunderstanding what you had said.
Well, this is where it just gets bizarre. The phrase “ethnic cleansing” is understood by almost every English speaking person on the planet to carry an extremely negative connotation. Your continued use of it as if it was a neutral term after it has been pointed out to you repeatedly that is a loaded term (i.e. has extreme negative connotations) is frankly disingenuous.
This is exactly what I’ve been telling you that your position implies. Obviously the answer is no. Murdering millions of inhabitants to make room for you is pretty much wrong. I don’t consider the expulsion of Germans from lands the Nazi regime murdered inhabitants by the millions to be simply ethnic cleansing. But if the expulsion of Germanic peoples from lands where millions were murdered to make room for Germanic colonist is ethnic cleansing , do you honestly consider this to be in the same boat as the removal of Israeli settlers? Hint: The Isreali settlements weren’t there for centuries, and the Israelis didn’t commit mass genocide to make room for more of them. Which is what happened to Germanic people in Eastern Europe.
Very fascinating, but I’m not at all unaware of it. Guess what? The government of your national heritage starts a genocidal war that kills 50 million people, which was just a start for what they planned as mass genocide - yeah it sucks that you had nothing to do with it and get forcibly relocated to Germany. It’s not fair, but who said life was fair and those are the breaks. Kinda beats being shot in the back of the head and dumped into a ditch cos you’re a Slav or a Jew, no?
I have no idea what your point is. If you are trying to be sarcastic, please just spell out whatever you are trying to say.
I have no idea what you are trying to argue.