Can I ask a possibly highly ignorant question? How much of the population of those settlements were born there, and how many deliberately chose to move there?
Because I can see those specifically seeking to live in those settlements as making a political statement and they should not be surprised if that doesn’t work in their favour.
I think it’s important to point out that the problem with these settlements is not only that they are illegal, it is that they prevent any meaningful peace settlement. Israel is never going to allow effective control over the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the west bank pass to the Palestinians. This means that the 2 million or Palestinians living there will always be subject to the whims of a foreign power. Obviously that is going to create an ongoing conflict.
Annexing land in war is illegal not only because it is morally wrong, but because it breeds future conflicts.
Seeing as how counter-factual claims have been gainsaid on a factual basis? Shocking… that.
And no, the capture of Jerusalem, as XT already pointed out, had to do with the 1) 1967 war which Israel would have waged against Jordanian holdings if Jordan had stayed out. 2) The fact that, while Jordan administrated it, it denied Jews access to it thereby prohibiting them from visiting some of the holiest sites in Judaism, and did things like using Jewish gravesones to line the Arab Legion’s latrines.
It doesn’t have to do with “ancestral claims” in the way you most likely mean it, and certainly not in the twisted equivocation that glutton is using.
Glutton, glutton, glutton, do you think this is my first dance with you? That I don’t remember your pattern of “mistakes” up and down these debates? Not only do I know the actual history and that, as pointed out, you are being counter-factual, illogical and irrational by claiming that those who bought land believed that they had a claim to it via ‘entitlement’, I also realize that your use of the word “entitled” is about as accidental as, say, when you once posted an Egytpian article on this forum which claimed that the Israeli rabinate was vocally in support of genocide and you just couldn’t bother to even pretend to fact-check the story, let alone hunt down the online Ha’aretz article that was supposedly being ‘paraphrased’.
So sorry, what I know is that the Zionists chose the area for a number of reasons, one among them a sense of historical connection.
I also know, as already pointed out, that you’ve deliberately twisted facts, equivalences and you’re busy using loaded and inaccurate terms to desperately push a tu quoque.
It’s not even really subtle, either.
If I decided to move to where my Grandparents lived because I wanted to get closer to my roots, and I rented a house there, only someone with a very, very… shall we say strange… use of language would claim that I was displaying a sense of “entitlement” towards the land, let alone that I was “exactly similar” to someone whose grandparents also lived on the land and claimed that by that right they already owned that land and it was, in fact, their home. You can bold “which you already kneeeeeeeeeew!” as much as you want, but it’s not like I’m going to forget history, facts or logic, eh?
I’m not following you here. Are you really suggesting that it’s “counter-factual, illogical and irrational” for BrainGlutton to point out that many early Zionists had a strong sense of “entitlement” to the biblical Land of Israel, and that this was their prime motivation for choosing that region to attempt to establish a modern Jewish state?
The early Zionists themselves weren’t shy at all about claiming what they saw as their ancient entitlement to Palestine as a Jewish land. Here are some typical endorsements of that claim from a 1919 article by the Jewish scholar and Zionist historian Howard Sacher:
That’s “historic title”, as in, “entitlement”. I really don’t see how this can be meaningfully equated with a vague and watered-down “sense of historical connection” along the lines of wanting to move back to your grandparents’ hometown out of nostalgia for your roots. What Sacher and many other Zionists were expressing was, as he put it, a profound “passionate identification” of the very concept of Jewish identity with the particular geographical region where the Jews had lived and ruled thousands of years ago.
Funny use of language there. The truth is “suggested” and glutton’s deceptive pablum is “pointed out”.
You forgot that your own cite points out, in one of its first opening paragraph, that Sacher’s comment came in the wake of the Balfour Deceleration. So rather than a ‘sense of entitlement’, you’re dealing with people who had an actual legal right to settlement on the land as codified by the sovereign power over it.
Never mind all the other massive differences between the actual situation and glutton’s fallacious analogy whereby he tried to use slieight of hand to pretend that Jews wanting to buy land and achieve self determination on it as authorized by the land’s sovereign are “exactly similar” to people who claim that they own land which was never theirs, or any of their ancestors’, in the first place.
So aside from the fact that the context, circumstances, facts, motivations, legal frameworks and goals are completely different in the two situations, yeah, they were “exactly similar”.
An interesting bit here is the way the settlements contribute to the continuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Israeli hawks understandably support the settlements since it creates a population dependent on the threat of military force to protect it from its hostile neighbors, and that it legitimizes claims to territory that was originally supposed to be a part of Egypt and Jordan, but that those states are both unwilling and unable to defend.
Palestinian hawks love to hate the settlements since they provoke hatred by ordinary Palestinians of Israelis, inconvenience and threaten the ordinary Palestinian population, and provide a rallying call for more militants to their cause and a case of injustice to claim their cause is right.
The average Israeli or Palestinian mother? I would imagine they should hate the settlements for prolonging the conflict and making a peace settlement less likely. Unfortunately, their rhetoric comes at a volume level far lower then those on both sides calling for violent action.
Did you miss the point where international law doesn’t recognize an Israeli right to sovereignty over the West Bank? Aside from Israel and the U.S., most countries seem to believe self-sovereignty over the West Bank is a higher moral claim than Israeli sovereignty over it.
Back to the op …
We have established that indeed Israel will to at least some degree remove those settlements that are illegal by Israeli law.
It is as of yet unclear if the current Israeli administration will comply with Obama’s holding them to no (Israeli-legal) settlement expansion even for “natural growth” (new buildings for expanding population by births) but I think most think that they will, even if that only occurs as a result of slowly ratcheting pressure from the US.
All current settlements will never be forcibly evacuated even if some are. Some dream of a solution that does not forcibly evacuate anyone but allows Jews in those settlements to choose to become minority citizens of a new PA with that apparatus guaranteeing their safety if they comply with PA laws (which are protective of minority rights and freedoms) and pay taxes to the PA.
Any proposal that requires that all or even any settlements have “to be removed before Hamas and other factions … cease their violence against their old enemy” will fail before it even begins. No new growth met by a best effort by a PA to halt all violence, as per the “road map”, can happen with appropriate pressures. Any actual removal will need some major negotiated and enforcable solution that assures the Israelis of long term security to be at hand. And that is a hard sell indeed. Without that no amount of pressure would get even the Israeli Left to want to budge.
I saw the assertion that this was so, but I missed the proof. If it was in a previous post, what was the post number?
-XT
Yet more fiction.
And interestingly enough, when Egypt and Jordan conquer territory by military force and deny its inhabitants self determination, you claim it was ‘supposed’ to be their territory. Funny, that.
Speaking of which…
Please stick with the right century at least if you can’t stick with the right decade. The discussion you’re responding to, even with Kim stretching things, dealt with the Balfour Deceleration. Which did indeed grant Jews the right to settlement.
For fuck’s sake, it was the very first two words before the sentence you snipped out of context.
Didn’t see it in any post, but according to Wikipedia UN Resolution 181 the West Bank was supposed to become a “Arab state” apparently that never happened. Not sure why not, but I imagine the wars from 1948 to 1982 had something to do with it.
I see that I was mistaken. That’s the error in learning history from games like Balance of Power where they show the West Bank as part of Jordan. 
So – you are saying that if a nation conquers territory by military force and denies its inhabitants self-determination that’s a bad thing, right?
But isn’t that exactly what Israel did to create the settlements?
Sure – I was actually thinking of the present situation rather than the Balfour Declaration, which is 92 years old! I hardly see it having any relevance to the present. I apologize for not fully reading the thread before posting. I’m not sure that I really did that for the sake of fuck, though - I think fuck can get along just fine without me. 
Getting back to the present – wouldn’t it be better if Israelis settled in, well, Israel, and let the Palestinians set up whatever government they want in the West Bank?
There’s already enough trouble in that part of the world with the crushing poverty of the West Bank and the need for some sort of security agreement that should probably prevent the Palestinians from fielding any military force that might be capable of attacking Israel. Why do more Israelis need to move to the West Bank?
? You seem to be arguing that the early Zionists could have had either “an actual legal right” to settle in Palestine or “a sense of entitlement” about doing so, but not both. But that makes no sense: of course they had both.
In fact, the prime reason that early Zionists sought a legal right for Jews to settle in Palestine in the first place was precisely because they did have “a sense of entitlement” to that region. This is evident from Zionist views expressed long before the Balfour Declaration; for example, in Theodore Herzl’s 1903 statement that “It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that, whatever the fate of the proposition [to substitute Uganda as the location of a Jewish state] may be, our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable.”
In short, ISTM that BrainGlutton was pretty much just stating the obvious. Yes, the existence of Israel as a modern Jewish state is ultimately based on a strong feeling among nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Jews that that region was in some way their “home”, even though they and their ancestors had not lived there for many years. That was the chief reason why, as you put it, “the secular Zionist movement took up the cause of buying and cultivating land that Jews could move to” in that region.
You seem to be attempting to draw an unrealistically sharp distinction between (1) the early Zionists’ sense of historical entitlement to the ancient Jewish homeland, and (2) their pragmatic focus on legal and property rights to make Jewish settlement in Palestine a practical reality. You’re claiming that “the very existence of Israel” is based on (2) and that it’s “fiction”, “bullshit”, “irrational”, “counterfactual”, and so on to say that it’s based on (1).
But in fact, since (1) was ultimately the chief motivation for (2), your outrage seems, at the very least, wildly exaggerated, not to mention bewilderingly pointless. Why should it be so enraging to note that many modern Palestinians have a feeling of “birthright” to a locality where they don’t currently live that’s exactly similar to the feeling of “birthright” that many early Zionists had to a locality where they didn’t currently live?
Um…I think the problem here is you seem to have a misunderstanding of what ‘entitlement’ means. Looking at your quote there, it seems the Herzl is expressing desire. One doesn’t need to set goals if one feels entitled…they are, well, ENTITLED after all. You seem to be confusing entitlement with longing.
But you are conflating the attitude that the Zionists felt entitled to Israel with the fact that they set as their goal the eventual return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland. The Zionists WANTED to return to Israel and to live where their ancestors had, to form a Jewish state as their ancestors had. They didn’t feel they were entitled to it…such a claim would be ridiculous. The Jews NEVER felt entitled…they were one of the most prosecuted peoples throughout history for gods sake!
And you seem to have a rather tenuous grasp of what the word entitlement and entitled actually means.
-XT
No, I don’t think so. Perhaps you’re overinterpreting my use of it, though. I am certainly not claiming that early Zionists somehow imagined that they had an OFFICIAL LEGAL right to move to Palestine before getting all the paperwork in order. (For that matter, I doubt that the Palestinian children mentioned by Odesio, who described the former family villages that they visited as their “home”, imagine that they currently have an OFFICIAL LEGAL right to live there at present either.)
“Feeling entitled” in the sense of “I claim this property as indisputably mine in every legal sense just because I think I ought to have it” would indeed have been a ridiculous claim. “Feeling entitled” in the sense of “This land is my God-given ancestral home and it ought to be established as legally mine because it’s inextricably bound up with my identity” was not a ridiculous claim at all, and in fact many early Zionists made that claim explicitly.
The quote from Sacher that I cited earlier illustrates that very clearly, especially in its invoking “the historic title of the Jewish people to Palestine”. And it’s not just Sacher or post-Balfour Zionists who said these things. As far back as 1862, Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem approvingly quoted Laharanne’s insistence on the Jewish ancestral right to Palestine:
In the first place, I think you must have meant “persecuted”. In the second place, this is just silly: why should being persecuted prevent someone from feeling rightfully entitled to something, even though it’s currently being denied them?
Israelis are somewhat unresponsive to argumentum ad populum concerning them; and frankly, given their history and that of the Jews generally, can you blame them?
There’s a difference between acting from a sense of entitlement, and claiming that you are actually entitled to the land.
I think the difference comes down to whether you buy it, or try to just take it.
Not unless they expect their political opponents to pay more attention to argumentum ad populum than they do themselves. Saying “we will continue to do x, y or z even if all other nations condemn it” while at the same time saying “it’s wrong for so-and-so to do a, b or c because all other nations condemn it” would be hypocritical.
Well then, in either case I’m not seeing how the Zionists would be culpable of feeling entitled to that land. In the first place, they DID try and buy the land (and in fact they bought land and settled in Israel for over a century before the official formation of the country). So…no entitlement at all. They were willing to go along with the original UN partition plan and co-exist with a separate Palestinian Arab state. No entitlement there either, by my understanding of the word…or by your definition. They didn’t just take the land either…they WON the land after being attacked repeatedly. They didn’t even try to annex the land, though it was well within their rights to do so…and in fact, it was what nearly every other nation on earth has done in similar circumstances. So, again, no entitlement there either.
-XT
You lost me.
What exactly are you referring to?
Fair enough. If the Palestinian kids that Odesio mentioned should happen to illegally invade and occupy their ancestral villages without any official sanction, rather than just expressing a personal feeling that those villages are their rightful “home”, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that their sense of entitlement differs substantially from that of the early Zionists.
At present, though, I see no real reason to dispute BrainGlutton’s view that the Palestinian kids’ feeling of “this is my true home, even though I don’t live here now” is exactly similar to the feeling that ultimately inspired the establishment of the modern state of Israel on the location of the ancient land of Israel.