- Joined
- Sep 15, 2013
- Messages
- 8,311
- Reaction score
- 4,112
- Location
- Australia
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
Again, for Jewish immigration and autonomy to come at the expense of local Arabs was never necessary and by all appearances never even desired by most Jewish people and leaders; that it turned out that way was a result of the conflict of which Arabs were probably the earliest and certainly the main instigators. Trying to draw a parallel with European colonialism seems rather strained from this angle, as from others, because it requires ignoring various inconvenient facts which put Jews' right to immigrate and self-govern on much better standing against Palestinians' right to exclude and deny them. You're trying to create an equivalency between on the one hand Europeans coming over to (for them) brand new lands with no justification to migrate and claim them against the obvious sovereignty of the local inhabitants, and on the other Jews returning often under the duress of persecution or genocide to a historical and cultural homeland from which their people had been repeatedly unjustly expelled over the millennia and over which local inhabitants did not have sovereignty.There is also, as yet unmentioned, the racist element to this settler colonialist endeavour that was found in the others and is still supported today , often seen right here in this subforum. That is the idea that the Jews should have their homeland at the expense of the indigenous Arabs simply because they were able to develop it. You can see the same excuses for all of the other settler colonialist examples. We same the same " savage " natives that are not presented as civilized in the I/P conflict as we saw in the propaganda justifications for the other settler colonialist systems. " A land without a people" ? ring any bells?
In the case of Australia or America or the like, one could argue that since the native peoples 'owned' the land and it was stolen from them, by rights that land should all be returned to the heirs/descendants of the original owners and failure to do so constitutes a crime of receiving stolen goods on a massive scale. The biggest problem I have with that argument is the question of whether it it is legitimate to/what it means to 'own' land, an uncreated, unearned, finite, vital resource. But inasmuch as we do talk about owning or administering or 'rightful' sovereignty over a land, obviously those lands belonged to the Aborigines and Native Americans and their descendants should have special rights even many generations after the land was taken from them. Judging by your contempt for colonial history I'm guessing you might agree with that? But I'm sure you already know how that principle can be applied in the case of Palestine, whose main inhabitants for most of the 1st millennium BCE were forcibly conquered and ultimately exterminated, enslaved or expelled in large numbers. Claiming 'ownership' of the land for 19th or early 20th century Palestinian Arabs is problematic enough in itself; outright denying any legitimacy to Jewish migration and autonomy is even more problematic.
As is often the case I think the more reasonable perspective lies between the extremes, namely that both Palestinian nationalists and Zionists had a legitimate case, and given the historically-proven population capacity of the region both groups could and should have been able to reach a satisfactory compromise. Unfortunately the leaders and many people of one of those groups were seemingly far less willing to reach a peaceful compromise and considerably more inclined towards overt hostility and violence, leading to this ongoing cycle of conflict down to the present.
Last edited: