zukunftsangst wrote:
Rather, I don't think the ownership is valid in the first. Imperialism might be the reality of the world, but I don't see that as a reason to accept the current state of affairs.
National boundaries and ownership of various sections of the world do change over time. I suspect that it is you who were making an exception in this one case, not the other way around.
Quote:
I would say that the people who've continuously inhabited the region for millennia have natural rights which supersede those of military conquerors and those who they pledge the land to.
Which people though? Have you actually studied this issue? Have you looked at the population numbers in the region in question going back to say the 1920s? Have you looked at the ratio of various ethnic/religious populations over that time period? The region was fairly sparsely populated until after the Jews began putting a lot of money into building their new nation of Israel. When it was just a smallish number of Jew, Christians, and Muslims living in the area, no one cared much, and no one fought over it much. Tourists came and went and that was about it.
The people you today call Palestinians are largely made up of the descendants of those Arab tribespeople who moved into the area *after* the Jews began spending lots of money and effort to build it up. In many cases, they moved there deliberately in order to prevent the creation of a Jewish state, often at the request (or demand) of the Muslim run states nearby. During the British Mandate period, it was a fairly common practice for the neighboring states to push the nomadic groups out of their territory and into the Palestinian territory. Partly because this allowed them to get rid of troublemakers and extra mouths to feed and foist them on the British, but it's hard to read the historical records and not see a strong anti-semitic aspect to it as well.
Quote:
It's my opinion, and I would be obliged to say a matter of fact, that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is no particularly different than any other matter of colonization or imperialism. Only, it's been clouded by ethnic matters. 'The Jews have suffered great persecution through history so we'll turn a blind eye to their current war crimes', etc.
I'd say that the blinds eye aspect has been overwhelmingly outweighed by the anti-semitic angle though. No other group of people would have faced such great opposition to the creation of a state, right? The reason we have conflict is because there are large groups of people who've opposed a Jewish state from day one and have acted to create a conflict in order to prevent it. That conflict continues today.
Palestine is the name for the general territory. It's not an ethnic or national identity. The Jews living in Israel are *also* Palestinian. As are the Christians. As are the numerous Muslims who live peacefully in Israel itself. For some strange reason, you (and many others) attribute this label to just the Muslims who were pushed out of Jordan, Syria, and Eqypt and told to make trouble in Isreal, and who then got caught up in the middle when those three nations attempted to invade, and then became refugees when the nations they initially came from refused to take them back after the conflict ended. Very very very few people living in the camps and calling themselves Palestinians were people who'd been living in the area for generations prior to the creation of the Jewish state in the first place.
I just think it's complete absurdity to attempt to grant some kind of centuries (or even millenium) long struggle of a local people, when most of them can't trace their heritage in the area itself to a time prior to the actual struggle itself. The reality is that the Palestinians moved (forcibly in some cases) into the region either immediately before the conflict(s) or shortly afterwards. And they were moved there deliberately to create the exactly conflict and problems that we're seeing. And in the most bizarre twist, those refugee camps have experienced some of the highest population growths since the conflict began. Strange, don't you think? Most people would be attempting to move out of such camps, and you'd certainly expect population growth within them to be low, right? It's fairly clear that people are moved into those camps deliberately to create a problem for Israel and to make people like you feel sorry for them.
You should feel sorry for them. But it wasn't Israel who screwed them over.