If people A can claim legitimate rights to a land they abandoned several centuries ago, a land now inhabited by a mix of people: The majority of people A who stayed and later adopted a new identity, plus others who migrated to the land in the course of subsequent wars and occupations, then according to this narrative:
- Vladimir Putin is justified in invading and reclaiming parts of Ukraine. In fact, it would be quite legitimate for him to claim all of Ukraine. Russia abandoned Ukraine only a few decades ago. Ukraine was merely a region, never a country.
- Italy can reclaim lands it once occupied during its Roman Empire era around the Mediterranean. None of the countries existing today around the Mediterranean ever existed as a country during the Roman occupation. In fact, most of them became "countries" in the last couple of centuries.
- Turkiye can reclaim lands it once occupied as the Ottoman Empire. Same argument as with Italy and the Roman Empire.
- England can claim legitimate rights to parts of the United States, Canada, Australia, India, etc. There never were such countries prior to the English conquest of north America.
- India can claim absolute rights to Pakistan. There never was a country called Pakistan prior to the partition of India in 1947.
- European Christian countries can claim legitimate rights to Palestine since they occupied it for 200-300 years less than a millennium ago. There was once a thriving Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and surrounding fiefdoms and counties once in the Near East, Palestine included. Why can't the French, the Germans, and others use that argument to invade Palestine, ethnically cleanse it of its inhabitants - Muslims and Jews - and establish Christian settlements where their ancestors once lived?
The point of this hypothetical exercise is that while a Jewish kingdom existed some 2,500 years, based on tenuous fictional accounts recorded in dubious biblical stories, many of which reek of fantasy, it is inconceivable in our world today that recent European converts to Judaism can reclaim lands that another ancient people, the Hebrews, occupied more than two millennia ago.
If we were to accept the biblical accounts as true to reality, then the Canaanite people (ancestors of the Palestinians) who lived in Palestine prior to Joshua's Hebrew conquest have the right to claim legitimate rights to today's Palestine, especially that Joshua's conquest had all the accoutrements of a genocide: The Bible says that he killed every Canaanite man, woman and child, then took their land, supposedly because the loving Yahweh told his pet people they can do such atrocities .
Why do the apologists of Apartheid Israel insist on excluding the founding of Israel from this sort of argumentation, a founding that has all the characteristics of a colonialist violent conquest of somebody else's land?
If the world as we know it today accepts that a people from Europe, massacred and persecuted by their own fellow Europeans, and who declare themselves religious descendants of a Bronze Age people, can claim rights to a land their own dubious ancestors took by massacres and wars from another people, then any country can claim ownership to any land its former citizens once took by force and occupied.
If Israel is shielded from the same judgment of reason that in principle should apply to all countries, then where do the land-grabbing and killing stop? By what measure of reason, equity and justice is Israel placed above such standard moral criteria that it goes on annihilating another people at will?
Finally, with the democratization of information, the monopoly of information has ended and the brainwashing no longer works. The world now sees the horror that Israel has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on the Palestinian people, the majority of whom live in exile after having been ethnically cleansed form their millennial homes and villages.
Israel still has a chance of surviving if, and only if, it makes amends to the Palestinian people, compensates the victims of the violent founding of Israel, and demonstrates humane contrition by granting the Palestinian people the undiluted freedom and self-determination they deserve. That would be the ethical thing to do.
But to continue to subject the Palestinians to crude and barbaric treatment since the founding of Israel over the ashes of historic Palestine, including threats to further ethnically cleanse what remains of Palestine by evicting the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in order to construct a purely Jewish state - itself the definition of a theocracy a la Iran or Saudi Arabia - is an atrocious proposition and an invitation to unending torment and heartache.
Benyamin Netanyahu's current government includes ministers whose political platform is the expulsion (a hypocritical term for massive ethnic cleansing) of the Palestinians of the West Bank, Gaza, and those Palestinians of Galilee who stayed after the violent founding of the State of Israel). No one should pretend to not have seen it coming when the racist Zionists, Yahweh's pet people (a supremacist racist notion), chase the Palestinians out of what remains of historic Palestine.
Remember the Crusaders? They claimed between 1099 and 1289 that Palestine was their "Holy Christian Land" that was stolen from them by the Muslim Arab invaders a couple of centuries earlier. So, like the European Jewish converts of the mid-20th century did, modern-day European Christians can argue that they had a kingdom there once, start sending "exodus" ships to the Israeli shores, mount an international campaign of disinformation to sedate other people into guilt, start their own terrorist organizations like the Haganah, Stern, Irgun and others, persecute and chase both the Jewish settlers and their Palestinian victims, and re-establish a modern Kingdom of Jerusalem backed by all of the power and technology that Europe can muster.
But the Crusades did end. When the balance of power turned, they could not hold on to their Kingdom and they were evicted back to Europe. The might of Israel and the backing it forcibly coerces out of a guilty West might ensure its survival for some time, but it is doomed on the long term, especially on account of the violence with which it was founded. Israel has done everything it could to lose any potential friend in the region.
Go ahead and accuse me of anti-semitism. It is such a pedestrian, easy, cheap accusation nowadays that it doesn't stick anymore. Instead of defending the indefensible, I invite guilt-laden Europeans who committed the Holocaust to think of the putrid lives the Palestinians are made to live by the "most ethical country" on earth.
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