At UnHerd David A. Bell considers a very interesting question: does conquest convey a right to territory? His opening raised some red flags for me:
The two expulsions took place only a few years apart. In the first, starting in 1945, the Soviet Union took the lead in driving as many as 12 million ethnic Germans from territories that had previously belonged to Germany. They largely ended up in what became West Germany, their places taken principally by Czechs and Poles. In the second expulsion, in 1948-49, the newborn state of Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from their homes, while hundreds of thousands of others fled what had become a war zone. All in all, well over 700,000 were forcibly displaced.
The problem is that during the period he’s addressing there were actually three expulsions: the expulsion of ethnic Germans from territories conquered by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II, the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from the newly-created land of Israel, and, the expulsion he fails to mention, the expulsion of roughly 900,000 Jews from Muslim lands of North Africa and the Middle East. Omitting that expulsion elides over something pretty basic.
Without digressing too much, I suspect that there aren’t 1,000 people alive today who are living where their ancestors have lived for the last 1,000 generations. Everybody is from somewhere else. They are where they are now because their ancestors took the land from somebody else whose ancestors took the land from somebody else, whose etc. It may be distasteful but if there is no legitimate claim of ownership via conquest then no country has any legitimacy or, more precisely, the only way to claim any legitimacy is by drawing some arbitrary line in history labelled “This Far and No Farther”. Somehow such lines have a tremendous tendency to be self-serving in one way or another.
There is another way of looking things which goes back to a Scottish saying: possession is nine-tenths of the law.
So, you can keep what you have as long as you can generate the will and violence needed to do so. Did I get that right? If it had succeeded, would the Nazi invasion of Russia have been justified? The death camps?
Palestine belongs to the Ashkenazi as long as they kill enough Palestinians. Menachem Begin actually said that, or some close paraphrase.
That is, of course, the ancient rule. When the Celts conquered Britain, they killed 90% of the Neolithic male farmers, and kept the women.
About 3.5 million illegal alien invade the US each year, 80% of them military age males. At one point does America become theirs? Is it legitimate for native Americans to kill the invaders on sight?
Asking for a friend.
Most of the Jews in Israel are either Sephardic or Mizrahi. Only about 30% are Ashkenazic.
Let’s look at the question from a different perspective. The ancestors of the Bantu-speaking people of South Africa arrived there about a millennium ago. Do they have no right to remain there? The same is the case for the Navaho in the Southwest of the United States—their ancestors arrived about a millennium ago.
As I said, it’s distasteful but consider the alternatives. There are basically three:
1,500 years ago there were only a handful of Arabs in Palestine—a few Bedouins. BTW the present Bedouins side with the Israelis.
Seems like apples and oranges. Italy and Germany may have tried to conquer N Africa but failed. Russia and Israel successfully took and held new land.
Steve
Dave Schuler: Establish an arbitrary Start of History.
The “Start of History” would be the formation of the United Nations and binding promises made by the members to eschew any right of conquest. That’s why most wars since WWII have been cast as civil wars.
Israel joined the United Nations in May 1949. Palestine has never been a member. That implies that for Israel the earliest relevant date on which to eschew a right of conquest would be May 1949. Or, said another way, the Palestinians’ claims are meaningless unless history starts long before the formation of the United Nations.
Dave Schuler: That implies that for Israel the earliest relevant date on which to eschew a right of conquest would be May 1949.
That would the ‘pre-1967’ borders. Israel had agreed not to use force to change borders.
Not being a fan of Israel’s I don’t particularly want to defend the actions of the Israelis. Their side of the story on the Six Day War is that they were defending themselves against attack by their neighbors.
Dave Schuler: Their side of the story on the Six Day War is that they were defending themselves against attack by their neighbors.
That’s right. Israel has a right to self-defense. They can even temporarily occupy a territory to exercise that right. But they can’t—consistent with their obligations—simply take and keep territories by force. They have to at least pretend they have legal motivations.
Even Russia’s original incursion into Ukraine was justified by protecting the Russian minority there. The claim that Ukraine is really part of Russia, however, is not legally sustainable, as changing existing borders through force is specifically precluded, not just by commitments of the United Nations, but according to Russian attestations in the Budapest Memorandum.
What complicates the situation WRT Israel is that both Jordan and Egypt have refused to re-occupy the West Bank and Gaza, respectively, which they had occupied prior to the Six Day War. Syria has returned to the Golan and Egypt to the Sinai, other territories temporarily occupied by Israel.
IMO the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrates a failure of the United Nations, compounded by the recently revealed complicity of UNRWA with Hamas. The UN Charter should not be a suicide pact.
The entire matter is aggravated by the desire of some Israelis for a “Greater Israel” consisting of the present Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and parts of the Golan and Sinai. I do not believe the United States is interested in that aspiration so our unquestioned support for Israel is a mistake. With Hamas’s 10/7 attack the situation has become one in which they can’t move forward and they can’t move back. Israel was attacked because Hamas could. How do you foreclose that while Hamas still exists? How does Israel accomplish the permanent elimination not just of Hamas but other radical Islamist groups, without occupying Gaza?
There has always been a natural right of conquest.
Seems that peoples are attempting to supplant it as wars become more expensive and destructive.
We’ve become adept at exploiting resources and labor of other nations without conquest. Instead of killing them and taking their goods, we conscript them financially and take their resources in perpetuity.
Hamas, being a death cult, won’t play that.
However, it’s occurred to me at least, that the Russians could have bought their way in the Ukraine perhaps at a lower cost.
And with receipts in hand, there would be no question of right or wrong.
As I understand it, some 40% of commercial real estate in Hawaii is owned by Japanese investors today.