Comment by skrebbel

1 year ago

> When you occupy someone's land, there can never be peace until they get their land back or are fully exterminated or controlled militarily

I don’t understand why people think this is a good argument. Lots and lots of places shifted in control since 1948. Poland moved half a country to the left, world empires got decolonized, India and Pakistan split and then the latter split once more, all with enormous population movements, the list is nearly endless. “All of that should revert to how it was before, even if at the cost of kicking out or killing everybody who live there” is a pretty extreme revisionist take.

In all these countries, “we should restore our borders to $maximumSizeEver” is widely understood to be a far right take (the Russians want Ukraine, the Greater Hungary people want Transylvania, the Greek neonazis want Trabzon (!), everybody wants Kashmir, etc etc etc). It’s a far right talking point. But for Palestine it’s somehow a mainstream opinion. I don’t get it.

I mean, there’s lots of good arguments to be made for the Palestinian case IMO but I don’t find “they once had more land and therefore they should get it all back no matter the consequences” very compelling.

21 comments

skrebbel

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harpiaharpyja  1 year ago

Thank you for bringing some perspective to the discussion, because there are so many counterexamples to the GP post.

Karelia is another one. Whether or not such situations are resolvable peacefully is entirely up to the nations involved.

I don't see why revanchism gets a free pass in the specific case of the Palestinians.

smoothjazz  1 year ago

Forcing people off of their land is the definition of ethnic cleansing and I don't think that's ever ok nor generally accepted in the world. I think Israel is a lot like apartheid South Africa. You can end the apartheid government and start making reparations, including land back to the native inhabitants.

  • skrebbel  1 year ago

    Yeah it's never OK but do you also think Finland should get Viipuri back? That was the second-largest city of Finland, the Soviets took it in WWII and kicked out all the Finns and that was that. It's now Vyborg, a sleepy Russian town of little importance. That was a catastrophe too.

    Do you also think Lviv should be Polish? And Wrocław German? And Trabzon Greek? No wait I mean Armenian, which do we even pick, seriously everybody wants Trabzon! Should the entire Arabian peninsula be Turkish again?

    Where does it stop? Why should Palestine be restored to its one-time borders but not the rest? All this happened in a time when moving populations around at the whim of a few imperialist rulers was considered a super normal thing to do. That doesn't make it right, but the Nakba isn't a particularly unique historical event. Get over it, and focus on the actual current events that are also bad, such as the settlements, decades of effective imprisonment of everybody in Gaza, and so on. There's plenty of good arguments! But "from the river to the sea" is a far right revisionist talking point and in my opinion it does an enormous disservice to the Palestinian case.

    • biorach  1 year ago

      The issue is that after the Winter war there was still a Finland, after WWII there was still a Poland, and a Germany and a Turkey and a Greece and an Armenia.

      There is now no real Palestine state and no realistic prospect of one. Somewhere between 5 and 8 million Palestinians are now condemned to be extremely unwilling subjects of an endless military occupation by a hostile state and reduced to second class status in their own homeland.

      _That_ is the crucial difference.

      12 replies →

    • toyg  1 year ago

      What you forget to mention is that, in many cases, a lot of those moves are indeed still contested.

      And in fact, the Zionist argument is exactly that one: "because there were some Jews here 2000 years ago, this land must be a Jewish ethnostate". Why is that argument ok, but "there were Arabs here 80 years ago" is not?

      Because, in reality, both arguments are stupid and tribal to a level rarely seen after 1950. Both should join modernity and move to a shared state - not based on XIX century racism, but on XXI century respect for democracy, religious equality, etc etc.

      Unfortunately, the side with (atomic) power refuses to even countenance the possibility, because of a tribalistic ideology that shames some of their magnificent ancestors. And so we continue with an eye for an eye, like in the darkest of times.