Comment by lokar
4 months ago
The started off settlement by legally buying property for wealth (mostly absentee) landlords, who were non-Palestinians (they lived in other part of the Ottoman Empire).
4 months ago
The started off settlement by legally buying property for wealth (mostly absentee) landlords, who were non-Palestinians (they lived in other part of the Ottoman Empire).
America bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. France never had any meaningful presence in that territory; being incapable of defending the territory should America decide to take it anyway is probably a big part of the reason they decided to accept money for it.
Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?
Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.
That was a very different situation. That area had been under ottoman rule for generations. There was a long history of ownership.
The Ottomans had no legitimate right to sell that land out from under the people who actually lived there. The whole premise of Zionism is just one of many cases of European colonialism, and no more legitimate than any of the rest.
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If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.
Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.
You can evict renters from the land and move in yourself.
If they then take to violence against you, you have the right to defend yourself.