Stolen Land

 

There's a great deal of preening, primarily on the Left, about "stolen land", the notion that the Europeans who arrived on these shores in the 15th century and on 'stole' the land from the indigenous people whose land then is still rightfully theirs.   A more ridiculous position has not been held for ages, potentially never.

When the explorers and conquistadors first set foot in the Americas (and Africa and Australia, if it matters), the inhabitants were Stone Age people.   They knew about fire, but not about wheels.   They hunted with spears, bows, and atlatl, and got their 'greens' largely by picking fruit from trees.   Any animal husbandry was focused on keeping the goats alive until it was time to eat them.   To suggest that any of that gave some property rights to the inhabitants is the prelude to demanding that we all regress to their lifestyle.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect had intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.    — Galileo Galilei

Having attained a modicum of civilization — whatever form that might take — the duty of the newcomers — not to the locals, but to themselves — is to make what use they can of the environment — the environment that the then-current inhabitants had neither the skill nor the impulse to exploit.

Israel is, funnily enough, in the same general position.   When the current crop of modern Jews began drifting back to what would become Israel, the Ottomans were in charge, and the land was barely fit for raising goats.   It had been in roughly that condition for millenia.   There had been no serious effort at making it more productive.   The arriving Jews changed that.   They converted the desert-like landscape into a productive greenspace such that 'Jaffa oranges' (among many other things) became something never before seen.

Suddenly, the 'Palestinians' want their ancestral homeland back from those who stole it from them — and brought it from the Stone Age into the Modern Age.  

Don't make me laugh.   More importantly, don't make me cry.

 

Israel

 

I'm not expounding; I'm just 'noodling'...

There's a lot of talk about how Jewish Democrats are going to deal with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who just won the Dem primary in NY's 14th CD.  The problem with AO-C is that she's anti-Israel and Jewish Dems are now faced with a dilemma: support the Dem nominee or support Israel.  It got me to thinking.

Before the 20th century, the part of the world we now call 'Israel' was dominated by the Ottoman Empire.  In WW-I, the Ottomans sided with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, lost, and had all their territory seized by the victors.  Had the Ottomans sided with Britain and France, there probably wouldn't be an 'Israel' and I wouldn't be noodling about it, but that's not how it played out.  For a long time, 'Palestine' was Britain's to govern if not own, and after WW-II, displaced Jewish populations demanded and got a 'homeland' carved out of the British Mandate.

Lest there be any confusion, 'Palestine' is derived from 'Philistine', but it has never been a nation with a distinct government, a distinct culture, or a distinct language, at least since the Philistines got overrun.  It has been, at most, an administrative district, a convenient shorthand to designate a particular geographic region.

The first Jewish settlers arrived while the Ottomans were still in charge.  When they got there, the area was barely fit for raising goats, and had been in that condition for millennia.  Today, Israel is a productive greenspace that is in stark contrast to the millions of square miles of wasteland that surround it.  Having seen what the Jews did with their patch of desert, the envious 'Palestinians' want it back.  They didn't do anything but raise goats on it for 2,000 years, but now it's their homeland.

Don't get me wrong: I don't support the U.S. giving Israel millions of dollars per day, but I think the Israelis have established ownership via sweat-equity.  What the Israelis did the Palestinians could have done... but didn't.  There are vast uninhabited tracts of land indistinguishable from pre-Israeli Palestine within a day's journey from Israel.  Any nearby country could acquire a huge population of formerly-Palestinian homesteaders for free and have them improve that country's economy.  That is not an acceptable solution, because Israel would still exist.  The only acceptable solution is one that eliminates Israel.  Besides, those formerly-Palestinian homesteaders would likely be as useless on their new land as they were on the old.

The fact that other nearby nations could (for almost no cost) solve 'the Palestinian problem' — and don't — invites speculation that they don't actually want that problem solved.

Yes, there should be a two-state solution for Palestine.  The other 'state' should be east of Jordan.  Any nation in the local group that isn't interested in having Palestinian settlers on their desert needs to STFU — permanently.

Jewish Dems still have a problem in AO-C, and they're going to have a come-to-Jesus (sorry...) moment in the very near future.

Okay, I was expounding.