The problem with this analogy is that Czechoslovakia didn’t start by expelling 700 000 Hungarians from its territory. My great-grandmother was a proud Hungarian and refused to learn a single Slovak word, justifying her ignorance by saying: “I was born in Hungary, and I have never moved”. So she spent most of the century living in Czechoslovakia, trying to ignore this fact as much as possible. And it worked for her.
Taking a territory from another country is one thing, taking homes from people living there is another.
A more fitting analogy would be Beneš Decrees, but that’s not how the country was founded, it happened a few decades and a world war later, and as far as I know there was no attempt to deny it.
Wow. I didn’t know about these details honestly. I guess we can agree that Israel did many things that were wrong, and we can even call those war crimes.
I just don’t agree with your original claim that the very creation of Israel was wrong.
There is nothing wrong per se with wanting to have your own country. Unfortunately, all places on land are already taken, so your options are: seasteading, colonizing Mars, or killing someone else and taking their country. The first two options are currently technically impossible. The third option was considered perfectly okay a few centuries ago… and kinda okay a century ago, as long as you didn’t do it to white people… but is generally frowned upon these days.
(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)
I don’t buy the argument “the land is ours, because our ancestors lived there more than thousand years ago”. I mean, imagine what would it look like if everyone started following this rule. Would you support my crusade to conquer the place in Asia (I don’t even know where exactly, but perhaps we could figure it out) where our Slavic ancestors came from more than thousand years ago? Or would you call me insane if I proposed it seriously?
The usual argument “but Jews were killed by Nazis, and therefore they deserve their own country to finally have a place where they are safe” fails to explain why Palestinians should be the ones to pay for the crimes of the Nazi Germany. Why don’t we take a part of Germany instead, and make it a new country for Jews? That would be fair… and also more convenient; placed in Europe, it could be a part of EU and/or NATO today, away from the conflicts. (Yeah, but it is not their homeland. Yeah, but I don’t buy that argument.) This version of justice sounds like: someone punched you, therefore you are now allowed to punch a completely unrelated person, and call it self-defense.
What other arguments are there? “It was okay, because the British said it was okay.” Uh, why was it okay for the British to say that it is okay to displace almost million people? And how is it okay to do something just because the British said it would be okay? (Hypothetically speaking, if British gave a permission to murder everyone in Palestine instead, would you say that the people who actually did it did nothing wrong, because they had someone else’s permission? People in Nuremberg were hanged for smaller leaps of logic.)
So please explain to me in what sense the actions that created Israel were right. (Not why it would be okay to create Israel in a hypothetical uninhabited land; because I agree that yes that would be okay.)
How would you see the situation if instead Israel was created today? Like, you would turn on the TV and hear that somewhere far away, half million people were forcefully driven away from their homes, to make place for a new country of white people. Would you honestly say “nothing wrong with that”?
*
The only reason why I don’t say that the fair thing would indeed be to cancel the project of Israel and send everyone home is… that it happened a few decades ago. [EDIT: Oops, I forgot about the Jews who already lived there before Israel. I guess that would mean yes to Israel, but probably a smaller one? Not sure, would need to check the population numbers before Israel.] The new generation of Israelis are at home there, in the literal sense of “they have never actually lived anywhere else”. So I don’t think that displacing people should be solved by… displacing other people.
There must be an expiration date on crimes, otherwise we would have endless vendettas and complete legal chaos, because practically everything that can’t be produced (such as land) was taken by force at some moment of history. But at the same time, the victims of those crimes deserve, at least, a public admission that it happened, and perhaps an apology—even if it comes with a firm statement that although we genuinely feel bad about that, no recompensation is going to happen, ever. As far as I know, this didn’t happen. Instead, Israel has a law against commemorating the event. (At the same time, they complain that Palestinian schools don’t teach their kids about the holocaust.)
So the first step would be to stop the bullshit about how all those Palestinians left their homes voluntarily. Yeah, I get it, it is so convenient when other people start voluntarily doing what you want, as soon as you aim a gun at them. But seriously, if this is what you teach your kids at schools, of course you will raise a generation of nationalistic morons who believe that their ancestors never did anything wrong, and therefore they are morally superior to the rest of humanity. Which, of course, also makes all their actions today perfectly okay, because the world deserves a payback. -- As opposed to living in a world full of flawed people, where we need to find a way to be nice to each other anyway.
Of course, none of this means that Israel should not address the terrorist attacks by force today. This is more about what to do after that.
I am not saying that displacing 700,000 people was okay. I am saying is that splitting the region between two people who were already living there was right. Especially given that these two people could not be realistically capable co-governing together given their not-so-great relationship.
But you are changing argument on the go. First, you start by saying it’s not ok to come to someone else’s land and steal it (100% agreement on that). Then you pretend that somehow there were not living Jews in Palestine (they were already). They had as much right for the land as all the muslims that lived there.
I agree with that, thanks for correcting me! (Made an edit in my comment.)
Splitting the region between two people who live there—ok (with some more details)
Displacing 700 000 people, and inviting strangers to replace them—not ok
The details on splitting the region are that it should approximately follow the locations where those people previously lived (i.e. not something like “the people who previously mostly lived in the south will get the northern part, and vice versa” or “the people who were previously 5% of the population will get 95% of the territory, and vice versa”). Of course, this cannot be done perfectly, a square mile at some place is not equal to a square mile at a different place, and it might be better if the new borders go along some river or mountain, to make them naturally defensible. Also, the people who were e.g. 20% of the population should intuitively get 20% of the territory, even if they were a majority in 0% of cities, I suppose? (Mathematically equivalent to drawing borders and resettling people 1:1, until everyone is on the “correct” side.)
And, after this is done, the people living in one part are free to invite strangers to their homes, keeping the borders unchanged.
My understanding is that Jews were 1⁄3 of the total population, not 20%.
I agree though that the UN plan for Palestine was too generous to Israel, but that might have also be caused by Arab side essentially sabotaging it and not engaging in negotiations?
And the actual outcome for Israel turned out to be even more than the original UN plan was suggesting. Still, I don’t know how a good solution would look like here. Jews were the underdog here and if they wouldn’t secure the territory they secured, it would probably get pretty bloody bad for them. Simply, them having some smaller territory that wouldn’t really be defensible doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium to me. Also, it’s not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today’s population). I don’t think there would be any Jews alive today would the roles be reversed.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not me trying to absolve them of the war crimes they did, nor me trying to say that it’s fair that they pretty much got most of the land while Arab’s live an an Apartheid state occupied by Israel.
I am just saying that I don’t think that there was some magic easy solution back in 1948 that would lead to magically better situation than there is today.
FYI: This is the proposal from 1937 rejected by Arabs that would have been IMO fair according to population criteria. I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
Not sure how much I can trust ChatGPT, but frankly I don’t have energy left for a more serious research, so I asked:
You are a historian. What was the demographics of Palestine before 1948?
I got a list of groups, but no numbers, so I asked again:
Can you estimate the fractions of total population these groups made somewhen around 1920?
Now the same, for 1940.
Now the same for 1900.
I mean, I was interested in what happened before Nakba, but didn’t know how far to go in the past. Too much in the past is less relevant. Too little, on the other hand, includes the Zionist immigrants, and I was interested in the people who lived there traditionally.
ChatGPT said that Arab population was roughly 80-95% of population in 1900 and 1920, and 70-80% in 1940. Jewish population was around 5-10% in 1900, 10-15% in 1920, and 20-30% in 1940. Other minorities, such as Druze, Circassians, and Samaritans, were likely less than 1%.
So, if this is correct, the number “1/3 of the total population” already includes the Zionists that immigrated before 1948. The fraction of Jews traditionally living in Palestine is much smaller.
EDIT:
When I asked about today, ChatGPT gave separate statistics for Israel and Palestinian Territories, so I asked again:
Please express this as a fraction these groups have in the territory of Israel and Palestinian Territories together.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT sucks at math (yes, that also makes the previous numbers suspicious), it just couldn’t do the addition properly, so I asked for absolute numbers instead, and got this: in Israel 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs, in Palestinian Territories 0 Jews and 7 million Arabs (5 million in the West Bank, 2 million in Gaza). So, assuming I am better at math than ChatGPT, it makes 40-45% Jewish population, and 55-60% Arab population in September 2021.
Sorry, I guess I expressed myself confusingly, the parts about “people who lived in south vs north”, “5% and 95%”, and “20% of population, but a majority in 0% of cities” were all meant only as illustrative examples of what I meant by fair vs unfair division of a territory, not statements on the specific number of people in actual Palestine and their historical locations.
Also, it’s not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today’s population).
Some people disagree with this statement, but unfortunately I don’t the time to figure out who is wrong here. Seemingly no one can agree even on the basic facts, so every single sentence anyone says on this topic needs to be verified. The weekend is over, I am out of time. :(
I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
I agree. I am not good at geography, but there seem to be no natural borders in that area, except for the river Jordan.
On the other hand, compared to some fractal-like proposals I have seen, that one seems unbelievably simple.
Another problem seems to be that the areas where both sides live are economically interconnected, so you can’t simply “build a wall” between them. (I think so. Maybe I am wrong here.) My reasoning is that if you build a wall and stop interacting across it, at some point it becomes boring to keep yelling at the wall. But if thousands of people cross the border every day, that is thousand opportunities for some petty aggression to escalate, and a daily reminder how much your enemies suck. (“Good fences make good neighbors.”) Again, I know too little about the commerce in the area to propose a natural place where a wall could be built. Maybe there is no such place.
(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)
Buying land from governments really hasn’t been a very legitimate concept from the beginning. Even if they are willing to sell, the people living there probably don’t want you ruling them, and where they don’t want to sell, I fail to see the crime against humanity in paying people to move to another country until there are few enough left that you can walk in, become the super majority, and declare yourself the new government.
Of course, that doesn’t mean men with guns won’t try to stop you. I can very much see how elites with guns like this environment where no one ever has the option of forming a new country, or buying out their own country from under them. The problem here is that people who are not powerful elites tolerate this, and don’t consider that we could cut governments out of this equation entirely.
The problem with this analogy is that Czechoslovakia didn’t start by expelling 700 000 Hungarians from its territory. My great-grandmother was a proud Hungarian and refused to learn a single Slovak word, justifying her ignorance by saying: “I was born in Hungary, and I have never moved”. So she spent most of the century living in Czechoslovakia, trying to ignore this fact as much as possible. And it worked for her.
Taking a territory from another country is one thing, taking homes from people living there is another.
A more fitting analogy would be Beneš Decrees, but that’s not how the country was founded, it happened a few decades and a world war later, and as far as I know there was no attempt to deny it.
Wow. I didn’t know about these details honestly. I guess we can agree that Israel did many things that were wrong, and we can even call those war crimes.
I just don’t agree with your original claim that the very creation of Israel was wrong.
There is nothing wrong per se with wanting to have your own country. Unfortunately, all places on land are already taken, so your options are: seasteading, colonizing Mars, or killing someone else and taking their country. The first two options are currently technically impossible. The third option was considered perfectly okay a few centuries ago… and kinda okay a century ago, as long as you didn’t do it to white people… but is generally frowned upon these days.
(In theory you could buy a piece of land, but in practice, countries are unwilling to sell.)
I don’t buy the argument “the land is ours, because our ancestors lived there more than thousand years ago”. I mean, imagine what would it look like if everyone started following this rule. Would you support my crusade to conquer the place in Asia (I don’t even know where exactly, but perhaps we could figure it out) where our Slavic ancestors came from more than thousand years ago? Or would you call me insane if I proposed it seriously?
The usual argument “but Jews were killed by Nazis, and therefore they deserve their own country to finally have a place where they are safe” fails to explain why Palestinians should be the ones to pay for the crimes of the Nazi Germany. Why don’t we take a part of Germany instead, and make it a new country for Jews? That would be fair… and also more convenient; placed in Europe, it could be a part of EU and/or NATO today, away from the conflicts. (Yeah, but it is not their homeland. Yeah, but I don’t buy that argument.) This version of justice sounds like: someone punched you, therefore you are now allowed to punch a completely unrelated person, and call it self-defense.
What other arguments are there? “It was okay, because the British said it was okay.” Uh, why was it okay for the British to say that it is okay to displace almost million people? And how is it okay to do something just because the British said it would be okay? (Hypothetically speaking, if British gave a permission to murder everyone in Palestine instead, would you say that the people who actually did it did nothing wrong, because they had someone else’s permission? People in Nuremberg were hanged for smaller leaps of logic.)
So please explain to me in what sense the actions that created Israel were right. (Not why it would be okay to create Israel in a hypothetical uninhabited land; because I agree that yes that would be okay.)
How would you see the situation if instead Israel was created today? Like, you would turn on the TV and hear that somewhere far away, half million people were forcefully driven away from their homes, to make place for a new country of white people. Would you honestly say “nothing wrong with that”?
*
The only reason why I don’t say that the fair thing would indeed be to cancel the project of Israel and send everyone home is… that it happened a few decades ago. [EDIT: Oops, I forgot about the Jews who already lived there before Israel. I guess that would mean yes to Israel, but probably a smaller one? Not sure, would need to check the population numbers before Israel.] The new generation of Israelis are at home there, in the literal sense of “they have never actually lived anywhere else”. So I don’t think that displacing people should be solved by… displacing other people.
There must be an expiration date on crimes, otherwise we would have endless vendettas and complete legal chaos, because practically everything that can’t be produced (such as land) was taken by force at some moment of history. But at the same time, the victims of those crimes deserve, at least, a public admission that it happened, and perhaps an apology—even if it comes with a firm statement that although we genuinely feel bad about that, no recompensation is going to happen, ever. As far as I know, this didn’t happen. Instead, Israel has a law against commemorating the event. (At the same time, they complain that Palestinian schools don’t teach their kids about the holocaust.)
So the first step would be to stop the bullshit about how all those Palestinians left their homes voluntarily. Yeah, I get it, it is so convenient when other people start voluntarily doing what you want, as soon as you aim a gun at them. But seriously, if this is what you teach your kids at schools, of course you will raise a generation of nationalistic morons who believe that their ancestors never did anything wrong, and therefore they are morally superior to the rest of humanity. Which, of course, also makes all their actions today perfectly okay, because the world deserves a payback. -- As opposed to living in a world full of flawed people, where we need to find a way to be nice to each other anyway.
Of course, none of this means that Israel should not address the terrorist attacks by force today. This is more about what to do after that.
I am not saying that displacing 700,000 people was okay. I am saying is that splitting the region between two people who were already living there was right. Especially given that these two people could not be realistically capable co-governing together given their not-so-great relationship.
But you are changing argument on the go. First, you start by saying it’s not ok to come to someone else’s land and steal it (100% agreement on that). Then you pretend that somehow there were not living Jews in Palestine (they were already). They had as much right for the land as all the muslims that lived there.
I agree with that, thanks for correcting me! (Made an edit in my comment.)
Splitting the region between two people who live there—ok (with some more details)
Displacing 700 000 people, and inviting strangers to replace them—not ok
The details on splitting the region are that it should approximately follow the locations where those people previously lived (i.e. not something like “the people who previously mostly lived in the south will get the northern part, and vice versa” or “the people who were previously 5% of the population will get 95% of the territory, and vice versa”). Of course, this cannot be done perfectly, a square mile at some place is not equal to a square mile at a different place, and it might be better if the new borders go along some river or mountain, to make them naturally defensible. Also, the people who were e.g. 20% of the population should intuitively get 20% of the territory, even if they were a majority in 0% of cities, I suppose? (Mathematically equivalent to drawing borders and resettling people 1:1, until everyone is on the “correct” side.)
And, after this is done, the people living in one part are free to invite strangers to their homes, keeping the borders unchanged.
My understanding is that Jews were 1⁄3 of the total population, not 20%.
I agree though that the UN plan for Palestine was too generous to Israel, but that might have also be caused by Arab side essentially sabotaging it and not engaging in negotiations?
And the actual outcome for Israel turned out to be even more than the original UN plan was suggesting. Still, I don’t know how a good solution would look like here. Jews were the underdog here and if they wouldn’t secure the territory they secured, it would probably get pretty bloody bad for them. Simply, them having some smaller territory that wouldn’t really be defensible doesn’t seem like a stable equilibrium to me. Also, it’s not like they are discriminating against their Arab citizens (20% of today’s population). I don’t think there would be any Jews alive today would the roles be reversed.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not me trying to absolve them of the war crimes they did, nor me trying to say that it’s fair that they pretty much got most of the land while Arab’s live an an Apartheid state occupied by Israel.
I am just saying that I don’t think that there was some magic easy solution back in 1948 that would lead to magically better situation than there is today.
FYI: This is the proposal from 1937 rejected by Arabs that would have been IMO fair according to population criteria. I have no idea whether that kind of land would be viable from the military point of view. The long thin stretch of blue seems like really hard to defend.
Not sure how much I can trust ChatGPT, but frankly I don’t have energy left for a more serious research, so I asked:
I got a list of groups, but no numbers, so I asked again:
I mean, I was interested in what happened before Nakba, but didn’t know how far to go in the past. Too much in the past is less relevant. Too little, on the other hand, includes the Zionist immigrants, and I was interested in the people who lived there traditionally.
ChatGPT said that Arab population was roughly 80-95% of population in 1900 and 1920, and 70-80% in 1940. Jewish population was around 5-10% in 1900, 10-15% in 1920, and 20-30% in 1940. Other minorities, such as Druze, Circassians, and Samaritans, were likely less than 1%.
So, if this is correct, the number “1/3 of the total population” already includes the Zionists that immigrated before 1948. The fraction of Jews traditionally living in Palestine is much smaller.
EDIT:
When I asked about today, ChatGPT gave separate statistics for Israel and Palestinian Territories, so I asked again:
Unfortunately, ChatGPT sucks at math (yes, that also makes the previous numbers suspicious), it just couldn’t do the addition properly, so I asked for absolute numbers instead, and got this: in Israel 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs, in Palestinian Territories 0 Jews and 7 million Arabs (5 million in the West Bank, 2 million in Gaza). So, assuming I am better at math than ChatGPT, it makes 40-45% Jewish population, and 55-60% Arab population in September 2021.
Sorry, I guess I expressed myself confusingly, the parts about “people who lived in south vs north”, “5% and 95%”, and “20% of population, but a majority in 0% of cities” were all meant only as illustrative examples of what I meant by fair vs unfair division of a territory, not statements on the specific number of people in actual Palestine and their historical locations.
Some people disagree with this statement, but unfortunately I don’t the time to figure out who is wrong here. Seemingly no one can agree even on the basic facts, so every single sentence anyone says on this topic needs to be verified. The weekend is over, I am out of time. :(
I agree. I am not good at geography, but there seem to be no natural borders in that area, except for the river Jordan.
On the other hand, compared to some fractal-like proposals I have seen, that one seems unbelievably simple.
Another problem seems to be that the areas where both sides live are economically interconnected, so you can’t simply “build a wall” between them. (I think so. Maybe I am wrong here.) My reasoning is that if you build a wall and stop interacting across it, at some point it becomes boring to keep yelling at the wall. But if thousands of people cross the border every day, that is thousand opportunities for some petty aggression to escalate, and a daily reminder how much your enemies suck. (“Good fences make good neighbors.”) Again, I know too little about the commerce in the area to propose a natural place where a wall could be built. Maybe there is no such place.
Buying land from governments really hasn’t been a very legitimate concept from the beginning. Even if they are willing to sell, the people living there probably don’t want you ruling them, and where they don’t want to sell, I fail to see the crime against humanity in paying people to move to another country until there are few enough left that you can walk in, become the super majority, and declare yourself the new government.
Of course, that doesn’t mean men with guns won’t try to stop you. I can very much see how elites with guns like this environment where no one ever has the option of forming a new country, or buying out their own country from under them. The problem here is that people who are not powerful elites tolerate this, and don’t consider that we could cut governments out of this equation entirely.