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DiogenesKynikos 11 hours ago

I'll bite.

Most demands for self-determination were for self-rule on land already inhabited by the group in question.

Zionism was unique in that it demanded self-determination on land inhabited almost 100% by a different group of people.

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settrans 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Given that the Jews were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Romans, by definition, any Jewish self-determination would need to take place in a land that is at least partially[0] already inhabited. You now have two choices:

1. Deny Jews the right to self-determination altogether, continuing the dispossession of an actively persecuted people, indeed, the same one that was about to face the Holocaust in Europe, thereby punishing them for their own historical victimization, or

2. Acknowledge the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination, even if it takes root in their historical homeland and entails negotiating with and sharing the land with other peoples, thereby accepting that historical justice often requires grappling with imperfect realities, and that two national claims can coexist without one invalidating the other.

Or are you arguing that self-determination only applies to groups of people who haven't been exiled from their homeland (i.e. the people that need self determination the least)?

[0] Before Zionism, the population of Mandatory Palestine was 98% smaller than the same region today. Even the Arab population has increased 26-fold. So, yes, technically it was inhabited, but dramatically less developed. And even then, Jerusalem was 60% Jewish.

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DiogenesKynikos 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Given that the Jews were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the Romans

2000 years ago.

You're saying that events from millennia in the past mean that the Palestinians should have had to cede the land they lived on to a group of outsiders from Europe.

People can make of that what they may (I think it's ridiculous), but you at least have to admit that it completely invalidates your argument that Zionism is just like any other demand for self-determination. We're talking about a demand for other people's land, based on appeals to events from thousands of years ago.

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settrans 9 hours ago | parent [-]

You're changing the topic. Nobody is talking about ceding land, we're talking about re-establishing a nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. And besides, no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway, since all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers.

So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination? Or are you saying that because they were expelled from their homeland so long ago, they forfeited the legitimate claim to self determination?

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DiogenesKynikos 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> Nobody is talking about ceding land, we're talking about re-establishing a nation in the historic homeland of the Jewish people

You're saying the same thing with different words. In order to "re-establish" that nation, they had to take over control of Palestine, against the will of the people who actually lived there.

> no Zionist demanded land or induced anyone to cede their land prior to 1947 anyway

That's not true at all. The entire point of Zionism was to take over political control of Palestine and found a Jewish state there. The mainstream Zionist movement wanted all of Palestine, and the radical right wing of Zionism (the "Revisionists," who eventually became Likud, Netanyahu's party) even wanted what is now Jordan.

> all Zionist land acquisition was through voluntary purchases and legal land transfers

That's formally correct before 1947, but the goal was to take over all of Palestine. The leadership of the Jewish Agency (the Zionist quasi-government in British-run Palestine until early 1948) knew that ultimately, it would come down to war with the Arabs, and they prepared for it. They were also very interested in forced "population transfer" (which today would be called "ethnic cleansing"), which they hoped the major powers would agree to.

Even the land purchases were extremely predatory. Imagine the worst aspects of gentrification, but at the scale of a country and enacted for explicitly racist reasons. The Zionists bought up land from landlords who didn't even live in Palestine, and then forcibly removed the Palestinian farmers who lived on the land.

Even so, they never purchased more than about 6% of Palestine, before they forcibly took most of the rest in 1947-48.

> So are you arguing that the Jews are not a people that merit self determination?

First, the obvious question, as I've said, is "where?" Is easy and relatively harmless to say in the abstract that "this group of people is a nation and deserves self-determination." But when you start laying claims to other people's lands, that becomes a problem.

I don't really want to get into who is "a people," but I'll just point out that what you're saying implies that American Jews are just Israelis who happen to live abroad. I think that's incredibly wrong. Jews belong to many different nationalities.

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settrans 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It sounds like you're against the idea of national self determination altogether. Can you think of an example of a successful assertion of the right to self determinism which didn't involve a national entity asserting sovereignty over a body of land populated by a diverse group of people?

As we have already established, the population in the land of the historical mandate has exploded, including a manifold increase of Arabs (living peacefully within the borders of modern Israel as equal citizens, I might add), so clearly it is possible to accommodate this diverse population in a Jewish state.

Are you against all national self determination? Or is there some threshold of homogeneous concentration of one people after which it becomes legitimate? If the Zionist pioneers had managed to achieve a 99% majority of Jewish population in Palestine through legal immigration before asserting sovereignty, would that pass your test?

Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms?

	▲	DiogenesKynikos 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> If the Zionist pioneers had managed to achieve a 99% majority of Jewish population in Palestine through legal immigration before asserting sovereignty, would that pass your test? The whole enterprise was illegitimate, because it was carried out against the will of the population of Palestine. The population did not want a foreign group of people to come in, settle the land and take over. The British colonial rulers forced Zionism on the Palestinian population undemocratically. You keep on appealing to self-determination, but you completely ignore the Palestinians' right to self-determination on the land they had inhabited for centuries. > Or would you just prefer to see the European Jewry perish in toto under the Holocaust and Eastern European pogroms? The way to avert the Holocaust would have been to prevent the rise of fascism in Europe. The vast majority of Jews were anti-Zionist, and did not want to leave their home countries. The idea that Polish Jews would have all left Poland for the Middle East before WWII is just fanciful. Only a small percentage of them wanted to pack up and go to Palestine, a far-away place they knew nothing about.