Well, what else do you propose doing? Kicking off the people who live there now would cause more property rights issues than it resolves. It's very silly that someone who lives in a town where there was no Palestinian village 80 years ago has to be nothing and someone who lives in a town where there was a village has to buy his home back or get kicked out. There's no reason to expect Palestinian refugees who would move back to Israel to respect private property rights of Israelis. All indications are that they would try to destroy property and kill people. You can look at October 7.
Not to mention figuring out who lived where will require some evil messy bureaucracy, in fact you probably need some of international communist bureaucracy. And then people will argue about who the heirs are and so on. The same goes for Jews demanding property in Poland, black people demanding their property, or any other such example. Compensation is much cleaner, and that way Israelis would bear the cost in a more fair way.
The same goes for the black farmers who lost their land. I think they got monetary compensation, no? I must say that I get annoyed at all of these anti-Israel libertarians who whine about 1948 property loss forever and ever, but do not give a shit about property lost by Black Americans, or by Jews in Europe during WWII (to the Nazis, even to Poles post-WWII), or by Jews in the Arab World around the same time. I hate to be "woke" but it does seem relevant here that Rothbard was credibly rumored to have used the k-word in private.
Israel certainly committed injustices in 1948, but this was really a small injustice by the standards of the time. Jews in Arab lands lost as much land as five times the area of Israel, much more. Not to mention what happened to the Germans after WWII. And of course, we know what happened during WWII.
The vast majority of Palestinians expelled were tenant farmers and if they hadn't been kicked out, their descendants wouldn't (mostly) be living on tiny little patches of land divvied up among a population that has expanded nearly 10 times; they would be living in cities, just like most Palestinians in the occupied territories and Israel today.
You don't even have to cite examples of wartime expulsions: literally every county outside the new world had a process in which peasants were maneuvered off 'their' land and went to live in cities. In England, this goes all the way back to the enclosures of the 16th century, though it really got going in the 18th. The idea of Palestinians literally taking back their plot of land that their grandfather was a subsistence farmer on is incredibly crazy.
The middle ground position is that Israel should make restitution to Palestinians who are the descendants of those who had property confiscated in 1948. It is true that Arab countries would not consider doing the same to descendants Jewish refugees, but I believe Jews can afford to be better than Arabs. It would be an act of unreciprocated magnanimity, but magnanimity is good for the soul, and a trait that Jews would benefit from cultivating.
However, the main Palestinian claim is different, namely that Palestine as a collectivity belongs to the Palestinians as a collectivity. This is a metaphysical claim, that we might call religious. Such metaphysical claims cannot be settled by argument, they can be only be settled by war, and the Arabs have tried that multiple times, so they should quit it.
Israeli governments have offered Palestinian refugees monetary compensation time and time again. What Israeli leaders will not do is accept moral or historical culpability for the uprooting of the refugees in 1948 because they believe that it was an understandable and to some extent inevitable outcome of a defensive war that their fledgling state was waging for its very survival.
A true “middle ground” would involve the Palestinians taking the money and stop insisting that their great great grandchildren and their progeny be perpetual refugees. Naturally, they have never agreed to this and it doesn’t look like they will any time soon
ECHR is an evil organization. Their decision was probably motivated by anti-german bigotry rather than any sense justice.
I'm inclined to say that technically Germans have a right to get their land back, but right now Germans and all other Europeans have much bigger problems.
Well the issue with a "right to land back" is that exercising it creates more problems than it solves, so I think reparations are usually the best way.
EHCR just used the correct "legal" (i.e. "international law") argument, that all of the relevant "international laws" on the "right of return" postdating the 1940s. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/499/
Anyway, I'm not the world's biggest fan of "international law" (and I put it in quotes for a reason) but it does seem relevant that all of these international communist bureaucracies like UNRWA, Amnesty International, HRW, etc claim to follow "international law" and yet "international law" is opposed to the "right of return".
The very nature of law is opposed to rights of return. The concept of 'time immemorial' in English law means from 1189, which is when England started to recover from being a war-torn chaotic hellhole, and this was defined in 1275, a time period only 10 years less than from now to the establishment of Israel.
It’s also worth mentioning that even in the 1948 war Jews were kicked out of plenty of land by the Jordanians. And here they were unambiguously kicked with none of them left. This didn’t happen in Israel which is why Israel is 20% Arab.
Also worth mentioning this https://youtu.be/ldLiR794DsQ?feature=shared a more recent black loss of land. They were able to sue for compensation. I think not for literally owning the land.
It’s also worth mentioning that Israel has huge net tax transfers from Jews to Arabs and that Arab Israelis are much richer than other Arabs. The net tax transfers have probably exceeded the 1948 property loss and will soon if they haven’t already. These are not Palestinians sure. OK, before 10/7, the West Bank had a higher GDP/capita than Egypt and Jordan. The end of guest work did hit them hard though. Also worth noting that before 1948 the Jews cleared the malaria and it saved a lot of Arab lives. This is some free rider problem I guess and not a property rights issue.
Anyway, I do think one other similarity with the black issue is the taxation thing. There have been lots and lots of net tax transfers from Jews to Arabs in Israel. I guess it’s generally not the Arabs who lost property, but if anything you could argue that because of the tax transfers probably more than 100% or at the very least a large and growing part of Israel’s debt to Palestinians has been paid off by Israeli Jews and is only owed by Israeli Arabs.
Most of us (myself included) have a pretty thin understanding of Israel and Palestine, and so we project our own pro or anti Western biases onto the situation. But even within that, everyone expects more of Israel than the various Arab nations around it, which is definitely telling.
There are certainly religious extremists in Israel who would fight against the Palestinians in any circumstances. But you can hardly deny that Palestinian terrorism is also a security problem that any state would need to deal with.
The dispute in Israel is fundamentally a nationalist one. Two people want a homeland on the same sliver of territory. It’s therefore not unlike the situation with U.K./Ireland, first in the early 20th century and later in 70ies and onwards.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Jews accepted partition in 1947 and the Arabs not only rejected it, but started a war which they ended up losing. Reading your piece in isolation without that context makes it sound like Jewish militias went around expelling Arabs for arbitrary and jingoistic reasons when in fact the opposite was true: expulsions were ad hoc and a legitimate war aim given the circumstances.
The Irgun definitely were jingoistic, but the Haganah, who carried out most of the expulsions and later would become the Israeli Defense Force, were not.
Obviously the conflict didn’t begin in 1947, but European Jews didn’t arrive in Palestine from the late 19th Century until then as conquerors but as legal immigrants. They not only bought their lands from Arabs fair and square, but also managed to homestead and cultivate them much better than their Arab neighbors. See Block and Futerman’s “The Classical Liberal Case for Israel”
Agree with your conclusion and rationale. However it is not so crystal clear that the Jews kicked the Palestinians out. The British lied to everybody and then got out of the way and the bullets flew There are around 2 million Arab Israelis today. . Whereas basically all Jews have left the rest of the middle eastern countries due to hostile environment
It’s a matter of semantics. I wouldn’t say they were “kicked out”. Germans in Poland and Czechia were kicked out. Israel is 20% Arab to this day. There were expulsions but most of them fled. Yes the vast majority were not allowed back. The decision not to allow them back was made after they had already left. I wouldn’t say that this decision retroactively determined whether they were “kicked out”. I would say that some were “kicked out” but most were not.
By the way that’s another one. Do Germans get a right to the property they lost in Poland and Czechia? That happened at the same time. Some of them are alive today. A European court (following EHCR) decided against them actually and in favor of Czechia in Bergauer et al v Czech Republic, saying German expellees weren’t even entitled to compensation. EHCR is binding on both Germany and Czechia since they signed it. International law is arguably dumb though.
And another one is that Jews didn’t get back all their property in Europe during WWII. Not just the ones in the Arab World. Also Europe. Again, similar timescale. We rightly view Holocaust survivors and their descendants who whine about 1945 property as cringe.
Kicked out is an interesting concept. For thousands of years peoples , tribes, kingdoms, nations have been warring over land and booty, killing and slaving and generally not acting in pleasant ways. Mostly might has meant right. The rules based peace has been relatively short and honored in the breach. The UN has its uses, I guess, but Russia China and the U.S. use their security council veto whenever it pleases. But the right of return is not really a right validated by history. As was said Israel has an Arab population of around 20 percent who serve in the IDF and all walks of life. There were Jews all over the Middle East going back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. And now? Close to zero. So kicked out? Meh.
Are you denying that they were kicked out? Or are you saying it's ok because other tribes have been kicked out of other places? Or because Jews were kicked out of other parts of the Middle East?
Maybe they were kicked out. Going back to Gangs of New York and west side story, gangs would fight over territory. There were wins loses and ties. Borders would change. I guess I saying that however you wish to describe it , it was not extraordinary. One of many. Not the crime of the century
Why did some flee and some stay? I don’t know the answer to this question.
"If a young child is kicked out of his home by masked gunmen who kill his father, it seems hard to deny that when the child grows up he would be within his rights to go back, kill the gunmen and retake his childhood home."
This seems irrelevant. Even though there are Palestinians who got their land stolen in 1948 that are still alive I think we can be pretty sure that that vast majority of the gunmen in this scenario are dead. Considering the low number of survivors on both the expelling and getting expelled side it wouldn't surprise me if the number of Palestinians that could take their land back from the person who stole it is zero even in theory.
And if we change the scenario it to "child goes back to his land and steals it from the children of the person who originally stole it" the situation becomes a lot more morally gray.
The thing is, you bc any simultaneously argue that Israel occupying The West Bank (or heck… Taking any of the pre ‘67 territories) is fine and dandy. While simultaneously refusing the Palestinians rights to take the land back by force or terrorism.
Either all land grab is fair game or none of it is.
I think that theft of land is categorically more serious than theft of money, so I'm not sure if the transfer payments count as reparations.
The Lord Yahweh says, only chosen man land. And your entire foreign policy is based on a people that claim God told them to kill babies
Enjoy your Third World war
Well, what else do you propose doing? Kicking off the people who live there now would cause more property rights issues than it resolves. It's very silly that someone who lives in a town where there was no Palestinian village 80 years ago has to be nothing and someone who lives in a town where there was a village has to buy his home back or get kicked out. There's no reason to expect Palestinian refugees who would move back to Israel to respect private property rights of Israelis. All indications are that they would try to destroy property and kill people. You can look at October 7.
Not to mention figuring out who lived where will require some evil messy bureaucracy, in fact you probably need some of international communist bureaucracy. And then people will argue about who the heirs are and so on. The same goes for Jews demanding property in Poland, black people demanding their property, or any other such example. Compensation is much cleaner, and that way Israelis would bear the cost in a more fair way.
The same goes for the black farmers who lost their land. I think they got monetary compensation, no? I must say that I get annoyed at all of these anti-Israel libertarians who whine about 1948 property loss forever and ever, but do not give a shit about property lost by Black Americans, or by Jews in Europe during WWII (to the Nazis, even to Poles post-WWII), or by Jews in the Arab World around the same time. I hate to be "woke" but it does seem relevant here that Rothbard was credibly rumored to have used the k-word in private.
Israel certainly committed injustices in 1948, but this was really a small injustice by the standards of the time. Jews in Arab lands lost as much land as five times the area of Israel, much more. Not to mention what happened to the Germans after WWII. And of course, we know what happened during WWII.
The vast majority of Palestinians expelled were tenant farmers and if they hadn't been kicked out, their descendants wouldn't (mostly) be living on tiny little patches of land divvied up among a population that has expanded nearly 10 times; they would be living in cities, just like most Palestinians in the occupied territories and Israel today.
You don't even have to cite examples of wartime expulsions: literally every county outside the new world had a process in which peasants were maneuvered off 'their' land and went to live in cities. In England, this goes all the way back to the enclosures of the 16th century, though it really got going in the 18th. The idea of Palestinians literally taking back their plot of land that their grandfather was a subsistence farmer on is incredibly crazy.
Holy shit 88M in China alone from 1990-2008:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0097700419839638?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.9#:~:text=Based%20on%20the%20extent%20of,2008%20(Sargeson%2C%202013).
This is six times as many people as the number of people of Palestinian descent there are on Planet Earth. And it's a far more recent example.
But yeah Simon this is why compensation is the more realistic position.
The middle ground position is that Israel should make restitution to Palestinians who are the descendants of those who had property confiscated in 1948. It is true that Arab countries would not consider doing the same to descendants Jewish refugees, but I believe Jews can afford to be better than Arabs. It would be an act of unreciprocated magnanimity, but magnanimity is good for the soul, and a trait that Jews would benefit from cultivating.
However, the main Palestinian claim is different, namely that Palestine as a collectivity belongs to the Palestinians as a collectivity. This is a metaphysical claim, that we might call religious. Such metaphysical claims cannot be settled by argument, they can be only be settled by war, and the Arabs have tried that multiple times, so they should quit it.
Israeli governments have offered Palestinian refugees monetary compensation time and time again. What Israeli leaders will not do is accept moral or historical culpability for the uprooting of the refugees in 1948 because they believe that it was an understandable and to some extent inevitable outcome of a defensive war that their fledgling state was waging for its very survival.
A true “middle ground” would involve the Palestinians taking the money and stop insisting that their great great grandchildren and their progeny be perpetual refugees. Naturally, they have never agreed to this and it doesn’t look like they will any time soon
Agree.
Related are my comments in this thread: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-359/comment/80702627, including the point about the persistence (and thus reversion) of status which haven't been mentioned here.
ECHR is an evil organization. Their decision was probably motivated by anti-german bigotry rather than any sense justice.
I'm inclined to say that technically Germans have a right to get their land back, but right now Germans and all other Europeans have much bigger problems.
Well the issue with a "right to land back" is that exercising it creates more problems than it solves, so I think reparations are usually the best way.
EHCR just used the correct "legal" (i.e. "international law") argument, that all of the relevant "international laws" on the "right of return" postdating the 1940s. https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/faculty_scholarship/499/
Anyway, I'm not the world's biggest fan of "international law" (and I put it in quotes for a reason) but it does seem relevant that all of these international communist bureaucracies like UNRWA, Amnesty International, HRW, etc claim to follow "international law" and yet "international law" is opposed to the "right of return".
The very nature of law is opposed to rights of return. The concept of 'time immemorial' in English law means from 1189, which is when England started to recover from being a war-torn chaotic hellhole, and this was defined in 1275, a time period only 10 years less than from now to the establishment of Israel.
It’s also worth mentioning that even in the 1948 war Jews were kicked out of plenty of land by the Jordanians. And here they were unambiguously kicked with none of them left. This didn’t happen in Israel which is why Israel is 20% Arab.
Also worth mentioning this https://youtu.be/ldLiR794DsQ?feature=shared a more recent black loss of land. They were able to sue for compensation. I think not for literally owning the land.
It’s also worth mentioning that Israel has huge net tax transfers from Jews to Arabs and that Arab Israelis are much richer than other Arabs. The net tax transfers have probably exceeded the 1948 property loss and will soon if they haven’t already. These are not Palestinians sure. OK, before 10/7, the West Bank had a higher GDP/capita than Egypt and Jordan. The end of guest work did hit them hard though. Also worth noting that before 1948 the Jews cleared the malaria and it saved a lot of Arab lives. This is some free rider problem I guess and not a property rights issue.
Anyway, I do think one other similarity with the black issue is the taxation thing. There have been lots and lots of net tax transfers from Jews to Arabs in Israel. I guess it’s generally not the Arabs who lost property, but if anything you could argue that because of the tax transfers probably more than 100% or at the very least a large and growing part of Israel’s debt to Palestinians has been paid off by Israeli Jews and is only owed by Israeli Arabs.
Most of us (myself included) have a pretty thin understanding of Israel and Palestine, and so we project our own pro or anti Western biases onto the situation. But even within that, everyone expects more of Israel than the various Arab nations around it, which is definitely telling.
If people expect “more’ of Israel, it’s likely because Israel presents itself as an enlightened, democratic Western country.
Well it can’t go both ways. You can’t claim to be enlightened westerners while simultaneously engaging in Bronze Age blood feuds with your neighbors.
There are certainly religious extremists in Israel who would fight against the Palestinians in any circumstances. But you can hardly deny that Palestinian terrorism is also a security problem that any state would need to deal with.
Sure it is. Israel isn’t unique in that respect. Spain, UK, Italy and Germany all had significant terror problems.
An obvious way to fix terrorism of course, would be to exit the territories where a substantial part of the population doesn’t want you.
(And no, Gaza is hardly a relevant example of that backfiring.)
I'm not getting the impression you have a good understanding of terrorism in the UK. The other countries I can't really comment on.
The dispute in Israel is fundamentally a nationalist one. Two people want a homeland on the same sliver of territory. It’s therefore not unlike the situation with U.K./Ireland, first in the early 20th century and later in 70ies and onwards.
There are some things in common. But the British state’s attitude to Northern Ireland has no analogue in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
It’s also worth pointing out that the Jews accepted partition in 1947 and the Arabs not only rejected it, but started a war which they ended up losing. Reading your piece in isolation without that context makes it sound like Jewish militias went around expelling Arabs for arbitrary and jingoistic reasons when in fact the opposite was true: expulsions were ad hoc and a legitimate war aim given the circumstances.
I think you're selling the Arabs a bit short. The conflict did not start in 1947 and the Irgun were definitely jingoistic.
The Irgun definitely were jingoistic, but the Haganah, who carried out most of the expulsions and later would become the Israeli Defense Force, were not.
Obviously the conflict didn’t begin in 1947, but European Jews didn’t arrive in Palestine from the late 19th Century until then as conquerors but as legal immigrants. They not only bought their lands from Arabs fair and square, but also managed to homestead and cultivate them much better than their Arab neighbors. See Block and Futerman’s “The Classical Liberal Case for Israel”
Agree with your conclusion and rationale. However it is not so crystal clear that the Jews kicked the Palestinians out. The British lied to everybody and then got out of the way and the bullets flew There are around 2 million Arab Israelis today. . Whereas basically all Jews have left the rest of the middle eastern countries due to hostile environment
They fled gangs of men with guns and then the men with guns refused to allow them to return to their homes. That constitutes being kicked out.
It’s a matter of semantics. I wouldn’t say they were “kicked out”. Germans in Poland and Czechia were kicked out. Israel is 20% Arab to this day. There were expulsions but most of them fled. Yes the vast majority were not allowed back. The decision not to allow them back was made after they had already left. I wouldn’t say that this decision retroactively determined whether they were “kicked out”. I would say that some were “kicked out” but most were not.
By the way that’s another one. Do Germans get a right to the property they lost in Poland and Czechia? That happened at the same time. Some of them are alive today. A European court (following EHCR) decided against them actually and in favor of Czechia in Bergauer et al v Czech Republic, saying German expellees weren’t even entitled to compensation. EHCR is binding on both Germany and Czechia since they signed it. International law is arguably dumb though.
And another one is that Jews didn’t get back all their property in Europe during WWII. Not just the ones in the Arab World. Also Europe. Again, similar timescale. We rightly view Holocaust survivors and their descendants who whine about 1945 property as cringe.
Kicked out is an interesting concept. For thousands of years peoples , tribes, kingdoms, nations have been warring over land and booty, killing and slaving and generally not acting in pleasant ways. Mostly might has meant right. The rules based peace has been relatively short and honored in the breach. The UN has its uses, I guess, but Russia China and the U.S. use their security council veto whenever it pleases. But the right of return is not really a right validated by history. As was said Israel has an Arab population of around 20 percent who serve in the IDF and all walks of life. There were Jews all over the Middle East going back to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. And now? Close to zero. So kicked out? Meh.
Are you denying that they were kicked out? Or are you saying it's ok because other tribes have been kicked out of other places? Or because Jews were kicked out of other parts of the Middle East?
Maybe they were kicked out. Going back to Gangs of New York and west side story, gangs would fight over territory. There were wins loses and ties. Borders would change. I guess I saying that however you wish to describe it , it was not extraordinary. One of many. Not the crime of the century
Why did some flee and some stay? I don’t know the answer to this question.
"If a young child is kicked out of his home by masked gunmen who kill his father, it seems hard to deny that when the child grows up he would be within his rights to go back, kill the gunmen and retake his childhood home."
This seems irrelevant. Even though there are Palestinians who got their land stolen in 1948 that are still alive I think we can be pretty sure that that vast majority of the gunmen in this scenario are dead. Considering the low number of survivors on both the expelling and getting expelled side it wouldn't surprise me if the number of Palestinians that could take their land back from the person who stole it is zero even in theory.
And if we change the scenario it to "child goes back to his land and steals it from the children of the person who originally stole it" the situation becomes a lot more morally gray.
The thing is, you bc any simultaneously argue that Israel occupying The West Bank (or heck… Taking any of the pre ‘67 territories) is fine and dandy. While simultaneously refusing the Palestinians rights to take the land back by force or terrorism.
Either all land grab is fair game or none of it is.