There were actually two uses of 'country' in that short excerpt from a long report in which the word is used by MacDonald many more times, and quite appropriately - i looked up the word in a friend's unabridged eng-esp dictionary last night, it is not at all limited to 'formal and recognised nation-state with clear boundaries etc', that is not even its first-mentioned definition ... here i have a mid-sized old US english-only dictionary which gives as first mention, '1. any considerable territory demarcated by specific conditions: region or district: mountainous country' ... this is consistent with our use of it in logging, where we will say things like, steep country eh, and we are not talking about federal states or nations or politics or any of that stuff ... think of Marlboro Country, except not on the back of a magazine, it's like that
But thanks for bringing it back towards the issue in your second paragraph ... which ends pretty weak imho, you understand how the indigenous would 'feel' violated ... kind of indicates it's all about their feelings, nothing to do with their inherent right to the status of human beings ... although, your wording is open to interpretation, granted ... Palestine had never yet been a state of its own, so sure they would likely have in 1917 imagined an identity based on pan-arab, clannish and regional within that ... arab being a linguistic distinction, not tribal, but language is important to us all [see 'country' above, and search thread for 'canaanite', lol] ... a succession of events has changed this sense of identity by today, it would have been a process, not a thing that happened on a single date, and threat from outside would have been a major stimulant to the change, perhaps we can agree that far
The Nadines will always want to minimise how fast there flew around the world the ideas of self-determination expressed in Wilson's fourteen points and the whole idealistic fantasy behind the League of Nations .... it was brand-new, a live thing in the air, you didn't have to be literate or even understand it well to get an impression of change in the wind ... here were europeans themselves promoting an end to european conquests of others, in favour of home rule, however guided by europeans it was intended to be in the various cases - this was radical stuff, together with the communist religion the two could be argued to form the history of that century ... in Palestine, brits had beaten off the turks with arab help, then administered it under a mandate whose clear terms were that it was not a british possession, but rather a british responsibility to guide its people to self-government ... none of us present were there then in the few years following, but i cannot believe that at least bits of this idea could fail to have been translated into arabic and filtered through to palestinian indigenous on the ground .... can't believe either, that the idea was likely to be entirely absent from local rhetoric during the riots of 1920 |
