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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (86935)	11/9/2000 1:14:29 AM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Yes, the Arabs owners were mainly absentee, too. The discussion of "legality" in such cases is really a bit of a sham, as it is anywhere where land tillers have been converted into tenants by armed conquest. Yes, this is the way the world works. The Jews arrived after that conversion and bought the land from the conquerors. Is there any moral obligation to follow or respect a law which is imposed by an outside power? I guess you are saying that the land should be given back to the peasants. Good idea. I think the U.S. should be given back to the Indians and that you should quintuple the wages of your servants and open Keogh plans for them, and what about medical insurance, too. It's too unfair and inequitable, the disparity between first world income and third world outgo. I know about it, I lived in the third world. Steven, the Jews bought the land on the open market, and you are buying servants on the open market, and I did, too, in the third world. I suspect our servants have felt we were stealing their lives for what was to us a pittance, but it's the way the world works. If you buy land that is occupied by people who have nowhere else to go, have you no obligation to those people? That's a deep question. Good people who have the resources should be kind to others. The Arabs who lost land through the process of eviction (and not everyone was evicted, there was plenty of open land purchased by Zionists, too,) became part of a landless proletariat, as has happened in country after country in modern times. It's almost the defining social characteristic of the industrial era, isn't it? The Zionists weren't doing anything that wasn't standard operating procedure around the world. There should be better SOPs. Magnanimity should be legislated into existence wherever possible. I mean this. The Palestinians of 1898-1948 saw the land they occupied being rapidly expropriated by foreigners wielding hard currency, Expropriate means take without paying, but nevermind. The price was, although acceptable to the owners, less than it should have been, and the owners should have charged more and shared with their tenants or just given the land to their tenants the way you would have. Just kidding. If all that you had was forcibly removed from you because some person you had never seen or heard of wrote some words on a piece of paper that said it was quite alright for someone to come and take it, would you call that stealing? Yes, I would feel that my livelihood had been stolen from me, and it was terribly unfair. (How could the tenant farmers not have heard of the owners? Weren't they paying them rent or a portion of their production? Those Arab elites for whom they worked of course wanted them kept illiterate and ignorant, so it's not surprising that they were amazed at their fates in the world of land ownership.) But you are not one of those serfs, Steven, and you came on here and said, rhetorically but misleadingly, that the Jews had "stolen" the land from the Palestinians, and it's not quite like that. They bought it from its owners in the open market in an unfair world in which those who lived on the land didn't have the money to buy it-- a world that doesn't understand that the way it should work is from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. It was cruel. It was SOP. It was the way the world worked and works among the law-abiding. About what the Zionists should have done, granted that they wanted to establish a safe haven-- there was, in fact, a movement within Zionism (a la Martin Buber, Judah Magnes) in support of a binational solution, which, alas, did not survive the Arab Revolt of 1936 - 39 and the embrace by Palestinian nationalism of Nazism. It probably would have failed anyway, as idealistic solutions assuming the possibility of brotherly love tend to, I'm sure you agree. So sovereignty over an area that could be defended obviously became a central requirement, given the imperative to have a place of refuge. The thread running through your complaints about Zionism as practiced in the real world seems to be that the architects and pioneers of the movement did not conduct themselves like angels, but rather like everyone else always has. You never criticize the Palestinians at all. You never give the Jews a break. Palistinian behavior and attitudes toward the Jews will have the profoundest affect any possible future Israeli willingness to weaken themselves along the lines you suggest. The more scared the Israelis are, the more to the right they will move and stay. You are right, it will never happen.