To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (225434 ) 3/28/2007 4:04:52 PM From: neolib Read Replies (1) | Respond to But you are taking both sides of this argument. First you deligitmize the private owners of the land, most (but far from all) of whom were in Damascus, saying they were "foreign". But they were only "foreign" because of borders that the Brits had just drawn - borders you also want to deligitmize because they were colonial! So which is it? Then again, the Middle East is fundamentally different from sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a case of tribal organizaation with communal lands with vague boundaries. The Middle East has a long history of well-defined property rights and the concept of selling land. It goes back thousands of years. Abraham bought the Cave of the Patriarchs for a burial ground 4000 years ago. So this implied argument that anybody claiming to be an original inhabitant should just be able to cancel out property sales based on moral supremacy, well I don't buy it, and wouldn't even if I thought the Palestinian Arabs were the original inhabitants, which they are not. You know perfectly well how many people have lived in Palestine throughout the years - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Circassian, Druze, Samaritans, you name it, they've been there. As for how the population of the US would react to your hypothetical scenario, I would say: very differently from the Arabs, more like Europe has reacted to the much more violent upheavals and population moves it has suffered in the last hundred years. There would be a war, followed by a treaty, followed by getting on with their lives. Only the Arab world (and again I insist that you can only understand the problem by looking at the whole region) has decided to hold itself hostage to the Question of Palestine, and use Israel as a scapegoat that prevents reform or political change in the Arab lands.
