Current events aside, the fundamental reason to favor the Palestinian cause over the Zionist project is not that the Israelis are Western and the Palestinians are not. That's knee-jerk woke "decolonial" claptrap, which does the Palestinians no favors. There's nothing inherently wrong with being Western, just as there's nothing inherently right with being Eastern, Southern, or whatever. Regions are neither virtuous nor vicious. From time immemorial, non-Westerners have been as brutal, domineering, and interested in slave-holding/trading as Westerners. Slavery was the uncontroversial norm for millennia everywhere -- including in the pre-Columbian West. It still exists in Asia. So the non-West gets no points on that count. On the other hand, the ultimately successful antislavery campaign arose in the West in the 19th century, not somewhere else. You don't hear much about that. Kudos to the British and the founders of the North American antislavery societies.
No, the fundamental reason to side with the Palestinian cause is that the right to private property in land is legitimate. Sorry, socialists. For the most part, Palestinians had their land taken by force, as Zionist leader and first Israeli president David Ben-Gurion acknowledged. Today's troubles flow from that.
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteIn his Maxwell School lecture on Israel and international law, Kontorovich begs the question of *Israeli* sovereignty over mandatory Palestine and says nothing about individual rights. He just begins, in realpolitik style, with imperial might makes right.
ReplyDeletePS: Amazing that he doesn't mention that before the 1948 war the Zionist leadership had agreed with King Abdullah to let Transjordan take possession of the West Bank. See Avi Shlaim's Collusion Across the Jordan for details.
ReplyDeletePPS: Even if we assume Kontorovich's case, which I don't, we end up with an argument for equal rights for all from the river to the sea. No grounds exist for Jewish supremacy, which saturates Israeli law. See the report of B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization
ReplyDeleteAgain, thanks for the Kontorovich link. My favorite line in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
ReplyDeleteSheldon, I saved a link to that Ben-Gurion quote on the home page of my cell phone so that I can easily pull it up and show it to anyone who questions the circumstances to which Israel came into being.
ReplyDeleteThank you. I know that Nahum Goldman, president of the World Zionist Organization, quoted him in his 1962 memoir.
DeleteOne last thing about the Kontorovich lecture: it is irrelevant to my post. He acknowledges that his case ignores morality, indigeneity, and history. He says he is concerned only with legal formalism, which is his term. I think his approach is wrong and that he leaves out important matters even if we accept that approach. Still, his thesis has nothing to do with my original statement.
ReplyDelete