Sunday, October 10, 2021

Any tension between criticism of Israel seizing Palestine based on a centuries-old grievance and calls to return land to Native Americans? This is a question not a declaration of apostasy please do not pummel me with pavingstones. 

What's the expiration date? Romans took Israel from the Jewish in 72 CE - that's a long time ago. There is no Rome to hold accountable, but local control had passed in succession to Arabs. Was that somehow "receiving stolen property?" does it somehow justify the Zionist project?

An indigenous population once lived where [homeowner] now lives. The homeowner bought the property as part of a succession - how distant must this purchase be from the initial dispossession for it to no longer share the illegitimacy of seizure by force? What if there is evidence that the native population that lived on the property had themselves seized it by force from another native population just a few years before Euro/Americans dispossessed them? Which population's claim is stronger? Is it white people magic that makes their conquering the one that was wrong? I'm being serious - if it were possible, for example, to "give back" central Mexico, should it be given to the heirs of the Aztec population, or to the heirs of the populations the Aztec themselves had seized it from by bloody force?

Should it maybe be "given back" to the indigenous noble houses that were empowered by Spain for generations until they declined/were betrayed and were replaced by the Spanish?
 
Whose seizure was the legitimate one? Clearly there's an expiration date. No one is still angry at the Assyrians for the brutal relocations and genocides they attempted and committed.
 
Anybody clamoring for Mongolia to pay reparations?
 
Living memory is a good start I think. There are easily traceable dispossessions and injustices local and repairable. Ta-Nehisi Coates identified lots of examples related to the African American population's treatment regarding home ownership and financing in the US. 
 
Making essentialist arguments about the legitimacy of kinds of people in kinds of places is a bad road to go down, I think.