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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Should there be a “statute of limitations” for historical grievances?
As I read about the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I can’t help but feel sympathetic for the Palestinian view that they were unjustly deprived of their land in the “Nakba”. Nonetheless, the entire history of Israel involved the area being constantly passed between empires, and far enough back you have Jews being killed or forced into exile after the Jewish-Roman wars.
If you start the clock today and ignore all history, Israel’s current territory is legitimate (as is any territory, by default). If you start it in 1948, then they look like occupiers. If you start it in biblical times, Israel starts to look legitimate again. If you insist that time passing doesn’t matter at all, you’re forced into a hopeless task of trying to track the very first cases of early humans unjustly taking land in the area from other early humans.
An unbounded “statute of limitations” for grievances that go back thousands of years seems completely impractical. But very short time limits seem undesirable too. I’m opposed to Russia invading Ukraine and I think it is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to try to reclaim Russian-occupied territory now. But I would not, for example, endorse Germany trying to reclaim Kaliningrad today, even though it was annexed and had its German population expelled and replaced mostly with Russians after WWII.
There are many other historical examples. I think it was unjust that American former slaves were not given reparations in their lifetimes, but am much less enthusiastic about reparations for their descendants today. Here in New Zealand, the indigenous Maori population have legitimate historical grievances, and many Maori tribes have received compensation from the government in recent decades. Nonetheless, I would not support the strongest claims by Maori activists today.
I’m influenced a lot on this matter by a paper by Tyler Cowen called How Far Back Should We Go? Why Restitution Should Be Small. He argues that under any multiple different ethical theories, it is difficult to justify large restitution for wrongs committed in the distant past. It becomes impractical even in theory to identify who alive today is better or worse off, the original victims and beneficiaries have died, and intergenerational restitution claims are on much shakier ground.
In the case of territorial integrity, I think it’s a very good thing that we have a norm against expansionist wars, and pushing back against recent conquests (e.g. in the Russia-Ukraine war) should be part of that. But it would be completely impractical to try to correct all current borders that were the result of historical expansionism, even if we limited ourselves to just the past century or so. Even if you could pull it off, it would mostly end up just disrupting the lives of people quietly living their lives for the sins of their forefathers and probably wouldn’t do much to help anyone.
Bringing it back to Israel/Palestine, where does it leave me?
Well, if I’m to be consistent about being sceptical of long-ago restitution claims, anything along the lines of “Jews were exiled from ancient Israel thousands of years ago, so they deserve it back” has to be a non-starter. Consistently applying a similar standard to other groups would radically upend the world, from the descendants of Ghenghis Khan compensating the descendants of his victims, to Native Americans getting the USA back.
For the “Nakba”, we’re talking about claims that are now 75 years old. That puts it right in the marginal zone, in my view. There is a small but rapidly dwindling number of living victims, and more or less all the perpetrators are dead. But it’s far from a Ghenghis Khan-level distant past.
Finally, there are obviously very many recent grievances in the Israel/Palestine conflict, that this line of thought doesn’t apply for.
The statute of limitations in common law, in nearly all cases, only runs out if no redress is being pursued. You can't just stall on a lawsuit that's been filed against you for years, then claim that it has gone stale. As long as the lawsuit is filed on time, the SoL argument is moot.
The Palestinians haven't exactly let this drop. Indeed, one can argue the extent to which they have had any opportunity to let it drop if they had wanted to. So if this were a lawsuit, no statute of limitations would apply.
The SoL concept probably applies better to internal minorities like amerindians or ADoS; or to long settled controversies like Greater Hungary.
You have to be dispossessed from something you actually own before you get to keep a claim going. If the Jews have an 1800 year claim, that negates the claim of the Palestinians from while they were still living there. If they don't have a valid claim from when they were still living there, they have nothing they can keep going for 80 years.
The comparison isn’t exactly one for one since common law has a sovereign. The question is where there is no sovereign should we import concepts like SoL in terms of morality. And I think the answer is yes — we are probably into fourth generation Israelis at this point.
It doesn’t matter if Palestine has “contested” the issue (assuming the land was rightfully Palestinian land in the first place). You are basically creating a situation where you will cause a massive amount of short term harm (by moving out the fourth generation Israeli) while also encouraging states to utterly quash any other “claimants” (because if they shut up because they are decimated — in the figurative sense — they lose their claim).
I think the logic of things like AP and SoL is at some point the past needs to be the past. That logic can still work even when there is no sovereign.
I think until such time as Israelis stop kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust, Palestinians can be permitted to protest their subsequent territorial expropriation.
Are Israelis kvetching at Germans any more? My impression was that in the current year most of the people kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust are Jewish-American lawyers looking for a payoff.
What would you do with your statute of limitations anyway? People won't just compensate others or renounce their claims based on that if they didn't intend to. Israeli settlements are against international law, but they still exist. Moreover, it seems that some cases can't be solved by time. Gibraltar has been british for very long, yet the disagreement with Soain will continue for decades.
If you want to have one nonetheless, one important factor would be: how many people living today in the world were alive at the time? Are direct victims still living, or would they still be living if they had not been victims?
There are differences: It was not sudden, but the migration took years, and many were able to sell their property, but still you don't do that out of a whim. Jewish organizations calculate the property loss into astronomical sums of hundred of billions (of course) and "also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel)".
The official position of the Israeli government is that Jews from Arab countries are considered refugees, and it considers their rights to property left in countries of origin as valid and existent.
In 2009, Israeli lawmakers introduced a bill into the Knesset to make compensation for Jews from Arab and Muslim countries an integral part of any future peace negotiations by requiring compensation on behalf of current Jewish Israeli citizens, who were expelled from Arab countries after Israel was established in 1948 and leaving behind a significant amount of valuable property.
As these people and their descendants are probably richer now in Israel than if they would have stayed in Morocco and Iraq (I guess?) it is not a real issue aside as a tit-for-tat argument countering Palestinian demands, but taking historical grievances earnestly is that a valid argument?
Palestinians cluster with ancient Canaanite DNA, so the argument that Jews are the exclusive original inhabitants is a nonstarter. And Israel obviously does not believe in a statute of limitations because to this day Germany makes payments yearly restitution payments, Poland is pressured into compensating for lost Jewish property, and elderly German camp guards are put on trial. It would be a supremely ironic argument for Israel to make.
I think this is one of those things where the devil is in the details. I like the idea, but I think it would be impossible to decide on any particular exact amount of time for it. No matter what the exact amount of time was, there would always be one group whose claims were just barely within the limit and another whose were just barely outside of it. Then both sides of both of those conflicts would get angry / happy that it wasn't just a little bit off in another direction. And everybody would be throwing every possible kind of influence at whatever organization was responsible for deciding exactly what the timeframe was, etc.
Adverse possession only applies where the real owner doesn't notice. If you're trying to evict me the whole time, it doesn't matter how long I stay in your house, it remains your house.
It isn’t a one for one but same idea. If government A has operated as the de facto government for 30 years it’s enough to say government A is the proper government (and honestly maybe not that long)
The whole thing gets really messy. If a people can claim particular group of property, does that mean any sufficiently large sub population can claim territory within the larger group?
There is no morally satisfying answer. And indeed, international law is really only on the edges. The point is trying to push towards a workable outcome; not some morally platonic ideal (that doesn’t exist).
In case of Palestine, there are still people alive who were pushed out of their homes in the "original" Nakba, and it's been followed by a continuous process of more and more Palestinians being pushed out of their homes and being literally replaced there by settler families. I remember seeing a tweet basically implying it's not actually good for the Palestinian cause to be bound together with woollier "decolonization" advocacies like land back for Native American tribes who lost it over a century ago, since in case of Palestine, you have plenty of cases where a specific family holds an official ownership title to specific land now occupied by specific settlers.
Personally I think a 50 year limitation seems fair.
However I do feel the need to push back against the view that the Nakba was a Jewish injustice against Arabs. Arabs started the 1948 war. The Jews wanted a peaceful partition of the land. If they had simply allowed the Jews to live in the homes they had peacefully purchased, they would not have lost their own homes.
If the Ukraine/Russia war were to resolve with Ukraine expanding its territory somewhat, I would be very unsympathetic to the claims that this was a terrible injustice to the Russians.
Personally I think a 50 year limitation seems fair.
Do you agree that Israel should stop accepting their annual "sorry" payments from the German government, pursuing old men who were Nazis, etc?
It strikes me that it's basically impossible to make proper restitution for millions murdered, but relatively easy to make whole someone that's had their land connived and stolen away from them. If anything, all the Israeli schmaltz and guilt about WW2 should stop well before the Palestinians give up on regaining their rightful homes.
Both are in restitution for evils that are older than the state of Israel, ie well past your 50 year rule. If the Paelstinian cause has exceeded some statute of limitation, it follows that WW2 and all its attendant evils has passed also.
I agree that Germany does not today owe Israel (or the Jewish community more generally) any sort of reparations or apologies for the Holocaust. It's an awful history, but it's history.
Yeah - moving some 98yo geezer who was a piece of shit Nazi during WWII from a nursing home outside of a prison to a nursing home inside of a prison doesn't sound like the best use of the justice system's time and effort. Almost all of the perpetrators are dead.
If you're suggesting that the 98 year old shouldn't be jailed because he isn't going to harm anyone, by that reasoning it would also be wrong to jail an ex-Nazi 10 years after the fall of Berlin. It's not as if someone 10 years after the end of the war is going to run another concentration camp, after all, nor is he going to take over the country in order to get himself allowed to build one.
If punishment is to be a deterrent at all, you have to precommit to punish criminals even when doing so prevents no future crimes. Once you have done so, your precommitment forces you to punish them. And "desire for revenge" is how actual humans precommit.
If that ex-Nazi is damn near bedbound and suffering from terminal cancer or ALS or some shit, yeah, I wouldn't want to prosecute him all that hard. He can't commit lesser crimes for shit and he's going to be dead soon enough.
Idk. I can see arguments for clemency if the 40yo nazi in 1955 is quadriplegic or has terminal cancer or needs nursing home level care because he has ALS or something. You are just moving him from a free world nursing home to a prison one.
I thought we were talking about the "what a man did 50 years ago, he is not guilty for now" situations, not the "actually this man is exactly the same as he was 50 years ago and proud about it" situations. So no, if you're being a nazi today you're not decoupled from what nazis did 50 years ago, or 80 as it may.
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Notes -
Should there be a “statute of limitations” for historical grievances?
As I read about the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, I can’t help but feel sympathetic for the Palestinian view that they were unjustly deprived of their land in the “Nakba”. Nonetheless, the entire history of Israel involved the area being constantly passed between empires, and far enough back you have Jews being killed or forced into exile after the Jewish-Roman wars.
If you start the clock today and ignore all history, Israel’s current territory is legitimate (as is any territory, by default). If you start it in 1948, then they look like occupiers. If you start it in biblical times, Israel starts to look legitimate again. If you insist that time passing doesn’t matter at all, you’re forced into a hopeless task of trying to track the very first cases of early humans unjustly taking land in the area from other early humans.
An unbounded “statute of limitations” for grievances that go back thousands of years seems completely impractical. But very short time limits seem undesirable too. I’m opposed to Russia invading Ukraine and I think it is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to try to reclaim Russian-occupied territory now. But I would not, for example, endorse Germany trying to reclaim Kaliningrad today, even though it was annexed and had its German population expelled and replaced mostly with Russians after WWII.
There are many other historical examples. I think it was unjust that American former slaves were not given reparations in their lifetimes, but am much less enthusiastic about reparations for their descendants today. Here in New Zealand, the indigenous Maori population have legitimate historical grievances, and many Maori tribes have received compensation from the government in recent decades. Nonetheless, I would not support the strongest claims by Maori activists today.
I’m influenced a lot on this matter by a paper by Tyler Cowen called How Far Back Should We Go? Why Restitution Should Be Small. He argues that under any multiple different ethical theories, it is difficult to justify large restitution for wrongs committed in the distant past. It becomes impractical even in theory to identify who alive today is better or worse off, the original victims and beneficiaries have died, and intergenerational restitution claims are on much shakier ground.
In the case of territorial integrity, I think it’s a very good thing that we have a norm against expansionist wars, and pushing back against recent conquests (e.g. in the Russia-Ukraine war) should be part of that. But it would be completely impractical to try to correct all current borders that were the result of historical expansionism, even if we limited ourselves to just the past century or so. Even if you could pull it off, it would mostly end up just disrupting the lives of people quietly living their lives for the sins of their forefathers and probably wouldn’t do much to help anyone.
Bringing it back to Israel/Palestine, where does it leave me?
Well, if I’m to be consistent about being sceptical of long-ago restitution claims, anything along the lines of “Jews were exiled from ancient Israel thousands of years ago, so they deserve it back” has to be a non-starter. Consistently applying a similar standard to other groups would radically upend the world, from the descendants of Ghenghis Khan compensating the descendants of his victims, to Native Americans getting the USA back.
For the “Nakba”, we’re talking about claims that are now 75 years old. That puts it right in the marginal zone, in my view. There is a small but rapidly dwindling number of living victims, and more or less all the perpetrators are dead. But it’s far from a Ghenghis Khan-level distant past.
Finally, there are obviously very many recent grievances in the Israel/Palestine conflict, that this line of thought doesn’t apply for.
The statute of limitations in common law, in nearly all cases, only runs out if no redress is being pursued. You can't just stall on a lawsuit that's been filed against you for years, then claim that it has gone stale. As long as the lawsuit is filed on time, the SoL argument is moot.
The Palestinians haven't exactly let this drop. Indeed, one can argue the extent to which they have had any opportunity to let it drop if they had wanted to. So if this were a lawsuit, no statute of limitations would apply.
The SoL concept probably applies better to internal minorities like amerindians or ADoS; or to long settled controversies like Greater Hungary.
I'm pretty sure that Jewish prayers have included "next year in Jerusalem" and the hope to return to Israel for centuries.
Exactly. If it can't be extinguished in 1800 years in exile, it certainly isn't extinguished in 80.
You have to be dispossessed from something you actually own before you get to keep a claim going. If the Jews have an 1800 year claim, that negates the claim of the Palestinians from while they were still living there. If they don't have a valid claim from when they were still living there, they have nothing they can keep going for 80 years.
...I don't really see how that works.
The senior claim is superior. If Israel's 1720-year claim was valid at the time, the newer Palestinian claim cannot have ever been.
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The comparison isn’t exactly one for one since common law has a sovereign. The question is where there is no sovereign should we import concepts like SoL in terms of morality. And I think the answer is yes — we are probably into fourth generation Israelis at this point.
It doesn’t matter if Palestine has “contested” the issue (assuming the land was rightfully Palestinian land in the first place). You are basically creating a situation where you will cause a massive amount of short term harm (by moving out the fourth generation Israeli) while also encouraging states to utterly quash any other “claimants” (because if they shut up because they are decimated — in the figurative sense — they lose their claim).
I think the logic of things like AP and SoL is at some point the past needs to be the past. That logic can still work even when there is no sovereign.
I think until such time as Israelis stop kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust, Palestinians can be permitted to protest their subsequent territorial expropriation.
Are Israelis kvetching at Germans any more? My impression was that in the current year most of the people kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust are Jewish-American lawyers looking for a payoff.
It's mostly Germans and "Germans" telling other Germans that they're insufficiently penitent.
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What would you do with your statute of limitations anyway? People won't just compensate others or renounce their claims based on that if they didn't intend to. Israeli settlements are against international law, but they still exist. Moreover, it seems that some cases can't be solved by time. Gibraltar has been british for very long, yet the disagreement with Soain will continue for decades.
If you want to have one nonetheless, one important factor would be: how many people living today in the world were alive at the time? Are direct victims still living, or would they still be living if they had not been victims?
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There is a flip side to the Nabka, because after Israeli independence a million Jews left or were expelled from the Muslim world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_world
There are differences: It was not sudden, but the migration took years, and many were able to sell their property, but still you don't do that out of a whim. Jewish organizations calculate the property loss into astronomical sums of hundred of billions (of course) and "also estimated Jewish-owned real-estate left behind in Arab lands at 100,000 square kilometers (four times the size of the state of Israel)".
As these people and their descendants are probably richer now in Israel than if they would have stayed in Morocco and Iraq (I guess?) it is not a real issue aside as a tit-for-tat argument countering Palestinian demands, but taking historical grievances earnestly is that a valid argument?
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Palestinians cluster with ancient Canaanite DNA, so the argument that Jews are the exclusive original inhabitants is a nonstarter. And Israel obviously does not believe in a statute of limitations because to this day Germany makes payments yearly restitution payments, Poland is pressured into compensating for lost Jewish property, and elderly German camp guards are put on trial. It would be a supremely ironic argument for Israel to make.
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I think this is one of those things where the devil is in the details. I like the idea, but I think it would be impossible to decide on any particular exact amount of time for it. No matter what the exact amount of time was, there would always be one group whose claims were just barely within the limit and another whose were just barely outside of it. Then both sides of both of those conflicts would get angry / happy that it wasn't just a little bit off in another direction. And everybody would be throwing every possible kind of influence at whatever organization was responsible for deciding exactly what the timeframe was, etc.
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Adverse possession is generally 15 years. Why not double that and call it a day?
Adverse possession only applies where the real owner doesn't notice. If you're trying to evict me the whole time, it doesn't matter how long I stay in your house, it remains your house.
It isn’t a one for one but same idea. If government A has operated as the de facto government for 30 years it’s enough to say government A is the proper government (and honestly maybe not that long)
The whole thing gets really messy. If a people can claim particular group of property, does that mean any sufficiently large sub population can claim territory within the larger group?
I don't find the morally satisfying at that point though.
For one thing it implies strongly that one should never accept a temporary cease-fire, since the clock is ticking!
Moreover this kind of thinking fails to address problems like Israeli settlements.
There is no morally satisfying answer. And indeed, international law is really only on the edges. The point is trying to push towards a workable outcome; not some morally platonic ideal (that doesn’t exist).
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In case of Palestine, there are still people alive who were pushed out of their homes in the "original" Nakba, and it's been followed by a continuous process of more and more Palestinians being pushed out of their homes and being literally replaced there by settler families. I remember seeing a tweet basically implying it's not actually good for the Palestinian cause to be bound together with woollier "decolonization" advocacies like land back for Native American tribes who lost it over a century ago, since in case of Palestine, you have plenty of cases where a specific family holds an official ownership title to specific land now occupied by specific settlers.
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Personally I think a 50 year limitation seems fair.
However I do feel the need to push back against the view that the Nakba was a Jewish injustice against Arabs. Arabs started the 1948 war. The Jews wanted a peaceful partition of the land. If they had simply allowed the Jews to live in the homes they had peacefully purchased, they would not have lost their own homes.
If the Ukraine/Russia war were to resolve with Ukraine expanding its territory somewhat, I would be very unsympathetic to the claims that this was a terrible injustice to the Russians.
Do you agree that Israel should stop accepting their annual "sorry" payments from the German government, pursuing old men who were Nazis, etc?
It strikes me that it's basically impossible to make proper restitution for millions murdered, but relatively easy to make whole someone that's had their land connived and stolen away from them. If anything, all the Israeli schmaltz and guilt about WW2 should stop well before the Palestinians give up on regaining their rightful homes.
I agree that Germany does not today owe Israel (or the Jewish community more generally) any sort of reparations or apologies for the Holocaust. It's an awful history, but it's history.
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Why are you tying these two things together?
Both are in restitution for evils that are older than the state of Israel, ie well past your 50 year rule. If the Paelstinian cause has exceeded some statute of limitation, it follows that WW2 and all its attendant evils has passed also.
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Yes, it accomplishes literally nothing.
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Topically, debt abolition (jubilee) among the ancient Israelites ran on 50 year cycles.
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Can we then put the Holocaust to rest and the stop using nazi as qualifier?
I agree that Germany does not today owe Israel (or the Jewish community more generally) any sort of reparations or apologies for the Holocaust. It's an awful history, but it's history.
Yeah - moving some 98yo geezer who was a piece of shit Nazi during WWII from a nursing home outside of a prison to a nursing home inside of a prison doesn't sound like the best use of the justice system's time and effort. Almost all of the perpetrators are dead.
If you're suggesting that the 98 year old shouldn't be jailed because he isn't going to harm anyone, by that reasoning it would also be wrong to jail an ex-Nazi 10 years after the fall of Berlin. It's not as if someone 10 years after the end of the war is going to run another concentration camp, after all, nor is he going to take over the country in order to get himself allowed to build one.
If punishment is to be a deterrent at all, you have to precommit to punish criminals even when doing so prevents no future crimes. Once you have done so, your precommitment forces you to punish them. And "desire for revenge" is how actual humans precommit.
If that ex-Nazi is damn near bedbound and suffering from terminal cancer or ALS or some shit, yeah, I wouldn't want to prosecute him all that hard. He can't commit lesser crimes for shit and he's going to be dead soon enough.
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Idk. I can see arguments for clemency if the 40yo nazi in 1955 is quadriplegic or has terminal cancer or needs nursing home level care because he has ALS or something. You are just moving him from a free world nursing home to a prison one.
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I thought we were talking about the "what a man did 50 years ago, he is not guilty for now" situations, not the "actually this man is exactly the same as he was 50 years ago and proud about it" situations. So no, if you're being a nazi today you're not decoupled from what nazis did 50 years ago, or 80 as it may.
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Please, yes.
But I doubt we'll get there for another generation or two.
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