naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed 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.
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
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Notes -
The phenomenon of foreign groups arriving and displacing natives long predates the appearance of nation states, and I don’t think the impulse to resist it does or should depend on having one. The details will depend on the technology levels of the parties and also their mode of subsistence (so that if the natives are pastoralists or mixed hunter-agriculturalists, the issue won’t be land rights in the same sense as with pure agriculturalists).
Conflicts over who constitutes an ethnicity for the purpose of forming a state can often be extremely murky, e.g., with Southern Slavs. I don’t necessarily have an opinion on exactly how Serbo-Croatian types should be split up any more than Levantines. But if members of some Illyrian ethnoreligious diaspora that had left the area more than a thousand years earlier started showing up in Montenegro or Bosnia to buy up land to form an ethnic enclave, I expect they’d get a chilly reception.
I don’t think the people now called Palestinians played their cards very well, and I condemn killing of civilians when the parties are operating within a system where the distinction is meaningful (I do include this whole conflict, including during the Ottoman period - contrasting with, e.g., native warfare in what’s now the Eastern U.S., where no such distinction was generally established or observed). My original point was there’s nothing left or right wing about opposing a self-consciously distinct ethnic group from acquiring your home from under your feet, whether with or without violence, whether legal or illegal by the prevailing standards of the time and place. People will tend to oppose this happening (to themselves, at any rate) regardless of the flavor of their own ideology - a right wing ideology will serve as well for this as a left wing one.
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