ok it's Iraq but it's interesting
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Here is a link to a blog put up by Morgan on a different Blog. There are a
number of entries that tie more to your topic than theirs. Enjoy.
15 years ago
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Response to "Palestinians=Native Americans?"
I am having problems commenting on the other blog so here is my response
I think you have a good point about who are the "rightful" owners of the land. It seems difficult to define a point at which we can say that a certain group of people (whether it is an imagined community or a "real" one) can lay a claim to the rights of land. In some African communities they never had land "ownership"; instead people were stewards of the land. It is not as though they had no rights to the land because they did not possess a title deed. In either case, many Palestinians (as shown in the "Lemon Tree") may actually hold deeds from before the creation of the state of Israel. Do we count the point at which we start to use a Western system as the basis for "ownership"? There are so many different ways in which this process of assigning land ownership could occur, how can we determine which is the most "fair"? In some ways it almost seems simpler to leave things as they are. Can you imagine what it would be like if we were suddenly forced to return all of the lands in the US to their "rightful owners"?
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I think you make a good point about the distribution of land and the meanings of "ownership." However, I do not know if it would be simpler to leave everything the way it is. The entire situation is so complicated, that nothing is simple, maybe temporarily convenient, but not worthwhile long-term.
ReplyDeleteI realize that the US/Native American situation and the Israeli/Palestine are similar, but not the same. While the actions of the early US settlers towards the Native Americans were abominable, I realize that it is not good idea to just return all the land to their "rightful owners." However, just because that can't happen today, doesn't mean what happened centuries ago is okay. How do we rectify this type of situation? Is it possible? In a hundred or two hundred years, will the Israel/Palestine conflict be "solved" with time? Will returning land to the "rightful owners" (whomever that may be) seem just as impractical in Gaza as it does here? and will that be enough to resolve the conflict?