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MetalCrow's avatar

I feel like examining the income people make under the two regimes is necessary, but not at all sufficient to make a "which is better" claim. Sure, income is huge, but only one aspect of what it means to live under a government. Legal treatment, human rights, equal access to opportunities

are also vital. If you're mistreated and held as a second class citizen, money alone doesn't tell the whole story.

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Rewenzo's avatar

Yes, I often find that people arguing about Israel/Palestine use the phrase "stolen land" to refer to two separate distinct historical phenomena. One use I have sympathy for, the other I don't.

1) Prior to 1948, Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, moved to Palestine, bought land from the Arab owners, in perfectly legal transactions under either Ottoman or British Mandatory law, and developed the land into cooperative farms and towns and cities. Calling this "stealing land" is tantamount to saying it is theft for minorities to immigrate to a country and buy property from the locally dominant ethnic group. In most other contexts, e.g. Hondurans crossing the Rio Grande and forming communities and enclaves in Texas, calling this theft or colonialism would be considered racist in leftist circles.

2) During the 1948 Arab-Israel war, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were expelled from the country. Regardless of whether they were brutally expelled at gunpoint or left thinking they would return behind victorious Arab armies, it was Israel's choice to not let them return, and to either confiscate their homes or allow their confiscation. That is theft. I understand why they refused to let the Palestinians return, but the failure to compensate the Palestinians for their lost property is a black stain.

It's important to note that, unlike the first example of "stolen land," which was obviously contemplated from Zionism's earliest stages, this second use of "stolen land" was historically contingent. It was not part of any Zionist plan before 1948, and only arose in the context of a war launched by anti-zionists. While it's impossible to know what would have happened in the land of counterfactuals, where no war followed either the UN vote on partition, or Israel's declaration of statehood, it would have been very implausible for Israel, with its slight Jewish majority, to wage a campaign of ethnic cleansing against its Arab population while being surrounded by numerous more populous and powerful Arab states.

So when people say "the goal of Zionism was to steal land from the indigenous population and therefore it's an inherently white supremacist and colonial ideology" what they mean is that Jews buying land from Arabs for fair value is white supremacy and colonialism. (It is a similar critique to white gentrifiers buying apartments in Brooklyn.)

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