There’s a hidden assumption within discussions on territorial disputes that I never see called out, and that’s the question of how we determine who controls the dirt.
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.
I absolutely agree! I would only consider it as one factor out of many, but the income discrepancy in this case is so huge that it eclipses almost everything else. We know from real world experience how much pain immigrants are willing to endure for a modest increase in income, and a 10x magnification is unparalleled.
I do think it's also important to mention that by any objective standard, Arab Israelis are much more free than Egyptians and Jordanians. They can vote, have free speech (look like Haneen Zoabi, or look at Israeli Arabs writing in Haaretz), can criticize their government. There were a few disturbing stories of people arrested for social media posts right after October 7, but that seems to have quieted down, fingers crossed. Having Ben-Gvir as internal security minister does not help, but he will be voted out sooner or later, again fingers crossed. And quite honestly the free speech issues are much better in Israel than in Western Europe where you can be arrested for tweets. Israel has strong protections for academic freedom, better than the US.
They certainly have much more access to opportunities, and in fact there is affirmative action for Arabs in admission to Israeli universities. The affirmative action is de jure based on the socioeconomic status of a student's neighborhood, but the neighborhoods at the bottom of the ladder are reliably Arab.
One could argue that in light of the income and education gaps, Arab Israelis have less access to opportunities than Jewish Israelis, but the same is true in the US. There is a gap in income and education between Arab Americans and Jewish Americans, or between non-Hispanic White Americans and Jewish Americans.
I was going to say the numbers you give aren't clear-cut enough to make this point (you kinda blur average GDP with average wage and don't consider median wage, you don't consider Israel's negative impact on Gaza and the West Bank's economy, you don't separate Palestinian Druze Israelis, etc), but a quick search gave a 15$ average daily wage for Egypt, which *is* a very stark gap with Arab-Israelis.
I acknowledge the numbers I cite are imperfect, but I spent a couple of hours trying to track down good statistics and that was the best I could come up with. I added a qualifier but I'm happy to be directed towards better stats.
I think also a preference utilitarian view is important here. We can look at objective metrics like income and also objective measures of political freedom and see that Arab Israelis do better. But we can also just ask them.
One big difference between Israel and apartheid South Africa is that if you asked the median black South African if they want to end apartheid even if it lowers their living standards they will say sure. By contrast Israeli Arabs don't. Unlike in the South African case where there is a tradeoff between $$ (but not 10x, maybe 2x) on one hand and what people want and their political freedom on the other, in this case there is no tradeoff. One side has 10x money AND more political freedom, and so the people who live under it rightly don't want to lose it!
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.)
Yes, exactly. It's maddening how much these distinct phenomena are intentionally obfuscated. The people who fled Israel in 1948 and had their property confiscated had an unambiguously legitimate grievance and were entitled to a remedy.
The problem is that every one of those people is now dead, and allowing the perpetual inheritance of grievances across generations is a rubric no one wants to see _actually_ uniformly implemented. It just leads to a never-ending cycle of reprisals that is impossible to get out of.
The reason it gets obfuscated is because "some guy 70 years ago lost some property" is nowhere near as compelling a narrative as "our PEOPLE were INVADED by OCCUPIERS"
What's striking is that even if you compare it to other ethnic cleansings that were going on in the narrow 5 year period after WWII ended, the naqba was relatively minor. India/Pakistan partition resulted in 12-20 million people displaced and at least one million dead. The Soviets simply upped and moved Poland and Ukraine 300 miles west and ethnically cleansed 20-30 million Slavs and Germans hither and yon.
Great framework. Obviously what's missing wrt the Israel/Palestine conflict in particular is religion.
Killing/murder is common for nationalist movements, but murder-suicide (e.g., suicide bombings) are not -- people will only blow themselves up because of a belief in the afterlife.
If I/P was simply a land dispute it would have been solved long ago. Israel already has internationally recognized borders with Egypt and Jordan, and armistice (ceasefire) lines with Lebanon and Syria.
Beyond the 10x income gap between Israel and Jordan, if you care about women's rights, Israeli sovereignty is clearly far superior -- see honor killings, FGM, women's employment, arranged marriages, etc. etc.
Yeah. This is why I'm not at all a fan of Tibetan independence. Chinese rule led to a huge increase in living standards, and not like what they had before was a liberal democracy. It was a Buddhist theocracy.
Yeah, it was very weird when I learned the Dalai Lama title was essentially a religious monarch. There's no universe where I'd peg current Chinese rule as anywhere close to ideal, but for them to be an improvement over what came before seems plausible to me.
The other thing that bothers me is that between 1898 and 1948 Jews were leaving Europe in droves and moving everywhere in the world. North America, South America, Australia, the UK, South Africa, etc. By no means was Jewish immigration to all of these places welcomed. Indeed during World War II most countries refused to take any appreciable number of Jewish refugees. The standard left/liberal position on this is that those countries should have taken those Jews in (e.g. the morality play of the SS St. Louis), and that their refusal was inexcusable racism.
So you're left with an absurd situation where it was moral and good for Jews to immigrate to every country on Earth except Palestine, the one place on Earth where the government and the international community had explicitly set aside for Jewish immigration.
I agree with the general message of your post (borders should be made for man, not man for the borders), but I disagree with a lot of specifics.
For instance, by your own account of the Morroco government heavily colonized the West Sahara while pushing the natives out to barren desert and to Algeria. (As I understand it the Great March was only a protest, and the waves of settlers came progressively, but same thing.) So presenting the living conditions of the imported settlers as an argument in favor of Moroccan governance is... a bit skewed, to say the least.
If we're considering a living-conditions-based argument for legitimacy, we should consider the living conditions of people living in refugee camps or east of the Moroccan Wall, not just the living conditions of Morrocan settlers who got free lands and access to phosphate mines.
(Yes, multi-generational refugee camps are a bad thing and are a symptom of revanchism and reflect badly on the Algerian government, etc. But being an impoverished diaspora isn't great either.)
And I don't think financial living conditions should be the most important factor for these debates anyway. There's an argument to be made that the current world order is uniquely prosperous largely because there is an international taboo against wars of conquest. Enforcing that taboo both avoids ruinous wars, and ruinous arms races *just in case there's a war*.
This is why the international community tends to not accept arguments along the lines of "well my armies are already there anyway, so the course of action that saves most lives is for the rebels to lay down their weapons and accept my supremacy". If you accept it, you encourage a norm of blitzing troops in and placing your rule as a fait accompli (like Russia tried with Ukraine).
My personal stance is that in almost all cases self-determination of peoples should be the only thing that matters, with some provisions to account for forced exiles and bussing in settlers, etc. Measures of economic prosperity only account for state-legible metrics, and ignore forms of disenfranchisement that the locals feel keenly but are hard to translate to hard metrics. As a quick example, Sahrawis seem to place more importance on women's emancipation than Morocco does, though I'm not super confident about that point.
Under the lens of self-determination, Morocco *absolutely* comes out as the bad guy here: it systematically refused any referendum for independence proposed by the UN, even when the voter base included Moroccan settlers. One wonders, if Morocco is so sure that its rule is beneficial to West Sahara's population, why it's so afraid to put it to the test.
(FWIW I have a lot of sympathy for the Polisario Front. They made a lot of effort to be as Western-compatible as a secessionist militia could possibly be, to compromise with the Moroccan government, to pursue peaceful solutions, etc, and Western powers continually left them out to dry in return.)
And just to insist that this principle should be applied consistently: yes, I absolutely believe that Crimea should be considered Russian territory. The annexation referendum they did was shady, but there's more than enough evidence to assume that even a completely above-board referendum would have given the same results.
I failed to mention that most Sahrawis today live in Morocco (160k in Western Sahara where they make up 30% of the population, and 90k in the northern "mainland"). As far as I could find, virtually nobody lives east of the sand wall. It's left empty as a military buffer zone.
I absolutely agree that norms against wars of conquest is a very important factor! I left it out of this post in an effort to keep it simple. However, I do believe that past a certain amount of time, it does become optimal for rebels to just give up. I firmly support Ukraine in their war against Russia but realistically it might be best if they abandoned the conquered territories in exchange for joining NATO.
There's this weird (somewhat perverse) view by many lefties that these brown people are better off living in squalor under a corrupt authoritarian government where women have few rights and homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, rather than have them live under a democratic government with decent healthcare and a comfortable standard of living but where they are viewed as a cultural underclass. Another great article, Yassine!
Palestine/Israel aside, I noticed that Americans tend to downplay linguistic differences and their impact on everyday life.
Czech, German and Hungarian are, barring any acquired skills, mutually totally unintelligible. Each of the appropriate nation states will have its entire legal code etc. written in the dominant language, and it will be in its interest to also push its own citizens, including kids, to learn the dominant language.
But if there is a significant, territorially compact community speaking the other language on the "wrong" side of the border, they are forced to be bilingual and possibly adapt to a very different culture, while it would be much easier for them to just attach themselves to the other country.
Of course there are some other things at play, but ceteris paribus, what sense does it make to force half a million Hungarians to become half-Slovaks if they can stay Hungarians by attaching themselves to Hungary instead. Detaching communities from the "mother" country was usually done in the aftermath of a war, by victors to the vanquished, and often meant quite explicitly as a punishment, dividing families, businesses etc. It was also usually followed by open pressure to assimilate the next generations to the victorious nation.
As of today, open pressure to assimilate is no longer in vogue, and the situations that resulted from WWI and WWII peace treaties are often resolved by some degree of autonomy (such as South Tirol), but you still have the extra burden of bilingualism, which is a gift for individuals, but an expensive governance nightmare.
It is possible that the rise of automatic translators will alleviate this problem, which is nowadays quite expensive indeed.
I would say I downplay linguistic differences, but not as an American. Growing up in Morocco meant growing up with both Arabic and French, with our classes roughly split in half. Despite having only two (!) television stations, they also split programming into the two languages, having duplicate news broadcasting one after the other. Since then the government has also added the indigenous Berber language of Tamazight into the official roster, so now everything is in triplicate.
There still was a divide, but primarily urban/rural with most villagers rarely having a reason to learn French. I don't know if I would consider the overall situation much of a big deal, because language acquisition is a trivial exercise when acquainted early enough.
Doesn’t this prove too much? In that any country that can claim to have a decently competent government can just claim sovereignty over any badly run country, and you would have to be cool with it? Give Europe all their colonies back and give Central/South America to the USA?
I did not expect to see an argument from you supporting Trump’s talk of retaking Panama!
If we forced all of Haiti back to France while only needing really to kill gangsters to achieve the transition, they laid down the law and infrastructure soon after, and within 50 years Haiti was the most prosperous island in the Atlantic, what moral calculus would have to be made here to call that a bad thing?
> any country that can claim to have a decently competent government can just claim sovereignty over any badly run country, and you would have to be cool with it?
Yes, I've already bitten the bullet on this question in the "The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind" essay: "Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it’s useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community’s needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week)."
There's other factors for me to consider though. I wouldn't just take a government's claim at being competent at face value, I'd need to see proof it's true and that they would apply it properly in this new territory. There's also the question of whether the transition "costs" are even worth it, such as if the colonial acquisition requires a military bloodbath that quickly eclipses any potential upsides. The vast majority of colonial enterprises were neither intended to be benign nor did they play out that way in practice. They were violent and extractive endeavors, though that's not an inevitable consequence of "foreign government ruling over territory".
The British were generally horrendous colonial masters, but the way they handled Hong Kong was phenomenal. China regaining control of the island is technically de-colonialism, but it's been a downgrade by any measure for Hong Kong residents, particularly from the standpoint of civil liberties.
I think Yassine's point would be that indeed Gaza under Israeli dominion prior to October 7, 2023 should have been more preferable to Gazans than Gaza now. October 7 seems like insanity.
No? I honestly don't see how you keep drawing that inference despite it being the literal opposite of what I'm saying.
Again, the Nazi invasion of Poland brought about a marked decline in the quality of life for the inhabitants of Poland. In Nazi occupied Poland, Poles were earmarked for extinction or chattel slavery.
"Nazi Germany also was considerably more prosperous than the Polish Second Republic, FWIW."
Pre-Nazi Germany was more prosperous than Poland, and post-Nazi Germany too. This observation doesn't tell you much about the political systems involved, rather than that the German language space was more developed than the Polish language space for a mix of reasons.
Also as a Czech: in general, everyone but the hardcore nationalists accepts that our uneasy co-existence with the German-speaking people had its positive attributes as well. They were indeed more developed and educated than us, and they taught us a lot of things. It was probably inevitable for them to dominate us in the 18th and the 19th century on the basis of being more developed alone, and as long as their dominance was mostly benevolent, it was an OK-deal for everyone involved.
But as usual, pupils will start to get closer to the teachers, and our former teachers reacted by sliding into "less benevolence, more repression". You know the rest.
Fair enough, but the fact is that most people in the world are attached to their own ethnic group. Looking at the world's border disputes and saying as a rational individualist you find such attachments silly just makes you seem clueless, like a European missionary arriving in the Americas and trying to convert the natives.
Obviously nationalism, including ethno-nationalism, is a potent force! I never deny that. But if you accept and present a movement as nationalistic, it then becomes very difficult to get foreigners to give a shit about it. That's why the pro-Palestine movement adopts the colonialism and oppression framework instead of the (more accurate) nationalism one.
Again I think that's a Western (even WEIRD, to use the acronym) way of seeing things. I think in other parts of the world ethnocentrism is far more accepted. Plus any story about colonialism is inherently about nationalism.
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.
I absolutely agree! I would only consider it as one factor out of many, but the income discrepancy in this case is so huge that it eclipses almost everything else. We know from real world experience how much pain immigrants are willing to endure for a modest increase in income, and a 10x magnification is unparalleled.
I do think it's also important to mention that by any objective standard, Arab Israelis are much more free than Egyptians and Jordanians. They can vote, have free speech (look like Haneen Zoabi, or look at Israeli Arabs writing in Haaretz), can criticize their government. There were a few disturbing stories of people arrested for social media posts right after October 7, but that seems to have quieted down, fingers crossed. Having Ben-Gvir as internal security minister does not help, but he will be voted out sooner or later, again fingers crossed. And quite honestly the free speech issues are much better in Israel than in Western Europe where you can be arrested for tweets. Israel has strong protections for academic freedom, better than the US.
They certainly have much more access to opportunities, and in fact there is affirmative action for Arabs in admission to Israeli universities. The affirmative action is de jure based on the socioeconomic status of a student's neighborhood, but the neighborhoods at the bottom of the ladder are reliably Arab.
They also tried to remove standardized tests at some point: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/yisrael-beytenu-mk-slams-ben-gurion-university-fast-track-entry-for-arab-sector/ and https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/237388 .
One could argue that in light of the income and education gaps, Arab Israelis have less access to opportunities than Jewish Israelis, but the same is true in the US. There is a gap in income and education between Arab Americans and Jewish Americans, or between non-Hispanic White Americans and Jewish Americans.
Yes, I did not intend to gloss over the other factors as unimportant. I'll edit that part for clarity.
I was going to say the numbers you give aren't clear-cut enough to make this point (you kinda blur average GDP with average wage and don't consider median wage, you don't consider Israel's negative impact on Gaza and the West Bank's economy, you don't separate Palestinian Druze Israelis, etc), but a quick search gave a 15$ average daily wage for Egypt, which *is* a very stark gap with Arab-Israelis.
I acknowledge the numbers I cite are imperfect, but I spent a couple of hours trying to track down good statistics and that was the best I could come up with. I added a qualifier but I'm happy to be directed towards better stats.
That is true, a 10x increase is pretty hugely significant.
I think also a preference utilitarian view is important here. We can look at objective metrics like income and also objective measures of political freedom and see that Arab Israelis do better. But we can also just ask them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberman_Plan#Poll_of_Umm_Al-Fahm_residents
One big difference between Israel and apartheid South Africa is that if you asked the median black South African if they want to end apartheid even if it lowers their living standards they will say sure. By contrast Israeli Arabs don't. Unlike in the South African case where there is a tradeoff between $$ (but not 10x, maybe 2x) on one hand and what people want and their political freedom on the other, in this case there is no tradeoff. One side has 10x money AND more political freedom, and so the people who live under it rightly don't want to lose it!
Income plus safety plus opportunity for their children?
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.)
Yes, exactly. It's maddening how much these distinct phenomena are intentionally obfuscated. The people who fled Israel in 1948 and had their property confiscated had an unambiguously legitimate grievance and were entitled to a remedy.
The problem is that every one of those people is now dead, and allowing the perpetual inheritance of grievances across generations is a rubric no one wants to see _actually_ uniformly implemented. It just leads to a never-ending cycle of reprisals that is impossible to get out of.
The reason it gets obfuscated is because "some guy 70 years ago lost some property" is nowhere near as compelling a narrative as "our PEOPLE were INVADED by OCCUPIERS"
What's striking is that even if you compare it to other ethnic cleansings that were going on in the narrow 5 year period after WWII ended, the naqba was relatively minor. India/Pakistan partition resulted in 12-20 million people displaced and at least one million dead. The Soviets simply upped and moved Poland and Ukraine 300 miles west and ethnically cleansed 20-30 million Slavs and Germans hither and yon.
Great framework. Obviously what's missing wrt the Israel/Palestine conflict in particular is religion.
Killing/murder is common for nationalist movements, but murder-suicide (e.g., suicide bombings) are not -- people will only blow themselves up because of a belief in the afterlife.
If I/P was simply a land dispute it would have been solved long ago. Israel already has internationally recognized borders with Egypt and Jordan, and armistice (ceasefire) lines with Lebanon and Syria.
Beyond the 10x income gap between Israel and Jordan, if you care about women's rights, Israeli sovereignty is clearly far superior -- see honor killings, FGM, women's employment, arranged marriages, etc. etc.
Yeah. This is why I'm not at all a fan of Tibetan independence. Chinese rule led to a huge increase in living standards, and not like what they had before was a liberal democracy. It was a Buddhist theocracy.
Yeah, it was very weird when I learned the Dalai Lama title was essentially a religious monarch. There's no universe where I'd peg current Chinese rule as anywhere close to ideal, but for them to be an improvement over what came before seems plausible to me.
The other thing that bothers me is that between 1898 and 1948 Jews were leaving Europe in droves and moving everywhere in the world. North America, South America, Australia, the UK, South Africa, etc. By no means was Jewish immigration to all of these places welcomed. Indeed during World War II most countries refused to take any appreciable number of Jewish refugees. The standard left/liberal position on this is that those countries should have taken those Jews in (e.g. the morality play of the SS St. Louis), and that their refusal was inexcusable racism.
So you're left with an absurd situation where it was moral and good for Jews to immigrate to every country on Earth except Palestine, the one place on Earth where the government and the international community had explicitly set aside for Jewish immigration.
I agree with the general message of your post (borders should be made for man, not man for the borders), but I disagree with a lot of specifics.
For instance, by your own account of the Morroco government heavily colonized the West Sahara while pushing the natives out to barren desert and to Algeria. (As I understand it the Great March was only a protest, and the waves of settlers came progressively, but same thing.) So presenting the living conditions of the imported settlers as an argument in favor of Moroccan governance is... a bit skewed, to say the least.
If we're considering a living-conditions-based argument for legitimacy, we should consider the living conditions of people living in refugee camps or east of the Moroccan Wall, not just the living conditions of Morrocan settlers who got free lands and access to phosphate mines.
(Yes, multi-generational refugee camps are a bad thing and are a symptom of revanchism and reflect badly on the Algerian government, etc. But being an impoverished diaspora isn't great either.)
And I don't think financial living conditions should be the most important factor for these debates anyway. There's an argument to be made that the current world order is uniquely prosperous largely because there is an international taboo against wars of conquest. Enforcing that taboo both avoids ruinous wars, and ruinous arms races *just in case there's a war*.
This is why the international community tends to not accept arguments along the lines of "well my armies are already there anyway, so the course of action that saves most lives is for the rebels to lay down their weapons and accept my supremacy". If you accept it, you encourage a norm of blitzing troops in and placing your rule as a fait accompli (like Russia tried with Ukraine).
My personal stance is that in almost all cases self-determination of peoples should be the only thing that matters, with some provisions to account for forced exiles and bussing in settlers, etc. Measures of economic prosperity only account for state-legible metrics, and ignore forms of disenfranchisement that the locals feel keenly but are hard to translate to hard metrics. As a quick example, Sahrawis seem to place more importance on women's emancipation than Morocco does, though I'm not super confident about that point.
Under the lens of self-determination, Morocco *absolutely* comes out as the bad guy here: it systematically refused any referendum for independence proposed by the UN, even when the voter base included Moroccan settlers. One wonders, if Morocco is so sure that its rule is beneficial to West Sahara's population, why it's so afraid to put it to the test.
(FWIW I have a lot of sympathy for the Polisario Front. They made a lot of effort to be as Western-compatible as a secessionist militia could possibly be, to compromise with the Moroccan government, to pursue peaceful solutions, etc, and Western powers continually left them out to dry in return.)
And just to insist that this principle should be applied consistently: yes, I absolutely believe that Crimea should be considered Russian territory. The annexation referendum they did was shady, but there's more than enough evidence to assume that even a completely above-board referendum would have given the same results.
I failed to mention that most Sahrawis today live in Morocco (160k in Western Sahara where they make up 30% of the population, and 90k in the northern "mainland"). As far as I could find, virtually nobody lives east of the sand wall. It's left empty as a military buffer zone.
I absolutely agree that norms against wars of conquest is a very important factor! I left it out of this post in an effort to keep it simple. However, I do believe that past a certain amount of time, it does become optimal for rebels to just give up. I firmly support Ukraine in their war against Russia but realistically it might be best if they abandoned the conquered territories in exchange for joining NATO.
What a great article, great thinking.
Well said. Competent governance matters.
There's this weird (somewhat perverse) view by many lefties that these brown people are better off living in squalor under a corrupt authoritarian government where women have few rights and homosexuals are imprisoned or killed, rather than have them live under a democratic government with decent healthcare and a comfortable standard of living but where they are viewed as a cultural underclass. Another great article, Yassine!
Palestine/Israel aside, I noticed that Americans tend to downplay linguistic differences and their impact on everyday life.
Czech, German and Hungarian are, barring any acquired skills, mutually totally unintelligible. Each of the appropriate nation states will have its entire legal code etc. written in the dominant language, and it will be in its interest to also push its own citizens, including kids, to learn the dominant language.
But if there is a significant, territorially compact community speaking the other language on the "wrong" side of the border, they are forced to be bilingual and possibly adapt to a very different culture, while it would be much easier for them to just attach themselves to the other country.
Of course there are some other things at play, but ceteris paribus, what sense does it make to force half a million Hungarians to become half-Slovaks if they can stay Hungarians by attaching themselves to Hungary instead. Detaching communities from the "mother" country was usually done in the aftermath of a war, by victors to the vanquished, and often meant quite explicitly as a punishment, dividing families, businesses etc. It was also usually followed by open pressure to assimilate the next generations to the victorious nation.
As of today, open pressure to assimilate is no longer in vogue, and the situations that resulted from WWI and WWII peace treaties are often resolved by some degree of autonomy (such as South Tirol), but you still have the extra burden of bilingualism, which is a gift for individuals, but an expensive governance nightmare.
It is possible that the rise of automatic translators will alleviate this problem, which is nowadays quite expensive indeed.
I would say I downplay linguistic differences, but not as an American. Growing up in Morocco meant growing up with both Arabic and French, with our classes roughly split in half. Despite having only two (!) television stations, they also split programming into the two languages, having duplicate news broadcasting one after the other. Since then the government has also added the indigenous Berber language of Tamazight into the official roster, so now everything is in triplicate.
There still was a divide, but primarily urban/rural with most villagers rarely having a reason to learn French. I don't know if I would consider the overall situation much of a big deal, because language acquisition is a trivial exercise when acquainted early enough.
Doesn’t this prove too much? In that any country that can claim to have a decently competent government can just claim sovereignty over any badly run country, and you would have to be cool with it? Give Europe all their colonies back and give Central/South America to the USA?
I did not expect to see an argument from you supporting Trump’s talk of retaking Panama!
If we forced all of Haiti back to France while only needing really to kill gangsters to achieve the transition, they laid down the law and infrastructure soon after, and within 50 years Haiti was the most prosperous island in the Atlantic, what moral calculus would have to be made here to call that a bad thing?
Well asked. I would love to hear a principled anti-colonialist lay out a response.
> any country that can claim to have a decently competent government can just claim sovereignty over any badly run country, and you would have to be cool with it?
Yes, I've already bitten the bullet on this question in the "The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind" essay: "Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it’s useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community’s needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week)."
There's other factors for me to consider though. I wouldn't just take a government's claim at being competent at face value, I'd need to see proof it's true and that they would apply it properly in this new territory. There's also the question of whether the transition "costs" are even worth it, such as if the colonial acquisition requires a military bloodbath that quickly eclipses any potential upsides. The vast majority of colonial enterprises were neither intended to be benign nor did they play out that way in practice. They were violent and extractive endeavors, though that's not an inevitable consequence of "foreign government ruling over territory".
The British were generally horrendous colonial masters, but the way they handled Hong Kong was phenomenal. China regaining control of the island is technically de-colonialism, but it's been a downgrade by any measure for Hong Kong residents, particularly from the standpoint of civil liberties.
A glib attempt to justify Might Is Right. I note that Zionists are happy to base *their* claims on Palestine on literal ancient history.
Nazi Germany also was considerably more prosperous than the Polish Second Republic, FWIW.
If "might is right" was your takeaway, then you misunderstood my argument.
A) Poland under Nazi Germany was decidedly not more prosperous than the Polish Second Republic
B) Jews or Poles were materially much worse off within Germany under the Nazis than Jews and Poles in the Polish Second Republic
Compare to Gaza right now vs Gaza before October, 2023.
I think Yassine's point would be that indeed Gaza under Israeli dominion prior to October 7, 2023 should have been more preferable to Gazans than Gaza now. October 7 seems like insanity.
So you are saying that the AK in occupied Poland should have acquiesced to Nazi dominion.
No? I honestly don't see how you keep drawing that inference despite it being the literal opposite of what I'm saying.
Again, the Nazi invasion of Poland brought about a marked decline in the quality of life for the inhabitants of Poland. In Nazi occupied Poland, Poles were earmarked for extinction or chattel slavery.
Yes, and the occupants of Gaza are marked for extermination right now.
"Nazi Germany also was considerably more prosperous than the Polish Second Republic, FWIW."
Pre-Nazi Germany was more prosperous than Poland, and post-Nazi Germany too. This observation doesn't tell you much about the political systems involved, rather than that the German language space was more developed than the Polish language space for a mix of reasons.
Also as a Czech: in general, everyone but the hardcore nationalists accepts that our uneasy co-existence with the German-speaking people had its positive attributes as well. They were indeed more developed and educated than us, and they taught us a lot of things. It was probably inevitable for them to dominate us in the 18th and the 19th century on the basis of being more developed alone, and as long as their dominance was mostly benevolent, it was an OK-deal for everyone involved.
But as usual, pupils will start to get closer to the teachers, and our former teachers reacted by sliding into "less benevolence, more repression". You know the rest.
Might + good governance, prosperity, and an independent populace makes right.
Fair enough, but the fact is that most people in the world are attached to their own ethnic group. Looking at the world's border disputes and saying as a rational individualist you find such attachments silly just makes you seem clueless, like a European missionary arriving in the Americas and trying to convert the natives.
Obviously nationalism, including ethno-nationalism, is a potent force! I never deny that. But if you accept and present a movement as nationalistic, it then becomes very difficult to get foreigners to give a shit about it. That's why the pro-Palestine movement adopts the colonialism and oppression framework instead of the (more accurate) nationalism one.
Again I think that's a Western (even WEIRD, to use the acronym) way of seeing things. I think in other parts of the world ethnocentrism is far more accepted. Plus any story about colonialism is inherently about nationalism.