BUT JEWS STOLE THEIR LAND!

Self-righteous activists will defend Palestine to the last dead Palestinian. Their cause is just that righteous.

How many times recently have you heard a variation on the theme that “Jews came and stole Palestinians’ land”?

I get that every time my arguments is winning.

“Pro-Palestinian” activists think that is the mic-drop defense.

“Jews stole their land!”

Nothing else matters if Israel was founded on false premises and stolen land.

In case you are wondering why I put “pro-Palestinian” in scoff quotes above, this is precisely the reason.

“Pro-Palestinian” activists are more concerned with winning an argument than ending the violence. They are not pro-Palestinian. They are the reason Palestinians are dying.

For most of these activists in Canada and elsewhere in the West, dead Palestinians are not so much a tragedy as a handy bludgeon to condemn Israel and its supporters.

A few things worth considering …

While there were many peoples who lived in the land we’re talking about 2,000 or 3,000 years ago, Jews are the only ones who still exist as an identifiable community.

Arabs, obviously, come from Arabia, while Jews come from Judea, so there’s that.

If there were a more glaring, tangible example of the logical fallacy of Muslim/Arab/Palestinian indigeneity trumping Jewish indigeneity, it is that the Muslim holy site in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, is built on top of the Jewish holy site, the Western Wall/Temple Mount. It’s not like the Jews came along later and tucked their holy site inconspicuously under the Muslim one.

Moreover, the simplistic idea that Jews disappeared then returned after the Second World War and displaced the local inhabitants is widespread but false.

There have always been Jews in the Levant (the Holy Land, Zion, Palestine, whatever you want to call the region). In an unbroken line for at least 3,000 years, Jews have lived there, albeit in small numbers after the Romans dispersed most Jews during the first century CE.

On the other hand, between 1918 and 1947, the Arab population of Palestine increased 120%. Most of these people came from elsewhere in the region, mostly the collapsed Ottoman Empire – specifically to benefit from the economic growth created by Zionist development.

In other words, many or most of the Arab people Western activists like to depict as indigenous to the area may have roots back a generation or two. A Jew living in the same place, who activists like to depict as foreign usurpers, may be able to trace an unbroken genealogical line back millennia.

The mantra that “Jews stole their land” has caught on partly because all of us carry, to one degree or another, conscious or unconscious biases about Jews that make us susceptible to the idea that those people routinely take what is not theirs.

On the other side, there are those who diminish the legitimacy of Palestinian people – their very identity or their right to live where they are. (There’s a big difference here, though – this anti-Palestinian motif is largely a rhetorical argument and, inasmuch as it is has a political dimension, it is a fringe. Denial of Jewish indigeneity and Israelis’ right to exist are the foundational core of the Palestinian movement.)

But here is why almost none of this matters – or shouldn’t …

What is the point of all this historical debate? What point is there in rehashing ad nauseam who arrived when? What does either side gain by arguing over who was there first or whose rights to the place are most valid?

For the sake of this argument, let’s pretend it could be empirically proven that Jews have no right to the land they call Israel, that they came in and stole it from the rightful Arab citizens and residents there.

Or let’s say we could irrefutably prove that Palestinians are not a national people and that they have no authentic claims to self-determination.

What then?

Putting aside theory, philosophy, ideology, woulda, shoulda and coulda, both peoples are there, now. Neither is going anywhere. To fight over who and what is right and just in this case is not a means of advancing the cause of either people; it is a device to avoid the facts and a resolution.

Any just settlement of the conflict will require us all to put aside our assumptions about who belongs and doesn’t belong and ensure that those who do live between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River find ways to do so in peaceful coexistence.

The “stolen land” argument, whether it is historically valid or the bunkum I know it is, exists solely to eradicate the legitimacy of Jewish claims and, in the process, inhibit coexistence.

If we claim to support peace and coexistence, promoting the erasure of either group’s existence or rights is not only inhumane, it’s strategically counterproductive.

This emphasis on the past is understandable in this history-heavy land, of all places. But it is an impediment to coexistence, not a step toward it. We need to move past these historical arguments and focus on the future. One way to do that is to take the historical arguments to their illogical conclusions, demonstrating the way they hinder, rather than help.

In Israel and Palestine, and among the proponents of both sides’ narratives abroad, there are those for whom coexistence is subordinate to succeeding in an existential argument over national legitimacies and rights. This is true of both sides. But it is more true of one side than the other.

The Israeli side has shown flexibility and compromise, at different times to varying degrees and with exceptions that do not disprove the rule.

The Palestinian side has been almost universally uncompromising and, until 2020 and the Abraham Accords, the larger Arab world had been almost as unrelentingly uniform in their rejectionism.

This is the point in the discussion where overseas activists, sensing impending defeat, fall back on the contention that Jews landed in Palestine in 1948 and stole the land from the indigenous inhabitants. And we begin again.

We can keep fighting over who was there first, who deserves to be there, who stole what and blah blah blah. That has always been the Hamas approach – and its impacts are clear, with tens of thousands dead, and still counting.

Overseas activists reward this strategy, providing a global cheering section that encourages Hamas to keep it up.

There is a depraved strain among overseas activists – many who self-righteously claim to advance peace and coexistence – to reward intolerance, war, violence and death. The “stolen land” argument is foundational to this approach. It loathes compromise and ensures years or generations more fighting because it won’t let old grievances rest.

This needs to end. And it is self-declared (if malapropos) “pro-Palestinians” who perpetuate both this intolerant argument and, by extension, the endless war, conflict and casualties.

Compromise is for losers, according to these activists, and ensuring that the virtuous Palestinian cause defeats the iniquitous Zionists is worth every death it costs.

“Pro-Palestinian” militants in Canada and elsewhere in the West, it seems, will fight for Palestine to the last, dead Palestinian.

Their cause is just that righteous.

See why I use scoff quotes?