Whose Land
2021-05-31
Periodically an argument is made that "my people were here first, therefore you must give the land to us." It shows its head from Palestine to Native Americans, but it’s a strange and stunningly uncurious and thoughtless argument to make. It’s never been convincing to me, and I’d like to illustrate why.
MAGA
A number of years ago a political slogan "Make America Great Again" was scoffed at by fundamentally incurious people. Just when was America great? What year do you want to wind back the clock, name a date! But those same people would cheer on ideas of reparations, disavowing Israel, and giving things to Indians; ostensibly because it was "stolen land".
But who was it stolen from? Was Israel stolen from Jordan? From the Romans? From the Ottomans? From the British? From the Caananites? From the Philistines? They’ve all occupied that land for varying amounts of time, and today’s Palestinians are descended from all of them.
If you’re trying to make a claim that at some time period these or those people occupied the land, then which year is it? In what year was the world at perfect balance with all peoples in their proper "place"? And how did you judge that this was the right alignment of the world?
To which year do you want to wind back the clock?
Originality
The claim of "we were here first" tends to stretch back before recorded history. There seems to be an idea that groups of humans sat on specific parcels of land until some unspecified point at which conquest began. Someone can only be the "original" owners of land if they reach back that far, and their claim has to assume that nobody else was there except their ancestors. But nobody can prove anything like that; quite the opposite. Everything points to humanity constantly shifting and warring, killing tribes over resources and getting into disputes over exactly who owns what.
Worse, you don’t even need to have an invader to have claims of stolen land. Let’s take an oversimplified example, which i’ll use Biblical characters for.
Adam and Eve live in the garden of Eden, and they’re doing alright. Their two boys Cain and Able are adults and while things are always a little tense it’s alright for now. Who owns the land? Well, the clan of Adam. All four of them own it. They all have claim to it - being born (or whatever) on the land, being raised there, and living their whole lives there.
But then Cain and Able get into a dispute, and decide that the other is intolerable. They each demand the other one leaves the land, get the hell out of here. Both have equal claim to the land, and both demand the other leaves.
This is a split, or (when religious in nature) a schism. It should be obvious that this situation is never going to lead to agreement over whose land it is; Able will say it was stolen from him, Cain will insist Able is not a real owner. The descendants of each will war over it for eternity, each believing that they’re the rightful owners. So, I ask again, who owns the land?
This gets more complicated when you remember that humans didn’t spontaneously erupt from the ground in discrete tribes - we migrate and spread outward, growing to find new land. Each tribe isn’t made from some atomic process, they’re grow and split from other tribes. Given any piece of land, and any number of tribes have ancestral legitimate claims to it.
So, there’s no way to tell what tribe was there "first", and disputed land doesn’t even have to come from an invasion.
Recency
The next bad argument goes something along the lines of "sure, but they only recently came into possession of the land, within the last 80 years! My great-grandfather really did live there first, my family should have it".
Alright, great. So should Taiwan (the rightful continuation of the Republic Of China) be given back the rest of China? Should the CCP just cede ownership? Should they also divest themselves of Tibet, and give Hong Kong back to the British? Because all of those things happened in the last 80 years, yet I don’t hear much argument about that conquest. It seems like westerners generally don’t care anymore, even though it was the product of so many more deaths, famines, and destruction than Israel was.
And this is to say nothing of even our allies - should Northern Ireland be given back to the Irish? Should Crimea be given back to Ukraine?
The recency argument neccesarily has to fall back on the originality argument, they’re saying something used to be something that benefited them and no longer does, therefore we should rewind to that prior time. But it’s inconsistent, and not how humanity works.
As an example that regular people might be familiar with, this was precisely the argument underpinning the "Sudetenland" concept popularized by Hitler. Germany used to have almost double the land, until the events of WW1, in which the victors "stole" large swaths away from it. Therefore, they argued they were not invading anyone, they were restoring their stolen land. This actually worked, world leaders at the time were famously hesitant to stop the Germans from taking over entire countries, which worked out really great for the citizens of those countries.
It gets even worse when considering splits. Take for example Yugoslavia, which split into six different countries during its bloodbath of a civil war in the 90s. There used to be one country which ruled what is now five more, should the descendents of that ruling area claim ownership of the five others? Life sure was better for them under that regime, and there are those in living memory who had their land taken from them, and resettled in one of the new countries favorable to their tribe. Should we try to put Yugoslavia back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?
The world is always shifting, and that shift is not inherently evil or good. To claim that shift itself is bad we must endorse claims of those that we hate (probably? right?), or be hypocrites.
Sins of the Fathers
Claims of "stolen land" are made by descendants. People who were born, raised, and make these arguments from somewhere else. They never lived in the country or land that they demand be recreated. They were not killed, they were not beaten, they were not driven out of anywhere - their lives only know the conflict because they fuel the conflict. They believe they are owed something, and they’ll terrorize or start wars over it.
This boils down to an ethical and Biblical principle called "Sins of the Fathers" (alternately, "generational guilt"), which can be phrased as "Are the sins of the father passed down to the son?" In other words, if you do something terrible, should your son be forced to make it right?
The Bible itself (while not exactly a great ethical textbook) gives two conflicting answers, one which asserts that yes the sons must make right what a father does wrong. Otherwise no justice can be done to the victims of the father, and the father has little deterrance to doing even more wrong. The other answer is that no the sons must not bear responsibility for what they didn’t do; for something that probably occurred far before their birth. They didn’t ask for this and weren’t a part of it, holding a gun to them and demanding something is itself an act of injustice.
But claims of ancestral land necessarily have to assert that the sins of the fathers confer to the son, because otherwise you can’t demand anything of descendants. But this gets into ethically-questionable territory - if you commit atrocities (such as firing tens of thousands of rockets at civilians) in order to advance your claim, are your descendants not liable for your crimes? If you use force to "take back" your land from someone, is that not itself a crime that can be passed down? Have you not stolen from them?
Ultimately if you affirm generational guilt, it all leads back to the originality argument - you have to assert that it’s not stealing if you’re stealing it back (even if you never owned it). But then we’d have to establish who owned it "first", right?
The sins of the father do not pass to the son, and if you think they do, you’re a hypocrite for using force to accomplish your goals.
You have what you can hold
Ultimately humanity boils down to "might makes right". It isn’t the ethically-pure route, it isn’t even moral, but it is how it works. The CCP owns China because it killed hundreds of millions who disagreed. Israel owns Israel because they fought off invasion attempts from every single country in the region multiple times. Yugoslavia is six stable countries because that’s what each group could keep a hold of. Northern Ireland is in the UK because the kingdom drove the Irish out of it. Eleven states are in the U.S. because their secession failed and they were invaded in their own homes.
If you hold it, you own it. If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it. It doesn’t matter what your ancestry is, where you live, what you speak or what your claim is - "good" and "evil" countries alike all operate the same way. A given border only exists because armed men prevent invasion. A nation only exists because armed men prevent rebellion. Land is only owned if it is gripped tightly.
There is no state of equilibrium, or perfect ordering of humanity. There is no year we can look to where everyone was "in their place". Historical claims of ownership are shallow and meaningless; you never owned it, and you don’t own it now.
