January 10, 2009

When Does the Statute of Limitations Run on the Theft of a Country?


Zionism teaches that the Jews were entitled to a state in Israel because they were dispossessed in AD 70. Sometimes they add there has been a continuous Jewish presence since AD 70, consisting mostly in a handful of pious Jews. The Arab refugees are not entitled to return, say the Zionists, even though they left in 1948. After all, they (or their allies in the Arab states) started a war and lost, then lost again and again.

These same Zionists doe not advocate that the Anglo-Saxons return to the mainland, the Magyars to Central Asia, the Cherokees to Georgia and Tennessee, and certainly not the Arabs to Sicily, Spain, and Portugal.

Question: Is there a right of conquest? If so, the Israelis may be able to claim the benefit of it, but must abandon their ancestral claim to a right to return to a land where they were twice soundly defeated in AD 70 and AD 135 or so.

If there is no right of conquest, and conquering and expelling another people is a crime, when does the statute of limitations run, such that undoing the wrong is no longer an option? If it's less than 1800 years, the Zionist claim to possess the land as of right goes by the boards. But then, when does the Palestinian right of redress expire?

If Jews have a religious right to the land, it must have been revealed by a new-fangled prophet no one has ever heard of, because no sect of religious Jews, 150 years ago, had heard of such a thing, and Reform or Orthodox, Jews until recently rejected the notion. It took a bunch of atheists to invent it. In short, it is a recent fabrication with little religious credibility, notwithstanding the "religious Zionist" thugs of Hebron.

1 comment:

Ben Cronin said...

Hey, followed you over from Juan Cole's. I think this is really an excellent point about how long we remember various historical crimes and whether it is possible to ever "correct" them.