Saturday, July 20, 2024

the icc claims the israeli settlements are illegal because the "palestinian people" deserve self-determination.

while i understand what they're attempting to state, and the ruling has a sound legal basis, the ruling is also rooted in complex historical inaccuracies. it would be helpful if we could start by defining what the term  "palestinian people" actually means.

there is an interesting article here about the territorial changes in the ottoman empire:

i'll let you sort through it yourself, but it is abundantly obvious that the entire coastal region of the eastern mediterranean was split into ottoman provinces from the mid 16th century until the end of world war one, when the british and french created their own provinces, of which palestine became one (by mimicking ancient roman political divisions).

generally speaking, the ottomans considered the eastern mediterranean coast to be a part of the province of syria:

before the mid 16th century, the region was controlled by other varieties of turks, by crusaders, by arab colonists and by byzantine romans, and while the area was called palestine after the philistines, who were greeks, there was never any sort of palestinian state, or really even a distinct palestinian province after the end of roman rule. the region was broadly seen as southern syria or northern egypt, depending on who was more powerful at the time, and variously under the control of despots in constantinople or on the arab peninsula.

the closest thing to a palestinian state was the crusader states.

so, who are these "palestinian people"?

i don't mean to be disingenuous. the context of the ruling is clear enough, and it is relatively obvious that it intends to refer to the people that lived in the palestinian mandate created by great britain after the first world war, out of the southern parts of the ottoman syrian province. this was a political identity created by a colonial power, and not an indigenous identity, but it is what they mean.

but, who are these people? and where did they come from?

while nobody has ever wanted to admit it, everybody has always known that they were about 80% indigenous converted hebrews and about 20% colonial arabs and turks (with a substantial amount of genetic influx from subsaharan slaves, brought in by arabs). this was obvious enough that ben gurion wrote a book about it, and it has since been confirmed beyond a doubt by modern genetic science.

so, if the "palestinian people" are actually converted hebrews, and we agree in principle that they should have self-determination, what does that actually mean?

it would mean that they need voting rights and land use rights in an israeli state. 

because they're actually hebrews.

this is where the ruling gets confused, as it confuses what is a religious conflict between a single ethnic group (hebrews, some of which are jews, and some of which are muslims) with an ethnic conflict between arabs and hebrews, which is not the actual truth, even if it has taken on that form in territorial wars.

if the palestinians are arabs, they are not indigenous to the region, and should seek self-determination outside of it. if the palestinians are hebrews, which they actually are, they should seek self-determination within the hebrew state. there is no logical or legal basis to have a hebrew state that is muslim parallel to a hebrew state that is jewish. that would be like trying to carve pre-revolutionary france up into catholic and calvinist spaces, and we see how that turned out (not good. lots of dead people. for a long time.).

and, that brings us to the actual issue before us, which would be the land use laws and enforced segregation in the hebrew state, which claims to be western and democratic, but has segregation laws that are neither thing and need to be abolished. this is done by supporting a civil rights movement within israel, and not by arguing for parallel states on the same land that will have no future but perpetual warfare.

the icj ruling is consequently misguided, but not for the reasons proposed by netanyahu. the "palestinians" in the west bank, who are mostly muslim hebrews, need to have some right to compensation if the indigenous group, which is the jewish hebrews, wishes to seize the land for itself, which means what? it is hebrews seizing land from hebrews. they are seizing their own land from themselves and then giving preferred status to a member of the indigenous religion over the introduced one, which has the added layer of complexity that they're basically the same fucking religion, anyways.

what i want the icj to do for me - please - is to sit down and try and actually define these terms properly in order to clarify what they're actually fucking talking about. their ruling is rendered incoherent without properly defining the terms they're using, but if they were to actually do so, they would find they don't have an issue to adjudicate on, besides the lack of egalitarian land use laws in a country that sees it's particular indigenous denomination of a set of shared cultural beliefs as superior to any other derived one.