‘The aggressor state’
More than 700 and perhaps as many as 1300 years ago — back when the peace-loving Muslims were trying to conquer Europe by the sword (till they were stopped at Tours by Charles Martel) — the ancestors of the people who became the Aztecs passed through what is now Utah and Arizona, on their way south.
Left behind were relatively peaceful farmers, the Anasazi, likely the ancestors of today’s Pima and Papago (Tohono O’Odham.)
Nature hates a vacuum, and peaceful farmers tend to rule a land only until a more aggressive group arrives to take their women and their corn. It appears that warlike group, for the land to become Arizona, consisted of a couple of tribes speaking Athabascan tongues (thus, probably from Canada), the Navajo and Apache.
Did the Navajo and Apache buy their lands? Of course not. They took them.
A little more than a century ago, it was the turn of the Navajo and the Apache to have a good portion of their lands taken from them by a people better skilled or more ruthless in war — the “Americans.”
Did the Yankee “purchase” those lands? Did we seek international arbitration to set boundaries? Don’t be ridiculous. The land was simply taken. Less than 125 years ago.
So let us suppose that today some bands of red-blooded young Apache men, aware of the crimes and indignities of the past, managed to smuggle over the Mexican border some rockets and artillery pieces of Iranian or North Korean manufacture, and began driving around the San Carlos Apache Reservation and the Tonto and Coronado National Forests in Southeastern Arizona, firing off these weapons, several times each day, into the American towns of Tucson, Safford, Globe, and Mesa, Arizona.
Let us suppose that — as these attacks mounted — every couple of days an innocent white or black or Hispanic American woman, old man, or child was killed.
What do you suppose would happen? I suppose all the law enforcement agencies of Arizona would descend on the San Carlos Reservation, backed up by the National Guard if necessary, hunting for these killers. If the residents were uncooperative, we might see the equivalent of martial law, with roadblocks, warrantless traffic stops, and house-to-house searches (the courts would rule it all illegal, three or four years later), until the miscreants were rounded up, whereupon they would be put on trial for murder.
Would the United Nations squawk? Would the French try to impose a “cease-fire”?
Would demonstrators protest this violation of Apache sovereignty by blocking traffic in London or looting and burning parked cars in Paris?
Don’t be ridiculous.
Yet, I submit to you, the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon have been doing precisely what my made-up, hypothetical Apaches would have been doing, and offering precisely the same justification — appropriation of long-disputed lands not from them, but from their grandparents.
Yet suddenly when I or the Review-Journal point out the Israelis sat still for more than a YEAR under a deadly missile and mortar barrage before invading Gaza last weekend — pointing out that American taxpayers would be unlikely to tolerate so much as a week of inaction in the face of such attacks — Internet posters find my crippled powers of rational thought “disappointing considering the level of insight you normally exhibit.”
“This pro-Israel shit is way off base,” writes another correspondent. “Israel has been the aggressor state since 1948, created by a bogus UN ‘mandate,’ stealing land already inhabited by others, and killing those who refused to surrender their property voluntarily.’ ”
Wow. Can we have the names and dates-of-birth of a few Palestinian Arabs murdered by the fledgling Israeli state because they “refused to surrender their property voluntarily”? Were there firing squads?
In fact, every Palestinian account I’ve read of Muslim Arabs abandoning their property in what is now Israel in 1948 speaks of “rumors” that the Jews had launched or might launch a bloodbath, often accompanied by the admission — express or tacit — that they assumed they would soon be returned in triumph in the wake of a victorious pan-Arab army.
It seemed like a safe bet. But the Arabs failed to cover.
Meantime, how many of the Jewish Palestinian families who lived in what is now Jordan in the 1920s — before the former British protectorate was split in two, with the Arabs getting by far the larger half — are still there? Few if any, from what I can learn. When they fled to Israel — with some considerably more palpable indications of the fate that might await them at Arab hands — were they recompensed for their property by the Muslim Arabs? No one has been able to tell me they were. Do those Jews have a realistic “right of return”?
Did Israeli armored “aggressor” columns seek to invade and conquer Cairo and Amman and Damascus in 1948? Oh, please. Israel fought three desperate defensive wars for its very survival in its first 25 years. The closest thing most IDF forces had to an “armored vehicle” in 1948 was a Jeep.
The Palestinians now firing rockets and mortars into Israel never lived there. Their grandparents may have lived there.
The world is full of places inhabited by people who did not come by their current property “legally,” unless we refer to the law of conquest. The Polish village from which my father’s father came here to America was destroyed in the First World War, but many of the fields and farms to the east now lie behind the border of Belarus.
The Russians have no right to such lands. They just grabbed as much as they wanted, first in a crooked deal with Hitler, later by the brute force of the Red Army.
But if I were go to Belarus and start killing civilians because of my “righteous grievance” over land once farmed by my grandparents, would any Arab Muslim (or French diplomat) stand up in my defense at the U.N., or anywhere else? Of course not. I’d be promptly tried and executed as a murderer of civilian strangers unknown to me, and rightly so.
Ditto for any Jew who went on a killing spree today, trying to reclaim real estate seized from their grandparents in Russia or Germany in 1917 or 1942.
Shall the descendents of the Saxons start killing the descendents of the Normans, since “England has been the aggressor state since 1066”?
I will not fault the Israelis for not further attempting to negotiate a “settlement” with the Palestinian Arabs, because you cannot “negotiate” with anyone who will not first acknowledge your right to exist — it is a mistake to grant a “cease fire” to anyone who considers “peace” a mere breathing space to rearm and resupply before trying again.
I, for one, would like to see the American taxpayer quickly phase out his/her economic propping up of Israel (and the matching, ongoing bribery of Egypt), not only because our Constitution authorizes no such expenditures, but because I think that aid artificially sustains a top-heavy European-style Israeli welfare state where free market capitalism would probably work much better.
But if it’s true that “Israel has been the aggressor state since 1948,” it’s equally true that America has been an aggressor state since we started moving west of the Appalachians — if not long before — and that any descendent of any Indian tribe has a “right” to murder you, your spouse and children in your sleep, at any time.
“Thus,” said Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth, “your own reasons turn into your bosoms, as dogs upon their masters.”
You might want to watch out for that.
January 18th, 2009 at 9:29 am
Vin, I don’t recall how I stumbled onto your blog. But I’m glad I did. Your stuff shines like a brilliant diamond in a dreary heap of media/opinion dung.
Every time I read your scribblings I feel like I’m getting a flu shot that keeps me well.
Best regards,
Bob
January 18th, 2009 at 10:56 am
[…] take this hypothetical: What if some native American tribes smuggled ordnance and artillery into their reservations, and […]
January 18th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Vin, common sense, facts and unassailable logic never stood a chance against emotions, demagoguery and a silver tongue. Witness our soon to be president. never-the-less, I enjoy reading your column and dreaming that someday, someday . . . . .
January 19th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I hate that two governments are fighting (and encouraging the conflict) and getting innocent people on both sides killed. If the people could see the truth, they might all join in a common cause to kill off the state-parasites who are using them as pawns. One can always dream.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:29 am
Vin, unfortunately you left a few pertinent facts out of the analogy.
To make it fit better, suppose that on their reservation the Apaches had elected a faction to their local government to which the US Govt. strongly disapproved, because they have the slogan “U.S. Out Of North America.” And so the USG responds by laying siege to the reservation. No trade in or out, no travel in or out, only a tiny trickle of “humanitarian aid” allowed to pass through Homeland Security checkpoints at the borders. But not enough food to feed many of the kids or treat many of the sick.
So now the hot-blooded young Apaches start firing their unguided rockets toward the nearest white towns. Most of them land in open country but some of them do hit homes, businesses, and schools.
So the USG responds by giving them the Branch Davidian treatment, on a larger scale. Thousands of bombs, some of them with depleted-uranium warheads, some with phosphorous, pour in relentlessly on the reservation for weeks. The USG tells non-combatants to leave the rez but with the borders sealed, there’s nowhere to go. The USG tells its citizens that they “are trying to avoid killing civilians” but of course it’s inevitable that civilians will be killed in an action such as this. Then come a division of heavily armed troops and tanks, attacking everything that moves, destroying police stations, hopsitals, and schools “because that’s where the Apache militants were storing weapons” in every case.
Injured children are allowed to leave the rez for treatment in Mexican hospitals. But aid agencies are barred from entering the rez to rescue people trapped in collapsed buildings, or children huddled in the rubble to terrified to move or unwilling to abandon the bodies of the parents they saw killed by rockets and flying lead.
And for every white or hispanic killed in the Apache rocket attacks over the course of three years, ten Apaches, militant and non-militant alike, are killed in three weeks.
How do you think libertarians should respond to something like that?
January 20th, 2009 at 1:31 am
[…] “That’s like saying that the Israeli’s who occupied the land in the 40’s are dead, so they don’t deserve it either.” Actually no, it’s nothing like that. A closer analogy would be American Indians shelling cities from reservation land because they claim their ancestors used to live on the land those cities occupy. https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=151 […]
January 20th, 2009 at 2:03 am
The flaw in your logic is so obvious that I can see it even at this hour of the night.
In case you forgot,
the Israelis did not just come and win the land in a battle or a war. They had the backing of the entire civilized world, for pity’s sake because of the supposed killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
And their reasoning was that THEY USED TO OCCUPY THE LAND 2000 YEARS PRIOR TO THAT.
They also cloaked their argument in religion based on the Bible where God gives that land to ACTUAL descendants of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and so forth.
So to summarize,
your contention is that people do not have a right to demand land on the grounds that their ancestors used to live there.
But for some reason, the Israelis having done just that – armed mightily by the US – is some kind of exception to your contention.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:04 am
[…] killing the descendents of the Normans, since ‘England has been the aggressor state since 1066’? “Vin Suprynowicz puts a ray of good sense on the running Israeli/Palestinian horror-show. Do read the whole thing […]
January 20th, 2009 at 11:27 am
The death and destruction of Palestinian villages by Irgun and its associated terrorist groups in the late 40s is well documented if you are interested enough to read about it. It’s not pleasant reading but might set you straight on the true history of the bollodshed in the Middle East.
January 20th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Somehow this whole column ignores the root of the issue.
Palestinians don’t want back in Israel, they want Israel out of the West bank and Gaza, both part of the 1948, and 1967 agreements, with the UN that Israel ignores.
Both places where jewish people and jewish people alone are allowed to carry autmatic weapons (or any weapons legally) though, they aren’t even supposed to be there.
Where attrocities are carried out every day, that make the nerf rockets the Palestinians are sending out seem like childs play. (I say nerf rockets because how do you bombard people with rockets everyday for months, and kill 2 people.)
Here is a video you should watch, I realize that it is long… but it might help you to see all sides to this story, because now, your seeing the medias take.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6604775898578139565
January 21st, 2009 at 8:16 am
Vin, my problem is simple. My labor, is stolen from me, not voluntarily given to Israel. The harder I work, the more of my productivity is taken and given to Israel and others as well, which makes my hatred grow to an extreme level. Let Israel survive without my involuntary aid. Those who wish to support Israel may do so of their own accord. If you fail to understand my point, then what business do you have writing a novel like The Ballad of Carl Drega? Slavery is still alive and well.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:10 am
I may have jumped the gun here, I see you make my point lower down in your blog.
“I, for one, would like to see the American taxpayer quickly phase out his/her economic propping up of Israel (and the matching, ongoing bribery of Egypt)”
This I can agree with, the rest is irrelevant.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:43 pm
What a great piece!!!! Thanks for this Vin!!!!!
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:09 pm
“I, for one, would like to see the American taxpayer quickly phase out his/her economic propping up of Israel (and the matching, ongoing bribery of Egypt), not only because our Constitution authorizes no such expenditures, but because I think that aid artificially sustains a top-heavy European-style Israeli welfare state where free market capitalism would probably work much better.”
That’s the Vin Suprynowicz I’ve come to know and respect.
Regardless of where one’s sympathies may lie with respect to Israel and Gaza, what are you saying here is the bottom line. The United States has neither a national interest nor the constitutional authority to be picking sides in any of the innumerable conflicts around the world.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Another example: 15 million Germans were expelled from Poland at the end of WWII, and 3 million Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia. But do we see all those refugees, along with their children and grandchildren, living in refugee camps to this very day, with their very own dedicated UN agency to keep them on welfare, engaged in a campaign to murder as many Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks as they can until they get their lost property back? Do we see them marching in the streets of their refugee camps in full Nazi regalia, shouting at the top of their lungs that Hitler didn’t kill enough Jews and Slavs?
No, we don’t.
Similarly, million of Chinese fled the Chinese Revolution in 1949, but we don’t see the residents of Hong Kong, Taiwan, or elsewhere trying to kill as many Chinese civilians as they can until they get their land back in mainland China.
Another analogy: If someone stole my property, would that justify me in raping and torturing to death the thief’s daughter? IOW, what ideology says that murdering innocent civilians is an acceptable remedy for alleged land-theft? Certainly not one that has anything to do with liberty.
July 11th, 2010 at 10:35 am
You sir appear a right propagandist and practitioner in the art of Lutz-spin and Word Doctoring based on a review of a series of false statements regarding cutting NASA, preventing foreign oil cleanup efforts, etc. Dig deeper in your research before writing about a subject so you don’t lazily add to the so familiar rot on top that passes for truth and fact.