Playboy interviewed veteran White House correspondent
Helen Thomas, who recently lost her job because of her comments on Israel. Unsurprisingly, Playboy's interview generated some disgustingly vitriolic feedback, one piece of which reiterated an old Zionist argument: Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jews, which they have continuously occupied for millennia. The Palestinians, as most famously put by Israeli prime minister
Golda Meir, are a made-up people.
I'm quite deliberately leaving out the Biblical part, because it's the same thing as saying that Israel belongs to the Jews because God said so, a position also put forward by Golda Meir. Anyone who thinks they are privy to information from God qualifies as insane and isn't someone that can be reasoned with.
If you accept this argument in favor of Israel's unquestioned right to its territories, are you also in favor of abolishing the United States of America? After all, the Native Americans have inhabite their ancestral homelands continuously for millennia, and certainly the Americans are a made-up people. They're just a bunch of Europeans who showed up a couple of hundred years ago and conquered America for themselves. At least the Arab conquest happened well over 1,000 years ago; by those standards, the people who call themselves Americans today are newcomers. So if the Arabs living in Palestine have no right to be there, surely the Americans of European, African or Asian descent who form the vast majority of the population of North America have even less right to their current homes. Obviously, if over 1,400 years of living in Palestine doesn't make Palestinian Arabs a "real people", then how can a few hundred years in North America mysteriously create the "Americans"?
Certainly the same must go for the European and African-descended populations of Latin America and the Caribbean as well: if Arab Palestine isn't a real country and a real people, then there's no way something like Brazil or Peru is.
Where, in fact, do we draw the line? Will most of Britain have to be vacated? After all, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes only showed up in what is now England slightly before the Arabs took over Palestine. The English, as a made-up people, will be forced to leave, and the Welsh, Scots and Irish can divide up the islands among themselves. Can the Germans and French stay, or will they need to head back east as well? The question of the Slavs is even trickier, because no-one's quite sure where to count that from.
So if you accept the Zionist argument referenced here, you really have to be in favor of a very large-scale rearrangement of the Earth's population. Resetting everything to the criteria given will involve moving around a billion people, because if the Arabs had no right to be living in Palestine in 1948, there's no way in hell today's Americans have any right to be living where they are now. In short, this is an unworkable and monumentally stupid argument that no-one can seriously advocate as a justification for territorial claims. We simply cannot accept the idea that if a people were living on a certain territory c. 600 CE, their descendants, or people who claim to be their descendants, have a right to that territory over everyone else. Also, to maintain that a people who have lived on a certain territory for over a millennium aren't a real nation is to maintain that many other nations aren't real, either; most explicitly, if there are no such people as the Palestinians, then it's clear that there are no such people as the Americans, either.
That this argument can be put forward at all is testimony to the sheer idiocy of the debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No reasonable person should stand for it.
