When does a people's claim to a land expire?

[Rex_Goodheart]

After one generation? Two? A hundred years? A thousand?

How many years does it take to legitimize a nation that was formed by expelling the existing people? Immediately? 60 years? A thousand?

[Wonk]

1. Apparently, when someone with better weapons and a will to use them

decides they want it instead.

/not sayin that's moral, by any means...

[Rex_Goodheart]

2. I guess I'm not alone in the opinion that...

the Balfour Declaration, Jewish immigration into Palestine, and the 1947 UN Partition were all wrong.

However, I'm not willing to give up my house and lot to the Catawba Indians, either. :)

[Wonk]

5. Gimme a minute to reread the original post and my reply. Ok, done.

Confirmed: No mention of any specific countries in either post.

[NYC]

3. The U.S. did it.

When was the U.S. considered legitimate? Should it be?

[htuttle]

4. There is no logically coherent way...

...to justify both Israel's and the United States' existence at the same time.

It pretty much comes down to force of arms in the end.

[Swede]

6. Winner's take all.

That's how it's worked throughout history.

[Yupster]

8. An interesting case was WWII

at the end of the war Russia decided that Germany needed to have a big slice of its historic territory taken from it.

So East Prussia, West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania were all given to Poland and millions of German families were evicted from land that had been unquestionably German for hundreds if not thousands of years.

The city names were changed. Gone were Konigsberg, Breslau, Stettin, Kolberg, Kustrin, Stargard, etc. They have all just been erased from the map.

And no one seems to care. There aren't any protests or marches or terrorist bombings.

It's interesting how some land grabs can start 50 year long conflicts and others are just accepted and the removed people just disappear or dissolve into other populations.

Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

[fishwax]

10. There was an even broader relocation of germans from east europe

including places like lithuania==these places weren't German by any stretch, but they had ethnic germans living there who were expelled in the name of ethnic homogeneity.

With respect to the reduction of german territory, it isn't at all unusual for wars to effect national borders in that way (and some of these places--including much of pomerania--had not actually been part of germany for very long, historically speaking). Germany started a war of expansion, was eventually stopped, and some lands were taken as compensation for the losses of war or, ostensibly, to prevent a recurrence of the problems leading up to war.

I don't know as much about the origins of modern isreal, so I could be off base, but it seems to me that the events shortly after '45--the withdrawal of a colonial power, the assertion of U.N. control and then various wars that took place afterwards--are a very different chain of events.

[eallen]

7. This isn't about land. It's about competing religions...

If it were about land, it could be settled with negotiation, borders, and money. The land is at issue only because competing religions both claim it as "holy." Everyone who believes in holy land shares responsibility for the mess.

[sofa king]

9. Hi Rex,

I spent about eight years working on land and title disputes in the United States, most of them involving American Indian tribes.

I'll try to skip most of the legal stuff and give you just the straight version: a people's claim to land expires as soon as they are too weak to control it any longer, period. There is plenty of ink spilled to make it appear otherwise, but that's how it really is.

At this point, the lawyers could swoop in and remind that I'm totally wrong in the eyes of the law. But I'm not, and to those lawyers I cite the millions of acres of alienated territory in the United States which was stolen from American Indians in spite of things like the 1790 Indian Non-intercourse Act and perpetuity clauses in our highest law of our land, treaties.

The Non-intercourse Act is particularly instructive, because that law made all land transactions between entities other than the United States and tribes null and void--they never happened, according to the law; the Indians still own that stolen land, even today.

The Oneida cutlery factory is still Indian land, according to the Non-intercourse Act. And yet the forks keep rolling off the line.

New Zealand made a similar arrangement with Maori tribes at the Treaty of Waitangi, and they're not going to give that stolen land back, either.

Sometimes the stolen land later was paid for at pennies on the dollar. Sometimes it wasn't. Never, as far as I know (and I should know), has stolen Indian land in America been directly returned to its owners quickly, fairly and without equivocation. That's in spite of the fact that the basic tenets of our legal system required in many cases that we do exactly that.

In cases like the air-tight Oneida claim I linked above, the lawyers just delayed the return of the land until other legal tools like laches could be used to dismantle the claim in the Supreme Court. Same thing happens everywhere else, all over the world.

So the honest (though not necessarily legal) answer is: as soon as you lose it, it's gone forever, unless you fight to get it back. The Law of Conquest never went away. I'm the first person to tell you that it shouldn't be that way, but it is.

There is a depressing corollary to all of this: lose your land, and you lose your nation. The reason why American Indian tribes have any claim at all (for most non-Indian entities, no land claim can last longer than about forty years, after which statutes of limitations and other clauses invalidate the claim) is because the United States once treated with tribes as sovereign, independent entities. But as they lost control of their land base, they lost their sovereignty, and today they are domestic dependent entities. Same thing happened in New Zealand and Canada; it was worse in Australia and South America, and most other places colonized by Europeans.

These questions may have been posed with sympathy toward one side or the other in the Israel-Palestine question, but there is a further wrinkle in that case: look to the past nineteen hundred years prior to 1948 and look for any significant period in which either Palestians or Jews actually owned and controlled that territory. I'm not sure there is one. For virtually all of that time, the territory was under the control of someone else, be it Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders, Mamelukes, Ottomans, the British, or other Arab groups. That only further underscores the sad reality of might-makes-right as the only controlling law.

Edit: I should also point out that both parties in the Arab-Israeli dispute are fully cognizant of this law of the jungle. That is why the Palestinians made the "liquidation of Zionism" a cornerstone of their governing document (Article 15 of the PLO Charter). That's also why the Israelis have responded to Palestinian insurrection by land confiscation and colonization. Edit2: I spent eight years researching it, not ten, and I'm still doing it.

[The Stranger]

11. Ask the Native South Africans.

[OregonBlue]

12. In the case of Israel/Palestine,they didn't expell them. They just herded

them into ghetto's and used them as cheap labor. If they had totally expelled them, this might be over by now but, who would have done the grunt work?

[serryjw]

13. The Mexicans want California back

What do you think.....Would miss Hollywood?