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I don't thing we disagree on Sharon - his record has been horrific for many decades, but he seems to have genuinely moved away from his traditional hard right position.

As far as compensation for annexed territory in the West Bank and E. Jerusalem goes I agree.  I'm not sure what you mean by 1948. If you're referring to the proposed partition in the original UN resolution establishing Israel, I don't see how that is relevant in practical or legal terms.  Israel's internationally recognized borders are those of 1966, and have been for a very long time. It makes no more sense to talk of that ephemeral proposed map than it does for the ultra hawks to bring up the (true) fact that for a brief period after WWI 'Palestine' was thought of as including what is now Jordan.

On the refugees I suspect we disagree completely. I don't just mean that even most of the Israeli left rejects any notion of a meaningful right of 'return' and thus there isn't any prospect of it being implemented.  I also find the idea wrong in principal. For while I think that attempts should be made to rectify ethnic cleansing in the immediate aftermath of such an event, doing so decades later is simply compounding one wrong with another.  There simply has to be a statute of limitations on such things.  In this my thinking has been perhaps influenced by my automatic association of a right of 'return' to the German expellee movement's notion of a Recht auf Heimat (or Heimatrecht) which is clearly associated with the strange idea that there is some mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory (Kulturlandschaft).  A notion that, incidentally is similar to that of the Zionist argument that Jews have some sort of historical right to Palestine.  In my view they have the right to Israel because Israel exists, period.

by MarekNYC on Tue Nov 22nd, 2005 at 03:05:59 PM EST
[ Parent ]
On the refugees I suspect we disagree completely. I don't just mean that even most of the Israeli left rejects any notion of a meaningful right of 'return' and thus there isn't any prospect of it being implemented.

I agree.

I also find the idea wrong in principal. For while I think that attempts should be made to rectify ethnic cleansing in the immediate aftermath of such an event, doing so decades later is simply compounding one wrong with another.  There simply has to be a statute of limitations on such things.

Here I´m unsure...
So then when do you think those limitations you mention should start to work? What does "immediate" mean?
One year after the ethnic cleansing, five years or ten years later?
Just asking? And remembering Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Doesn´t that mean that if nobody - no important country in the world - is interested in "you", "you" are required to shut up once once your "limitation" is reached? So if a powerful nation "occupies" your territory for - say one generation - and expells "you", "you" should shut up once reaching the "limitation". Right?

So Tibet should be quiet. Same for the West Sahara. And East Timor never should have gained statehood either. You just have to expell more than 50% of the complaining people for - how long? - one generation and the "statute of limitations" is valid, right?

So the Russians did just make one mistake. They just didn´t send more than 50% of the Baltic population to Siberia when they could. With the result of losing the Baltic states in the 1990s. I´m sure future dictators will carefully view your "statutes of limitations". :)

In this my thinking has been perhaps influenced by my automatic association of a right of 'return' to the German expellee movement's notion of a Recht auf Heimat (or Heimatrecht) which is clearly associated with the strange idea that there is some mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory (Kulturlandschaft).

Get real!
Only a tiny minority of Germans would actually return to the birthplace of their great-parents. That said the Chech laws after 1945 didn´t distinguish between supporters of Hitler and people resisting him. So the laws might be a touch insensitive...

So you disagree with the Baltic states laws that if you want to be a citizen you have to speak the local language and be a local citizen?
I mean their law made some "mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory".
Given your definition they don´t even have a right to exist?

The Baltic states only existed between 1920 and 1940?
Less than one generation. Before 1918 they were part of Russia. After 1945 they were part of the USSR.
So according to your definition they don´t have any right to exist? Your "statute of limitations" would have certainly expired for these states?

by Detlef (Detlef1961_at_yahoo_dot_de) on Tue Nov 22nd, 2005 at 05:56:19 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Doesn´t that mean that if nobody - no important country in the world - is interested in "you", "you" are required to shut up once once your "limitation" is reached? So if a powerful nation "occupies" your territory for - say one generation - and expells "you", "you" should shut up once reaching the "limitation". Right?
Right - I view that as the lesser of two evils.

How long do you think the rights should last? Do you think the Poles in the postwar period with their talk of 'recovered territories' and the 'repatriation' of the German 'settlers' were correct?

Only a tiny minority of Germans would actually return to the birthplace of their great-parents. That said the Chech laws after 1945 didn´t distinguish between supporters of Hitler and people resisting him. So the laws might be a touch insensitive...
The number actively involved (as opposed to passively supporting) was a small minority of the population. In any case depending on how the question was asked a clear majority of the expellees wished to return into the sixties. A right of return was the official policy of the German government until Brandt, and remained the official policy of the expellee movement long after that. And if the expellees had been kept in refugee camps as second class citizens (Jordan, occuppied territories) or non-citizens (everywhere else) I suspect that plenty would still want to 'return.' Conversely, if the Arab governments had had a deliberate policy of scattering the refugees throughout the rest of the population, breaking up old local communities geographically, and providing financial aid and partial compensation for lost property I imagine we wouldn't be all that worried about the Palestinian refugee problem today. (To be exact the Bundesregierung had a dual, contradictory policy for the expellees. On the one hand the practical one described above. On the other a propaganda/cultural one seeking to preserve their local identities so that they would want to return - hence the large scale funding of the Landsmannschaft movement and its associated organizations.)

Re. the Baltics - you do realize that Vilnius had a Lithuanian population of at most 5% in 1939, and no I don't think the Poles (or rather their children and grandchildren) expelled from Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine have any rights with respect to those countries.

And as a final note, a poem by the Polish poet Anna Frajlich, about her home town of Szczecin, formerly Stettin. (translation mine)
City

A sharp western light
strikes my eyes
a different view greeted me
from my childhood windows
from one side gardens
stretching out in the distance
from the other end of a street
planted so thickly with lindens
that their crowns formed a tent
the light as in a tunnel
somewhere in the distance
round and promising
the city was not ours
but taken from others
who fled here in the wartime
chaos and left everything
either buried in the gardens
or covered by the rubble
or simply on the table
red wine in crystal glasses
unfinished
dark stains on the sides
the city was not ours
but it flowered for us
berries and apple trees
in countless gardens
violets and lilies
in the hedges' shadows
flowered
the city by the river
spilled out along the borders
and in this city one heard
various languages
--like the bushes -- transplanted
from east to west
someone drawled in from Wilno
someone's Lwow gentry maners
-- in a whisper someone still spoke in German
and the survivors' Yiddish
filled the streets
and on the riverbanks
the city slang
already grew like grass
among the stones
and it is such an image
that endures in my mind
sometimes somber and then again
full of summer glare
spring autumn in the smoke
of burning branches
the city of my childhood

taken from someone
so that someone else's childhood
would pass by elsewhere

by MarekNYC on Tue Nov 22nd, 2005 at 07:13:18 PM EST
[ Parent ]
if the Arab governments had had a deliberate policy of scattering the refugees throughout the rest of the population, breaking up old local communities geographically, and providing financial aid and partial compensation for lost property

Why would that be the Arab governments' task? I hope you don't think the neighbouring Arab states' military response to Israel's unilateral declaration of independence is an all-Arab war crime comparable to Nazi Germany's, and you don't buy the broad Zionist (I'm afraid to say not just Likudnik) spin that the more recent development of Palestinian identity and the existence of the pan-Arabist ideology means that there are no real inter-Arab distinctions and all refugees are just 'Arabs'.

(Besides, no one thought this situation will last 50 years.)

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 04:19:29 AM EST
[ Parent ]
We indeed seem closer on Sharon, tough we may differ on the quality or quantity of his changed position. The Wall (with its bare territorial and broader economic effects), the extrajudicial executions (called 'targeted assassination'), especially those that seemingly came as 'answer' to any progress on the Palestinian side, the deliberate targeting of civilians as collateral damage (f.e. the case of the second missile in Nuseirat), the attacks on Palestinian and international non-violent activists, the constant lies about the previous and the cover given to soldiers being cruel on their own until evidence was leaked, the large-scale destruction of homes and agricultural lands with phony security arguments are still war crimes and the mark of a cruel unilateralist.

As for borders, Palestinians were no party to said international agreements. I brought up border changes in the context of a fair peace and a solution to the refugee issue (more on it below). Given that those international agreements didn't cover the denial of the right of return, they are irrelevant to my argument. (As for 1948, I was not referring to the proposed partition, but the ethnic cleansing.)

On the refugee issue, we indeed appear to disagree completely. For you, the consensus of Israeli politicians is a constraint setting the framework of a possible agreement, for me it is a central problem that has to be solved for a true agreement. (This is connected to the Israeli side of what I said elsewhere, the problem of history - things like that in 1968 Israel was the attacker not attacked, and that the Yom Kippur war was not without justification given the occupied Syrian and Egyptian territories.)

The Palestinian refuge problem cannot be compared to the case of post-WWII Germany, where there were interstate agreements, a large home country to absorb refugees, and the backdrop of a genocidal war that made many Germans accept/believe that this is the price to pay as a guilty nation. Nor to Poland, which was shifted to the East, nor to other post-WWII ethnic cleansings that were more of a reciprocal nature.

Israel doesn't want the refugees (and descendants) to move back for fear of upsetting the ethnic balance - but just that is the problem of Jordan and Lebanon too, which would cease to exist if Palestinian refugees were granted citizenship, while Gaza became an overcrowded megaslum with no room to expand ('internal' 1948 refugees are somehow always forgotten).

If Israel wants to limit the number of those moving back, it has to give some compensation, and the best would be territorial - especially given the situation of Gaza. I note that a large inflow of Palestinian refugees was always a spin of the Barak camp: the Palestinian negotiators did contemplate Israel's point of view, and always said that the right of return is more symbolic than practical: they didn't expect the overwhelming majority of refugees to move into Israel anyway, and had compensation schemes in mind (and ones less bold than mine, BTW).

(Side note: I am not sure that that many German expellees think about collective, rather than individual rights to property - but I submit you being the professional, you must know them better.)

*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.

by DoDo on Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 04:08:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]
1st paragraph: Yes Israel runs a brutal and criminal occupation. It is far from the only such government in the world, indeed there are several which are far worse human rights abusers. If we're to go beyond simple verbal condemnations than you need to explain why specifically Israel should be so targeted - as opposed to say China, Russia, North Korea, India...

My answer would be that it is because of the incredibly destabilizing effect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that only makes sense if the objective is to seek a resolution. And that brings me to the second paragraph about the Israeli consensus against a Palestinian right of return. Insisting on such a right is the equivalent of saying that there will be no peace for the forseeable future since an overwhelming majority of Israelis sees it as tantamount to the destruction of their country.  You could counter by saying the same applies in reverse to the Palestinians. I don't think that is the case, but if it is then there is no real hope for settling the conflict and international efforts should be limited to just keeping it at as low a level as possible.  Forcing Israel to accept a right of return strikes as absolutely insane - seeking the destruction of a nuclear armed, conventionally powerful state, smack in the middle of an important and volatile region is not exactly a recipe for world stability.  I'll also note that its been almost forty years since the UN Security Council abandoned its insistence on a right of return - switching to a conveniently vague demand for a 'just solution' to the refugee problem.

In the case of Germany I agree with you on one point - the expulsions took place in the immediate aftermath of Germany's crimes during WWII. Germans only began seeing it in that light in the sixties. In the first ten-fifteen years of the Bundesrepublik the Germans themselves were presented as the primary victims of the war. The interstate agreement (i.e. the Potsdam declaration) was made by the victorious great powers, Germany wasn't involved, nor was Poland a party to the agreement shifting its borders, though the ethnic cleansing of Germans did have the support of virtually all Poles. West Germany's constantly repeated official policy (repeated both verbally and in German law) was that the 1937 borders remained valid, that expellees retained ownership over all property in the Vertreibungsgebiete, that the compensation they received in the Lastenausgleich did not change that one bit, that the Poles in the former German lands were illegal squatters. With respect to the Sudetenland the policy was that Munich was not valid but that the expulsion was illegal and that the Sudeten Germans had a right to exercize their Selbstbestimmungsrecht - i.e. to vote to join Germany. The expellee movement rejected the idea that the Poles or Czechs had any claims on private property, using the analogy that no matter how long a thief keeps posession of his stolen goods, and even if they pass on to his children, they remain the property of the rightful owner and his heirs.  It was only in 1991 that Germany accepted the Potsdam borders de jure (1970 was only de facto since the constitutional court ruled that West Germany couldn't give de jure recognition to the postwar borders)

And no, I don't think Israel should offer compensation to the refugees, and if it should, then think for a second just what the proportionate compensation should be for a relatively bloodless (Kosovo level) ethnic cleansing, vs what Israel would deserve from Germany, or indeed other nations complicit in one degree or another in the Holocaust. Or what the Armenians should get from the Turks, or pretty much every nation of the former (and in the case of the Caucasus - current) Russian colonial empire.

The hellish mess of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in large part the direct result of the attitudes and actions of European societies. Israel should withdraw to borders based on the 1967 status quo ante with one-for one compensation for any (minor) adjustments, but that's it. Paying for the monetary cost of making the agreement work should be the rest of the world's problem, and particularly that of Europe.

by MarekNYC on Thu Nov 24th, 2005 at 03:56:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

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