I hate this myth so fucking much, Palestinians had plenty of beautiful orchards filled with fruits and nuts before the first genocidal colonist even thought about stealing their land
It’s the same fucking myth from every settler colonial state. They said the same things about South Africa, the same things about North America, anywhere the settlers came they tell themselves “why, there’s nothing and nobody here!” atop a mountain of indigenous bodies.
the only thing you’re missing is “Well, they weren’t really using the land properly”
I’ve seen that one used so much; that apparently if you’re not making proper use of the land, there’s nothing immoral about taking it from you and turning it into something better.
If that was logical then corporations would have the right to every ounce of land as they can make them extremely profitable.
All that space wasted to house just three people? All that unused garden space? Companies would make every square inch contribute towards productivity.
In Thomas More’s classic Utopia, 1516, he argued that colonists would be justified in seizing territory by force if local people were unwilling to join in the colonists’ productive way of life. Land not fruitfully used could rightfully he seized by those who would render it fruitful. In such cases, the colonists were entitled by natural law to appropriate land without the permission of any local authority.
The English would go even further, extending the principles outlined by More to encompass not just land unused or uncultivated altogether, but land not used fruitfully enough, and not in the right way, by the standards of English commercial agriculture.
Oh yeah, when I started reading about permaculture and agroforestry the main takeaway I got was “Holy shit, the indigenous people here in :amerikkka: had already perfected these systems and then we came here and destroyed it all while calling it progress”
yeah when islam spread to the levant 1400 years ago, they built the second-ever mosque and then everyone left
Say what you will about Norm Finkelstein but thank goodness he sacrificed any kind of a career to put a stake through the heart of that story.
To be brief:
The gist of it is Norman Finkelstein spent alot of time and effort debunking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Time_Immemorial by Joan Peters.
According to Peters, most people who call themselves Palestinians are not actually Palestinians, but instead descendants of recent immigrants from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria, who came to the land in waves of immigration starting in the 19th century and continuing through the period of the British Mandate. She argues that what is referred to as the 1948 Palestinian exodus was not ethnic cleansing, but actually a population exchange that resulted from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Norman Finkelstein wrote that Peters’ book was ‘among the most spectacular frauds ever published on the Arab-Israeli conflict,’[17] arguing that its substance was based on extensive plagiarization of a work by Ernst Frankenstein published in the 1940s.[18] His 1984 review was based on his doctoral thesis, later expanded and published in Image and Reality of the Israel–Palestine Conflict. Finkelstein went into a close examination of all of Peters’ notes and sources, and argued that her work persistently misrepresented or distorted the primary documents. His systematic critique of the book, attacking the two major pillars of Peters’ thesis, which he regarded as a ‘threadbare hoax’ supported by the ‘American intellectual establishment’, had a major impact of later reviews of the book, especially those in Great Britain.
There is more to it obviously, with a surprise second-act appearance by Alan Dershowitz, but that is the broad strokes. It was actually quite a big deal and I remember the student protests when Finkelstein was denied tenure in 2007.
Literally one word refutes the claim that “there really wasn’t many people there at all”: Nakba.
:the-podcast: <-- That’s it, that’s the episode.
I remember someone saying “maybe it’s ‘computers care’” and now I can’t unhear it when Nima does the outro.
