Israstine: Whose Land Is It?

To whom does the land rightfully belong (and if you didn’t get it, this is referring to the country formerly known as Judea, later renamed Palestine, and now called Israel)? Ever since the Romans expelled the majority of Jews from Judea, people the world round knew the answer: the Jews.

Who else could claim ownership of a land named Judea? Muslims; who did not exist at the time of the expulsion, 1940 years ago? Christians; who had yet to form into a religion and laid no claims on the land? Buddhists? Hindus? Eskimos? The question of ownership, had it been asked before the 20th century would have seemed absurd.

Since the 1967 war, however, popular perception outside of Israel has opened up to the myth of ancient Palestinian nationhood. That insidious myth has in recent years begun to penetrate even into the Israeli consciousness. “It is our land, indeed, but they also have legitimate rights” is the common refrain. Do they?

Let’s examine land ownership on a national level, and how it is transferred from one group to another. From time immemorial the ‘Right of Conquest’ was a legitimate means of gaining legal ownership of territory. That is to say, if country A and country B go to war, and country B loses, country A is the legal owner of whatever territory of B that it comes to control by the end of the war.

The 4th Geneva Convention and the UN Charter, however, banned such practices and refused to recognize the legality of the Right of Conquest. A “territorial integrity” clause was added to the Charter to prevent ipso facto claims that would open the door for virtually every nation’s right to existence to be disputed. Any already existing state which is a member to the Geneva Convention and a UN member is protected from prior claims under this clause.

As far as the land of Judea is concerned, on both a moral and legal basis, the right of ownership is clear. If the right of conquest is morally viable, so while the Jewish people lost their land in 70 CE, they were within their rights to regain it by conquest in 1948 and 1967. The Geneva Convention and UN Charter are irrelevant because Palestine did not exist in either 1948 or 1967 as a country and certainly was not a UN member state. Jordan and Egypt, the occupiers of Gaza and the West Bank, were not legal possessors of the land they occupied from 1948-1967.

If conquest is not a moral means of attaining and losing ownership, so the Jews never ‘lost’ Judea, and its merely been stolen from one group after another, though legal possession always remained with the Jewish people.

In either case Judea, the whole of Judea, which certainly includes the West Bank and Gaza Strip, clearly belong only to the Jewish people.