Oddbean new post about | logout
 I know the history is complicated. States don't own land in my perception, people do. As far as I can say, there has been a lot of immoral takeover of land by Israeli's, backed by the state. I've seen Saifedean debate Walter Block, and his arguments held up pretty damn good. I'm not having conversation.

Maybe I would agree that those people were occupiers, but that doesn't make it right what happened. 
 If you view the people of Israel as occupiers, you're saying they have no right to exist in Israel today.  You set aside 3,000 years of historical facts and Jewish heritage in the Holy Land.  That would put you on the side of genocide of Jews.  

That puts us back to my original point, if Palestinians would simply let Israel exist, there would be peace.  Israel warns civilians before they bomb a target, Hamas uses their own people as shields.  There is no moral equivalency between the two. 
 In my view everybody has the right to exist anywhere, as long as you get your property in an ethical way. A lot of property in Israel, as it seems to me, was obtained with violence. 

I don't think whole states belong to anybody, although governments pretend to. 
 In my place, the property was once obtained with violence from native people.

How about yours.
 
 That's probably true for all land where people want to live. Btw these 'native' people did the same thing, at least in the US. 
 So what do we do, how far back does the violence have to have occurred to be "legit" or "forgotten". Currently we see the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Israelis and the Palestinians dig out various maps from various times in the past that show all sorts of things, each one in their favor.

It seems that there is some sort of consensus by the "international community" whoever that is that draws the line post WW2 1950-ish and those are the official borders now and they stay forever.

Seems pretty arbitrary to me.