Sovereignty and Identity
In a short discussion after class, one of my francophone profs mentioned that the thought that the sovereignty issue would never go away. Parents pass their identity to the kids and there's not much to be done about it. It's an issue of identity
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Okay, here goes my soapbox:
Wow, I think this is an issue on which reasonable people can disagree, but not quite with the parameters you've mentioned!
Although the Romans destroyed the Temple around 70 CE, the Jewish population in Judea (the Romans named it Palestine to undermine the Jewish connection to theh land, a very effective strategy, as it turned out...) continued to live there for a few more hundred years. In fact, a Great SanHedrin (Jewish court) survived in the North and scholarly work continued to flourish. It wasn't until around 400+CE that persecutions pushed most of the remaining community outside of Judea, into Europe and other places. But a small Jewish community remained in Judea continously, although it was always very poor and struggling. Israel also remained the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people and whenever circumstances allowed, there would be migrations back. One more succesful one was in the middle ages, when many Jewish sages returned to Israel and there a thriving community in Safed. Major waves of immigration started again in the late 1800s/early 1900s, not long after the majority of Palestinian Arabs arrived in Israel, drawn by economic opportunities and stability afforded by the British occupation. When Jews started arriving after 1945, it was largely because they had no other place to go. Jews who returned to their 'home' countries in Europe found their property and belongings scavenged, and even experienced pogroms. No other country opened its borders to the huge numbers of Jewish refugees.
In my opinion, the mistake was the failure of the Arab nations to recognize and respect the partition declared by the UN. If they had, maybe the two populations could have grown and thrived. But when they attacked the day after partition, the situation was militarized and changed forever.
I think it would be a mistake to allocate land/sympathy based only on historical occupation, not only because history is much harder to establish than political advocates pretend it is, but also because the right to self rule shouldn't be dependent on historical military success. According to your view, all the Jewish population in Israel would have to do is expel the Palestinians and hang on to the land for a sufficiently long time (how long? 100 years? 1000? 2000) and the Palestinians claim to self-rule there would be completely extinguished.
In my opinion, *both* Jewish self rule and Palestinian self rule are worthwhile and necessary. It's not clear how that can be accomplished. Although there is popular support for a two state solution in Israel, the Palestinian political platforms that find the most popular support all call for an end to any Jewish self rule in the land. That's a struggle, and that's the struggle that is happening. But calling Jewish self rule a huge mistake and calling for Palestinian self rule *instead* is... well, unfathomable to me.
Finally, in regards to Quebec: I don't know that it matters that the French abandoned the colony, I think it matters that the settlers did not abandon their French identity. Also, I don't know that you need French in Quebec any more than you need English in the ROC, so that doesn't seem unjust to me. Also, Quebec was continually screwed in the evolution of Canadian confederation and constitutionalism, so it doesn't seem wrong to me for the ROC to be on the defensive a bit now. Lastly, the situation in Quebec until the Quiet Revolution, with an impoverished, undereducated French majority providing the work and labor to support an economy and government run by a wealthy, educated, English minority, parallels apartheid as closely as almost any imperfect historical parallel. So, yeah, I have a LOT of sympathy for QC separatism, even while I'm not sure that it's the best move for the future.
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Even now, Palestinian Israelis live anywhere they want, work, and vote. Yes, they do face discrimination, but they hold nine seats in Parliament and one seat on the Supreme Court. In the Palestinian territories, there have been periods of greater and lesser autonomy. The status quo has generally been pretty high - collecting their own taxes, running their own municipalities, their own public transportation and airports, building their own police and armed forces, receiving aid and negotiating trade, setting their own law (including the right to bear arms), and generally free from Israeli incursion. No, it's not full autonomy, but it sure beats even Thereisenstadt, the 'model' concentration camp, and the Japanese internment camps in the USA.
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